by Weldon, Fay
‘Thank you,’ said Nerina, ‘for what you did with my records. My mum told me.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ said Ellen. ‘In fact don’t ever mention it.’
‘Okay,’ said Nerina, ‘but I guess I owe you a favour, all the same. A lot of us do.’
‘Nerina,’ said Mrs Khalid, ‘supposing your brother saw you wearing that T-shirt.’
‘My brother,’ said Nerina, ‘can go to Saudi Arabia for all I care.’
‘Or Sharif?’ her mother pleaded. ‘You know you like Sharif. What would Sharif say?’
‘He won’t see me to say anything,’ said Nerina, ‘will he? I hope you don’t suppose I’m insane!’
‘Since she started at the poly she’s been very difficult,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘I’m not sure about education for girls.’
‘My mother’s quite right,’ said Nerina. ‘I used to have a head quite full of interesting things. Now I’m at college there’s only a kind of vacuum. I fill it up with facts and theories, but it’s going to take for ever: it’s a deep, deep well.’
‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ said Ellen. ‘You’d better be careful. All kinds of things can come rushing in to fill it up.’
‘So I’d noticed,’ said Nerina. ‘Well, I’ll be off,’ and she swayed away, leaving a drift of rather heavy scent behind her.
‘You’re in her good books,’ said Mrs Khalid, ‘that’s the main thing. She can be quite tiresome when crossed. I wish she’d wear trainers. Those shoes are so bad for her feet.’
Now that Bernard left industrial action to others, the heart had quite gone out of the staff’s work-to-rule and normal relations were resumed. Neither side won. A draw was declared. But now both the academic board and the management team viewed Bernard with some apprehension, fearing where his energies would next take him. It was with some relief that they assented to his desire to take over outreach work in the local community. It was on his prompting that ethnic drop-out youths were now accepted onto college courses without formal qualifications; it was on his urging that examinations were now being set and marked in Urdu and other minority languages, the faculties shamed at last out of their insistence that English was the only language in the world that counted. Bernard was triumphant. The college was at last loosening up. The Faculty of Art and Design now ran courses on graffiti in conjunction with the Faculty of Social Sciences. ‘The Role of the Magic Mushroom in Primitive Cave and Contemporary Wall Art’ won its author a first. When Bernard went to the canteen there was a stir, a breath of recognition. The young, the bold, the lowly paid and overworked, acknowledged him as their spiritual leader. The few, the old guard, who could see what generations of scholars had endured for, struggled for, thus lightly swept away, were not so happy. Notions of excellence, of the primacy of scholarship, the victory of steady thought over wild opinion, the sense of generation building upon generation, all thus abandoned in the craven desire to please the student, entertain the student, keep the college in funds. The few were shrewd, powerful, influential and dined in high political places; Bernard knew it, and did not care. Indeed, he found it energizing. ‘No one worth their salt,’ he said, ‘but does not have enemies. Once the mind is free from its self-imposed shackles anything is possible. Even changing the world.’
Mrs Parkin came to stay for a week and went after a day. Bernard would not let her set up Jesus, Mary and Joseph on the mantelpiece even though Christmas was coming.
‘Look, Mum,’ he said, ‘I can just about stand Christmas dinner as a family get-together. But I will not have idols in the house.’ Mrs Parkin left, blaming Ellen for having turned her son from a faith that had sustained her family through death, famine, hardship, war, bereavement. Ellen said it was nothing to do with her, but she was lying, and Mrs Parkin knew it. Once she was gone Bernard and Ellen were able to ask Jed and Prune round for Christmas dinner. Prune was pregnant again and wore a murky green long woollen smock. Ellen wore a skin-tight gold dress with black glittery trimmings.
‘Isn’t that dress rather low cut,’ asked Bernard, ‘for a simple Christmas dinner with friends?’
‘I bought it at Oxfam,’ said Ellen, as if that excused everything. But Bernard paid the matter little attention. There was a kind of dance of thought going through his head: he had to keep in step. He couldn’t stop it.
‘The synapses are twanging,’ he complained, on occasion to Ellen. ‘They get out of step. The rules are gone: the safety nets. Everything links, from cosmology to microbiology. When it finally does link up the computer will explode.’
‘I hope you don’t talk like that at college,’ she said.
‘Of course I don’t,’ he said. ‘I’m not mad.’
Sometimes his eyes would glaze over for a second or two as if he were out of their world altogether. Ellen wondered if he had petit mal and looked it up in a medical dictionary – neither of them went to doctors if they could help it – but the entry was not very helpful, and it seemed in any case the kind of symptom it would be better to be vague about, not define, not name, for fear the naming made it worse, less likely to evaporate out of existence. And sometimes Bernard would wake shivering, from a restless sleep, dreaming of punishments.
‘Well,’ he said in the new year, a couple of days after term had started, ‘I’ve certainly been and gone and upset Nerina, of all people. And over such a trivial thing.’
‘Now what have you done?’
‘I told her God didn’t exist and she took offence.’
‘But she must allow you your opinion.’
‘On the contrary. You must remember Nerina’s background. The ideological war is as real to her as any war with guns and tanks. If your idea is contrary to my idea your idea must be eliminated, especially if it starts getting a territorial foothold, and might just possibly catch on.’
‘Excuses, excuses, the girl’s a fool.’
‘Don’t say that, Ellen. Don’t even think it!’ He looked round anxiously, as if for bugging devices. ‘Now listen, Ellen, we’ve unhinged her from her original faith. We shouldn’t have done it. Mention Allah, mention the Prophet, she laughs. It’s dangerous. She worships the Devil, Ellen, and that’s the truth of it. To say aloud that God doesn’t exist is to thereby negate the Devil. What’s more, you see, Jed’s group is on the point of bringing Satan into corporeal existence. She blames me because it’s taking so long. I know she does.’
‘Have you said anything about it to Jed?’
‘I know what he’ll say. He’ll say it’s all part of continual assessment: the whole point of the course is mass hysteria. The control group will be perfectly sane.’
Married to a madman, thought Ellen. If I don’t look at it, it will go away.
‘Perhaps I’d better say something to Jed.’
‘Don’t, don’t. Nerina might find out.’
‘I should just let them get on with it,’ said Ellen lightly, ‘so long as they don’t start sacrificing goats. On the other hand perhaps they should. Then the Animal Rights Activists can campaign against them, and let you off the hook.’
‘You’re not taking this seriously, Ellen.’
‘No.’
He thought a little. He blinked. His mind clicked back into another, less agitated gear. ‘I mentioned to Jed that Nerina had a crush on him, and I’m afraid it got back to her.’
‘You and Jed sit in the senior common room discussing the emotions of students?’
‘Sometimes they are relevant, Ellen. The staff is in loco parentis. Some of our students are very young. We were discussing the probability of Nerina’s essays being all her own work: or whether someone’s fronting her. They really are remarkable. She’s sent them up to a London publisher who is actually going to bring them out – Multiculturalism and Pluralism in the New Europe. Do you think she’s sold her soul to the Devil?’
‘Is Jed’s relationship to Nerina perhaps very close?’
‘It is perfectly proper, Ellen. Of course there is sometimes an erotic element between teacher and pupil.
How can there not be? The point is, Nerina apparently took offence.’
‘You mean you told Jed and Jed told Nerina and Nerina told you and blah, blah, blah. Children’s playground stuff.’
‘I suppose in a way a man remains a child until he has his own.’ He wanted a baby. Ellen didn’t.
‘Prune has nearly had lots of babies. It hasn’t grown Jed up, so far as I can see. She has high blood pressure. She’s in hospital. Did he bother to mention it?’
‘No. Perhaps you should visit her? You have lots of time.’
Bernard thought Ellen should take a proper job. Ellen didn’t.
‘What a good idea! Perhaps it’s the black magic group has put her blood pressure up? Perhaps they mean poor Prune to die in labour so Nerina can marry Jed?’
She shouldn’t have said it. He started looking into corners for the bugging device, though he said he was searching for a stray cigarette, left over from the days when he smoked.
‘Ellen, don’t joke. They’ve put a curse on me now, for betraying Nerina. I can feel it.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Ellen. ‘I wish I’d stayed on at college. It seems much more exciting these days than it used to be. Perhaps you should start smoking again? It’s been all trouble since you stopped.’
That night a bird hurled itself against the window pane and woke them both up. After that a bird – the same one or another – fell through the chimney into the grate and then fluttered and banged in terror around the room. Ellen caught it in a towel and put it out and went back to sleep. In the morning Bernard was pale and his hand trembled too much even to lift his coffee cup, let alone butter his toast.
‘You look as you did when you wanted to be a priest,’ said Ellen, irritated. ‘It was only a bird.’
‘Birds don’t fly about at night,’ said Bernard, ‘in the middle of winter.’
‘Owls do,’ said Ellen.
‘How do you know it was an owl?’ he asked.
‘It had big eyes,’ she said, which seemed to satisfy him, though she hadn’t noticed its eyes, merely the trembling flutter of the feathers through the thin towel as she caught it. She hadn’t liked it. Perhaps her towels were too thin? Perhaps she should buy new?
Bernard reversed straight out of the new garage into the road and hit a passing van. Car and van were written off though no one was hurt. But Bernard fainted so she took him into casualty.
‘If I speak to Nerina,’ said Bernard, whose blood pressure was so low there was talk of admitting him for a day or so, ‘she might lift the curse. On the other hand it might make matters worse.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Ellen, ‘you put your foot on the accelerator not the brake. You were tired. The bird kept you awake.’
Bernard was admitted for tests. Ellen went to find Nerina. She found her sitting on a bench beneath a stark tree in the college grounds, in a snowy landscape. She was alone. She was wrapped in soft brown wool. A snowflake or so glistened in her black hair. She sat as if on a throne: her dark eyes glowed. Her face remained impassive, but her expression was equable.
‘How nice to see you, Ellen,’ said Nerina. ‘How is your husband?’
‘In hospital.’
‘Well,’ said Nerina, ‘I understand he isn’t really your husband. You did not go through a religious ceremony with him.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Your husband did.’
‘I see.’
‘So there is no protection for him in you. And now he has betrayed us.’
‘How did he betray you?’
‘I don’t think it’s proper for me to tell you,’ said Nerina. ‘Besides not being a proper wife to Bernard, you are also an adulteress. In some countries in the world you would be stoned to death. But you helped me out with my grades so I’ll overlook that.’
Ellen thought it safer not to go further into these particular matters. ‘Well,’ Ellen said, ‘I am very fond of my husband, in spite of my western ways, and I know he has a great respect for you, Nerina; and is thrilled about your publishing contract, and any betrayal of confidence has been totally inadvertent. I know he’d want me to say that to you.’
‘In my culture,’ said Nerina, ‘we take love seriously. And if you had indeed repented and reformed – which Jed says you have – why did you have Christmas dinner in a revealing dress?’
‘Because it was cheap and I liked it,’ said Ellen. ‘Honestly, that was all.’
‘I suppose that might be true,’ said Nerina. ‘My mother says that though you were always very pleasant and she liked you, you never paid your share of the office coffee. And she was sorry you had so little belief. She thought it would do you good to be taught belief.’
‘I expect I’ll come round to it in good time,’ said Ellen.
‘I daresay you will,’ said Nerina, waving cheerfully to the group of smiling students, brightly wrapped in woolly hats and scarves, who now approached her. ‘We’re going to build a snowman. What fun! You don’t have anything of Bernard’s on you, I suppose?’
‘No,’ said Ellen. ‘I don’t.’
‘Well,’ said Nerina, ‘we can do without. Your husband looms quite large in many of our minds. Some students had to do an extra year because of the staff work-to-rule. Their exam papers weren’t marked. Many suffered because of your husband’s principles.’
Brenda telephoned a couple of hours later to say she was well, considering, and how was Apricot? She hadn’t heard from her for some time.
‘Considering what?’ asked Ellen.
‘Considering I’m eight and a half months pregnant and haven’t heard from you for a couple of weeks. Not even a “how are you?”’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ellen. ‘Well, I’m fine. I just had a man round here declaring eternal love. I looked out the kitchen window and there he was, standing at the back gate with a bunch of red roses in his hand.’
‘How nice for you,’ said Brenda. ‘How’s Bernard?’
‘In hospital, but nothing serious.’
‘That’s really very convenient then,’ said Brenda.
‘It is, isn’t it.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He is the Vice Chancellor of the University of Bridport,’ said Ellen.
There was a short silence.
‘Are you sure? It seems a little out of character.’
‘I’m sure. He’s quite plump and I suppose quite elderly, but he has a wonderful mind. Apparently I met him at a conference on the economics of multiculturalism. I was taking the minutes of the meeting. I can’t remember him but he remembers me.’
‘It all sounds most improbable.’
‘It is improbable for those on the ground that an aircraft should crash on to them. In fact the chances are a million to one against it. But there the aircraft is, its fuselage sticking up out of your house. His name is Julian.’
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 Chernechersky,
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.
