by Fay Weldon
‘She has low self-esteem,’ said Brenda, ‘from being so fat, and a romantic nature. That’s how it ends up.’
Ellen said, ‘Then why doesn’t she go on a diet?’
The remark got back to Belinda, who didn’t speak to her for years thereafter.
‘Apricot was one thing,’ said Belinda, ‘but Ellen is just too ruthless for comfort. Ellen and Lady Macbeth? Nothing in it!’
Valerie’s garden interview with Eleanor Darcy
Q: SO YOU STAYED happily married to Bernard for fifteen years?
A: Journalists always make the assumption that to be married for a number of years is to be happily married for those years. What has the length of time to do with it? Couples stay together for any number of reasons other than happiness: questions of money, children, accommodation or idleness, depression, habit, fears above all: fear of what the neighbours will say, fear of loss of status—fear of going without sex being chief amongst them. And I daresay the worry about what to do with the cat or the problem of finding spare time in the executive diary keeps other unhappy couples together. But yes, as it happens, Bernard and I were happily married for fifteen years, in the face of all likelihood, and against the prognostications of our friends.
Q: To what do you attribute this success?
A: Success? Why do you equate being happily married with success? However, we’ll let that pass. I attribute it to frequent and energetic sex, to our not having children, to my habit of deferring to him, and lying about my actions, my whereabouts, my politics, my emotions and my orgasms.
The day was bright. They sat in the back garden at Eleanor Darcy’s insistence. Trains passing the other side of the wooden fence interfered with the recording. Brenda’s children played in the paddling pool. Valerie faced into the sun. Eleanor wore a pretty straw hat. Valerie wore a little scarf around her neck to hide Hugo’s love bites. She could not see the state of Eleanor’s neck because Eleanor wore the collar of her crisp white blouse up. Why, on so hot a day?
Q: But isn’t this dishonest?
A: Of course. You asked me how I stayed happily married and I replied. The reply is honest; you just don’t like it.
Q: But isn’t marriage about partnership, trust?
A: Yours may be. Mine are not.
Q: But surely women have a right to sexual fulfilment? Men should work to achieve it. The woman ought not to lie about these things, or how will men ever learn?
A: There is no such thing as a ‘right’ to anything: Right to Life, Right to Choose, Right to Housing, Right to Orgasm—all it means is ‘it would be nice if only’. Of course it would be nice. It is just that so many desirable ends are incompatible. Or, if interests overlap, they do not necessarily coincide. What is good for the child is often not good for the parent, and vice versa. What is best for father and child may be perfectly horrible for the mother. And where sex is concerned it is perilous to talk about shoulds and oughts. Shoulds and oughts end in far too many impotent and guilty middle-class men writhing around hopelessly in the beds of friends and strangers. The upper and working classes, being less verbal, less given to talk of shoulds and oughts between the sheets, have less trouble, if you’ll forgive me, simply getting it up and putting it in, to the relief and satisfaction of everyone concerned. In Darcy’s Utopia there will in general be little talk of ‘rights’. And in sexual matters men and women will aspire to individual pleasure not proper behaviour, and go about it however they see fit, and with any luck without too much talk about it.
Q: I am interested in this Utopia of yours. I am sure our readers would like to hear more about it.
A: Then bully for you and bully for them, though I suspect you’re lying. Now I know Utopianism has recently had a bad press. Unrealistic, naïve, elitist to envisage a better society, a perfect state, and work towards it. We have decided human nature is bad, that people only work for money, respond only to the profit principle, and must be controlled by threats and punishments. They forget that it is ‘we’—or ourselves on a good day, ‘society’ as we call it—who understand that punishment is appropriate. In other words, that we are good. When we get it together to be so. And what else are we to do, not just as individuals, but as a society, but plan some kind of future for ourselves? Drift on as we have been: in our sour, brutish, dangerous cities, in our pesticide-soaked countryside: the will of the people increasingly triumphant, and not its best will, likely as not its worst will? One day the electorate chooses a government to exterminate the Jews: the next day decides on one to take it down the Marxist-Leninist road: the next that all it wants is dishwashers and CD players. Who wants the people’s will to prevail? Not the people. They’ve too much sense. Democracy is a dicey business: it must be seen to work, but not actually to apply, or else we’re all in the soup.
Q: The readers of Aura might find that rather hypocritical. Dangerously so.
A: Better a government that pays lip service to democracy than one which doesn’t even do that. Political parties have somehow got it into their heads that voters want to agree with them, so put up policies with which voters will agree. But voters merely want to elect representatives who have the time and wit to run the country so they can get on with their lives in peace. ‘Democracy’, rule by the people, did not always have the good press it enjoys today. It was seen as something to be avoided at all costs. It was the demagogues of Ancient Rome who first made proper government impossible. Citizens, whipped up into a fervour of indignation, simply stopped doing as they were told: started bringing horses noisily in by night for deliveries, not washing the sidewalks and so forth, just for the hell of it. Just to show they could. How the senators, the patricians, fumed!
Pure democracy has never worked: it works in a moderated form where there is a literacy qualification, or a property-owning qualification—which usually amounts to the same thing—and the voter is capable of making an informed judgement. But life has got too complicated to understand: the vote is no longer sufficient protection for the working man. In Darcy’s Utopia there will be elections, but people will be expected merely to vote for people they personally like. It will be a popularity contest. An annual ‘boy or girl most likely to run the country’ jamboree. And annual; by the time they’ve got themselves together it will be practically time for them to disperse. The civil service, again composed of volunteers on Community Tax Service, will spend time un-making regulations and shortening forms. Most legal documents will merely state, ‘common sense will prevail’.
Q: So all the work in Darcy’s Utopia will, as it were, be a tax paid to the community. An ability tax, not an income tax?
A: Exactly. Good for you! Though workaholics will be free to work as long as they please, if they can find something to do machines can’t. You’re a workaholic; you’ll have a brilliant time.
Q: Thank you. Now a question our readers always want to ask. Is it possible to love two men at once?
A: Why do you ask? Is it you who are interested, or your readers? Shall we go inside? The wasps are beginning to annoy me, and I see they quite frighten you. And it’s such a busy day for trains. All those people, off to work, off shopping, off somewhere. Do you think we have a group soul? A group identity, the way they say black beetles do? You seem quite tired and nervy; not at all the way you were last time: very trim and self-contained. I hope nothing bad has happened? As I said before—was it to Hugo, or to you, Mrs Jones?—curses have a peculiar knock-on effect. I was never the focus of an actual focused ill-wishing, merely a bit part player in Bernard’s drama, but look what happened to me!
They were inside, in the kitchen. Brenda washed up mugs at the sink. Eleanor Darcy made coffee, using a frugal quantity of powder and low-fat milk, too late for Valerie to murmur that she took hers black. She took the opportunity to check the tape was running. It was not. She would have to rely upon her notes.
Q: How could you tell if a misfortune was the result of a curse, or just ordinary bad luck? A simple matter of cause and effect?
A: Ah. Your wife leaves you, you lose your job, your friends quarrel with you. In themselves these are not misfortunes. It is in your reaction to them that misfortune lies. You are humiliated by your wife leaving you. You hate being on social benefits. You are lonely without your friends. Indeed, the expectation of such misfortunes quickly brings them about. You may indeed deserve to lose your wife, your job, your friends—naturally it is easier to accept the power of the curse than the fact of your own selfishness, unlikeability, destructive bad temper and so forth. Just as it is easier to blame witches, agents of the Devil, for male impotence, famine, drought, war, plague and so forth than it is to blame God whom, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we insist on regarding as a benign and even moral being.
Q: You keep coming back to God and the Devil. Why?
A: So would you if you’d seen the Devil, snarling and slavering and trying to get in a window of the second floor of a students’ residence. Even through the double glazing the glass was beginning to melt and you could hear this horrible panting sound.
Q: I thought you said your husband had seen the Dark Thing?
A: I saw him in Bernard’s face. If you believe in the Devil you had better believe in God, or else what a fix you’re in! If you have finished your coffee I think it is time you went. I find myself very tired today, I don’t know why. There is very little to do here; idleness quickly makes one tired. At least I expect that’s it. I never answered your question about loving two men at once. Isn’t it strange that men never seem to wonder whether it’s possible to love two women at once? They usually say to the old love about the new, ‘I love you but am in love with her,’ meaning that their nature is divided: their protective and uxorious souls reach out for the old love: their sexuality towards the new. I should consider that a little, if I were you.
And, as if she were the therapist and the journalist the patient, Eleanor ushered Valerie from the door. When Hugo, later that day, tested Valerie’s recorder he could find no fault with it. ‘You just forgot to switch it on,’ he said. Such as had been recorded was all but inaudible; though the sound of trains, children and wasps was clear enough. ‘I have never in all my professional life forgotten to switch the tape on,’ she said. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘you have never in all your life been in love with a man as you are with me, yet it happened.’ And she was obliged to admit he was right.
Valerie ventures out of the Holiday Inn
I WAS TRYING TO make sense of my notes, and dabbing lotion on a nasty wasp sting on my finger, when Hugo turned up with the twins, two untidy little girls with red noses and pale wispy hair. They were, fortunately, not identical, though why I should be pleased they were unidentical I don’t know, as identical twins are conceived of the same coupling; unidentical very often of two separate couplings, and so far as I was concerned the less sexual congress Hugo and his Stephanie had the better. Stef was turning out to be very trying; she seemed unable to accept that one love can finish just like that—poof!—and a new one begin. She believed, wrongly of course, that Hugo was infatuated by Eleanor Darcy. The timing of his leaving would naturally suggest just such a conclusion.
‘Valerie,’ he said to me, ‘I’ll have to take these two to my mother again,’ at which the little ones set up an ungrateful wail, ‘but I’ll be back as soon as possible. I’m sorry but Stef is really behaving in an impossible way. The children were her idea, not mine.’
I set aside Lover at the Gate to attend to the children’s needs—Coke and hamburgers from room service soon quietened them. Stef, Hugo pointed out, was dead set against junk food. It is unwise for mothers to be too ideologically sound in matter of diet—it makes it so easy for rivals to the children’s hearts to worm their way therein, and win.
A taxi was called and Hugo and the children left for Liverpool Street and I was left alone with my own thoughts, in a state of mind I could only describe as lustless. It occurred to me that I should perhaps wait for my daughter Sophie outside her school, to make sure she understood that I had not abandoned her, had merely left Lou for a man who loved me and would make me happy; that things would presently calm down, and as soon as Hugo and I had sorted things out a little and established our new home she could join us. In the meantime she was more than welcome to share the facilities of the Holiday Inn—room service and swimming pool and sauna. Sophie was after all thirteen, and it’s a rare contemporary child—especially born to parents in the communicative arts, that being the only umbrella heading under which both Lou and myself could suitably cluster: though he saw, probably rightly, greater sensibility and sensitivity in a Bloch quartet than he did in a Sunday Times editorial—who can expect both parents to live permanently and companionably together.
I left the hotel, feeling rather like the Lady of Shalott, breaking the spell, leaving her room, her castle, going only to the river’s edge, there to drown herself, and made my way to the Navimore School for Girls. One by one they sauntered out, or clustered together for safety in great rushes: all in theoretical navy and white, but with such imaginative variation in those two colours and where and how placed, and in what fabric, as to make their apparel singularly unalike. The girls were, however, very much alike: wide-eyed, glossy-haired, with a hunch of shoulder and ease of hip that made them all the sisters they longed to be. And there, yes, that was Sophie. She had a little mole above her pretty upper lip, so I knew it was she. I approached. ‘Sophie—’ I said.
And she cut me dead. My own child looked through me with her wide, hazel, dark-fringed eyes and cut me dead. Was it Sophie? She swung round and I recognized the broken metal heel guard on her right shoe. Yes, it was Sophie. She would not part with her shoes for long enough for me to have them properly repaired. ‘Sophie,’ I begged, but she walked on, with a flick of a navy pleated skirt on which I recognized a cigarette burn. Lou smoked three cigarettes a day: it was his one bad habit—and on one occasion Sophie’s skirt and a stub had somehow come into contact.
What had Lou told Sophie? What had he said to her? How had he betrayed me? Poor child, she must be suffering. What had I done? I saw Sophie swing lithely on to a bus before it stopped moving. How many times had I told her not to do it?—to wait.
But she was right: if you didn’t get on the bus while it moved, you didn’t get on it at all. The driver seemed to be playing some kind of survival game with the girls of the Navimore School: he slowed down out of courtesy to the bus stop sign, but took it no further than that. He drove, they leapt, all survived.
I stood, shaken, watching after the departing bus. A dog, some kind of uneasy black and white mixture between collie and labrador, trotted happily towards me. It looked at me in the kind of easy, assessing way dogs on their peculiar errands do look at strangers—and then looked again, and stopped dead: his hackles rose: he backed, he made a kind of howling noise, turned tail, and fled.
Abashed, I made my way back to the Holiday Inn. I passed a church on the way and really believe I would have gone in to sprinkle myself with holy water—but it was locked, as churches are, these days, against vandals. It was left to the glass, chrome and carpets of the Holiday Inn, the sense of un-exotic, common-sensical luxury, to sustain me. The third floor was a no-smoking floor or I think I might have started smoking again after six years’ abstinence. The ambience presently calmed me. The sense of order, of human needs being comprehensible, in fact meetable, was reassuring. Plentiful towels, hair dryer, little bottles of everyday necessities—shampoos, conditioners, shoe horns—whoever uses shoe horns?—our one suitcase each, the few clothes neatly hung: our personal computers, reference books—the tools of our trade. What else could a man and a woman need, I repeated to myself, except each other?
Poor little Sophie would by now be suffering pangs of guilt for her behaviour towards me. I wondered whether to call and say I understood, I forgave her; we’d meet next week some time. I decided I would. I called home. Lou answered. On hearing my voice he put down the phone. I was devastated. Forget Sophie, who was g
iven to drama and tantrum anyway, what about Ben, my little boy? Apple of my eye? Perhaps Lou had told him the monstrous lie that I didn’t love him any more? Of course I loved him. It was just that I loved Hugo more. I had met Hugo at a party and unforeseen and overwhelming emotions had consumed me. That was all. The love of man and the love of children are different things: the one does not exclude the other. Surely Ben would understand that, if Lou explained it properly? Ben spent so much time playing computer games, barely pausing to eat, that lately I’d sometimes wondered if he knew I existed at all. He seemed scarcely even to register the changing faces of au pair girls.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I am not bad-looking, but no beauty: too thin, too earnest, too practical, I had always thought, to inspire sudden, romantic love. And yet I had! When the two halves, separated by that terrifying law which parts the two who were never meant to be divided, defy that law and meet, there can be no gainsaying them. Hugo and Valerie.
There was something wrong here, something I didn’t understand. I wanted Hugo to return at once, at once, to keep the niggling doubts down where they belonged: what was going on? I noticed I had my pen in my hand again. When I wrote a line or two of Lover at the Gate I felt at ease, buoyantly happy, confident. Put down my pen and I heard in my ears the howl of the fleeing dog, saw the metal flash of Sophie’s shoe—I could not bear it. I picked up the pen. Anxiety dispersed.
The phone rang. I ran to it but it wasn’t Hugo. It was Eleanor Darcy.
‘How did you know I was at the Holiday Inn?’ I was puzzled. ‘Is that where you are? What a strange place to be! Do you really like hotels? I hate them. I just called the number Brenda gave me. She’s good at names and addresses and details. I’m hopeless. I think we’ve got an arrangement to meet tomorrow. I’m sorry, I can’t make it. It’s visiting day for Julian tomorrow, in prison. It quite went out of my head. I know what you’re thinking: fancy forgetting a thing like that! The trouble is, it’s quite easy. Out of sight is out of mind, when it comes to people as curse objects.’
