by Weldon, Fay
‘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 fles
h. 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 w
ith 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.
