to get out into the world and get on. Eleanor Darcy, I had no doubt of it, had been a brave and ambitious child.
She was at home, yet not at home, in her friend Brenda’s house. Brenda is a former school friend, who has so definite a ‘no comment’ policy as to be of very little help to Aura’s readership. She is the mother of four children under seven, and I think in the circumstances remarkably loyal to Eleanor, who lounges around her living room, sprawling, filling up time and space, talking about subjects way above Brenda’s head, though Brenda told me, as I left—as well as she could for trying to get on the children’s boots—that in fact she ran the local branch of the Labour Party and was active in environmental matters. It is always a mistake to suppose people to be ordinary, just because they have four children under seven and a low income. Almost no one is ordinary. Dig a little into ‘ordinary’ lives and you find passion, desperation, amazing acts of self-sacrifice and self-control and often powerful religious belief. It is only when the ordinary are suddenly elevated to the ranks of the un-ordinary that both their virtues and their eccentricities become apparent. Brenda, nevertheless, does still seem rather stubbornly ordinary, as does her house, a new semidetached on a slip road in an outer suburb. It has the virtuous shabbiness of the home of a good mother of four, whose husband is a mini-cab driver—that is to say is doing the best he can while getting his act together. Brenda brought us, without complaint or comment, many cups of caffeine-free instant coffee during the course of the interview. I can scarcely even remember what she looks like, except that her skirt was too tight and her stomach bulged, as stomachs do when you have had four children in a short time and are too unselfish to take the time to exercise. Her taste in slip covers for her three-piece suite was not good. Red roses on shiny black fabric is out of place in a humble suburban house, when the carpet is rough, serviceable hessian and toys pile up in the corners of rooms, and not even the most dedicated can find the time or energy to move them: if indeed there is anywhere to move them to. Hugo complained that the sofa was greasy and he got jam on his cuff. I did not think he would give much column space to Brenda. Readers do not pay to read about the likes of themselves.
But I may be wrong. One interview with Eleanor Darcy, some nights with Hugo, and I can already see I may be wrong about many things. My mind may, creaking and protesting, have to go into some new gear, as my body has already done, leading the way. I had always assumed that journalists—all professional people, in fact—should keep their work life and their love life apart, were they young and foolish enough to have the latter. I was wrong. I could see lust quite remarkably sharpening the edge of my writing. I had been married to Lou for fifteen years; our children, Sophie and Ben, were now thirteen and twelve. We had led a peaceful organized and unpassionate family life. If I had never been tempted to mix my professional and my personal life, it was because the opportunity to do so, alas, had not arisen. I had seen myself, as I had Lou, as the kind of person who has just about enough sexual energy when young to get it together with a member of the opposite sex and start a family and then leave all that kind of thing to others. I was wrong. All I had done was lower my sights, in the interests of respectability, moderation and a quiet life, and presented myself to the world as someone altogether ladylike, altogether a-sexual. It had worked so far and no further. I had been seated next to Hugo at dinner. Love had struck like lightning, leapt with the whirlwind; I loved, I worked, I thought, I felt, and there was no separating any of them out, or wanting to. Thus prepared, I will insert a new computer disc and begin Lover at the Gate.
LOVER AT THE GATE [1]
Eleanor Darcy’s birth
‘I THINK I FEEL A pain,’ said Wendy Ellis, Eleanor Darcy’s mother. It was the middle of the night, in the summer of a year somewhere between