by Weldon, Fay
She rose from the chair. She paced. Today she wore a tan silk shirt and light dun-coloured trousers. She had the air of a female terrorist: someone who might take it into her head to shoot at any moment. Valerie thought, Good heavens, it was safer, after all, on the Mail on Sunday than on Aura, earthquakes notwithstanding. This may yet be the end of me.
Q: No. I was not saying any of that. I was asking how you enjoyed school.
Eleanor calmed, sat down again.
A: Yes, I believe you were. I had a bad time at the hands of male journalists during Julian’s trial and in the period leading up to it: some residual paranoia sticks. They look for a femme fatale, a Mata Hari of world finance, a seductress. If a woman is to be taken seriously she must either be past the menopause or very plain, preferably both.
Let us return to the Faraday Junior School. Fresh-faced and bright-eyed, we five-year-olds trooped off to school: troubled and sophisticated we returned, the stuffing all knocked out of us. Schools are a strange contrivance; they do not occur in nature, yet somehow we suppose they do. Because a woman, by virtue of giving birth to a succession of children, is then landed with the task of bringing them up, is no cause to suppose children are best taught by the handful, the dozen, the score. Nature, as ever, provided a minimum, not a maximum, for our survival. Any mother knows that it takes more than one adult to cope properly with even a single child. The child has more energy and more passion than the adult. To make it sit still, sit up and oblige, because it is smaller than you and you can compel it, is unkind. To make it do so in company is bizarre.
In Darcy’s Utopia the first rule of education will be that in any school the teachers shall outnumber the pupils, and no pupil need attend who does not wish to do so. I suspect budding essayists and technicians will continue to turn up to be educated; those others, who find lessons a humiliation because they are daily exposed and defined as dullards, will not. Much will be gained by the individual and very little lost to society. Teachers, teaching only those who wish to learn, will regain their self-respect and that of their pupils. They will stay even-tempered from morning to night. In Darcy’s Utopia you will not see the eyes of the child dulling, the brow furrowing, as puberty arrives.
Children do quite like to gather together, in fits and starts, to enjoy one another’s company, to find out how others live. It is natural enough for them to want to acquire knowledge from their elders. But it is unreasonable from this to extrapolate ‘the school’ as one of the cornerstones of society – for what are schools but institutions in which, in the name of knowledge, we ghettoize the young, and keep them from adult company, coop up the violent with the meek, those who like learning with those who don’t, and in general fit them for the modern world, which one quick glimpse of the television will show them to be a violent, murderous, greedy, vulgar and horrid place, in which people in a good mood throw custard pies at one another and in a bad mood chop each other to pieces?
Q: I take it you did not like school?
A: I liked it very much. I was sorry for those who didn’t, who by far outnumbered those of us who did. I daresay the Faraday Junior was no worse than any other school: indeed even a little better. No one was moved to burn the place down and the teachers were not encouraged to beat the children: though I had my knuckles painfully rapped on various occasions when I had apparently failed to decode some mysterious message or other. Teachers get irritated, of course they do, their elaborate and expensive training courses notwithstanding. Why? Because they are doing the most unnatural thing in the world, which everyone tells them is perfectly natural, in order that little children should all sit down quiet and good in one place and learn to take the world for granted, and not attempt to change it.
Q: But you tried to escape? You did want to change your situation?
A: When you ask that you betray your belief that one class is indeed superior to another: that to be born to the uneducated lower classes is a singular life-problem: though I’m sure if I asked you straight you would, in your gentle, blind, liberal way, deny it. The class distinctions we employ, you would maintain, are descriptive not pejorative. The person with, say, the pinched and nasal accents of the English Midlands is no worse than the one whose language has the rounded and lordly ring of London’s Knightsbridge, merely different. Tell that to employers, boyfriends, doctors, the dinner party hostess. Second-class citizen! goes up in neon lights when those who use the pronunciation of the streets and not of the written word open their mouths. Rightly they are discriminated against! Woe unto them, say I, who do not seek to improve themselves but cling with misplaced loyalty to the speech of their parents, as they do to the homes they were born into.
In Darcy’s Utopia it will be as normal to practise elocution as to brush your teeth. If more than lip service is to be paid to the notion that we are all equal, then it must be first acknowledged that we are born unequal, and that some of us have to work harder than others to make up for it. We must be prepared to make value judgements – allow Milton to be better than Michael Jackson in absolute terms, not just because that one’s your cup of tea and that one’s mine. The politeness of the cultured towards the uncultured, the hurt defiance of the latter to the former, compound one another. With misplaced kindness, the best of us refuse to discriminate against the worst. All things are equal, we say, and we lie, and know we lie.
Q: You seem very conscious of class discrimination. Were you much aware of it as a child?
A: Yes, but I can’t say I suffered from it. To have hurt feelings is not a particularly painful kind of hurt. Toothache is much worse. I was certainly made very aware, as a child, of the strange and complex attitudes people had towards my father, the entertainer. They depended upon him for their pleasure, they admired him because he had a skill they did not, they liked him because he was charming and energetic, but they did not treat him as their equal. The best were patronizing; the worst could not help but insult him. The band would be required to eat, in the kitchen, cheaper food than that offered the guests: be offered beer if the guests had wine, wine if they had champagne. Should that have upset him? It always did. Jazz was popular in all circles during my childhood – the demand now is for more structured music or the cold beat of the synthesizer – but through the sixties the music of Black Africa in distress appealed to softened hearts. We went everywhere: from garden parties in the grounds of castles, wedding receptions in marquees, hunt balls in assembly rooms, university teas on graduation day, garden fêtes in the bishop’s palace, to the annual parties of car salesmen, the golden weddings of simple folk – once I even remember a gypsy funeral – ladies’ night at the masonic lodge, and the British Legion get-together. I went to them all and watched and listened and made my own judgements. To be the hired help is to be helpless in the face of taunts and insults. Just as the waitress gets blamed for the quality of the soup, so will the band get blamed for the non-vitality of the guests. If the guests won’t dance when the host expects them to, has depended on them to, that’s the band’s fault and they don’t get paid, or only after an argument. As the wine waiter trots back and forth to establish the status of the customer as connoisseur, so the band will be required to play the most tricky musical number – ‘Maryland’ for example – to prove the musical expertise of one or other of the revellers.
If I, the child groupie, was noticed – and I tried to make myself invisible – I would be treated in kindly enough fashion, but as something of a curiosity. Also, I used to think, as an embarrassment, as if the presence of children put a damp blanket on everything; made flirtation self-conscious, drunkenness difficult, dancing almost disgraceful. If the English do not like children, it is because they think they ought to behave properly, responsibly and quietly in their presence and can never riot or have a good time when they’re around. Children are real party-poopers. Ask Brenda. I learned a good deal about the role of food and drink as a socio-economic indicator. In the palace, the castle, the country house, the wine would be good but the foo
d tasteless, and the band given beer and sandwiches on the assumption that this would be their preference. The middle classes would serve sour cheap wine but exotic foods and the band would eat whatever the guests ate, but not for long: the hosts having paid for the band to play, not to eat. The lower classes – if we talk about upper and middle how can we not talk about lower? – served tea, beer, gin and stodgy food, cut as often as not into hamfisted wedges, fit to fill the belly not the hand, and, understanding that the band was working for a living, treated it with respect and decorum. Everyone got happily drunk together and a good time was had by all; so long as the band kept the beat, what they played was immaterial. I was given, in all circles, a great deal of orange squash, then as now considered the drink most fit for children, though only loosely connected to the orange. I can tell you that the further down the social scale we went the brighter and sweeter and richer the orange squash, and the more I loved it.
In the palace, in the castle, at the hunt ball and the country house men brayed like donkeys and women shrieked and swooped like owls: the middle classes made me fidgety with their concern — was I not out too late? Was my father being nice to me? Not too nice? Wouldn’t I fall asleep in class tomorrow? Wouldn’t I like to curl up on the sofa? – and mostly I enjoyed the sweaty heaving pleasures of the British Legion do, where the guests galumphed and the men got drunk and waved bottles around – and one thing I noticed through all the ranks of society, no matter what the background, or the income, or the form the party took, was that as the evening wore on women would begin to look pained and patient and longed to get home, but didn’t like to say so for fear of being accused of ruining the evening’s fun. Men do so dislike women who stand between them and drink.
In Darcy’s Utopia there will be no drinking before six in the evening and no one will mind, because life will be okay without it. It will be the custom rather than the law. We will have as few laws as possible. Persuasion will replace compulsion. To be drunk will be recognized as a symptom not of manliness but of extreme unhappiness, and since only on rare occasion do we want to broadcast the fact of our unhappiness to the world, the lager lout, the whisky soak, the sherry drunk will become a rarer and rarer phenomenon, until finally withering away.
Q: Were you brought up in any particular religious or political persuasion?
A: My father was converted to Communism when I was eight. I would stand on street corners with him while he sold copies of the Morning Star. He would instruct me in the history of the world while the people of the world walked by, ignoring the salvation we offered them, and the icy wind blew around our ankles. In the evenings we would have readings from Das Kapital. Yes, we did what we could to save the world, my father and I.
Q: You were very fond of your father?
A: I adored him. There was no denying he was forgetful. He forgot to hand in such little money as he collected from sales of the Morning Star; they prosecuted and he was put on probation for two years. That upset him very much. He felt keenly the ingratitude of the Party and lost his faith. During those difficult years, when he drank rather more than he should, he would sometimes even forget on the way home from gigs I was his daughter and not just an ordinary groupie.
Q: You mean you were a victim of child abuse?
A: How simply you put it. Never quite. Often nearly. But who isn’t, at least in their own minds? That is all for today. It is tiring to think about the past. How are you getting on with Lover at the Gate?
Q: I am not sure that it’s an appropriate title. Why are you so keen on it?
A: Because of the way life changes when the lover at last appears. Haven’t you found it to be so? In most people’s lives the lover stands there, at the gate, faithful, waiting, unnoticed. All we need do is ask him in. Not all of us have the courage, of course.
Q: But you had, Mrs Darcy?
A: Oh yes, and still have. So have you, Mrs Jones. One little push and the whole world’s one, no woman’s better than the next! Here’s Brenda with more coffee. Or is Jones your maiden name? Many women choose to work under their maiden names.
Q: Jones is my married name, as it happens.
A: I can see that might in the end cause some complications.
Valerie Jones made her excuses and left – she had had more than enough coffee. She felt sleepy rather than tired, as a result, she told herself, of having had so little sleep of late. She felt rather superior to Eleanor Darcy on this account and left Brenda’s house in good humour.
Valerie and Lou manage a conversation
Eleanor Darcy told me I was welcome to call her if necessary; if I needed any further factual details for my Lover at the Gate. She didn’t go so far as to give me her telephone number, but I prudently copied it from the instrument at a point during the interview when she was distracted: when one of Brenda’s children had somehow slipped into the room to find a drum stacked halfway down a pile of similar toys. My own children, Sophie and Ben, managed their early childhood well enough without the help of noisy, let alone musical, toys. My husband Lou was musical – a professional musician, in fact – and, I suppose understandably, couldn’t endure the sound of good instruments badly played, or bad instruments played at all. I notice I refer to him in the past tense. One speaks of ex-spouses in the past tense. Don’t you do the same? But Lou is still legally my husband: Sophie and Ben are certainly my children, not my ex-children. The title outruns even death. I suppose if a court denied me access to them, I might speak of them as ex-children. But that kind of thing doesn’t happen now. It used to, of course. Adulterous mothers would be prevented from ever seeing their children again, lest they spread the contamination of sin. Then I suppose they did turn into ex-children.
Lou is a kind, understanding and reasonable man: friend as well as spouse. All that has happened is that I met Hugo at a party and came to understand that, as well as having friend and spouse, a woman needs the excitement of a lover from time to time: a re-basing, as it were, in the physical: the reincarnation of the carnal self in a body which gets, over the years, far too controlled by spirit and mind. The customary sex of the marriage bed does so little to stop the mind working, and the mind must stop working if the flesh is to have its due gratification; the acknowledgement of its glory.
I called Lou. It seemed to me I owed him some explanation. Besides, he might be worrying about me. It was 10.23 according to the Holiday Inn’s radio alarm clock, which flashed on and off on the bedside panel, redly. I wished it would just steadily and quietly glow. My nerves were a little on edge. Shortage of sleep was beginning to tell. Lou would be in the middle of practice. He was – is – a man of regular habits: up at seven thirty, breakfast at eight, mail at eight thirty, and so on. Even his phone calls were planned and made on the half-hour. I should have postponed the call for seven minutes. It might have gone better.
‘Lou,’ I said, when I heard his quiet, familiar voice on the phone. ‘I think I’m possessed by the Devil.’ It wasn’t what I meant to say, but that’s the way it came out.
‘General belief is,’ he said, ‘that you’ve gone mad. My advice to you is to see a psychiatrist. I’m in the middle of practice, as you surely know. Have you anything important to say?’
‘How are the children?’
‘As well as children are when their mother fails to come home from a party because she’s shacked up with some gorilla in a cheap hotel. The children have rather a low opinion of you, I imagine.’ Lou is a slight, controlled man with a sensitive face: Hugo large, grizzly and loose-limbed.
‘Lou, you haven’t told them?’
‘We agreed to be honest with the children, I seem to recall.’
I could have taken him to task about how he was defining ‘agree’ and ‘honest’, but just somehow didn’t.
‘The Holiday Inn is far from being a cheap hotel,’ was all I could think of to say. ‘On the contrary, it’s rather expensive. They’ve taken a print of Hugo’s Amex, but I don’t somehow think he’s on good personal terms wi
th them, and you know how tight everyone is on expenses, these days.’
‘You just stay in the media world you know and love,’ he said. ‘It’s all you’re fit for. Leave me and the children in our little patch of civilization. Roll round in the gutter as much as you like, but don’t call me to tell me all about it. We’re doing just fine without you.’ And he put down the phone. No, it was not a good phone call. It brought back to me the reality of the life I had so abruptly left behind: I had somehow assumed it would fade out of existence when I wanted, fade back in when convenient, unchanged. That that was what years of impeccable behaviour earned you. A holiday. Apparently not! The clock flashed 10.27, 10.27, 10.27. I wondered if Lou would take up his bow and play until ten thirty, or whether he would extend his practice time for four minutes. He would probably do the latter, and hurry through the change of clothes which would prepare him for the half-hour’s weight-training which he did between ten forty-five and eleven fifteen every Tuesday and Friday. Today was Tuesday. I had not seen Hugo for three hours. Already my body was beginning to feel restless: demanding reunification with the object of its yearning. I could feel Hugo’s body similarly missing mine. What confidence, what pleasure this physical certainty of need and equal need begat. I felt my breath come short, my eyes seemed to roll in my head: I wore no clothes. I stalked the room naked. I, Valerie Jones, ex-wife of Lou; poor Valerie, uptight Valerie, Valerie of mind triumphant; ex-mother of Sophie and Ben: the phone rang: it was Hugo, of course it was.
‘Darling.’
‘Darling. Christ I miss you. I can get there at one. Only for half an hour.’
‘Make it thirty-three minutes.’
‘Why thirty-three?’
‘Any time without a nought on the end.’
‘You are all mystery. Stef was never a mystery.’
Stef was his wife. He’d used the past tense.
The phone call eased the torment of desire a little. I found that if I settled down to the tape and the life of Apricot Smith, I became quite comfortable.
