A taped telephone interview between Valerie and Eleanor
A: PUNISHMENT, YOU ASK? Perhaps it’s because I’ve never been a mother that thoughts of ‘punishment’ do not spring at once to mind. What kind of punishment will be meted out to evil-doers in Darcy’s Utopia? Good heavens, it will simply be exile from the place. To know that ‘punishment’ entails being kept away can only make a place more desirable to those who live there.
Q: But where will these exiles go?
A: To any of the other traditional societies which will no doubt abound: to places where they lock murderers in death row for years while debating whether or not to kill them, or child molesters with violent gangsters who love little children, or imprison maintenance defaulters who cannot bear to finance their ex-wife’s boyfriend, while letting others off who simply abandon all responsibility for their children: where the horrors of TV are the reward for good behaviour, and large sums of money for the sin of usury. Let defaulters be sent out to live for a while in the grimy, exhausted, baffling society we take for granted: where we must travel in underground tunnels to get to our place of normally quite unnecessary employment (unnecessary for the group other than to keep the wheels turning; necessary for the individual to provide the money which must be made but brings so little pleasure), to be consumed therein, like as not, by flash fires; let our troublemakers-in-exile go but for a breath of fresh air and camaraderie on a boat upon the river—to find the rules of navigation so irrational, so clouded by the custom and practice of the past that even to do something so human, so natural, is to endanger life itself—they will soon reflect on the errors of their ways. The wheels of industry outside Darcy’s Utopia turn to make products no one wants or needs, from nuclear warheads to teabag squeezers. What is wrong with fingers when it comes to tea bags? Let them hop about a bit in the heat of the moment, it will do them no harm, and under those turning wheels the human spirit, the human love of doing nothing for quite a lot of the time, except tinkering a bit here, fixing a bit there, lulls in activity which alternate with periods of hard and concentrated work, is crushed. I hope Aura pays your telephone bills at the Holiday Inn?
Q: Yes. You were saying?
A: I was saying I wasn’t sure that it was morally sound thus to ask Aura to support you in your love nest. I think the Independent should foot at least some of the bills. If you were living in Darcy’s Utopia your punishment would be being required to slip out to Birmingham, say, for a day or two, to wander around the concrete walkways that intertwine above its tangled motorways, and breathe in the fumes, observe the struggling sun. You certainly wouldn’t do anything to threaten your stay in Darcy’s Utopia again—or at the very least you would keep your telephone calls short.
Q: You mean there are to be no cars in Darcy’s Utopia?
A: There will be a few cars, many bicycles, and recycling stations on every street corner. There will be a free restaurant in every square—and tree-lined squares will abound which will refresh the ozone layer—where such local people as love cooking will compete in the culinary arts.
Q: Hang on a bit. Who’s doing the cooking? Whoever it is isn’t doing it for wages, because there aren’t any wages.
A: The cooks are working out their Community Unit. How does that grab you, Valerie? No more income tax, merely a Community Unit charge. We will not be taxed out of existence, will not watch the noughts wiped out on our bank statements, as happens wherever as a group we try to make things fair, but into existence. We will not pay our taxes in money—what will be the point, for money now pours in a ceaseless stream from the high street cashpoints? Yes, Valerie, that is what it does.
Q: Not just on Sundays, as your husband advised the Treasury in those heady days of the Bridport Scandal?
A: He did not go far enough. Every day of the week. It is how we make the transition from the money economy to Darcy’s Utopia. And nothing will taste better than food cooked by the community cooks—the healthier, the cleverer, the more energetic you are, the more work will be required of you. As things are, twenty-five per cent of us work to support the seventy-five per cent who do not. I don’t think we will see much drop in production—merely in anxiety. And of course if work is unpleasant you will cross off your Community Units really quickly, and be free to do as you like.
Q: I still think people only work for money.
A: Do you? No. You work because you like to do it. Mrs Khalid worked to get out of the house, for company. Her husband, the lawyer, I daresay worked from a sense of Commitment. Nerina worked to earn the attention of Jed. Her black magic circle worked to raise the Devil, and I’m sure without thought of monetary reward. You may say ‘you are talking about professional people, self-conscious people, the clever and the intelligent’—and yes, I am, but we have machines to do work, and people whose intense pleasure it is to make these machines. Any man who will only work for money let him not work at all. I don’t mind keeping him. It seems a small price to pay to live in Utopia. As it is, now that money buys so little, now the thrill of owning a car better than your neighbour’s, a better designed pair of jeans, begins to wear off, people work not for money but for the status money brings. Valerie? Are you still there?
Q: I was just moving the phone to my other hand.
A: You did call me. I didn’t call you. Where were we? Competition in the culinary arts. Yes, Brenda is a terrible cook, but a very good mother. She will expend her Community Units in childcare, not the communal cooking pot. Cooked food can of course be taken away to eat within the family unit, or eaten on the spot with friends. There will be little loneliness in Darcy’s Utopia. Solitude for those who seek it, company for those who need it. The old and the young will mix freely: the young won’t hate the old any more because the old will be more than just a reminder that the flesh is mortal and youth and life itself a passing thing, because the old will no longer be miserable; they will not feel their uselessness: they will be full of tales not of the good old days, but of the bad old days before Utopia, and so they will be loved and not abhorred. There will be no granny beatings in Darcy’s Utopia.
Q: But if there were, if I can return to this subject of punishment, because I don’t quite share your trust in human nature, would simple exile really be sufficient punishment?
A: You worry about exile. Perhaps you feel exiled yourself? Unable, because of your behaviour, to return home; obliged to live forever in the Holiday Inn. How are you getting on with my life story? How far have you got? Has Julian turned up on the scene?
Q: Yes. He has. How long was it after his declaration of love that you left Bernard? I realize you don’t like these direct questions, and use them as a starting ground for your preoccupations, but perhaps subjects such as exile are really more suitable for discussion with Hugo. The readers of Aura are more accustomed to thinking about matters of the heart: they like to know about you. Do you believe in short, sharp shocks for offenders, in abortion, in fidelity and so forth? What life has taught you, in fact? Personally I find Darcy’s Utopia fascinating, but my readers aren’t at ease with politics.
A: More’s the pity. Let them become so. Let each and every one of them consider the nature and purpose of punishment. Do we imprison other people to satisfy our desire for vengeance, to deter others, or to reform the wrongdoer, by making prison so horrible he never does it again? We know this latter seldom works but we go on trying it as a solution. There will be no prisons in Darcy’s Utopia. I advise you to have none in this society of yours you seem so proud of. Close them! Simply open the doors and let everyone out, into the streets of your horrid societies, littered already with the homeless, the lost, the indigent, those who have had the misfortune to be three days without washing—after that clothes and body smell so there is little chance of either employment or rehabilitation: they will be back out on the streets anyway as soon as their sentence is up. Why wait? Why hang about? If any prisoners are by common consent truly and irrationally violent let them be shut up in secure hospitals, but kindly dealt with in the most pleasant circumstances possible. Ugliness in the external world is the cause of much internal ugliness. Deglamorize crime, say I: define the criminal as insane, and he may be less anxious to be a criminal. The heavier the sentences for rape, the more rape there is. Hadn’t you noticed?
Q: You have that the wrong way round. Surely?
A. No, I have not. A man rapes a woman because he wants to do something very nasty to her, pay her whole sex out for not managing to save him from distress, for not being worthy of his love—and the nastier the community tells him it is, the more likely he is to do it. Of course it is a horrible thing for a man to do, but nothing is gained, practically, by underlining this fact—except I suppose it comforts women to feel the judiciary begins to take their woes seriously. Eight years slopping out! Ten years! Twelve! But it doesn’t stop rape. On the contrary. There will be very little rape in Darcy’s Utopia: generation by generation it will fade away, as only women fit to be loved by their children are allowed to bear them. And since if you want money you have only to stand outside a cash disposal unit to receive it, on any day of the week, so there will be little point in crime. That is enough for today.
Q: Don’t go. Let me get this straight. You are seriously relying on the distress of exile to deter the wrongdoer?
A: It used to be considered so. The newspapers of my childhood were full of the sufferings of exiled kings. To be sent from the kingdom, never allowed to return, was considered a fate worse than death. And we have so very many exiles these days—dissidents, political refugees—people who have escaped or been sent away from oppressive regimes, never to be allowed to return, and yet we fail to acknowledge their distress. The Iranian taxi driver in New York weeps for the land of his childhood, the friends he once knew: the family he once had: he has had to start his life again; he will never be a whole person, and he knows it. But he does not have the word for it: the word that defines it, explains it, and in the explaining makes it just a little better, as when a doctor diagnoses a pain. Exile. It is what the wife feels when her husband locks her out of his life: the husband likewise. That is why changing the locks on the door of the marital home is so powerful and horrifying a symbol. The erring partner is sent into exile, both real and emotional.
Q: I’m sure Lou wouldn’t change the locks.
A: I wasn’t speaking personally. Good heavens! Here comes Brenda with the coffee. We drink decaffeinated: she insists. I seem to remember the Holiday Inn coffee as being rich, powerful stuff. Don’t drink too much of it: it’s bad for the nerves.
Q: Thank you for the warning, Mrs Darcy.
A: Do call me Eleanor. Ta-ra.
Q: Ta-ra.
Valerie misses home
MAKE NO DOUBT ABOUT the pull of habit: the anxiety that ensues if any regular, familiar, pattern of event is disrupted, let alone stilled, however disagreeable the pattern of events might be. The first few mornings in Hugo’s company—usually a flurry of sexual activity, followed by a pleasant languor—prevented me from feeling any sense of early morning loss. As the flurries became a little more familiar, a little less accompanied by the shock of the new, indeed in general rather less, thoughts of home began to obtrude. I missed, of all things, breakfast. I missed Lou’s petulance, Sophie’s agitated search for missing garments, Ben’s repeated refusal to feed the cat with canned meat but only with tinned salmon: his apparent motive laudable—if he was a vegetarian, of the kind who eats fish, so should the cat be—his real motive to irritate his father, who was daily irritated.
I missed the hassle, the subdued indignation of a woman who, her husband insisting on a ‘sit-down breakfast for the family’ and not one taken merely on the wing, on the grounds that a family that eats together stays together, has on that account to spend twenty minutes every morning getting up and down from her chair, fetching fresh coffee, making more toast, answering the phone, removing the cat from the table, irritating that same husband every time she does so, because he likes peace while he eats. Must have peace, he, the creative artist, having barely recovered from last night’s concert, already tense about the next. Why of all times of day should I miss this particular dreadful hour? Had there been some real achievement here, after all, in the ritual sopping up of breakfast aggro in the interests of happy family life? Which seems so often, in spite of all theory and effort, to be the maternal and not the paternal role? When I had finished Lover at the Gate I could perhaps persuade the editor of Aura to run a piece on the problem; I didn’t want to write it myself—I just wanted to know; to be told, for once, what everything was all about, not to be the one who did the telling.
The pages of Lover at the Gate mounted steadily beside my printer. As the pile grew higher, so it seemed to me, little flickers of interest in the outside world returned. I both longed to finish it, yet dreaded the finishing. What then? When Eleanor had let me go, if Eleanor let me go, what then?
LOVER AT THE GATE [8]
Bernard and Ellen part
A MONTH OR SO later Prune’s baby was stillborn—one of those apparently perfect babies who turn out to have failed to develop a brain—and Bernard said, ‘Nerina’s group ill-wished it.’ Ellen said, ‘That’s absurd. It was conceived with a genetic defect: its handicap predated the insult to Nerina.’ Bernard said, ‘Well, perhaps black magic groups can predate curses. How do you know they can’t?’ and Ellen replied, ‘You should have been Witchfinder General. You’d have picked out and burned a thousand witches,’ and Bernard was upset and insulted, feeling she was seeing him as reactionary when everyone knew he was a radical, a feminist, a reconstructed man, liberal in outlook, tolerant in behaviour, his heart and mind firmly in the right place. Ellen and Bernard were not getting on too well. The phone had gone a couple of times lately and a man, with a gravelly, upper echelon civil service note to his voice, rather than the serviceable tones of the locality and the polytechnic, had asked for Eleanor, and Ellen had taken the call on the extension.
‘Who was that?’ Bernard asked, too proud to listen in to the call. ‘He’s a man offering me a job up at the university,’ said Ellen. ‘You know I had my name down at the agency for temping work. I think I’ll take it.’
‘Why does he call you Eleanor?’
‘I put Eleanor on the form. I thought I might get paid more as Eleanor than as Ellen.’
They needed the money. The Inland Revenue had discovered a mistake in their accounting: they were demanding six hundred and fifty pounds from Bernard forthwith, which he did not have. He had bought No. 93 from the landlord at a good price, but now dry rot had appeared in the porch, and if not seen to soon would damage the fabric of the house. Wendy’s ghost made a dramatic appearance again, knocking Ellen’s contraceptive pills off the mantelpiece: drifting around the bedroom in a kind of orange glow, Ellen was prepared to call in a priest to exorcize it but Bernard said drearily it was all too late, too late. Bernard’s white shirts had somehow got in with a pair of Ellen’s red socks and were now a pinkish grey. He hated to be so sloppily dressed. All misfortunes were blamed upon Nerina. Nerina would sit in class staring at him, Bernard said, her steady brown eyes, half-reproachful, half-triumphant, plotting further troubles for him, big and little stabs of revenge. He slept too much, not too little: he was too desolate, too anxious for lovemaking. The curse of depression lay upon him: Ellen suggested lithium, which does so much to calm the manic-depressive temperament, but Bernard said lithium was no defence against Nerina. Nerina had it in for him.
‘Bernard,’ said Ellen, ‘are you sure you didn’t make a pass at her? If you ask me, only excessive guilt would make you quite so fanciful. Though it’s better to have this Nerina blamed for your pink shirts rather than me. If she didn’t exist I would have to invent her.’
‘Of course I didn’t make a pass at Nerina,’ said Bernard. ‘That might be the trouble. Jed did. Jed’s the kind to bed his best friend’s wife if he thought he’d get away with it. Jed has just got a senior lectureship and won a five-hundred-pound premium bond, and poor Prune’s baby is dead.’
Julian Darcy did not believe in curses. Julian would just have looked startled, even indignant, had Ellen seemed for one moment to give any credence to the powers of black magic. Black magic was for the credulous, the ignorant, the uneducated. Julian moved amongst the powerful of the land: the thought behind the Conference: the mind behind the Act. Julian had a benign and cultivated air. Julian took a sip of claret here, a glass of Perrier there: Julian made a trip to 10 Downing Street: Julian went up to a shoot in Scotland: Julian and Georgina gave a dinner party and who was guest of honour but the Chancellor of the Exchequer and his wife. After dinner, Ellen asked, when the guests had gone, when the house was quiet, when the mind was stilled, what then? No, Julian and Georgina had long since given up sex. They were friends, good friends, no more.
Julian’s conversation, when not about the beauty of Eleanor’s body, the freshness of Eleanor’s mind, was about recession and government intercession, exchange rates, the International Monetary Fund, and occasionally what minister was sleeping with what actress, and who had behaved shoddily pre-privatization and which member of the Stock Exchange was going shortly to be nailed for malpractice. Julian didn’t worry about whether dry rot in the porch had been caused by a leaky gutter or a curse: he would simply curse the cheque that had it eradicated forthwith. Eleanor knew: now she worked in the Vice Chancellor’s office she made out his personal cheques. Julian was not business-like about his own finances: he would hand her tattered files stuffed with letters, bills and uncashed cheques, which he had found at the bottoms of drawers. She would divide them as best she could between university and personal, and hand over to Miss Richards in the faculty office whatever seemed relevant, and Julian would murmur into her ear, ‘Brilliant, brilliant: I am so bad at this kind of thing!’, and Eleanor would say, ‘You are a person on the grand scale, not a detail man at all,’ or some such thing, and he would seem to be relieved, as if a lifetime’s self-doubt had been lifted. She enjoyed making him happy. It was so easy. Georgina was perfect, he would say; he had to be as much on show if he got up and went to the bathroom in the middle of the night as he would receiving guests. He liked to shamble sometimes, he confessed. To belch, to burp, to fart. Georgina wouldn’t let him. Ellen purred over his imperfections; his belly, his broken tooth, the hairs in his nose. ‘I love you for what you aren’t,’ she’d say, ‘as much as for what you are.’
Julian’s wife Georgina came to call upon Julian at work one morning: strode in, tall and elegant, in pale, impeccable clothes. She was as coldly charming to Eleanor as no doubt she was to everyone of lower status—which, as Ellen confided in Bernard, must be almost the entire world—and would have gone straight through to see her husband but Eleanor said, ‘One moment, please, Mrs Darcy, I’ll just see if he’s free,’ so Georgina Darcy had to stand there until Eleanor said, ‘Professor Darcy can see you now. You may go through,’ which pleased Eleanor as much as Georgina Darcy’s cool nod had displeased her.
Bernard said, ‘Why do you always have to work so late?’ and Ellen said, ‘Because there’s so much to do,’ and so there was. Bernard said, ‘At least he’s not the kind to make passes at a secretary: not a secretary without a qualification to her name: beats me why he employed you.’ ‘Beats me,’ said Ellen, and Julian did, sometimes. She liked that.
He took her up to Bridport Lodge, the Vice Chancellor’s residence, a country house of elegant Georgian proportions, when Georgina was away visiting friends in Scotland—naturally she had friends in Scotland: that kind of person did, said Liese. Leonard went shooting grouse sometimes. He sold Rolls-Royces now. Liese confided he wasn’t the man she’d married. She was glad her father was dead: Leonard was a mass murderer of little birds. ‘I expect he has to do it for the contacts,’ said Ellen, but it didn’t comfort Liese. Ellen, Brenda and Belinda were a little pleased to see this cloud pass over their friend’s life. While Georgina was away, Eleanor fingered through the garments in Georgina’s walk-in wardrobe: it was full of good tweed skirts and cashmere sweaters. Eleanor picked through Georgina’s jewel case, which was neatly packed with pearls and stud earrings—and then Eleanor would spend the evening sporting on the antique brass bed between Georgina’s linen sheets. She thought perhaps Ellen would have behaved differently. But linen sheets! Of course, there were staff to iron them, paid for by the university. The staff were always about. Julian was too grand to notice their presence, or else it served his purpose that they should be present, witness to his and Eleanor’s passion. Sometimes Eleanor had the feeling that Julian was devious, more devious than she allowed. Vice Chancellors, she supposed, often were.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ Brenda asked Eleanor. She came up to the university office one morning, pushing her loaded pram up the hill. ‘Can’t you even keep it quiet? The whole town knows. The whole polytechnic knows. Everyone in the world knows except Bernard and Georgina, and eventually someone will break ranks and tell them too.’
‘Knows what?’ asked Eleanor. ‘What am I doing wrong?’
Brenda called Belinda and Belinda drove all the way to Bridport to see Eleanor. She came in a little Deux Chevaux. She and her husband had joined a religious group and now gave most of their money away to its leader. Her baby came too, in a carrycot on the back seat.
‘You don’t even seem to understand that what you’re doing is peculiar, Ellen. People have extramarital affairs in a hole-in-the-corner way. Not like this. You are throwing everything away. And Vice Chancellors of universities, especially with political connections, do not normally risk careers and marriage for the sake of someone like you.’
‘Then perhaps he’s mad,’ said Eleanor. ‘And I don’t see I’m throwing anything away. I’m having a really nice time, and I’d rather have a lover than a baby any day. If you ask me, it’s only women who can’t find lovers, who only have husbands, who have to make do with babies.’
Belinda’s baby dickered and fretted in her mother’s arms.
‘Well,’ said Belinda, ‘that puts me in my place,’ and Eleanor had to apologize. She did not wish to hurt her friend unnecessarily. But Belinda pulled out a very full breast and offered it to the baby. She had put on weight again.
‘Tell you what,’ Eleanor said, ‘I’ll speak to Bernard if that makes you feel any better.’
She did. She said to Bernard they’d agreed always to be honest with each other, and anyway he hadn’t married her properly, only at a civil ceremony which he hadn’t really acknowledged at the time, and out of pity, not love, and now she had found someone she really loved, who really loved her, whose interests coincided with hers, and so forth, and since they had no children she was free to follow the desires and devices of her own heart, surely, and so forth and so on, and what it amounted to, she was seeing and sleeping with another man, and it didn’t mean she and Bernard would have to split up, she needed time to discover if this was what she really wanted.
Bernard wept. She had hoped he would hit her, but all he did was sit there with tears running out of his eyes and snot running out of his nose. Julian would at least have reached for his handkerchief—and there would have been one to hand, crisp, white and laundered. Eleanor found Bernard a tissue and gave it to him. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said, ‘this kind of thing happens in marriages all the time.’
Then he asked her what he could do to make the marriage better, asked how had he failed her; he would do anything, anything, to keep her; and the more he grovelled the more she despised him: and yet she was surprised. She had not expected this. The old Bernard would not have behaved so: the moral high ground would automatically have been his. He was in some way denatured, and by no doing of hers. Was this what depression did to men?
‘Don’t leave me,’ he said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t leave me. They want you to leave me; it’s part of my punishment. I’m cursed, can’t you see it? Are you completely blind? First they destroy your car, then your wife leaves you: next you lose your friends and your job. You’ll see!’
Eleanor couldn’t bear it. She went and slept in the spare room. Bernard brought her a cup of tea in the morning and gazed at her with wet, exhausted eyes; he hadn’t slept: of course he hadn’t slept.
‘You’re insane,’ Eleanor said. ‘You’ll have to see a doctor.’
Eleanor didn’t even drink the tea he brought. She said she’d rather have coffee, knowing there was none in the house. It was a long time since she’d bothered to go shopping. The more Bernard suffered the more she wished to hurt him. She supposed that was human nature. She decided not to think about it too much.
Eleanor took a short-cut through the polytechnic grounds to get to her office and the bracing nearness of Julian. It had been snowing in the night, but now the morning was clear and crisp. The early sun dazzled. The students had remade their snowman. She left the swept path the better to inspect it, treading as delicately as she could through the snow in her little new laced boots with their thin soles and impracticably high heels—Julian had opened accounts for her at all the city’s better stores, and occasionally Eleanor would use them, but only occasionally, and always in Julian’s interests: he loved to see her in the boots and nothing else. The snowman was wearing a scarf of the kind Bernard wore, and the kind Julian would never wear—a fuzzy blue scarf in prickly wool with patches of pale grey struggling through the weave. Julian wore silk scarves, soft against the face. Black stones stood for Bernard’s eyes, and little grey pebbles for tears trailed down his cheeks. And a stick just casually pierced where his heart would be.
The sun was beginning to warm the snow: a thaw had begun. The whole shape of the snowman was becoming indecisive even as she watched: its edges were sloppy and imprecise. She stepped forward and pulled the stick out of the heart, and a whole side of the snowman collapsed, and now only an untidy half of Bernard remained. Then the head toppled forward and fell. She was conscious that her boots were wet: her toes were becoming cold and uncomfortable. Her boots were not intended for such adverse weather conditions. All around the thaw was noisy in her ears. Snow fell and slopped in lumps from branches overhead. Bernard melted, formless, and was gone.
Eleanor called Brenda as soon as she got in to her office and had taken off her boots. She had put the electric fire on and stretched out her toes towards it, to warm them.
‘Brenda,’ she said, ‘you may be right about my being out of my mind. I do have very peculiar feelings of disassociation from time to time. I seem to be on some kind of automatic pilot which is none of my setting. Every moral weakness I ever had is somehow getting magnified to absurd proportions.’
‘It’s interesting you should say that,’ said Brenda. ‘Personally I blame Jed. You know I had this affair with him—’
‘I didn’t,’ said Eleanor.
‘It was nothing special. I worried because I didn’t like sex with Pete. I thought if I tried it with Jed it might be different.’
‘Was it?’
‘No. It’s just me. Apparently if you do too much sport when a girl. you never become—well—properly sensual.’
‘I’ll never have that problem,’ said Eleanor.
‘I noticed,’ said Brenda.
‘What is this to do with the magnification of my moral weakness?’
‘Jed is trying to set standards of positive religious tolerance throughout the college. The new policy is that from the Moonies to the Muslims by way of the Jesus freaks all Gods are equal, and if they want to worship the Devil that’s okay too. Mind you, the Academic Board only okayed it by one vote. A group of students have set up a black magic group and they’ve got a drawing of you up there and they go over it with a magnifying glass and that’s why you’re the way you are. A fornicating adulterous zombie. Night of the Sexy Dead.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Yes I am. But they are experimenting in black magic in Jed’s media communications course and he is having an affair with one of the students, and that’s always trouble.’
‘Nerina?’
‘Yes. The Brat Nerina. It makes me feel furious, I can tell you. Not to mention tall and gawky and ugly. Pete and Bernard are the controls, Nerina says; they being the least pervious to suggestion, by virtue of their education and integrity. Or else because Jed’s got it in for Pete and Bernard.’
‘Why should he?’
‘Because Pete’s my husband and Bernard’s your husband, idiot. Don’t think I don’t know about you and Jed. Mr Kiss-and-Tell himself. Of course it may be unconscious on Jed’s part.’
‘How’s Peter?’
‘Pete’s just fine. So am I. We’re impervious to the flesh. But you and Bernard are susceptible because you’re at it all the time.’
‘Who says so?’
‘Jed.’
‘Brenda, susceptible to what? Black magic?’
‘Of course not, idiot. Suggestion.’
Eleanor thought there was not much future in the conversation and put the phone down. She opened the press file and searched for and found the photograph taken at the conference; herself near the head of the table, her head bent over her notes, and it was true that the light shone through from the great arched quasi-ecclesiastical window behind her and gave her hair a bright outline, but scarcely a halo. Julian Darcy sat at the head of the table, as chairman, with the potentially ferocious, fleshy, rather pudgy amiability that characterizes men of power in their middle age. He was, on the face of it, not the kind of man to excite sexual passion in anyone other than his wife, and that only by force of habit and custom. She took a magnifying glass from the desk drawer, left there by her predecessor—Julian had had to let go a junior clerical assistant to make way for Eleanor—to examine the rather strange patterns made by the light from the window. What she had taken as a composition of trees and clouds in the window she could now interpret as an alarmingly goatish face; slit eyes, hair, horns and all. The winter sun shone through the magnifying glass and focused on to the glossy paper. A small circle began to smoke, to crinkle, to hole, to burn, to curl—she blew the flame out as soon as she had worked out what was happening, that this was fire—and though she remained, as if trapped forever writing minutes, both the field in the window and Julian Darcy had ceased to exist.
She put the photograph back in the file and swept away the little pile of embers with her hand. Julian liked her hands dirty. Georgina was always so clean. She called Belinda.
‘Do you believe in the Devil?’ she asked.
‘Of course I don’t,’ said Belinda. ‘I believe in the one, the eternal, the wholesomeness of light and all that junk. Frank believes in it, that’s to say, and it’s easier for me to take it all on board than fight it, what with the baby and all.’
‘If you’d stop breastfeeding,’ said Eleanor, ‘you might get a little intellectual rigour back, not to mention your figure, and be more help.’
‘You don’t need help,’ said Belinda. ‘It’s Bernard needs help. You’re a real pig to him, Apricot. And to me. You know I’ve always had a weight problem.’
‘Sow,’ said Eleanor, ‘and my name’s Eleanor,’ and put the phone down. Liese was out. She rang Ken, but his line gave a high-pitched buzz. He had not paid the bill. This was what came, she thought, of not not-believing in your own mother’s ghost. One thing led to another. Astrology today is witchcraft tomorrow. Give the occult an inch and it took an ell. Sections of Mafeking Street were prone to subsidence: if things fell off the mantelpiece it was because the earth moved.
Julian came in and said, ‘You haven’t got your boots on. Or your stockings. If you put your feet too close to the fire you’ll get chilblains,’ and he went down on his knees and took her toes in his mouth. She felt puzzled rather than excited: it occurred to her that when with Julian she usually felt more puzzled than excited. His mouth worked up her legs.
‘I don’t think any of this is quite right,’ she said. ‘There’s more going on here than meets the eye. I think I’d better give up the job,’ and she looked up and Georgina was standing watching. Julian hadn’t locked the door. Julian never locked doors: it was beneath him so to do.
Georgina was wearing a prickly wool skirt in a dreary blue with grey patches which reminded Eleanor very much of Bernard’s scarf, which she had last seen lying in a murky pool of melted snow. But her green cashmere sweater was so admirable Eleanor thought she’d look better in it than Georgina, whose bust was rather small. Negligible, as Julian would put it. Georgina said, ‘Well, I knew something was going on. I didn’t know it would be so disgusting. I am leaving now. I am filing for divorce.’ And she left.
Julian said, ‘Do you think you could organize the various graduation ceremonies, Eleanor?’, and Eleanor said, ‘I don’t see why not.’ And Julian said, ‘The senate won’t like it, but I will. How empowered love makes one feel.’ Julian spoke a lot of ‘one’ when others would say ‘I’: it was something to do with his class and age. Just to hear him speak made Eleanor’s spine tingle: they resumed their lovemaking. It can only be a marriage of true minds, thought Eleanor: forget his paunch, the hairs in his nose, the softness of the upper arms. Outside in the antechamber to his office, faculty heads waited unduly long for their appointments, even by Vice Chancellor’s standards. ‘He’s busy,’ said Miss Richards, the faculty secretary. They looked at each other but no one said anything. What could they say?
Eleanor went home to tell Bernard that events had precipitated her decision and she was going to leave him and live with Julian forthwith, and Bernard, with unexpected calmness, said that Julian would be expected to resign and Eleanor said no, if any man was irreplaceable in his work, in his field, that man was Julian Darcy. What was more, by virtue of his contract, he could only be dismissed from office by reason of insanity or depravity and to love a woman other than his wife was neither insane nor depraved. Bernard said, ‘You’ve worked all this out,’ and Eleanor said ‘Yes.’ Bernard said alas, his own contract of employment was not so secure; it contained a ‘failure to carry out duties to the satisfaction of the college’ clause. What was more, he said, he had that very day been asked to resign: the director had sent for him. For a long time, it appeared, management had been assembling a dossier of complaints against Bernard: accusations came from friends and foe alike—allegations of academic negligence, imprudent memos, and, now, it seemed, and totally unfounded, of misconduct with female students. What it really meant, said Bernard, was that they had him pigeon-holed as a political agitator. The truth of the matter was irrelevant. They simply wanted him out. His face no longer fitted. They just didn’t like him. And now, as he had predicted, he was a man without a car, a job, or a wife. Of course he was fighting it: he would go on teaching till they forcibly removed him, but what would he do for money? The union ought to support him, fight his case, but they too had deserted him. And he had lost his scarf, the blue one with the grey squares he was so fond of.
‘I’ll go and find it,’ said Eleanor, ‘but it will be the last thing I do for you.’
‘You won’t get rid of me so easily,’ he said. ‘I am your conscience. I am the real you. There is a little of me left to fight Nerina.’
‘Bernard,’ said Eleanor, having one more try, ‘a man’s misfortune lies not in the events that happen to him, but in his reaction to those events. Why can’t you just rejoice in the fact that I’m leaving you? Then it could seem to be a blessing, not a curse.’
But the pebble tears began to run down his cheeks, and she packed the nice new clothes he hadn’t noticed, and left. What else could she do?
She went by the polytechnic grounds and picked up Bernard’s scarf. No one else had bothered. It was wet. She would dry it out in Georgina’s airing cupboard and post it back.
Transcript of a Hugo/Eleanor tape
Q: YES, BUT COME along, surely a perfect society isn’t possible?
A: HOW DO YOU know? Why shouldn’t we have heaven on earth? You really make me tired, sometimes. You’re so full of ifs and buts, and looking for flaws, no wonder nothing ever happens: we all just drift on in the way we always have, bowing under legislation which builds on old legislation, precedent which builds on existing precedent: saying because this didn’t work then it won’t work now. But ‘then’ isn’t ‘now’. In Darcy’s Utopia everyone will understand that the lessons of history are nonexistent. No doubt history will be taught but in classes, remember, made up solely of children who wish to be in them, and teachers who enjoy imparting information and rejoice in the excitement of new ideas, who have a sense of the flow of mankind’s history: how we have progressed out of primitivism, barbarity, into self-knowledge and empathy with others; how in the spite of our natures we have achieved at least an attempt at civilization.
In Darcy’s Utopia nostalgia will be out of fashion. We will look back into the past with horror, not with envy and delight—we will stop our romantic nonsense about the rural tranquillity of once upon a time, which is, if you ask me, nothing but the projected fantasy of old and miserable men who, looking back into their own childhoods, see paradise. But it is a false paradise, falsely remembered. Wishful thinking clouds our memory. Times were better then, we think. We assume that what is true for us individually is true for society too. But it isn’t. The antithesis is true. One by one we grow old and decline, but our societies increase in vigour, grow richer in wisdom, stronger in empathy, as we hand our knowledge down, generation from generation. Our own individual fate clouds our vision: we stumble and fall, exhausted, but pass the baton on, runners all in this great race of ours. We should not get too depressed about it. I, Eleanor Darcy, have no children: children are the great cop-out, the primrose path to non-thought, to destruction. Leave it all to them, the fecund say, that’s all we have to think about. Wave after pointless wave, generation after generation, looking backwards, saying better then. Mine is the pebbly, difficult, problematic path, thorny with impossible ideas, genderless; here you get spat upon, jeered at, derided, but it is the only path which leads forward to heaven upon earth.
And why should we not have it? I tell you, if you look back, you will get burned, like Lot’s wife, to a pillar of salt; Lot’s wife, nostalgic for the past. In Darcy’s Utopia it will be very bad form to hark back; collecting antiques for the domestic home will be outré. A museum will be the only place for the artefacts of past ages, and let them be as gloomy and dismal as can be. In Darcy’s Utopia it will be accepted that museums will be very boring places indeed. If you want to subdue the children you only have to take them on a visit to a museum, and they will behave at once, for fear of being taken there again.
Room service had brought breakfast, and the mail. Valerie sat up in bed, Hugo still asleep beside her, and read the transcript. What bliss, she thought, what paradise, thus to live. Someone else to cook and clean, and bring the food: to be a man’s lover, not his mother/wife. She would live in the present. She would avoid forever the trap of nostalgia. She could see that the pleasure of this moment could, so easily, turn into pain, simply because it no longer existed. How was that to be avoided?
Q: But won’t that make for a heartless, soulless place? Surely we need the resonance of the past in order to enrich the present?
A: There you go again! Well, it’s understandable. Set foot outside your door, outside your little patch of safety, and lo, chaos waits; disease, poverty, madness, hurt, ebbs and flows all around: you’re knee deep in it. If you don’t get mugged your conscience gets pricked: the beggar at the door offends, the homeless in the alley hurts; drunkards sleep in every alley, the mad stand on the motorway and shake their fists. Those that have not reproach you: those that have, braying about profit and self-interest, offend you. You cannot believe that the past was worse than this. Rather, you don’t want to believe it was. Wars lay waste a generation, they say: fear of war has wasted one of ours.
And how we made them feel it, our young, with our talk of nuclear winter and Armageddon! The revenge of the old upon the young, to deprive them thus of all hope of the future. Look at them now: how they appal you! Hollow-eyed, white-faced, black-clothed, they walk like zombies round the streets, puffing in or shooting up the dreary stuff, which makes the present real, enables them to smile, and lift a languid hand in salutation to their friends. They vomit if they can, they sick it all up: and if their digestions in spite of all abuse stay sound, they drop their litter instead: walk ankle deep in discarded Coke cans, beer tins, fast food packs, dust and rubbish of every kind, not to mention the excreta of rats and dogs, and they don’t care one bit. It even seems to cheer them up a trifle. Looking at all this, you are assailed by guilt and confusion, and you think, what’s happened can only be this: that once there was a golden age, and everything ever since has been a falling away from that. Well, it shows a niceness of nature. You believe there’s something good somewhere: if only by process of polarity: that is to say, your profound belief in the existence of opposites; that if there is bad, there is also good.
Q: Isn’t there?
A: As it happens, yes. But it lies in front, not behind. We move towards the golden age, not away from it: it is inscribed in gold upon the gates which open into Darcy’s Utopia.
Q: You see it as a walled city, then?
A: I’m not quite sure. It stays vague. There are shining towers, golden spires. Or is that some memory I have of Toronto? I suspect as a place it may be rather boring to the eye, being ecologically sound. A lot of people will be doing a lot of painting pictures and making music, so the standard won’t be very high. But we’ll make up in quantity for what we lose in quality. And of course affairs of the heart will keep most of us very busily occupied, and make up for a lot.
Q: I take it that, in the manner of Utopias, the streets will be clear of litter?
A: Singapore changed from the dirtiest city in the world to the cleanest, by dint of one month in which the police shot on sight anyone dropping litter.
Q: And that will happen in Darcy’s Utopia?
A: I was joking, Mr Vansitart. I am teasing you. No, there are no firearms in the place. No one can point a stick of metal at anyone else and kill them from a distance, that goes without saying. Since it will be a recycling society, rather than a consuming society, there will be very little litter available for the dropping: and being a pleasant enough place, no particular desire to spoil it: and profit no longer being the object of the manufacturing process, Coke won’t have to come in cans: it will flow free from taps. There will be Coke points everywhere. Money will flow freely from the cash points next to them, in the transitionary period while we move from a money economy to a Community Unit economy. If you remember, our taxation comes in the form of a sliding scale of units—the young, strong, able, good and bright are awarded the most, the weak, ill, inadequate and feeble the least. Natural justice demands it. To each according to the ability, from each according to the need. The aim ceases to be to acquire money, but to expend Community Units. Those who are left with least at the end of their lives win the game! Unpleasant work gets rid of more units than does pleasant; cigarette smoking will actually gain you more units: the consumption of luxuries likewise. Necessities will be available in plenty in the shops—shopkeepers will be honoured; to keep shop will be a high status occupation, eating up Community Units by the hour! A coveted job. But we’re getting bogged down in detail, Mr Vansitart. Don’t you think it’s time for a drink? (Calls) Brenda, you don’t mind, do you? We’re going for a drink.
Valerie looked down at Hugo’s sleeping body, and the thought came to her, a little hard nugget in a meringue which otherwise melted on the tongue, that this was the wrong body, Lou’s was the right body. She spat the little hard nugget out of her mind efficiently, and rapidly, and her body dissolved back into rapture, but the pleasure of the moment stayed spoiled.