linen to easy-care Terylene: she brought them to Georgina Darcy’s table, eating with Habitat cutlery not Darcy family silver, on the grounds that the latter wasted staff time in the cleaning. Julian would be offered Cheddar not Stilton at the end of dinner. Stale bread was used up, not thrown to the ducks on the moat that half ringed Bridport Lodge. The face that stared out from Georgina’s bathroom mirror, marble-set, made do with a smear of Oil of Ulay, not, as had Georgina’s, layer after layer of creams and unguents, one for the eye zone, one for the lip line, others for cheeks and chin. Eleanor was not too proud to use up what Georgina left, in this respect as in all others, but once the pots were empty chucked them out and did not replace them.
And Julian Darcy didn’t mind one bit. Eleanor’s presence in the bed outweighed the cheapness of the sheets, her company at the table was more reassuring than his family’s silver: the Cheddar, she assured him, was healthier than Stilton (by which he knew she meant cheaper) and he said he did not care about the state of her complexion, he had more important things to think about.
Eleanor told four of the six staff at the lodge that they were redundant to her needs, and so they were. These were Mrs Kneely, Mrs Foster, Edward the under gardener and Joan Baxter who came in to do the laundry. These four members of staff were the ones most visibly distressed and startled by Eleanor’s sudden appearance in their midst; the ones who tittle-tattled in the town: who admitted to signing a letter of condolence and support, drawn up by Joan Baxter and posted off to Georgina before Eleanor could intercept it; who somehow or other never managed to make the marital bed, either because of the new sheets or the behaviour of those who now slept in it. It was a better bed, however.
‘It seems that only married Vice Chancellors get their beds made properly,’ observed Julian. ‘When they live in sin they don’t.’ It was Eleanor’s custom to make a bed by straightening a sheet and flinging a duvet. Julian was accustomed to blankets, in the old-fashioned style, tucked and tidied. But who, as Eleanor enquired, could make love properly under tucked blankets? It was absurd.
Julian received letters from his children: Julia, twenty-five, and Piers, aged twenty-two. Both said they would never see their father again, he had treated their mother so disgracefully, and would never accept a penny from him.
Julian said, ‘My children have treated me disgracefully; they have brought humiliation upon me. Julia dropped out of a promising academic career to be a nurse. Piers never gets up before two in the afternoon. Why do they think I want to see them again? I don’t.’
Brenda brought news that the black magic group had been disbanded, and Nerina was to be married in a Muslim ceremony to her brother’s best friend, and no longer went to college. Brenda’s husband Pete had, at Brenda’s insistence, made representation to the academic authorities about the sacrificing of a goat on college property. The RSPCA had been called in. There had been a terrible scandal. The media communications course had been re-evaluated. Hadn’t Eleanor read about it?
‘I’m kind of cut off here at the university,’ said Eleanor. ‘I can never work out which is the real world and which isn’t. But I’m very happy with Julian. That’s all I need to know.’
‘Don’t you even think about Bernard?’
‘I can’t say I do,’ said Eleanor. ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’
Brenda said she felt rather the same about her baby. She’d left baby and pushchair behind in the supermarket queue and gone home without them, quite forgetting, but she’d had the baby under a year and Eleanor had been married for fifteen years.
‘That was Ellen,’ said Eleanor. ‘I have been re-born. Risen guilt free as Eleanor from the ashes of the past. Do you think Nerina is continuing her black magic from home?’
Brenda said, from the sound of it, it was perfectly possible. Bernard was still in a bad way: clinically depressed, many reckoned.
‘Won’t Nerina get into trouble for not being a virgin?’ asked Eleanor.
Brenda said she thought there were spells to see to that kind of thing; failing that, cosmetic surgery could put it right. There were local doctors who specialized in it. What did Eleanor do all day?
‘I keep very busy,’ said Eleanor. ‘Julian is giving me