to Eleanor and said, ‘That went very well, my dear. Surprisingly well, in fact. Do you think we should be married as soon as my divorce comes through?’
Eleanor said, ‘I think that would be a very good idea indeed, Julian.’
‘You’re not,’ he said, ‘by any chance actually married to your Bernard? I take it you tied no formal knot?’
‘Good heavens, no,’ said Eleanor. ‘He was a Catholic and I wasn’t. Marriage was out of the question.’
‘More fool Bernard,’ said Julian. ‘You are everything a man could want, even a man such as me. How wonderful it is when a clever, competent and organizing head sits upon a body as young and supple and glamorous as yours.’
They went through a quiet marriage ceremony when Julian’s divorce came through. Eleanor said she wanted no big splash; she saw it just as the tying up of loose ends.
‘You didn’t ask me,’ said Brenda, ‘and I’m not surprised, considering, just a little hurt. So you’ve actually done it. Little Apricot Smith has turned into Eleanor Darcy and has the ear of the most powerful man in the kingdom and can murmur into it whatever she likes, any time, albeit bigamously.’
‘Well,’ said Eleanor, ‘at some times of day and all times of night.’
‘And Julian is in good moral, physical and mental health?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Eleanor. She was arranging flowers in a crystal bowl. She had a real gift for it. Sun streamed in through open windows. Soon it would be time for the coming year’s Graduation Week ceremonies. This time round she would not ask her friends to help out. There had been some comment on the standard of waitressing. A one-eyed girl behind the teapot was not, she had come to realize, what proud parents wished to see. They wanted the occasion unblemished by thoughts of the real world, from which their children were this very day escaping.
Eleanor was not speaking the exact truth to Brenda. Julian’s heart kept missing a beat. He was doing too much. The campus doctor told him it was stress: the condition was usual enough, not damaging to the heart, but a sign perhaps that he should slow down a little.
‘Of course, you’ve got a young wife,’ he said, jokingly. ‘I’ve known that carry off many a man in his prime.’
Julian reported the conversation to Eleanor.
‘What a very old-fashioned doctor,’ she said. ‘Perhaps the campus doctor of a young thrusting university should have a young thrusting attitude to life, and be rather better informed. Research shows the more sex you have, the healthier you are.’
Julian startled her by asking to see chapter and verse of the research. Every now and then she forgot and thought she was still married to Bernard. She found some published research which at least said that sexually active men were twenty per cent less prone to heart attack than the sexually inactive. Julian said twenty per cent wasn’t very reassuring. To avoid temptation he would sleep in a spare room for a day or two.
‘It’s not that I don’t want you,’ he said to Eleanor, ‘it’s that I daren’t. And I have a convocation in the morning; a faculty lunch, and golf with John Hersey of the polytechnic in the afternoon. We have to get a few things settled in the trans-binary field. And of course Downing Street next Wednesday, and an article on the Europeanization of the pound sterling still to be written.’
‘Julian,’ said Eleanor, ‘it occurs to me that things other than our sharing a bed make your heart miss a beat.’ But Julian found that hard to believe. If the heart misbehaves, the principle of Ockham’s razor suggests that affairs of the heart can only be to blame.
While Julian was at his convocation, Eleanor most civilly received a journalist from the Daily Mail. Normally, when the time for the three-monthly Downing Street meetings approached, no matter how they clustered, journalists would be kept from the door.
‘In matters of economic science,’ Julian would say, ‘the layman knows nothing, assumes much and fears more. All the press ever does is compound that ignorance, folly and fear; deliberately it fosters mistrust of change. Therefore, Eleanor, when faced with the ladies, gentlemen and guttersnipes of the media, let it be our policy to remain silent. Besides which, I’ve had murmurings in my ear in high places, and I can tell you this, mum is very much the word at the moment.’
In the high places of both government and academia, it seemed, messages came in the form