Rasputin,’ said Eleanor.
The photographer arrived, late and dusty, as press photographers normally do. He looked Eleanor up and down and said, ‘This is better. I thought it would have to be a desk-shot. Typical Vice Chancellor stuff. The best background you ever get in academia is an ivy wall.’
He posed her sitting perilously on the stone balcony, with the hills behind, and the breeze playing through her curly hair, head thrown back and long legs to advantage. ‘Oops!’ she kept crying as he kept snapping. ‘Nearly fell that time!’ Freddie went on pouring more champagne, and she went on pouring it over the wall but Freddie didn’t notice that. ‘Natural light!’ the photographer rejoiced. ‘Natural light and no ivy, no books. You’ve made my day.’
When Julian came home from playing golf he found Eleanor in tears. She said she’d let a journalist in—he’d pressured her and she’d somehow been manoeuvred into it—and she just knew he was going to make everything up; and a photographer had come along and snapped her as she sat on the wall playing ball with Mr Dowkin’s son.
‘Playing ball?’ enquired Julian. ‘Playing ball—?’
‘I do sometimes,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t know, Julian. You’re always in your office or running the world. And my legs were showing, I just know they were.’
‘Eleanor,’ said Julian, ‘this doesn’t sound like you.’
‘It’s because I’m so tired and miserable,’ she said. ‘If you’re not in my bed I can’t sleep. My judgement is all to pieces. I need you as much as you need me. How was golf?’
‘Bad,’ he said. ‘My heart was all over the place. The word from above is that trans-binary adjustments across the PCFC and UFC are out. They keep changing the goal posts. Now I doubt we’ll be able to asset-strip the polytechnic, even if they lie down and ask us to.’
‘I’ve never heard you put it quite like that before,’ said Eleanor, drying her tears, bored with those, as so was he. ‘You’ve talked about dual funding, incorporation, merger, maximization of resources, trans-binary unification across the field, but not asset-stripping. These things should never be put so crudely. This is academia, not the business world. If you don’t mind me saying so, I think not sleeping with me affects your judgement as much as it does mine.’
‘Eleanor,’ he said, ‘I think you’re right about everything.’
He returned to her bed forthwith and by the morning both his spirits and his judgement had returned. His heart still missed beats but he didn’t care. Eleanor handed him the Daily Mail, in silence. He studied it carefully. Eleanor was on the front page. ‘“Let them eat cake,” says leggy young bride of the new Rasputin.’ ‘You take a good photo,’ he said. ‘Rasputin? Do they mean me?’ He read on. ‘The upshot of this absurd piece,’ said Julian, eventually, ‘is that while the government dithers and listens to the outrageous advice of a maniac economic advisor, of dubious sexual morals, who lives in an ivory tower on champagne and caviar, the nation collapses further and further into economic crisis.’
‘A really vicious unfounded attack,’ said Eleanor. ‘They’ve even got my salary wrong. Thirty-five thousand pounds too low; and inflation has been evening out at fifteen, not twenty-two per cent. They can’t even do their sums.’
‘There’s the proof they made the whole thing up,’ said Eleanor. ‘Julian, I’d die if you thought I’d been indiscreet.’
‘My darling,’ said Julian, ‘whatever you do is okay by me. Just don’t leave my bed again or unfortunate things happen.’
‘Of course I won’t,’ she said. They embraced. Mrs Dowkin came in and asked Eleanor rather pointedly if she wanted more jars of caviar bought in. She was not above making trouble. Georgina, the real wife, the true Mrs Darcy, had she allowed herself to be photographed in the first place, which was doubtful, would have stood beside the family hearth, or by the big Chinese vase filled with flowers from the garden, not perched on a wall, all legs and hair. Julian looked at Eleanor rather shrewdly, she thought, but said nothing.
‘Get in some more,’ said Eleanor calmly, ‘but not too much. And some fish paste. We only had the caviar because the fish paste had run out. It was an unfortunate kind of day.’
‘Well,’ said Julian, putting down the Mail, taking up the Independent, ‘at least now we have nothing to lose,’ and went off to staff-management meetings to calm the uproar and assure the union delegates that the Mail article had been an unfair