by Fay Weldon
If Eleanor Darcy can manage a private room in a prison, perhaps she manages one in the local pub as well? But this is paranoia; of the kind her poor Bernard suffered from. The breathing lake, into which suspicion drops, like a stone, the ripples spreading! I trust Hugo, of course I do. My body is his, his is mine: one flesh. What was it Eleanor Darcy said? Love is the evidence you need which proves the benign nature of the universe. Love lets you know you are alive. Fate weaves its heady patterns all around; good luck attends you, nobody fools you: Hugo does not repair with Eleanor to the back room of the pub. Of course not.
Babies by licence only! There’d be abuses, there always are abuses: those with money would do what they wanted. Except that money, in Darcy’s Utopia, will count for nothing: just as it counts for nothing in Moscow today: where pockets are stuffed with roubles but there is nothing to buy. In Darcy’s Utopia money will be as meaningless as coconuts in a country where they fall from the trees: it will cease to be a corrupting cause. Would my neighbours have let Lou and me have Sophie and Ben? Of course they would. I am a good citizen, a nice person; I am just at the moment in the grip of a sexual passion, in the throes of love; I am alive: I who have been so nearly dead for decades, which is why I am currently neglecting them, just a little.
The phone goes. It’s Ben. How did he know I was here? ‘Mum,’ he says. ‘Dad said to call you if we wanted anything. He’s out at a concert. Sophie and me haven’t got a babysitter. There’s just us. Sophie’s got a pain—’
Sophie always has pains. It’s her age. I tell Ben to tell Sophie to put a hotwater bottle on it. How dare Lou leave them on their own? He either has to give up music, or organize live-in help of some kind. Where is Kirsty Bull? She can share his bed for all I care. Bath from ten forty-five to eleven; teeth for five timed minutes, lights out by eleven fifteen. Love from eleven twenty to forty on Tuesdays and Fridays should there be no concerts on either of those nights: otherwise do without. I am sure the world is full of women who would appreciate a pleasant, hard-working man with regular habits, and would be happy to babysit Sophie and Ben.
What do the children expect of me? I brought them into the world. Isn’t that enough? In another ten years they can come and visit me to their hearts’ content and I won’t object. Unless Ben remains a computer freak—he has his father’s appreciation of the mathematics, the square lines, the patterning out of existence; unless Sophie fails to lose a little of her egoism—or unless Hugo objects to their visits. I’m sure I don’t want his puny little creatures visiting me. I want his life to have begun the moment he met me, as he wants mine to have begun, simultaneously. Together, we exist. Separately, we are nothing.
LOVER AT THE GATE [7]
Brenda finds Ellen in a state of enchantment
BRENDA KNOCKED ON ELLEN’S door, nervous of what might happen next, anxious to know in detail what her friend Ellen had been unable to voice on the phone. Ellen opened the door wearing household gloves, her underwear and a wrap.
‘The kitchen sink is blocked,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to clear it with the plunger.’
‘Has he gone?’
‘Who?’
‘The Vice Chancellor,’ said Brenda. ‘I forget—is it the Chancellor who does all the work in universities, or is it the Vice Chancellor?’
She knew about polytechnics, not universities.
‘The Vice Chancellor,’ said Ellen, returning to the sink.
Brenda followed, and gratefully sat down at the kitchen table. Her pregnancy rendered her unexpectedly top-heavy: no matter how she tried to balance back on her heels, she kept feeling that she was about to topple forward. Ellen made no comment on Brenda’s state. Usually she at least went through the motions of expressing concern, and of sharing some of the apprehension and excitement of the pregnancy. But today, Brenda could see, the talk was to be all of Ellen. She was sorry for herself, but happy for her friend, whose life in the last few years, while Brenda’s went forward into the tumult of marriage and babies, had become predictable, unambitious and, to Brenda’s mind, surprisingly dull: as if Ellen’s peculiarly bright and individual life flame was losing its incandescence: that the sheer everydayness of married life to the difficult Bernard—Brenda, Belinda and Liese all agreed that Bernard was ‘difficult’, with his passions, his principles, his politics and policies—and though they marvelled at the ease with which Ellen, as they put it, handled him, had somehow expected something more dramatic, more marvellous, for their friend, than that she should, as they felt she did, stand round kitchen sinks all day, taking a little job here, a little job there, failing to make any impression on the world at all. When they asked her what she was doing with her life, she would reply ‘thinking’, which seemed a singularly flaky answer.
Now as Ellen stood at the sink, working the rubber plunger in, out, in, out, listening and watching in the dirty water for the signs of vacuum working, of pressure releasing, the shoulder of her blue housecoat fell down and Brenda was startled by the white luminosity of her flesh.
‘The Vice Chancellor,’ said Ellen, ‘is the chief executive officer of the university. The Chancellor is merely its figurehead. A position of great dignity, of course, but you only really have to work once a year, when you spend a week or so conferring degrees. The Vice Chancellor is the one who really counts. Bridport is a small, efficient, research-orientated, cost-effective university in the new mode, which specializes in the philosophical and economic sciences, and its Vice Chancellor works extremely hard and has little time for personal life.’
‘Did he tell you all that?’
‘Yes. He said he felt it was appropriate to present his credentials at the beginning of the courtship. He said he hoped I didn’t find him hopelessly old-fashioned.’
‘And did you?’
‘I thought he was rather sweet.’
‘You said he was old and fat.’
‘Yes but his mind, Brenda. A mind makes up for such a lot.’
‘Bernard has a mind, Ellen.’
‘Eleanor. Julian Darcy called me Eleanor. First I had to put up with Apricot because of my crazy parents, then Ellen when Bernard was trying to punish me and make me share his guilt—now at last I have been invested with some kind of romance, of unearthliness. You know Julian is a member of one of the government’s think-tanks?’
‘I don’t keep up with these things.’
‘You should. He’s a very busy man. When he’s not running the university, or sorting out the government, he writes books on monetarism and the economics of multiculturalism. He was looking out photographs for his publishers when he came across one of himself at last year’s conference on the economics of multiculturalism, and there I was in the background, my hair a halo around my head in a shaft of sunlight, and he faced at last what he had tried to avoid for so long—his love for me.’
Brenda wondered if perhaps Ellen were fantasizing, or teasing, and thought on the whole not. There was such a smell of sex in the air she wanted to open the window. She had thought at first perhaps it was the blocked drains, but no. Ellen gave up the plunger, took a towel, laid it on the floor, opened the cupboard beneath the sink and, with wrench and bucket at the ready, lay flat on her back on the towel, manoeuvred her arms inside the cupboard and unscrewed the joint beneath the sink where the soakaway met the drain. Brenda, female as she was, eight months pregnant as she was, felt an urge to join her friend upon the floor, kiss her, embrace her. It was perhaps as well—for Ellen would not, as she realized later, have reacted at all favourably towards such an advance—that the joint was quickly loosened and a whole flood of filthy water poured down into the bucket, as was expected, overfilled the bucket, as had not been expected, splashed and then poured over the prostrate Ellen. The water was deep brown, bitty, scummy and smelt dreadful. Ellen stood up. ‘Extraordinary,’ she remarked as she went to the shower, but quite calmly in the circumstances. ‘The sink wasn’t all that full, was it, Brenda?’
‘I hadn’t thought so,’ said Brenda, fo
llowing, perching on the end of the bath, ‘but I suppose it must have been.’
She was glad when Ellen at last covered up her nakedness, her luminosity, with jeans and sweater, and they went back to the kitchen to mop up the floor. The room smelt even more sweet and sickly than before. Brenda couldn’t make out what had been in the water.
‘When he said courtship,’ said Brenda, ‘what exactly did he mean?’
‘He wants to marry me.’
Brenda pointed out that Ellen was married already.
‘So’s he,’ said Ellen. ‘He has two grown-up children, and a wife. She’s very elegant and charming, he says—her name’s Georgina. She has to do all the social side of things. Vice Chancellor’s wives have to entertain a lot. It’s rather like being first lady at the White House.’
‘Isn’t she doing it well enough, or something? What’s his complaint?’ Brenda felt quite snarky. She had always remarked upon and lamented how little consideration wives were granted in adulterous relationships. They took on the role of the mother on a family outing—the nuisance and the spoilsport, the one who says ‘don’t go too near the edge’, ‘those apples aren’t ripe’, ‘shouldn’t we get home before the fog sets in?’
‘His present wife does it too well, if anything,’ said Ellen. ‘He says the magic has gone out of the relationship. He asks what is life without love?’
‘And what did you reply? I hope that life in his case was his commitment to the university, his students, his governments, his publishers, his wife, his children. Of all the men in the world this Julian Darcy seems to have a remarkable amount to give up for love.’
‘That’s what’s so wonderful about it,’ said Ellen. ‘And it’s strange, Bernard’s always been so good in bed—once we got going—but now all that with Bernard seems somehow too facile. Julian really had quite some difficulty, and yet spiritually, emotionally, sexually—Brenda, with Julian just now I was transported. It’s the only way I can describe it. Transported.’
Brenda felt a twinge or two in her belly. She hoped the strains of the morning were not going to induce labour early. Ellen was nutty; so much was evident. There was a condition called paraphrenia, of which she had heard—in which a person was recognizably insane in one area only, seldom certifiable, but just a terrible nuisance to family, friends and neighbours. Perhaps Ellen was a paraphrenic?
The door opened and Bernard came in.
‘Darling!’ said Ellen. ‘How wonderful! I rang the hospital and they said they didn’t think you’d be home until tomorrow. I was coming in this afternoon to see you, during visiting hours.’
‘Visiting hours are all day,’ said Bernard. ‘There’s a terrible smell in here. What is it?’
‘I’ve spent all morning unblocking the sink,’ said Ellen. ‘Haven’t I, Brenda?’
‘Yes,’ said Brenda.
‘Anyway,’ said Ellen, ‘they let you out, that’s the main thing. They were just being over-careful. Well, I’m glad they were. I rang the college to say you wouldn’t be in.’
‘They’re running the college on such a mean and cost-effective margin,’ said Bernard, ‘there’ll be no sick cover arranged for me whatsoever. I’d better try and get in this afternoon.’
‘They can’t arrange sick cover for reasons other than meanness,’ observed Ellen, making, as Brenda was glad to see, a cup of tea for her husband. He looked quite pale and shaken but perhaps, Brenda thought, no more than usual. Bernard always had the air of a man to whom a disaster had happened, or was about to happen. ‘They can’t arrange it because teaching staff decline to notify the office as to their whereabouts, let alone their projected absences, their sabbaticals, their leave-takings, legitimate or otherwise as they may be.’
‘Whose side are you on?’ asked Bernard sharply. ‘All of a sudden you’re talking like management,’ and then he seemed to forget that, and gave an account of his breakfast at the hospital; it had come three hours after the ward had been woken, and consisted of a soup plate at the bottom of which some grey fat-free milk swilled, into which a long tube of a kind of cornflakes was to be poured. He had read the tube. The flakes contained one third of the day’s vitamin, mineral and carbohydrate requirements for an adult. There was a slice of thin white bread, already curling, so long it was since it had left the loaf, spread with a kind of non-fat oil, and a cup of warm decaffeinated coffee with a packet of low-protein milk powder to go with it.
‘Poor darling,’ murmured Ellen, preparing toast, butter and marmalade. ‘Poor darling!’
Brenda felt quite weak. Was she meant to endorse her friend’s hypocrisy? She supposed, yes, she was.
After breakfast, Bernard had been told he was in good health; he was told to go home but had to wait for the consultant’s round before his departure could be officially sanctioned. The consultant was delayed, unusually, by an emergency, so Bernard had to sit like an idiot beside his bed, waiting for another couple of hours, fully dressed, while the work of the ward went on around him. He’d wanted to call home but had no change, and his phone card, when he tried it, had no credits left upon it, though he could have sworn it was all but new. The consultant when he arrived was scathing to the ward staff; saying there was no need whatsoever for Bernard to have been admitted: he had merely taken up a badly needed bed. Bernard had made his own way home. He missed the bus by a hair’s breadth and had trod in some dog shit but had stopped in a public toilet to remove it. He had been accosted by two rather aggressive homosexuals—
‘Gays,’ said Ellen.
‘Homosexuals,’ said Bernard—
but had managed to avoid them.
‘Bernard,’ said Ellen. ‘Such a chapter of accidents! I know what you’re thinking: that all this is proof that there is indeed a curse upon you. But I think you imagine it. I don’t expect you got much sleep last night. That’s a perfectly normal hospital breakfast: consultants are always saying things like that to ward staff: many of those phone cards are faulty: you are always missing buses because you’ve got your back turned checking the timetable when they do arrive.’
‘The dog shit was real enough.’
‘No doubt it was. But the dog population of this town is phenomenal. You probably mistook the concern of two perfectly ordinary people in the gentleman’s toilet—you look dreadfully pale—for sexual overtures. Anyway, here you are, safe and sound.’
‘Why do you try and avoid it?’ said Bernard. ‘I have had a curse put upon me by Nerina. Look what’s happening to poor Jed’s wife. There’s no doubt about it at all.’
‘Well,’ said Ellen, ‘this morning I feel singularly blessed, so there you are! I am surprised at you, Bernard. You’re such a rationalist, and here you are talking about curses. I expect you’re still a little shocked after the accident, and somehow the feeling-tone of your childhood has returned. All that heavy, doomy religion. Punishment round every corner.’
‘I expect that’s what it is,’ said Bernard, cheering up. ‘God, I’m glad to be home.’
Brenda made the generalized motions to leave that the wife’s friend is expected to make on the return of the husband. Ellen said she’d run her to the bus stop only their car was a write-off. Brenda said she thought perhaps she’d call Peter and he could run her to the hospital. She thought labour might have started.
And so indeed it had. Brenda’s baby was simply and safely delivered, happy and healthy and not noticeably premature. Whatever had been going on in the Parkin household had at least not affected Brenda, or her baby.
A taped telephone interview between Valerie and Eleanor
A: PUNISHMENT, YOU ASK? Perhaps it’s because I’ve never been a mother that thoughts of ‘punishment’ do not spring at once to mind. What kind of punishment will be meted out to evil-doers in Darcy’s Utopia? Good heavens, it will simply be exile from the place. To know that ‘punishment’ entails being kept away can only make a place more desirable to those who live there.
