LOVER AT THE GATE [5]
Ellen’s Marxist years with Bernard
‘I’M SO PROUD OF you,’ said Ellen, and meant it. Bernard hammered and puttied, putting their home to rights, at one with the worker, his brother; no longer above manual toil but now rejoicing in it. He who had palely loitered, fearful of moral contamination, now boisterously stamped through practicalities.
‘Man’s self-consciousness is the highest divinity,’ he said. ‘There shall be no other Gods beside it.’ He had shaved off his beard. His chin jutted sexily forward.
‘The criticism of religion leads naturally to the criticism of social relations,’ observed Ellen. ‘How wise Marx is: how everything applies: as true now as then!’
They rivalled each other in anti-deist sentiment. She worshipped him for worshipping Marx, or appeared to.
He had torn the little gold cross from around her neck, during love, with such force she was left with a welt which never ever seemed to vanish. She didn’t mind one bit, she said. She was proud of it: proud of his masterful nature—or appeared to be.
‘The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness, meekness—’ she read aloud from the early works of Marx, which she had never returned to the library, property being theft, and knowledge free for everyone.
Bernard looked robust rather than pale: had lost his translucency along with his soul. He looked others straight in the eye, he shouted their arguments down. ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heathen world; it is the very soul of soulless conditions,’ he harangued his erstwhile comrades in the streets, the vestries. They crossed themselves and prayed for him. This was what happened when you married a non-Catholic.
‘Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the prophets to the capitalists!’ he declaimed to his fellow students in the college library. Unlike Ellen, though, he always returned his books on time, so the librarians put up with him.
Bernard now argued with his teachers about his grades. Fainthearted, they took his essays back for remarking and upgraded them, as an airline always will a seat for a vociferous passenger. He plotted to overthrow the senior lecturer in psychology who was fifty-two and had not rewritten his lecture on Piaget for fifteen years. He worked up a cabal against poor old Professor Litmus, who taught statistics and never did anyone any harm, but droned on, and on, and at least never minded when his students slept. If Bernard could change, the world could change: and the sooner the better. He sat in smoky rooms like like-minded friends, talking late into the night. Wives and girlfriends made coffee. They rooted out revisionists, pilloried Trotskyists, jeered at the Anarchists, and even burned the works of Kropotkin in public. They chose Guy Fawkes’ night to do it and the gesture went unnoticed—he found a lesson even in this.
Brenda and Belinda were both by now feminists. ‘You shouldn’t make those men cups of coffee,’ they told Ellen. ‘Let them do it themselves.’ Belinda had lost two stone, given up her married man and was speaking to Ellen again.
Ellen put the point to Bernard.
‘As Jenny Marx said in 1872,’ she observed, ‘“in all these struggles the harder because the pettier part falls to women. While the men are invigorated by the fight in the world outside, strengthened by coming face to face with the enemy, we women sit at home and darn.” What do you say to that, Bernard? Or do we have to stay fixed in 1872? Is it revisionism to see some improvement in the human consciousness since then?’
‘I doubt it was 1872,’ Bernard said tenderly. ‘You’re just making that up, the way you make so much up. And I certainly don’t expect you to darn my socks. I have other things to worry about besides socks. Coffee’s different. Someone has to make it, and the women just sit smiling and nodding so it might as well be them. Just remember that as the State withers away, so will the many evils which accompany the capitalist state. Sexism included. Only work for the socialist revolution and you work for justice for everyone; blacks, women, oppressed minorities everywhere. Even musicians like your father. What did Marx say in his letter to Kugelmann? “Everyone who knows anything about history also knows that great historical revolutions are impossible without female ferment. Social progress can be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex—the ugly ones included.” Why don’t you ask Brenda and Belinda to come along to Friday meetings? I don’t think Liese would get much benefit from them.’
‘Brenda and Belinda are separatists,’ said Ellen, ‘and don’t go to meetings attended by men.’
‘You mean they’re lesbians?’
‘I do not,’ said Ellen. ‘Was that Marx’s joke about the fair sex, the ugly ones included, or yours?’ asked Ellen. ‘Marx said it,’ Bernard said. ‘Why?’
There was a feeling at the Friday meetings—more men than women attended—that sexual possessiveness between men and women was out of order. It was said that there ought to be more sharing and swapping, in the name of change, equality and the exploration of the self. Men and women, everyone agreed, were after all free and equal; marriage was a symbol of bourgeois oppression. One evening a row broke out when Jed Mantree slipped a beery hand into Ellen’s dress. Jed was a post-graduate student in psychology. His wife Prunella was present. She was pregnant and poorly.
‘Bastard!’ cried Bernard, belabouring Jed with his fists, splattering cheap red wine over books and walls. Ellen had to take Jed to casualty to have a cut above his eye stitched, as poor Prune was too upset to do it. They were away for hours. Bernard was in a torment of perplexity. Prune said dismally that she didn’t think it was right to stand between a man and his freedom. She went home to lie down.
‘See it in its historical perspective,’ Ellen comforted her husband when she returned in the small hours. ‘“Men make their own history,” to quote the master, “but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names and little cries in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.” Let me put it another way, Bernard, when you uttered your little cry “Bastard!” Ireland spoke through you, and your mother, and a whole history of sexual repression; the knee-jerk of an oppressed peasantry rose up in you when Jed’s fingers tweaked my nipples and you hit him, comrade in Marx though he was. You should have let him finger on. You should have been above it. All I had to do was step backwards. I didn’t mind. Neither did Prune. But how could you help it? Marx acknowledges the inevitability of your protest. Understands and forgives it, just like Jesus. I really do believe sexual possessiveness is something we should struggle against, no matter how difficult we find it. Of course Jed should not have tried to come between us; it was a counter-revolutionary act on his part, Trotskyite even, when you think about it, but in that act was Praxis, the moment when theory becomes practice, and you should not have interfered.’
Ellen had long ago given up her part-time work at the optician.
She too was taking her degree in the social sciences. Bernard was by now a junior lecturer in the same college where he had taken his degree. He was in a permanent state of outrage.
‘You are quite right,’ Ellen reaffirmed. ‘What are your employers but State parasites? As Marx so aptly put it, “men richly paid by sycophants and sinecurists in the higher posts, absorbing the intelligence of the masses, turning it against themselves.” Nothing changes!’
‘Let it work its way through him,’ said Ellen to Brenda, ‘let it work its way through and out; the harder I put it the faster it will happen.’
‘You want him to worship you,’ said Brenda, ‘the way Leonard worships Liese.’
Liese and Leonard had a wonderful wedding; now they lived with central heating and embroidered sheets.
‘I just want him to be rational,’ said Ellen.
‘I want, I want,’ said Ellen, pinning up above their bed her favourite William Blake print. It was of a man reaching out for the moon, crying ‘I want, I want.’
‘Not babies, I hope?’ asked Bernard. ‘What sort of world is this to bring babies into? Nuclear war is inevitable.’
‘Not babies,’ said Ellen. ‘According to Marx, you are quite right, war is inevitable.’ And she got out of bed, looked up the page, and read, ‘“A reduction in international armaments is impossible; by virtue of any number of fears and jealousies. The burden grows worse as science advances, for the improvements in the art of destruction will keep pace with its advance and every year more and more will have to be devoted to costly engines of war. It is a vicious circle. There is no escape from it—that Damocles sword of a war on the first day of which all the chartered covenants of princes will be scattered like chaff: a race war which will subject the whole of Europe to devastation by fifteen or twenty million, and which is not raging already because even the strongest of the great military states shrinks before the absolute incalculability of its final result. And failing that, the class war as interpreted by Engels, a war of which nothing is certain but the absolute uncertainty of its outcome.”’
‘Do come to bed,’ said Bernard.
‘Marx and Engels, messengers of God,’ murmured Ellen. ‘I believe. Help thou my unbelief,’ and she got back into bed. Bernard and she had discovered a whole new range of fashionable sexual positions. Their minds raged free: they talked, they shared. Nothing was shameful.
She watched a vase move of its own accord along the bedroom shelf and fall off and break.
‘Subsidence,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s been a hot summer. The ground beneath the house has shifted.’
‘More like poltergeist activity,’ said Ellen. ‘Perhaps the ghost of my mother came with the bed.’
‘I am sure Marx did not recognize the existence of ghosts,’ said Bernard, ‘but please don’t go looking for the reference; not now!’
Ellen waited for something to happen, something to change, but nothing happened, nothing changed. A little struggling lilac tree in the back yard died, because, Belinda said, too many men had pissed on it, out the window, not bothering to wait for the lavatory to be free. ‘Men talk,’ said Brenda, ‘and it’s all piss and wind and ends in death.’ Ellen would lie in bed at night watching the objects on the mantelpiece in the glow from the street light, hoping they would move again: that something from another world would intervene, give her a clue as to the nature of her existence. The curtains were too thin and let the light through. But books, papers, cigarettes and matches—they both smoked now—stayed where they were. Nothing moved. She read some more books, wrote some more essays, passed some exams. Drank more coffee, poured more wine, sidestepped Jed’s hand, sometimes didn’t. Nothing changed.
A stray, dingy orange kitten came yowling up to the back door one night. ‘Don’t feed it,’ said Bernard, ‘or it will never go home,’ but she did, and the next night there it was again. She opened the back door; it rubbed up against her leg. She let it in, fed it well, took it to the vet: the animal plumped up and out: it lost its dinginess, it all but glowed orange in the dark. It lived with them. They called it Windscale, after the power station. Windscale slept on the bed, moving over reluctantly as warm comfortable pockets changed shape and form while Bernard and Ellen made love.
Ken said—he came for Sunday lunch now, often with his stepdaughter but without his wife, who felt awkward in Ellen’s presence—that it reminded him of a kitten he’d given Wendy on the day she gave birth to Apricot. Perhaps it was a descendant of that same animal. Why not? Ellen was pleased to think it might be so. It gave her a sense of history. But still she wasn’t happy. She didn’t understand it.
‘I believe,’ said Bernard, in and out of the classrooms, cafés, kitchens, street corners, pubs, while Ellen nodded and agreed, ‘I believe. That the aim and purpose is to bring about the fall of the bourgeoisie and the rule of the proletariat, to abolish the old society based on class differences and to found a new society without classes and without private property. There is no such thing, mind you, as private property for nine tenths of the population: its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence for those nine tenths. I believe that the revolution cannot just come and go but must be permanent, and it is our duty to further it. I believe!’
‘Holy Mary Mother of God,’ said Ellen, sitting upright in bed in the middle of the night. ‘I know what the matter is. I’m bored. This can’t go on!’
Valerie receives a letter from Eleanor Darcy
Jack, the Holiday Inn bellboy, came up to Room 301 with a letter for Valerie. She put aside her manuscript, opened it, and read. It took some courage to do so. Missives from the outside world had begun to make her uneasy. She, who usually looked forward to the telephone ringing, had become nervous even of that. Safety lay in words on the page. Outside, all was danger and sudden, nasty surprises.
DEAR MRS JONES,
I drew our phone call to a rather abrupt end and I am sorry. I felt we were perhaps rather straying from the point. Let me give you the text of a talk I gave to the Bridport Women’s Institute, before the Scandal, and when Julian and I were still developing our blueprint for the world of the future. They were attentive listeners. Housewives, like the readers of Aura, are not idiots! Here goes—
‘The rich have got to come to some accommodation with the poor. The poor are winning; they are all around, making themselves felt. They are victims, which means that though not necessarily good, or pleasant, they have a moral ascendancy over the rich. Those who are in the right tend in the end to win: those who are in the wrong to let them win. The war is hotting up. The poor creep out of alleyways while the rich put the BMW in for the night and hit the rich over the head and steal the tyres. The rich do not dare to be alone at night in their grand houses: who lurks to rape around the panelled corners, swings to attack from the ropes in the work-out room? Their talk is of property prices, hired bodyguards and stun guns, because the poor are at the gate, inside the gate in the form of the Mexican nurse, the Filipino maid, the Irish girl, the Yugoslav lass; the ones who stand while others sit, and wash the dishes while others eat. The ring on your finger is their dinner for a year. The homeless sleep up against the air vents of the great hotels, supping on the scent of hot fudge sundae and clam chowder.
‘Do not suppose the rich have taste: they spend for the sake of spending, to spite the poor, to say “see what I have that you don’t”. The poor have standards, dignity, taste, conviction: they live honestly, full of hate, shitting in the houses of the rich if they get a chance to break and enter. And why should they not? For the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and no one troubles to hide it any more; to shut the poor away in poorhouses, the old in almshouses, the mad in madhouses, the orphans in orphanages. They are all out in the street now, in every city in the world, and their eyes follow the rich and plan their revenge. And why not? The rich live as fearful princes: the poor live as angry beggars. And there is no pleasure left in the life of the rich: for who can tell lumpfish from caviare any more, and caviare is cholesterol-rich anyway, and forbidden: and when the rich grow old and hired nurses dab away the dribble, can you trust the nurse to love you, or does she hate you? She hates you. She will twist your poor rich senile arm to pay you out, because you have an airy house on the hill, and she goes home to a room in the damp and humid valley. No, the rich must come to some accommodation with the poor: must acknowledge their existence: must open their houses and their fridges and their bank accounts and let the poor in. And there will be no poor.
‘In Darcy’s Utopia this lesson will have been learned. That if the poor are hungry they will eat your food, and why should they not?: that if they are dirty they will infest you with disease, and so they should: that if you ignore them they will mug you and steal what you have, which is no more than you deserve: that if they sit barefoot at your door they will hurt your conscience and you will have to let them in. That therefore there must be no poor, and for there to be no poor there must be no rich.’
So you see, Mrs Jones, something has to be done. The proportion of the underclass to the rest rises yearly, both nationally and internationally. We have grown too good, kind and sensitive to mow them down with machine guns, starve them out of existence. We must incorporate them, or die ourselves. They’ll see to that. We must build our Darcy’s Utopia before it is too late. Our systems, our structures, have to change. I do not expect you to agree with me on everything. I do not maintain I am even necessarily right. I just want you to think about it, and the readers of Aura too. Okay? I’m lunching with Hugo tomorrow. Isn’t that exciting!
With all good wishes,
ED
LOVER AT THE GATE [5 Contd]
Ellen’s Marxist life with Bernard comes to an end
‘PERHAPS WE SHOULD GO on holiday?’ Bernard suggested to Ellen.
Perhaps that was what she wanted: a holiday abroad might make her eyes look at him and not beyond him.
‘Oh I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I think going on holiday is a very bourgeois sort of thing to do.’
‘How do you know? You’ve never been on one,’
‘Neither have you,’ she said. It was true. He longed to go. His elder brother had been to Yugoslavia, one of his sisters to Greece.
‘In Russia,’ he said, ‘workers most definitely go on holiday. They even get sent to health farms, to relax.’
‘The Soviet Union,’ said Ellen, ‘and herein lies the tragedy, has become a revisionist state. We can take no lessons whatsoever from the Soviet Union.’
If he lingered in front of travel agents, she hurried him on. ‘Poor exploited things,’ she’d say of the couples who entered, hand in hand, full of pleasurable anticipation. ‘How they fall for it! The sop from the bosses: the holiday abroad!’ And she’d take him off to the second-hand bookstall which specialized in the politics of the left, or to attend a useful meeting, and stand around with banners.
‘All the same,’ he said, when the spring buds burst on the seven trees that grew in Mafeking Street, along which Wendy had once half-run, half-walked, on her way to give birth to Apricot, ‘it would be nice to be somewhere different, just for a time, just for a couple of weeks.’
‘You will see the same pattern everywhere you go in the world,’ Ellen said briskly: ‘The exploitation of workers; the disruption of native cultures; evidence of the military-industrial ethos, you will walk like a fool amongst other fools: a tourist, staring at the remnants of the past, memorials to worn-out cultures, galleries dedicated to the ostentation and decadence of slave-masters. Bernard, if we have any time to spare, better to stand and gaze at the name of the very street we live in, “Mafeking”, and contemplate its significance. How many died, how many wretches suffered and starved in that particular disgraceful military episode, so that the workers should be duped yet again in the name of the Empire? Worker set against worker, race against race.’
‘You’re quite right, of course,’ he said. What else could he say?
He wanted to buy a car, but she said that was a waste of money and anyway what was the matter with buses, why should they ride, filling the air with fumes, while others walked? She put all spare money into her bank account. ‘You’ll only waste it,’ she said, and she was right and he knew it.
At the beginning of every term he filled in a form habitually distributed to all teaching staff, requiring details of authorized absences from college; for sabbaticals, or the marking of outside examinations, or simply because contractual staff-student contract hours had been fulfilled.
‘You shouldn’t complete that form,’ she said. ‘What are you thinking of, Bernard? This is nothing more or less than an abuse of your professional integrity.’
The degree of his paranoia rose and fell, easily and rhythmically, like some distant lake she had once heard of, which locals claimed breathed in, then out, as if a living thing, among pleasant groves: if she dropped in notions, like stones, when the lake was at its fullest with what power did the ripples surge and spread. Bernard took the matter of the offending questionnaire to the union forthwith: the local dispute quickly turned national: Bernard spoke to the press, rallied his colleagues; but alas, all too many wanted no more than a quiet life: Bernard confided that sometimes he had to eat alone in the staff dining room.
‘The point is not to be liked,’ said Ellen. ‘The point is to seize the day! There were times when even Lenin stood alone! If we stand firm, the bosses will collapse. All the same, Bernard, I suppose you could sometimes talk about other things.’
Ellen now worked at an adventure playground—the Christabel Focus—for underprivileged girls in an ethnically mixed section of the city. It was a wasteland of sour earth waiting development: wooden structures had been hastily erected: old tyres swung from ropes: a lean-to hut provided shelter. The Focus, as it was called, had been organized by separatist feminists. Muslim parents favoured it for their daughters because men were barred the premises. Ellen was no longer a student—she had been asked to leave, having flung a pot of paint at a visiting Minister of Education. She had planned both the paint-throwing and the expulsion. She really could not bear to sit and listen for a minute longer, as she explained to Bernard, to the lies of the imperialist lackeys. Besides, she wanted to give more time to the Focus. ‘But Ellen,’ said Bernard, ‘if you’d only stuck it another month, you’d have got your degree and we could have begun to live quite comfortably.’
‘I don’t work to be comfortable,’ said Ellen. ‘Why should we be comfortable when all around us are living in poverty?’ On Friday nights, when Bernard thought she was supervising Karate for Girls at the Christabel Focus, she met Jed in a motel. He fumbled and humped and heaved and never mastered the art of supporting himself on his elbows so she would arrive home quite squashed and breathless; which was only appropriate.
Bernard’s second sister went to Corfu for a holiday and came back with holiday snaps.
‘Sometimes,’ said Bernard, ‘I too feel like going to a hotel somewhere and looking out over a blue Mediterranean sea, You and I could have breakfast in bed, Ellen. Wouldn’t you like that?’
‘And who would bring us our breakfast, wash our dishes?’ she asked briskly. ‘The underpaid, the overworked, the exploited? How about us going to the study group on Marx and the Hegelian Fallacy next month in Blackpool? That’s by the sea.’
They went. Bernard fell asleep mid-seminar, and Ellen wept, or was seen to weep, from the shame of it.
There was an unfortunate incident at the Christabel Focus: two young girls, aged six and eight respectively, hitched up their trousers to better climb a rope ladder in the presence of a visiting male observer from a possible funding body. Flesh had been exposed. The elders of the local Muslim community objected: the girls were withdrawn from the playgroup. Bernard, by now spokesman for the local race relations committee, accused the Christabel Focus of racism: of wilfully offending the religious sensibilities of a minority group. Then a group called ‘Mothers in the Majority’ accused the Christabel Focus of lesbian activity—not without some justification—in front of the children; Ellen accused Bernard of being anti-feminist, and attempting to ghettoize ethnic minorities; he accused her of racism and white elitism. Bernard slapped Ellen. Ellen slapped Bernard back, and the next day, after a meeting of all parties at which the local Director of Social Services tried to please everyone and offended everybody, lingered after the meeting, provocative and yawning amongst the filing cabinets, until he caught on, locked the door, and embraced her thankfully. That affair continued for some months. She felt the balance of her marriage with Bernard was thereby restored.
Bernard and Ellen went to visit Belinda, who had renounced her separatist tendencies sufficiently to marry a graphics designer. He was poor when she married him. Now he was rich. They had an expensive apartment of minimalist decor: spindly lamps, metal and glass furniture, real paintings on the wall and not a pot plant in sight. Bernard loved it, and said so, as they returned to the dingy familiarity of Mafeking Street. ‘Bourgeois decadence,’ sneered Ellen, and he shut up.
They went to visit Liese. Liese’s father had died. She had inherited a chain of garages. Leonard had given up architecture to help with the business. It flourished. There wasn’t a book in the house, but there was an indoor fountain,
‘Inherited wealth!’ said Ellen when they got home, before Bernard could say a word. ‘The very prop of capitalism.’
They went to visit Brenda and Peter. Brenda was teaching PT in a secondary school. Peter was now a colleague of Bernard’s at the poly. They had a new car, and went to the cinema and ate out. ‘These days it takes two people’s wages to keep one household going,’ observed Bernard.
‘We’ll manage on one wage,’ said Ellen. ‘That is to say, yours. I have no time to work, I’m far too busy.’ Ellen had retired from the Christabel Focus over a question of principle. The polytechnic staff were now on a work to rule, though only at local level—a vote or so at national level having gone against them in spite of a good deal of cooking of the agenda—and she was, as she said, too busy getting a strike fund to so much as think of earning, let alone working; let alone getting to bed before Bernard had long since fallen asleep. They had no television, of course: Ellen scorned it. The new opiate of the people, she jeered; now that religion had failed, TV had taken its place: the gods and goddesses of the new world were the stars and staresses of soap: the bosses’ latest plot to keep the minds of the proletariat addled. Bread and circuses! Holidays and TV! There was enough political theory for Bernard to read, God knew, without turning on the box. Let him get on with Das Kapital! ‘Praise Marx,’ Ellen was fond of saying, eyeing Bernard, ‘and pass the ammunition.’
One day Bernard sat up in bed and noticed the bruises on his wife’s neck. He didn’t think he had put them there but couldn’t quite be sure. He shook her awake. ‘Ellen,’ he said.
‘I have to sleep,’ she said. ‘So do you. We have an important meeting in the morning. If we’re clever we can win a procedural point on the Matters Arising Item 4 (2).’
‘Ellen,’ he said. ‘You win. I don’t think I can describe myself as a Marxist any more. I am resigning from the strike committee. I want a proper life the way other people have it. I want a car, a nice home, a working wife, a child, and to go on holiday.’
‘Capitalist swine,’ she murmured, and sank back into a sleep in which she tossed and stretched and he was sure muttered someone else’s name, but in the morning went with him to a garage and they actually bought a car, albeit second hand, and she let herself be dragged into a travel agency and they booked a holiday to Spain just like anyone else. And for some time after that they went to bed at the same time and Ellen gave up both Jed and the Director of Social Services; and when both threatened, in grief, spite and unreason, to report her infidelity to Bernard, said, ‘Tell away!’ and neither of them did, which rather disappointed her.
She felt no particular guilt: merely that marriage was a kind of old-fashioned scale: a tray on either side in which the fors and againsts had somehow to be kept in balance, and that extramarital sex had sometimes to be heaped on one side just to keep it steady because indefinable things were piling on the other. Were Bernard to be unfaithful to her, she was convinced, she would leave him at once. But she did not think he ever would be. Now he could see the world ranging round him, as it were, free, exciting and full of possibilities, neither limited by the encircling arms of Jesus, nor somehow squared off in a kind of boxing ring, with Marx, Engels, Lenin and Hegel fierce at every corner, barring all the exits. Now he could go inward, freely, into his own mind, Ellen had great hopes for him. She thought they could even be happy.
She thought she could in the end be legitimized, be more than just the girl who had married the first man who came along in order to get away from home: daughter of a mother who’d shacked up with her own mother’s boyfriend at that own mother’s unconscious behest—and had thereby had her life negated forever. Wendy betrayed by Rhoda’s desire for Ken: betrayed by the author of her own being: no wonder she had faded out of the world so quietly and gently and quickly, as if understanding it were better she had never been born. Apricot the accidental: Ken the instrument: Rhoda the foolish but all-powerful. Apricot, who, like Wendy, should never have been born. Apricot, now Ellen, reborn. Windscale the cat stopped coming into the bedroom: lay on one of the new chairs in the living room instead. At least that didn’t keep moving all night.
Hugo’s restaurant interview with Eleanor Darcy
Q: WOULD YOU SAY that feminism played an important part in your life, Mrs Darcy?
A: As I have already explained to your colleague from Aura, Mr Vansitart, I was a feminist of the socialist variety. Don’t the two of you discuss me? I have a feeling you have become quite close. Giddy, even. Perhaps too close, too giddy, to allow much time for discussion? Let me say I believed that the wrongs of women were interconnected with and subsidiary to the wrongs of man; that to work for the revolution was to work, indirectly, for women. That as the State withered away, so would sexism, racism and all other unpleasant social evils. Our agitations were of course not so much for ourselves, for we were all comfortably enough off—that is to say we could afford a bottle of wine every now and then and very few of us rose with the dawn and laboured until nightfall—but sprang from a burning sense of general injustice or a generalized sense of burning injustice, whichever quote’s the best or whichever your readers prefer. Gladly we gave our hearts and minds to others. We were the intellectuals of the revolution: our function to rally and inspire the workers. At my suggestion Bernard tried rallying and inspiring the college support staff—the groundsmen and the cleaners and the canteen ladies—but they weren’t interested. They wanted to get home to watch telly. In Darcy’s Utopia there will be no television.
Q: In that case I imagine people will flee Darcy’s Utopia in droves. Don’t you?
A: No, actually, I don’t. I believe if you took a referendum today a majority would agree that television should be stopped forthwith. Present them with a vision of a world in which meals were eaten at a table instead of on the knees before the flickering screen; in which conversation was commonplace; political and social ideas worked out by individuals, not spoon-fed into the mind by paid commentators; a TV-less world in which we danced and sang and played charades to entertain ourselves or even popped round to the neighbours; in which our children were not fed visions of death and dead bodies on the daily news, their infant imaginations no longer turned feverish and fearful by the sobs and sorrows of the bereaved; nor subject to the cruel, disagreeable and frequently morbid fictional fantasies of others—would we not really vote for this? Are we not well enough aware that on the screen, as on the page, good news is no news? Where is the drama in easy times, good times? Where is the benefit in not raping when rape is on the cards, not killing when killing can be done? Inasmuch as “good” television is confrontational, violent, full of event—why then, I think most people would agree, on reflection, yes, communally, we could do very well without TV. We certainly don’t want to do without it if others have it, for fear of what we might be missing, but if we all gave it up—Mr Vansitart, because the human race has invented TV doesn’t mean we have to put up with it.
Q: But surely people need to know what’s going on?
A: I suppose we could have one news bulletin a month, by which time what was important and what was not would have become apparent. And the occasional newsflash, I daresay, should a swarm of killer bees approach, or a hurricane, or a radioactive cloud, might well be useful. But the race to be first with the news which so obsesses journalists is quite pointless—a childish game they play at the behest of their capitalist masters: to be there first! Why? Who cares? In Darcy’s Utopia we will make do with listening to the radio. Hearing voices in our heads, we must work to make our own pictures. Hereby our imaginations will be educated and stimulated, not grievously curtailed and made afraid.
They sat in a fashionable Italian restaurant in the city. At nearby tables people nudged one another and whispered ‘Eleanor Darcy’. There had been a month or so where her face had been seen almost daily on TV: they had not yet quite forgotten. She changed seats with Hugo so that she sat with her back to the other diners. She had told him that Brenda was obsessively vegetarian, and that she longed for red meat: would he take her out? It was her idea, in other words, not his.
Q: You don’t imagine the TV industry would take kindly to its abolition?
A: Oh, we don’t have to be quite so drastic. Let them make programmes for each other. They do it anyway. Just let them not transmit them. I’ll have the lemon sole.
Q: But I thought you wanted meat?
A: Only in theory; when it comes to it. Faced with the actuality of change, one avoids it. One likes what one knows, and knows what one likes. Now when I was with Julian, my second husband, I was a great meat eater. Julian was fond of steaks: we got through jars of mustard. While I was with him I even developed a liking for steak tartar. Bernard was a pork and beans man, with a weakness for the occasional Irish stew, on the greasy side. Rhoda and my father lived on sausages and mash, and little crisp frozen chicken pies.
She wore a dress of fine and flowing black fabric and many long strings of blue crystal beads and a rather affected little red hat. Her hands were small, long-fingered and strong. The tape recorder sat on the table between a fluted glass containing an artificial rose and the giant black pepper grinder the waiter had inadvertently left behind. The more he required her to talk about herself the more he longed for her to ask him about himself.
Q: But what are people going to do all day in this TV-less world? Can you give me some idea as to their sexual and marital mores? I take it second husbands are allowed?
A: There, you see! Trying to catch me out again! The fear of governments always is that if people are not occupied playing competitive sports or watching TV they will be at it all the time. That there will be copulating and fornicating wherever you look—beneath the counter of the wool shop, behind the grille at the bank, in the schools’ staff rooms—everywhere you look there will be limbs writhing in ecstasy: only look upwards and you will see the mighty outspread wings of the Devil casting their reddish glow over all the land, and from the black and foaming pit of his fanged mouth the dreadful word will issue: ‘F*ck, f*ck, f*ck!’
Diners glanced surreptitiously over their shoulders. Eleanor’s voice rose. ‘Hush,’ he implored her. She apologized at once and moderated her voice. He thought she was glorious, glorious. Her green eyes glowed.
But no. It will not be like that. The inhabitants of Darcy’s Utopia will have as much or as little difficulty getting together as anyone else. Fear of rejection will inhibit many, others will cringe before fear of complications, responsibility, hurting others, failing to perform adequately, or having to reveal physical imperfections. Cellulite of the thighs keeps many a woman chaste: a potbelly keeps a man on the straight and narrow like nothing else. Most will stick to a partner chosen in the madness and self-confidence of youth, as they do outside Darcy’s Utopia. Women will continue to choose men—or men women; each sex always believes it is the other which does the choosing—the man being a little older, a little richer, a little more decisive than the woman, for this is how the majority of the human race pairs itself off, and why the myth of female inferiority is so prevalent throughout the world—it being the direct experience of so many children in so many households that Daddy knows best and Mummy’s a fool. The woman searches—though these days she doesn’t know it, matters of procreation being so far from anyone’s thoughts—for a good father for her young, adequate in looks, more than adequate as a provider; the man searches for a good, kind and competent mother for his children, not such a dog as to make copulation a problem—both settle for the best he or she can do. We rank ourselves amongst our peers very early on, so far as our physical attractiveness is concerned: we make our sexual moves within the group appropriate to our vision of ourselves. In Darcy’s Utopia people will make up and change their minds, try something new, retreat to the familiar, suffer from requited and unrequited love as much there as anywhere else: how can it be otherwise? But what they will be is discreet about it all. ‘What the mind doesn’t know the heart can’t suffer’ will be inscribed above every double bed in the land. No man will publicly humiliate a woman because she is ‘old’ or he finds her sexually unattractive: no woman will deride a man for his sexual insufficiency or because he is ‘weak’ or ‘wet’ or a ‘wimp’. It will simply be unthinkable so to do. Thus happiness and self-esteem will be maximized. Did you know, by the way, that statistically a woman tries out a new partner once in every two thousand copulations?
She ordered her fish unfilleted. Delicately and discreetly she parted flesh from bone. Her nail varnish was pearly pink. He thought of Valerie waiting for him. He did not think of Stef at all. His children were safely in Norfolk, with his mother, so why should he?
Q: Really? What is the figure for men?
A: I don’t know. I’m sorry. In Darcy’s Utopia, however, though love will flourish, and pleasure abound, furtive alliances be formal and reformed, and sexual excitements be breathless and secret and glorious, marriage will be beset around with difficulties and obstacles and deep seriousness: only the very determined will marry. Livings together will happen in abundance, of course; but marriage will be another matter: marriage will imply intent to procreate. Of all matters in Darcy’s Utopia only procreation will be subject to rules and regulations. It will be a most serious matter. You cannot have women popping new people out of themselves just at random, when and where they want. In Darcy’s Utopia there are bound to be children, but their parents will be carefully selected, and being in short supply they will grow up in a world which loves and admires children and finds them interesting, and doesn’t herd them together in schools to get them out of the way, dunk them in front of obscene videos to keep them quiet, and slap them about and threaten them in the streets, which is what happens in this society of ours which you seem to find both perfectly ordinary, and, worse, inevitable. Well, I don’t. How many children do you have, Mr Vansitart?
Q: Three. A little boy of eight and four-year-old-twins, girls. Loved and wanted children all of them. I find what you say monstrous. I cannot believe you mean it. You’re joking.
Hugo looked up in alarm as a woman in a black belted mackintosh and beret pushed her way through the restaurant towards him. He got to his feet. ‘Stef!’ he pleaded, but she slapped his face, there and then, in front of everyone. ‘Your mother brought the twins back. I’m taking Peter with me on holiday. The twins are in the buggy outside,’ she said. ‘You’d better bring them inside before someone steals them.’ And she left. Eleanor Darcy said, ‘Don’t bother about me. I’ll find my own way home.’