the Prime Mover: that they were more than notions—they were instructions.
‘You know what she told me?’ said Hugo. ‘She told me we should not see ourselves as God’s children, but as God’s parents. We are not the created, but the creators. What we have to do is be worthy of the love offered us by our creation.’
And I laughed for the third time, and said, ‘Well, I’d have more trouble than the Apostles ever did cleaning up Jesus’s act, let alone the Companions with Mohammed, in trying to present Eleanor Darcy to the readers of Aura as saint and/or messenger.
And I kept to myself the notion that God must work in an exceedingly mysterious way, in choosing so flawed and cracked a vessel as myself to record Eleanor Darcy’s life, obliging me to write it while myself trapped in a state of most acute sin—if we were to look at it traditionally, which I had no intention of doing, or through Lou’s beady eyes, or Stef’s manic ones, or the puzzled eyes of the five children Hugo’s and my love for each other affected—so mysterious indeed as to make you think we were much more likely to be talking about the Devil than of God. But I didn’t say that to Hugo. I wanted him there beside me on the king-size Holiday Inn bed and that was that.
LOVER AT THE GATE [12]
A disturbance in the economy
JULIAN WAS TO SPEND Wednesday at 11 Downing Street, in conference with the fiscal advisers to the Treasury. At two in the morning he stirred Eleanor awake.
‘These ceaseless problems with the economy,’ he said, ‘are because we’ve never had the nerve to do things properly. We’ve talked about cheap money,’ he said, ‘but we’ve never made it really cheap. We devalue the pound but only on paper. We use it to make people poor, not rich.’
‘Of course,’ said Eleanor, ‘to make the poor rich is to make the rich poor. That’s why we never do it properly.’
His fingers strayed over her breast. She thought of Sharif the beautiful. She wasn’t surprised Mrs Khalid had encouraged her daughter’s marriage. Now they were all bound together: like Rhoda to Wendy to Ken to herself to Bernard, and round again to one-eyed Gillian, for Ken would lose Gillian to Bernard; it was inevitable. And through Jed, through the joining of flesh, to Nerina, and all others before or since: except some seem to count, and some not to count, as did, or did not, death. Some deaths affect you: others don’t, for no reason that you can see. A close friend dies and not a feeling in you stirs: an acquaintance passes on: you weep and wail. As with death, so with sexual partners. Some count, some don’t. Jed counted and she hadn’t known it. If you knew it, would you do it? Most certainly you would. The connections are there to be made. They are foretold, inevitable. That’s why the pleasure goes with them: what you do is the fulfilment of fate’s will.
‘Think of me,’ said Julian, ‘think of me, not whatever you’re thinking of.’
‘I am thinking of you,’ she said.
‘What did you just say then?’ he asked.
‘To make the poor rich is to make the rich poor,’ she repeated. ‘That’s why we never do it properly.’
‘The creative approach to economics!’ he murmured, not without disparagement, into the dark. ‘But you’re right. Now if we were to make money really cheap—the Treasury just might do it. They have to do something. Shortages are endemic. It’s almost as bad in London now as it ever was in Moscow: if you want petrol you have to buy it out of someone else’s tank.’
‘That’s because the tanker men are on strike.’
‘No, it’s not,’ he said gloomily. ‘They were provoked into striking in order to mask the true situation, to give us time to think our way out of this one. We have no option but to jolt the economy. Electric shock it out of depression!’
‘You could always stand on street corners and give money away,’ she said. ‘Why not?’
‘It might do it,’ he said. ‘It just might do it. The old Keynesian way of work creation without the distorting effects of actually doing the work.’
He rolled over and went to sleep. She did not mind one bit. She dreamt of Sharif, which she seemed to be able to do to order. He beat her for her wickedness, and made her shroud herself in black robes as punishment, and she and