so: the moral high ground would automatically have been his. He was in some way denatured, and by no doing of hers. Was this what depression did to men?
‘Don’t leave me,’ he said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t leave me. They want you to leave me; it’s part of my punishment. I’m cursed, can’t you see it? Are you completely blind? First they destroy your car, then your wife leaves you: next you lose your friends and your job. You’ll see!’
Eleanor couldn’t bear it. She went and slept in the spare room. Bernard brought her a cup of tea in the morning and gazed at her with wet, exhausted eyes; he hadn’t slept: of course he hadn’t slept.
‘You’re insane,’ Eleanor said. ‘You’ll have to see a doctor.’
Eleanor didn’t even drink the tea he brought. She said she’d rather have coffee, knowing there was none in the house. It was a long time since she’d bothered to go shopping. The more Bernard suffered the more she wished to hurt him. She supposed that was human nature. She decided not to think about it too much.
Eleanor took a short-cut through the polytechnic grounds to get to her office and the bracing nearness of Julian. It had been snowing in the night, but now the morning was clear and crisp. The early sun dazzled. The students had remade their snowman. She left the swept path the better to inspect it, treading as delicately as she could through the snow in her little new laced boots with their thin soles and impracticably high heels—Julian had opened accounts for her at all the city’s better stores, and occasionally Eleanor would use them, but only occasionally, and always in Julian’s interests: he loved to see her in the boots and nothing else. The snowman was wearing a scarf of the kind Bernard wore, and the kind Julian would never wear—a fuzzy blue scarf in prickly wool with patches of pale grey struggling through the weave. Julian wore silk scarves, soft against the face. Black stones stood for Bernard’s eyes, and little grey pebbles for tears trailed down his cheeks. And a stick just casually pierced where his heart would be.
The sun was beginning to warm the snow: a thaw had begun. The whole shape of the snowman was becoming indecisive even as she watched: its edges were sloppy and imprecise. She stepped forward and pulled the stick out of the heart, and a whole side of the snowman collapsed, and now only an untidy half of Bernard remained. Then the head toppled forward and fell. She was conscious that her boots were wet: her toes were becoming cold and uncomfortable. Her boots were not intended for such adverse weather conditions. All around the thaw was noisy in her ears. Snow fell and slopped in lumps from branches overhead. Bernard melted, formless, and was gone.
Eleanor called Brenda as soon as she got in to her office and had taken off her boots. She had put the electric fire on and stretched out her toes towards it, to warm them.
‘Brenda,’ she said, ‘you may be right about my being out of my mind. I do have very peculiar feelings of disassociation from time to time. I seem to be on some kind of automatic pilot which is none of my setting. Every moral weakness I ever had is somehow getting magnified to absurd proportions.’
‘It’s interesting you should say that,’ said Brenda. ‘Personally I blame Jed. You know I had this affair with him—’
‘I didn’t,’ said Eleanor.
‘It was nothing special. I worried because I didn’t like sex with Pete. I thought if I tried it with Jed it might be different.’
‘Was it?’
‘No. It’s just me. Apparently if you do too much sport when a girl. you never become—well—properly sensual.’
‘I’ll never have that problem,’ said Eleanor.
‘I noticed,’ said Brenda.
‘What is this to do with the magnification of my moral weakness?’
‘Jed is trying to set standards of positive religious tolerance throughout the college. The new policy is that from the Moonies to the Muslims by way of the Jesus freaks all Gods are equal, and if they want to worship the Devil that’s okay too. Mind you, the Academic Board only okayed it by one vote. A group of students have set up a black magic group and they’ve got a drawing of you up there and they go over it with a magnifying glass and that’s why you’re the way you are. A fornicating adulterous zombie. Night of the Sexy Dead.’
‘You’re