Hugo’s further interview with Eleanor Darcy
Q: IT’S GOOD OF you to see me this evening. I’m very sorry about the disturbance at the restaurant and that we had to cut the interview short. I understand from Valerie—I’ve been seeing quite a lot of Valerie, as I think she’s indicated—that you were visiting your husband today. You must be tired. I imagine such prison visits are very trying?
A: No. Sometimes they can be quite heartening. Julian has lost a good deal of weight. He works out with dumbbells in the prison gym. A non-academic life suits him. Nowadays when his eyes light up for love of me, they are somehow clearer and brighter than they used to be; the lighting up is the more flattering. Julian used to be a good-looking man somehow clouded, dispersed, by layers of fat and the radiation of pure thought; now he is simply a cadaverous, eagly, extraordinarily randy man. We managed a cell on our own for over an hour.
Q: How on earth did you manage that?
A: Some of the prison officers are friendly. He has converted quite a few to Utopianism. Many thought it a cruel injustice that Julian should have to go to prison at all.
Q: I am reminded of Chernyshevsky, that most fierce and feared of Russian revolutionaries, who was put in prison and then converted the guards to Communism. They simply opened the prison gates and let him walk out.
A: If a thing can happen once it can happen again. I suppose you could describe Julian as that most fierce and feared of monetary theorists. To every age, its terrorist.
Q: Valerie has asked me if you could answer a few questions on her behalf. She is getting on well with Lover at the Gate, but sometimes the clues you provide are, well, enigmatic. Of course my piece will be very different from Valerie’s: I wouldn’t want you to think there was duplication: that we were taking up your time unnecessarily.
Hugo was beginning to feel oppressed by his surroundings. The shiny black sofa, the shabby furniture, the dull suburban road the other side of a forlorn garden, seemed some kind of irony. He did not believe Eleanor Darcy lived here. She merely pretended to; he felt the minute he left she and Brenda packed up themselves and the children and took off to more exotic surroundings. Yet was not this how most of the world lived, and thought themselves lucky to do so?—once survival was accomplished the struggle for ordinariness began.
A: You mean Valerie wants to know more about the role of children in Darcy’s Utopia? I thought she would.
Q: Well, you did speak of selection. Her liberal antennae were alerted.
A: Tell her all babies will be automatically aborted unless good reason can be shown why they should be allowed to proceed to term.
Q: Isn’t that a little drastic?
A: Yes. Even in Darcy’s Utopia it will take quite some getting used to. The decision to ‘choose’, or not to ‘choose’ will be taken away from the parents and left to an ad-hoc committee of neighbours. Are these two (or this one) not so much capable of loving a baby, as of being worthy of a baby’s love? If the verdict is that they are not, there can be no baby. Down the plughole with it, this little glob of potential life, this putative devourer of the world’s resources! The root of delinquency, the alienation, the violent and despairing habits of today’s young, has very little to do with the fact that their parents failed to love them—most adults look round quite desperately for something, anything to coo over, however erratically—but that their parents failed to be worthy of their love. Babies are born with a sense of fairness, justice, morality, and a great capacity for kindness and forbearance, and it is sheer disappointment in the character and nature of parent and world that changes this eager infant into a murderous teenager. Some survive, of course: time heals a few wounds, wounds a few heels. The teenager gets older, encounters some nicer, more controlled, more kindly people than he or she ever found at home—most people behave worst in their own homes—and with any luck comes to understand, yes, there is an aspiration or so floating around out there, and, if he, she, hasn’t seen too many horror movies, been too beaten up in body and mind, regains a little faith in a world at least potentially redeemable. He, she, grows up into a mortgage-paying, law-abiding adult who at least wants to give his, her, own children a better chance. And may or may not have the resolution, the constancy, so to do. Not to love, which is easy, but to be in truth, in fact, in deed, lovable. I hear the divorced parent saying, ‘Oh, the kids are all right. They know I love them,’ but it isn’t true. The kids are not all right. You may love the kids, but you are not worthy of their love. You look after yourself, not them. You have betrayed them, and they hate you for it.
Q: Well, that is a matter of opinion. And this notion of an ad-hoc committee of neighbours, with power of life and death, is surely very eccentric.
A: What are juries but ad-hoc committees of neighbours? Juries saw no problem deciding whom they were to despatch from this world: let similar bodies decide who is to come into it.
Q: It seems to me that the citizens of Darcy’s Utopia are going to be kept very busy.
A: Indeed. Idleness, in this nation of no work, will not be encouraged. There will be no ‘training in leisure’. Darcians will be hard at work, repairing the past, safeguarding the future; they will have no need of theme parks. Darcy’s Utopia has a Mission Statement, as does any corporate enterprise in the business world. ‘We are working towards a secular, unicultural, multiracial society.’ When citizens are called upon to make up their minds, pass laws or make regulations—their decisions will be infused with the light cast by this statement, and so by and large will work towards this end. It may be hard to take a step in the right direction, but it will be still harder to take a step in the wrong. We have a time scale, too. We give ourselves two hundred years to achieve it. If it doesn’t work, we rethink.
Q: Secular? But isn’t religion a civilizing force? Aren’t many of our social problems due to the decline of religion?
A: Now look. Nice orderly home-and-family-loving people are the ones who believe in God and even still go to church. They are nice people: they believe that everything ought to be fair, that is to say that virtue is rewarded and villainy punished. Since they can’t see it happening on earth they invent a heaven in which it does. And a kind of consensus develops amongst right-minded people in your neighbourhood, that if you keep to certain rules and rituals then by God, by magic, you’ll get to heaven, you won’t even have to die. Eat the wafer, chant the lyric, bow to Mecca: please God and he’ll be kind. But these people are not nice, orderly, home-and-family-loving because they believe in God. The temperament comes first. Acknowledging God is effect, not cause. And institutionalize the religion, any religion, and you’re in trouble. Nice people become guilty people, cruel people, unhappy people, trapped in belief structures their temperaments don’t agree with, taught peculiar beliefs in school, threatened by hell and afflicted by superstition. And what terrible damage they do, have done through the centuries, from the Inquisitor General to Stalin, to your young neighbour in the IRA who believes in the Catholic God and uses that to justify his murdering you in your bed, to the Mullah who whips up the faithful to civil strife in the name of Allah, to the Moonie who steals your children’s money and affections.
People like rules: it is not good for them to have them. The individual must come to his, her, own decision as to where morality lies. Do what you like in your own home, worship whatever God you please, but shut up about it in public. In Darcy’s Utopia church services of various denominations will exists and blind eyes will no doubt be turned. Common sense will prevail. But the jury of neighbours who decide upon your fertility might not look too kindly upon you if they think you are going to bring up your children as Jehovah’s Witnesses or Servants of Baal, or use the terror of hell as a way of controlling them: or beat the soles of their feet if they get the Koran wrong.
Q: Won’t terrible injustices ensue?
A: Chance and luck will be a factor in Darcy’s Utopia, as elsewhere. But good luck attends the happy. Darcians will try to be happy, to avoid self-righteousness. The self-righteous seldom smile.
Q: Would you describe yourself as happy?
A: I’m getting there. I don’t have children, which makes it easier. To have these hostages to fortune wipes the smile from many a woman’s face. Consider Brenda. In Darcy’s Utopia parents will have some reassurance in the fact that at least the neighbours thought they were fit to rear children: some of the responsibility for failure, should failure there be, ‘will rest with the community. But I like to think the neighbours, the ten just persons, men and women both, who have seen you in the shops, who have watched you cross a road, who understand your body language, will make the right decision.
Q: Could we get back to this uniculture of yours? Don’t you mean monoculture?
A: No. Monoculture assumes the domination of the single majority culture: that ‘they’ will be subsumed into ‘us’. That the eaters of curry must learn to love fish and chips, that husbands of four must become husbands of one, that young blacks must drive cars in the fashion of elderly whites: that the custom and laws of the majority will prevail. In a uniculture this is not the case. A uniculture is a matter for rational decision: we will be prepared to make value judgements. Better a culture in which men have one wife and women need not shroud themselves in black, we’ll say. Or perhaps we won’t. Better one in which marriages are arranged than left to love. Let us all sing the Darcian Anthem every morning at ten a.m. Let men wear skirts, not women trousers. Let us all change our names four times in our lives. Let us take our education in our middle not our opening years. Or whatever is decided. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll change it. And if you don’t like it, you can live somewhere else. And we might even divide Darcy’s Utopia into four and have a different Mission Statement in each, and citizens can move to the one they prefer: or work to change the one they’re in, if they prefer. Oh yes, Darcy’s Utopia will be all freedom and hard work, and all alive and energetic with a perpetual sense of achievement. Who will need religion when heaven is here on earth?
Q: This unicultural society of yours. Isn’t it going to be rather dull? What about the richness, the diversity of the multicultural society in which all decent non-racist folk take such pleasure?
A: Goodness, how you do sometimes remind me of Bernard! How all-pervasive is the orthodoxy of right-thinking people. I have never heard a member of an ethnic minority obliged to dwell within the barbarous framework of a powerful, prosperous, white, allegedly Christian culture talk about the richness of the multicultural society. That is left for members of the host community to do, as it busies itself ghettoizing the minority; and as it ghettoizes it mumbles, and if you listen carefully you can just discern beneath the self-righteousness, the self-congratulation, the following: ‘Okay, okay, so you were having a hard time in your own country. You poor things! Come over here and join us by all means—but not too many of you, so we’ll vet you as you come in; and not make getting in pleasant or easy; and just please stick to your own districts, and keep your own religion and dance away to tambourines, or bow to the East, or whatever you like to do to remind you of home—or home as it used to be a hundred years ago but certainly isn’t now—and aren’t we clever, and kind, and good, the way we give you your roots back?, and with any luck your children will grow up well-behaved and pleasant; ours certainly aren’t; because your children come of a society which, being somewhere else and a long time ago, is probably better than ours. And speak your own language, please: we’ll even teach it to you in our schools to prove how understanding we are, just so long as you do our dirty work for less wages than our own kind are prepared to accept: just so long as you keep yourselves to yourselves, and don’t let your children marry ours, because what we’re all terrified of, so terrified the word’s gone out of the vocabulary. Let me whisper, can you hear? MISCEGENATION. The mixture of races! The future, in other words.’
In Darcy’s Utopia no one is frightened of the future. We welcome it. Because this is the world’s future, and we must hurry towards it with open and welcoming arms. There will be no black, no white, no yellow; no Asiatic, no Caucasian; we will all, individually, be multiracial, multicultural; and then indeed there will be a wonderful diversity, and God’s will done upon earth. So don’t come to me, Mr Hugo Vansitart, with your ‘rich diversity of language and culture’. The richness and diversity will be when your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, are of mixed race, mixed ancestry: look at each other with fondness and love out of eyes which slant every which way and who compare the shade of their skins with interest, not envy: because the paler the skin no longer means the longer-lived, the more prosperous, the more educated, the more capable of reaching the fullness of human potential. And when that has happened, why, we might be able to invent a God as good, as moral, as human beings. That is quite enough for today.
Q: Could I just ask, before I go? You have on occasion referred to someone called Nerina—
A: Is your tape switched off? Good. Nerina remains off the record. Things are stirred up enough as they are, don’t you think? Nerina was someone—is someone—whom Bernard tried to help. He shook religion out of her mind, as it were, and into the vacuum rushed something rather disagreeable. Nerina is a very pretty, very bright girl; of Muslim background, though no one in the family actually ever went to a mosque—well, only her brother. You know how fanatical the young can be. Unfortunately and unwittingly Bernard angered her. And that is why Julian is in prison. And why I sit here, husbandless, dependent upon social security supplemented by such pitiful amounts of money as I can wring out of the national press, and Bernard genuflects once more, fled back to his baptismal church, terrified by the very notion of living outside it. All this, you might say, was Nerina’s fault—if only it was not clear to me that Nerina was the symptom, not the disease: the pustule, not the pox: that to this end, without need of her intervention, all would still have come. It is a terrible thing to laugh a person out of faith.
Q: A woman’s faith, too?
A: As I said, the greater includes the lesser.
Q: When you say that I think you’re laughing at me.
A: Now why should I do a thing like that? You are the most serious person in the world, Hugo, with your very neat suit, your very quiet tie, your hotel laundered shirt. I can tell from its whiteness, its crispness. Let me feel! Yes. You have to be careful of hotel cleaners: things come back very white, but don’t last long. Perhaps Valerie would wash them for you? Sometimes they have little bottles of stuff called Softwash on hotel shelves, which the guests take with them on leaving. Shall we go to the pub and have a drink?
Valerie is shocked
WHAT ELEANOR DARCY HAS to say is of course monstrous, fascist. Babies, aborted compulsorily in the womb! What about the woman’s right to choose, forget the baby’s right to life? Though Eleanor Darcy denies the very concept of ‘right’. ‘It would be nice if only’ is her replacement of the term, and I can see the point in that.
Babies selected to live by friends and neighbours! Who’d ever agree to that? What government would even dare? It is true, of course, that women would be spared the agony of choice. I think about my friend Erin, as I often do. She has a Down’s syndrome baby. We all knew it would be disastrous; we foretold that her husband would walk out, that her other children would suffer: we saw she was the only one of the family unit who couldn’t bear not to see the fruit of her womb, however sour, ripen, drop and live. And that’s how it turned out: the child, now twelve, is badly retarded, Erin is no more than its nurse; she manages without a husband, her other children are spiteful and embarrassed. Erin talks about the joy the mindless child brings her—well, so it may, but her love for it has been most destructive for others. Left to us, friends and family, we would have said no, Erin, sorry, not for you. This baby you insist on having keeps other babies out, ones which won’t cause this distress to you and yours. Just not this one; Erin, try again. All women have as many babies as they can manage: four, three, two, one, none at all: as many as they can afford—physically, emotionally, practically. I managed two. A woman spends years saying no, not this one, stay out of my bed: I’ll wait, a better man will come along: and with the better man a better baby. Let’s hope, here’s hoping he comes along! The lover at the gate is the father at the gate. Where is he? I’ll wait, yes I’ll wait, for a baby I can feed better, love better, provide running water for, give a father to, who stays around and bounces babies on his knee. To this end she stays a virgin, or practises abstinence, or contraception, or if things get further in spite of her best endeavours—for both men and her own desires are importunate—terminates. If she didn’t, she’d have babies annually from puberty until death by childbirth around the age of thirty or so. How it must have been for our Stone Age grandmothers—swell, oh, oh, pop, look, a little one—oh, it’s dead—oh, I’m dying, dying; dead! And even now we get it wrong; how often, for all our knowledge, we get it wrong. Choose a husband who leaves, a father who doesn’t provide; the genes don’t match, the conjunction goes wrong—the wrong baby at the wrong time; oh, bad luck! My neighbours, my friends, why did you not save me from this?
It wouldn’t all be negative. My other friend Edie gave birth to a baby with one leg. It showed up in the scan—one child in three, they say, is now born with some imperfection or other, mostly minor, sometimes major, and whether that’s due to pollution, or insecticides, or growth hormones, or radon gas, or nuclear power plants, take your choice, take your pick: and whatever the cause, the mothers stay healthy enough, are sufficiently medicated one way or another to bring babies to term—and we all said to Edie, what’s a missing leg? Keep this baby, look after this baby, you have a great husband, the other kids aren’t the kind to care, and we were right. It was okay. This child has a metal prosthesis and kicks hell out of the others at football. Of course he’d be happier if he had two legs, so would she, so would everyone, but he’d rather live with one leg than not live at all. We did know. We are born into a group, not just into a family, not just to an individual woman. Let the group decide. Ten good neighbours and true.
It isn’t the perfect way; it remains horrible, but the lesser of many evils. In Darcy’s Utopia it has to be. All babies terminated unless validated. What happens otherwise in our two-hundred-year, five-hundred-year plan? Can we wait for prosperity and education to keep mankind in check; so the humble villager, the wretched dweller in the shantytown doesn’t choose the traditional, unthinking, long-term option of a dozen children, the decision which in the long term destroys both them and theirs? We have lost that race: we must face it. It is all paradox, this business of procreation!
Every way we look we see a barrier and on the wall is written ‘No! Immoral! Unkind! Fascist!’ Everything but the free flow of natural selection is disagreeable to so much as contemplate, but the planet sinks beneath the weight of us, stinks because of the shit of us; if we don’t do something we all go down together, gasping for air, for heaven’s blessing. Governments do what they can. Time and time again they fail. Let neighbours, simple neighbours, try and do better. Meeting their quota, their too-small-for-comfort quota, always with generosity, understanding and compassion, understanding as a group what the individual woman knows by instinct, that this child, by existing, keeps that other child out.
Hugo says I am so persuasive in convincing myself on this subject he begins to wonder who it is who speaks through Eleanor Darcy, is it God or the Devil? This is quite an advance on his initial assumption that poor Julian Darcy, the Rasputin of Bridport, economic theorist and prisoner of his nation’s conscience, victim of its guilt, indolence and fear, is the motivating force behind Darcy’s Utopia. But how about the side benefits! How religiously, if only in order to obviate neighbourly interference, the Darcian woman would observe contraceptive precautions! If she wanted a baby, what a good neighbour she would be, if only to keep in well with them: how she would feed her neighbours’ cats, take in her neighbours’ mail, refrain from drunken disturbance! My Sophie, for example—if she were in Darcy’s Utopia and in a couple of years were to become a teenage primigravida, which is perfectly on the cards—I reckon the neighbours would know better than Lou or me if she was fit to be a mother or not. As it is, it’s the family who takes responsibility for denying the baby existence, though permitting its death rather than allowing its life. ‘Family physicians’ enjoy the most extraordinary regard in our society: somewhere in our joint head we need to see them as knowing, honest, trustworthy, benign and caring folk—the truth of the matter being that they are as forgetful, spiteful and drunk as the next person—and as likely to grow old, lecherous and incompetent as anyone else. Your family doctor may know one end of a thyroid gland from another—with any luck—but no especial wisdom is granted him because he sits in a surgery seeing one coughing person after another all day; peering into ears and wombs and hearing tales of insomnia and worms. I have been indecently assaulted by many a wise old family physician in my time: the passion for mammary examination—which has saved almost no lives at all over the past few years, it now appears—has been fomented and encouraged by male doctors. I wish Hugo would come back. My thoughts are growing wild. He somehow nails me, pins me, centres me in one spot like a butterfly spread for inspection, wonderful, beautiful; he steadies me. This time he did not want to make love to me when he dropped the tapes off, and in truth I was a little tired. It would be nice to have some conversation as well as sex—dinner out somewhere, say. But his editor had to see him.
If Eleanor Darcy can manage a private room in a prison, perhaps she manages one in the local pub as well? But this is paranoia; of the kind her poor Bernard suffered from. The breathing lake, into which suspicion drops, like a stone, the ripples spreading! I trust Hugo, of course I do. My body is his, his is mine: one flesh. What was it Eleanor Darcy said? Love is the evidence you need which proves the benign nature of the universe. Love lets you know you are alive. Fate weaves its heady patterns all around; good luck attends you, nobody fools you: Hugo does not repair with Eleanor to the back room of the pub. Of course not.
Babies by licence only! There’d be abuses, there always are abuses: those with money would do what they wanted. Except that money, in Darcy’s Utopia, will count for nothing: just as it counts for nothing in Moscow today: where pockets are stuffed with roubles but there is nothing to buy. In Darcy’s Utopia money will be as meaningless as coconuts in a country where they fall from the trees: it will cease to be a corrupting cause. Would my neighbours have let Lou and me have Sophie and Ben? Of course they would. I am a good citizen, a nice person; I am just at the moment in the grip of a sexual passion, in the throes of love; I am alive: I who have been so nearly dead for decades, which is why I am currently neglecting them, just a little.
The phone goes. It’s Ben. How did he know I was here? ‘Mum,’ he says. ‘Dad said to call you if we wanted anything. He’s out at a concert. Sophie and me haven’t got a babysitter. There’s just us. Sophie’s got a pain—’
Sophie always has pains. It’s her age. I tell Ben to tell Sophie to put a hotwater bottle on it. How dare Lou leave them on their own? He either has to give up music, or organize live-in help of some kind. Where is Kirsty Bull? She can share his bed for all I care. Bath from ten forty-five to eleven; teeth for five timed minutes, lights out by eleven fifteen. Love from eleven twenty to forty on Tuesdays and Fridays should there be no concerts on either of those nights: otherwise do without. I am sure the world is full of women who would appreciate a pleasant, hard-working man with regular habits, and would be happy to babysit Sophie and Ben.
What do the children expect of me? I brought them into the world. Isn’t that enough? In another ten years they can come and visit me to their hearts’ content and I won’t object. Unless Ben remains a computer freak—he has his father’s appreciation of the mathematics, the square lines, the patterning out of existence; unless Sophie fails to lose a little of her egoism—or unless Hugo objects to their visits. I’m sure I don’t want his puny little creatures visiting me. I want his life to have begun the moment he met me, as he wants mine to have begun, simultaneously. Together, we exist. Separately, we are nothing.
LOVER AT THE GATE [7]
Brenda finds Ellen in a state of enchantment
BRENDA KNOCKED ON ELLEN’S door, nervous of what might happen next, anxious to know in detail what her friend Ellen had been unable to voice on the phone. Ellen opened the door wearing household gloves, her underwear and a wrap.
‘The kitchen sink is blocked,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to clear it with the plunger.’
‘Has he gone?’
‘Who?’
‘The Vice Chancellor,’ said Brenda. ‘I forget—is it the Chancellor who does all the work in universities, or is it the Vice Chancellor?’
She knew about polytechnics, not universities.
‘The Vice Chancellor,’ said Ellen, returning to the sink.
Brenda followed, and gratefully sat down at the kitchen table. Her pregnancy rendered her unexpectedly top-heavy: no matter how she tried to balance back on her heels, she kept feeling that she was about to topple forward. Ellen made no comment on Brenda’s state. Usually she at least went through the motions of expressing concern, and of sharing some of the apprehension and excitement of the pregnancy. But today, Brenda could see, the talk was to be all of Ellen. She was sorry for herself, but happy for her friend, whose life in the last few years, while Brenda’s went forward into the tumult of marriage and babies, had become predictable, unambitious and, to Brenda’s mind, surprisingly dull: as if Ellen’s peculiarly bright and individual life flame was losing its incandescence: that the sheer everydayness of married life to the difficult Bernard—Brenda, Belinda and Liese all agreed that Bernard was ‘difficult’, with his passions, his principles, his politics and policies—and though they marvelled at the ease with which Ellen, as they put it, handled him, had somehow expected something more dramatic, more marvellous, for their friend, than that she should, as they felt she did, stand round kitchen sinks all day, taking a little job here, a little job there, failing to make any impression on the world at all. When they asked her what she was doing with her life, she would reply ‘thinking’, which seemed a singularly flaky answer.
Now as Ellen stood at the sink, working the rubber plunger in, out, in, out, listening and watching in the dirty water for the signs of vacuum working, of pressure releasing, the shoulder of her blue housecoat fell down and Brenda was startled by the white luminosity of her flesh.
‘The Vice Chancellor,’ said Ellen, ‘is the chief executive officer of the university. The Chancellor is merely its figurehead. A position of great dignity, of course, but you only really have to work once a year, when you spend a week or so conferring degrees. The Vice Chancellor is the one who really counts. Bridport is a small, efficient, research-orientated, cost-effective university in the new mode, which specializes in the philosophical and economic sciences, and its Vice Chancellor works extremely hard and has little time for personal life.’
‘Did he tell you all that?’
‘Yes. He said he felt it was appropriate to present his credentials at the beginning of the courtship. He said he hoped I didn’t find him hopelessly old-fashioned.’
‘And did you?’
‘I thought he was rather sweet.’
‘You said he was old and fat.’
‘Yes but his mind, Brenda. A mind makes up for such a lot.’
‘Bernard has a mind, Ellen.’
‘Eleanor. Julian Darcy called me Eleanor. First I had to put up with Apricot because of my crazy parents, then Ellen when Bernard was trying to punish me and make me share his guilt—now at last I have been invested with some kind of romance, of unearthliness. You know Julian is a member of one of the government’s think-tanks?’
‘I don’t keep up with these things.’
‘You should. He’s a very busy man. When he’s not running the university, or sorting out the government, he writes books on monetarism and the economics of multiculturalism. He was looking out photographs for his publishers when he came across one of himself at last year’s conference on the economics of multiculturalism, and there I was in the background, my hair a halo around my head in a shaft of sunlight, and he faced at last what he had tried to avoid for so long—his love for me.’
Brenda wondered if perhaps Ellen were fantasizing, or teasing, and thought on the whole not. There was such a smell of sex in the air she wanted to open the window. She had thought at first perhaps it was the blocked drains, but no. Ellen gave up the plunger, took a towel, laid it on the floor, opened the cupboard beneath the sink and, with wrench and bucket at the ready, lay flat on her back on the towel, manoeuvred her arms inside the cupboard and unscrewed the joint beneath the sink where the soakaway met the drain. Brenda, female as she was, eight months pregnant as she was, felt an urge to join her friend upon the floor, kiss her, embrace her. It was perhaps as well—for Ellen would not, as she realized later, have reacted at all favourably towards such an advance—that the joint was quickly loosened and a whole flood of filthy water poured down into the bucket, as was expected, overfilled the bucket, as had not been expected, splashed and then poured over the prostrate Ellen. The water was deep brown, bitty, scummy and smelt dreadful. Ellen stood up. ‘Extraordinary,’ she remarked as she went to the shower, but quite calmly in the circumstances. ‘The sink wasn’t all that full, was it, Brenda?’
‘I hadn’t thought so,’ said Brenda, following, perching on the end of the bath, ‘but I suppose it must have been.’
She was glad when Ellen at last covered up her nakedness, her luminosity, with jeans and sweater, and they went back to the kitchen to mop up the floor. The room smelt even more sweet and sickly than before. Brenda couldn’t make out what had been in the water.
‘When he said courtship,’ said Brenda, ‘what exactly did he mean?’
‘He wants to marry me.’
Brenda pointed out that Ellen was married already.
‘So’s he,’ said Ellen. ‘He has two grown-up children, and a wife. She’s very elegant and charming, he says—her name’s Georgina. She has to do all the social side of things. Vice Chancellor’s wives have to entertain a lot. It’s rather like being first lady at the White House.’
‘Isn’t she doing it well enough, or something? What’s his complaint?’ Brenda felt quite snarky. She had always remarked upon and lamented how little consideration wives were granted in adulterous relationships. They took on the role of the mother on a family outing—the nuisance and the spoilsport, the one who says ‘don’t go too near the edge’, ‘those apples aren’t ripe’, ‘shouldn’t we get home before the fog sets in?’
‘His present wife does it too well, if anything,’ said Ellen. ‘He says the magic has gone out of the relationship. He asks what is life without love?’
‘And what did you reply? I hope that life in his case was his commitment to the university, his students, his governments, his publishers, his wife, his children. Of all the men in the world this Julian Darcy seems to have a remarkable amount to give up for love.’
‘That’s what’s so wonderful about it,’ said Ellen. ‘And it’s strange, Bernard’s always been so good in bed—once we got going—but now all that with Bernard seems somehow too facile. Julian really had quite some difficulty, and yet spiritually, emotionally, sexually—Brenda, with Julian just now I was transported. It’s the only way I can describe it. Transported.’
Brenda felt a twinge or two in her belly. She hoped the strains of the morning were not going to induce labour early. Ellen was nutty; so much was evident. There was a condition called paraphrenia, of which she had heard—in which a person was recognizably insane in one area only, seldom certifiable, but just a terrible nuisance to family, friends and neighbours. Perhaps Ellen was a paraphrenic?
The door opened and Bernard came in.
‘Darling!’ said Ellen. ‘How wonderful! I rang the hospital and they said they didn’t think you’d be home until tomorrow. I was coming in this afternoon to see you, during visiting hours.’
‘Visiting hours are all day,’ said Bernard. ‘There’s a terrible smell in here. What is it?’
‘I’ve spent all morning unblocking the sink,’ said Ellen. ‘Haven’t I, Brenda?’
‘Yes,’ said Brenda.
‘Anyway,’ said Ellen, ‘they let you out, that’s the main thing. They were just being over-careful. Well, I’m glad they were. I rang the college to say you wouldn’t be in.’
‘They’re running the college on such a mean and cost-effective margin,’ said Bernard, ‘there’ll be no sick cover arranged for me whatsoever. I’d better try and get in this afternoon.’
‘They can’t arrange sick cover for reasons other than meanness,’ observed Ellen, making, as Brenda was glad to see, a cup of tea for her husband. He looked quite pale and shaken but perhaps, Brenda thought, no more than usual. Bernard always had the air of a man to whom a disaster had happened, or was about to happen. ‘They can’t arrange it because teaching staff decline to notify the office as to their whereabouts, let alone their projected absences, their sabbaticals, their leave-takings, legitimate or otherwise as they may be.’
‘Whose side are you on?’ asked Bernard sharply. ‘All of a sudden you’re talking like management,’ and then he seemed to forget that, and gave an account of his breakfast at the hospital; it had come three hours after the ward had been woken, and consisted of a soup plate at the bottom of which some grey fat-free milk swilled, into which a long tube of a kind of cornflakes was to be poured. He had read the tube. The flakes contained one third of the day’s vitamin, mineral and carbohydrate requirements for an adult. There was a slice of thin white bread, already curling, so long it was since it had left the loaf, spread with a kind of non-fat oil, and a cup of warm decaffeinated coffee with a packet of low-protein milk powder to go with it.
‘Poor darling,’ murmured Ellen, preparing toast, butter and marmalade. ‘Poor darling!’
Brenda felt quite weak. Was she meant to endorse her friend’s hypocrisy? She supposed, yes, she was.
After breakfast, Bernard had been told he was in good health; he was told to go home but had to wait for the consultant’s round before his departure could be officially sanctioned. The consultant was delayed, unusually, by an emergency, so Bernard had to sit like an idiot beside his bed, waiting for another couple of hours, fully dressed, while the work of the ward went on around him. He’d wanted to call home but had no change, and his phone card, when he tried it, had no credits left upon it, though he could have sworn it was all but new. The consultant when he arrived was scathing to the ward staff; saying there was no need whatsoever for Bernard to have been admitted: he had merely taken up a badly needed bed. Bernard had made his own way home. He missed the bus by a hair’s breadth and had trod in some dog shit but had stopped in a public toilet to remove it. He had been accosted by two rather aggressive homosexuals—
‘Gays,’ said Ellen.
‘Homosexuals,’ said Bernard—
but had managed to avoid them.
‘Bernard,’ said Ellen. ‘Such a chapter of accidents! I know what you’re thinking: that all this is proof that there is indeed a curse upon you. But I think you imagine it. I don’t expect you got much sleep last night. That’s a perfectly normal hospital breakfast: consultants are always saying things like that to ward staff: many of those phone cards are faulty: you are always missing buses because you’ve got your back turned checking the timetable when they do arrive.’
‘The dog shit was real enough.’
‘No doubt it was. But the dog population of this town is phenomenal. You probably mistook the concern of two perfectly ordinary people in the gentleman’s toilet—you look dreadfully pale—for sexual overtures. Anyway, here you are, safe and sound.’
‘Why do you try and avoid it?’ said Bernard. ‘I have had a curse put upon me by Nerina. Look what’s happening to poor Jed’s wife. There’s no doubt about it at all.’
‘Well,’ said Ellen, ‘this morning I feel singularly blessed, so there you are! I am surprised at you, Bernard. You’re such a rationalist, and here you are talking about curses. I expect you’re still a little shocked after the accident, and somehow the feeling-tone of your childhood has returned. All that heavy, doomy religion. Punishment round every corner.’
‘I expect that’s what it is,’ said Bernard, cheering up. ‘God, I’m glad to be home.’
Brenda made the generalized motions to leave that the wife’s friend is expected to make on the return of the husband. Ellen said she’d run her to the bus stop only their car was a write-off. Brenda said she thought perhaps she’d call Peter and he could run her to the hospital. She thought labour might have started.
And so indeed it had. Brenda’s baby was simply and safely delivered, happy and healthy and not noticeably premature. Whatever had been going on in the Parkin household had at least not affected Brenda, or her baby.