other.
Q: What did you say?
A: You heard me. But boil well first. Those are the only dietary rules I give you. Your desire to live forever should make it easy for you to fill in any number of others. Personally I find them boring. Now you have Darcy’s Utopia to create there will be some point in longevity. I have already spoken to you at length about marriage and sex. Don’t worry too much about HIV infection. Everyone dies. A virus is a small price to pay for sex. You will have to resort to nuclear power while you reduce your population and learn to live simply. You’ll just have to put up with the consequences: it’s your own fault for letting things get so badly out of control. You lost your way: you lost your vision. No one could look more than five years ahead.
Q: No punishments? No sanctions? No hellfire, no grappling hooks to drag you to the fire, no skinning alive? What are the consequences of the non-forgiveness you speak of?
A: The end of the earth, the end of you, that’s all.
Q: No hell? No heaven? Just blanking out?
Hugo’s voice:
She turned and looked at me: her being was luminous: I lowered my eyes. She laughed and the laughter was all around me. It was not nice at all.
A: It depends what you make of Darcy’s Utopia. If you find it heaven, lucky old you. Some might simply blank out with boredom, but if that’s hell it is a kinder one that any promised you in the past. I hope you see some improvement here. I do. Define yourselves more kindly; do yourselves and me that favour. After all, you’re the adults: I’m just the child.
Hugo’s voice:
I turned and went back to the house: I couldn’t bear it any longer. She went on into the light. Brenda said, ‘Oh God, she’s at it again. She goes down there, has a kind of fit: I have to drag her back to the house: she mumbles for hours: I don’t know what to do about it. I’m glad you’re writing it all down. Someone has to. I haven’t time, what with the kids and my husband working all hours.’
Valerie observes the birth of a new religion
HUGO’S ARTICLES WERE RECEIVED with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for pieces with titles such as ‘The Concept of Fiscal Negativity—a Long Hard Look’, that is to say, muted though respectful. Little by little his by-line dropped out of the columns altogether. I wondered what he was doing, and why, and where, but not for very long or very hard.
Lover at the Gate came out in Aura in serial form and won me another prize. ‘Best Fiction Biography of the Year’, a category devised, apparently, especially to meet the case. But no one interesting sat next to me at the Awards Dinner, and the decision went against publishing the work in book form, to my chagrin.
‘In a year’s time,’ my editor said, ‘everyone will have forgotten Eleanor Darcy. Pretty girls are only as interesting as the men they are with.’ And Eleanor was no longer with Julian Darcy. When he was released from prison she was not there to meet him; the media observed it, and forgot it. Julian was offered a top appointment with one of the larger banks, and accepted it, which event struck up a short-lived flurry of indignation and hilarity: when Georgina returned to him he was granted in the public mind a kind of forgiveness. But no one, it seemed, thought of Eleanor any more. My editor was right.
The house where I had interviewed Eleanor Darcy had somehow burned an impression of itself onto my eyelids. I’d see it when I closed my eyes: the most ordinary house in the world, except I’d given up thinking of houses, let alone people, as ever being ordinary. Let us just say there were many like it: semidetached, with a little square garden in the front, a rather longer one at the back; a house without pretension—just a place to live and think yourself lucky, as vibrant or dreary as its occupants.
I’d called Brenda from time to time but received no reply. I assumed she’d gone away. I wanted, without reason, to see the house again; and one day, without reason, other than that I was between assignments and both children were staying with Lou’s mother and it was eighteen months to the day from my first setting eyes on Hugo Vansitart, I