see myself in the mirror: bleary, hair uncombed. What was I wearing? One of Hugo’s shirts? Quite a nice pink striped one, I was glad to see: and track suit bottoms in mauve velvet. Not me at all. My children! I was a Woman with children. Where were they? Who was looking after them?
I was beginning to feel quite distressed by my own confusion: but then the revolving doors, which had never ceased their activity as I sat there, perpetually throwing in and drawing out the well-heeled and the faceless, produced quite suddenly three people with faces: Lou, Sophie, Ben, preceded by another, whom I presently recognized as Kirsty Bull, if only by the size of her legs: she had the kind of flat pudding face which could belong to anyone. She came straight up to me.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I made them come. They didn’t want to. They’re all furious. You’ve been a right bitch. They’re helpless without you. Your husband’s insane. Everything’s done to the metronome, from the washing-up to sex. I can’t leave them on their own. They’re not fit. So here they are. You organize them.’
And she swept out of the revolving door.
‘What a terrible woman,’ said Lou. ‘Female double-bass players are always like that. I should never have asked her in, but what was I to do? I had a concert and Ben had an exam.’
I had forgotten about Ben’s exam.
‘What happened?’ I asked him.
‘I got my grade eight,’ he said, ‘no thanks to you.’
‘Don’t you talk to me like that ever again,’ I said, thinking fast, and to Sophie before she could open her mouth, ‘Or you either. If you’ve learned your lesson then I’ll come home. Pay the bill, Lou.’
And the children looked quite nervous and subdued and Lou just went to the desk and took out his credit card and paid what was owing, without even studying the details of the account, and I felt not guilty but self-righteous. It was a very strange feeling, as if it came from outside me. The words ‘a sure touch’ came into my head: it seemed a bequest from Eleanor: a compensation for injury more like it. ‘She has a sure touch with men.’ What a gift! Especially since what to other women might be injury—to fall in love against your will and almost without reason—to me had been both an enlightenment and a joy, inasmuch as it was not an ongoing state of affairs, but had, just like that, and with the finishing of Lover at the Gate, come to a full stop.
While Lou was still at the desk Hugo came into the hotel and walked straight past me to the lifts. I called him. He turned to look at me and for quite a while he didn’t recognize me. Then he said, ‘Oh, it’s you, Valerie. You look so different!’ I said, ‘So do you.’ He said, ‘Are you going home now?’ It was like the embarrassment after a one-night stand, when neither knows quite how to behave. Yet we’d shared so much. He seemed as puzzled as I had been a little earlier.
‘I finished Lover at the Gate,’ I said, to put him at his ease. ‘And Lou has paid the bill.’
‘Lou?’
‘My husband.’
‘That’s good of him,’ said Hugo. ‘Some mix-up with my Amex card.’
I introduced him to Lou.
‘We’ve been working together,’ said Hugo. ‘On a most extraordinary story.’
‘So I gather,’ said Lou bleakly.
Hugo said, ‘It’s going to change the face of the world,’ and I said, ‘It may take more than Eleanor Darcy to do that,’ and Hugo handed me a tape and said, ‘Listen to that. I had it copied. You can keep it. We’ll be in touch, naturally.’
‘If you don’t come home at once, Valerie, I may not have you,’ said Lou and I said, ‘I’ll come home when I’m good and ready,’ which shook him and shook me, and Sophie and Ben watched open-mouthed as their parents spatted. I asked Hugo to give them a pound coin each so they could go and play the fruit machines. Lou said, ‘I don’t allow the children money just to gamble away,’ and I said, ‘That’s why I didn’t ask you, Lou.’ And he meditated this, while Hugo found the coins.
Hugo was a tall man with rather stooped shoulders and a lean, intelligent look. I thought I’d probably quite like him if I met him at a party, or was sat next to him at a Media Awards Dinner, but no more. I