Nerina shared a bed and he came to both of them while Mrs Khalid listened in the room next door. She had no choice. The house was small, the walls were thin: no wonder she bit her nails.
When Eleanor woke, luxurious and sated, Julian was pulling on his socks and suspenders. He was bright-eyed and elated.
‘It’s the answer,’ he said. ‘The answer! And thank God it’s one of those days when I could convince anyone of anything!’
And so it seemed it was: the meeting went on for only four hours of an anticipated six. The media, domestic and international, hovered outside the door both at Downing Street and Bridport Lodge. Eleanor was much photographed in mesh tights, but remained loyal, though, she felt, in some way coy. ‘If anyone can find a way,’ she found herself saying, unable to stop it, ‘my husband will. He’s a genius. He’s quite nervy, but that always goes with brilliance. He was hospitalized for depression when he was twenty-one. He had a course of ECG, which cured him. Just like Tom Eagleton: remember? McGovern’s running mate. Wasn’t that unfair, that whole business of being unfit for office because of a nervous breakdown? But it was all part of some smear campaign, wasn’t it?’
The think-tank emerged beaming from its meeting. A statement would be made on Monday. On Sunday morning at ten o’clock, without warning, the cash dispensers of the high street banks up and down the nation began to spew out notes. An hour of fives, an hour of tens, an hour of twenties. Then an hour’s pause. Then the cycle began again: neat packages of new notes slid gracefully, unasked, from under their tactful slots, on and on and on.
At first, as the press later reported—the home press subdued and embarrassed, the international press quite hysterical with glee—the public were nervous and suspicious: they kept their distance: then quickly the police arrived, suspecting a malfunction, to guard this enigmatic money supply from looters. As it so happened it was a wet and windy day: in many parts of the country the wind that so often whistles along the high streets whistled to good effect, and whipped wet notes over shops and into alleys and gardens and under the noses of the drunk, the wretched and the homeless, who on the whole disregarded them, understanding well enough that money was not the solution to their problems; what they needed was not to smell and to find someone to like them enough to be prepared to take them in. Word came from on high and the police went back to their headquarters: and, nervously, those who needed the notes to pay electricity and gas bills and mortgages began to gather them up and took them home to their children to count, and were thus relieved of anxiety, and smiled over the meal, and forgot to blame whoever was usually to blame, and made love to wives or husbands, as well as inclination or vigour would allow, and said to their children, okay, if you don’t want to go to school, don’t go: and to themselves, the job I do is pointless, useless; what is more I hate doing it and stayed in bed, and only those who thought, the job I do is valuable, others need me, depend upon me; I like doing it, went, and the traffic moved freely, because there was half the usual volume, and the petrol tanker men went back to work because, as their leader said that Monday morning, ‘Everything’s upside down; the government’s gone insane; we’d better not add to it.’
On Monday noon the machines stopped exuding money. ‘The fools,’ said Julian Darcy. ‘The fools. If they lose their nerve now, they’ve had it! Compromise, compromise! It will be the end of us!’
The move had been made on the strength of a majority of one, he told Eleanor. He had been eloquent in support of the action; others had supported it in theory but wanted time to think about it. An amendment had been moved but lost, to first educate the public, issue instructions; dole out money to the deserving poor, not undeserving: which, as Julian had pointed out, was no different than an increase in benefits: this faction had been defeated. Julian had argued for surprise, for the shock tactics which would jolt the economy out of depression, and he had won the day.
The fury of the country was very great indeed: though whether because it had happened