by Weldon, Fay
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 chang
ing 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 i
f 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.
