by Fay Weldon
‘It got worse after you left,’ he said. ‘The estate agents said when people came to look over it they’d see things on the stairs, and smell dry rot, though the surveyors couldn’t find any. How are you? Why do you keep sending these divorce petitions through the post? You know I’m a Catholic.’
Eleanor said she’d better come over and see him, and her father, and her father’s new girlfriend.
‘She’s not new,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s been going on for years. She’s much too good for him.’
Ken’s fingers had become arthritic and he could no longer play the banjo. Gillian had a back problem and a cataract in one eye, surprising in one so young, but Bernard said the depletion of the ozone layer and the consequent increase in ultraviolet light was causing an epidemic of cataracts. It was not a cheerful household.
Bernard said along with everything else the curse of invisibility had been put on him. He existed but did not exist. People looked through him in the street, in shops. He might as well be a little old lady for all the notice anyone took of him.
‘Bernard,’ said Eleanor, ‘you are very visible to me and Julian when you stand outside our window. I wish you wouldn’t. It does no one any good.’
‘It does me some good,’ said Bernard, and smiled. He had shaved.
He was looking a little less pale and thin. Gillian was a good cook, he said, considering her one eye. She was better than Eleanor had ever been.
‘I never set out to be a good cook,’ said Eleanor.
Ken said, ‘The trouble with you, Apricot, is that you take after your mother. Unstable.’
Eleanor said to Ken, ‘The trouble with me is that I like men twice my age, the same way you like girls half your age.’
Gillian said, ‘It’s tea time!’, and sat them all down to scones, cream and jam, and chocolate cake served on rather dirty plates and tea from a grimy teapot. It seemed her one eye enabled her to cook, though not to pick up Ken’s scattered tissues from the floor, or tidy away Bernard’s many combs. But perhaps she didn’t see it as her business so to do. The combs were all matted: Bernard seemed to be losing his hair. Gillian was a stolid girl, with a pasty face and thick lips. She had pale blue, rather prominent eyes, one very cloudy.
‘You’re going bald,’ said Eleanor to Bernard.
‘It’s that curse,’ said Gillian. ‘That black magic group they set up at the college. They’ve really got it in for poor Bernard. They mean him to lose everything. You were only part of it. It’s not official now but it still goes on.’
Ken said all women were the same, they were all gullible; if Rhoda hadn’t spent all his savings on a quack faith healer he wouldn’t be in this state now.
Eleanor held her tongue and ate some more chocolate cake.
Bernard said, ‘Ellen doesn’t believe in black magic any more than the Marxist dialectic, any more than she did Catholicism. Ellen won’t let anyone believe in anything, except her. Ellen is the new religion.’
Eleanor said, ‘They weren’t really trying to raise the Devil, according to Jed. They were trying to create an optimum environment for an experiment in mass suggestion.’
Bernard said, ‘Jed was trying to create an optimum environment to seduce girl students. Yet he flourishes like the bay green tree.’
Eleanor said, ‘His baby died,’ and Bernard said, ‘That’s flourishing,’ and Gillian said she’d make him wash his mouth out with soapy water and Ken said so far as he could see there wasn’t any soap: there hadn’t been for weeks.
Bernard said, ‘I say what I want. That group of Jed’s ruined me and what’s more it raised the Devil. I saw him. He was floating outside my window, on the second floor. It is not something I care to remember.’
Gillian said, ‘Have some more chocolate cake. I’m sorry I was nasty. It was only a dream, Bernard. He’s been in a bad way, Ellen.’
Bernard said, ‘Dreams are something you wake up from. This was not a dream. It was real. I didn’t wake up from it. He was real. The Devil is real. He has a mouth with flabby black lips and slit eyes like a goat: they glow like a dog’s eyes do in the dark but it wasn’t dark, it was still light. His breath smelt sickly sweet, like dry rot. His skin was scaly and hairy. His edges were a bit blurred but he was real. He was floating, not standing: the ground was too far beneath him for him to be standing, unless he was totally out of proportion, which I suppose is possible. Then he faded away. It wasn’t that I woke up but that he faded out. Except of course he’s still there. Just because you can’t see him doesn’t mean he isn’t there.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t, Bernard,’ said Gillian. ‘You upset yourself. He came home and gibbered for weeks, Ellen, and never went into college again. Now we’re all on benefits.’
‘Just as well,’ said Ken. ‘He was making a fool of himself; he should have resigned before he was fired. They gave him every opportunity, but you know our Bernard.’
They were very cosy together. Eleanor felt excluded.
Eleanor said, ‘So you won’t be standing outside our window any more, Bernard?’
Bernard said, ‘Oh yes I shall. I have nothing else to do. No car to drive, no job to go to, no hair to comb, no friends, no visibility; I reserve the right to stand beneath my wife’s window and fart while she makes a fool of herself having sex with a buggering old fascist.’
After a little while Eleanor said, ‘Ex-wife’s window, if you’d only sign the divorce papers. It might make you feel better.’
‘Wife,’ said Bernard. ‘Catholics do not believe in divorce.’
‘So you’re back in the faith,’ said Eleanor, coolly and politely. ‘After all that! I couldn’t believe it.’
‘Yes,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s safer. I keep my nose to the ground, think what I’m told, obey the rules, and go to Mass on Sundays. I have been punished for the sin of intellectual arrogance; God has demonstrated to me that the ecstasy of pure thought is reserved for heaven, not for earth; it is for angels, not for man. No, virtue lies in obedience; I will never teach again: it is a sin to interfere with the simple belief structures of innocent students—’
‘Let alone their bodies,’ said Ken, who as he grew older seemed to grow simpler. ‘Heh, heh, heh!’
‘And if I stick to all this,’ said Bernard, ignoring him, ‘my belief is that at least I won’t see the Devil in the flesh again, and that’s just about the height of my ambition. I’ve learned my lesson.’
‘Superstition,’ said Eleanor, ‘will get you nowhere. Shall we change the subject? How’s poor Prune?’
Gillian said, ‘Who’s Prune?’
Eleanor said, ‘Poor Prune is Jed’s wife. We all used to be quite close: not any longer. Jed had an affair with Nerina, but Nerina never liked anyone mentioning it. Now more than ever, I expect, since she’s married.’
Bernard clutched his stomach and said he had a bad pain, as if a needle was being driven into it. Ken said he wasn’t taking Bernard up to the hospital yet again, Bernard needn’t think he was. Gillian wept—equally out of both eyes, Eleanor was interested to see.
Eleanor said, ‘Well, I must be off. Have you ever thought of taking up catering, Gillian? The chocolate cake was wonderful!’ Gillian said tearfully she couldn’t say she had. Eleanor said perhaps now Gillian was part of the family she’d like to help her out in a little something she’d said she’d do up at the university, and Gillian said okay, anything to get away from this dreary lot. What she couldn’t stand was ill health, especially if it was mental.
Valerie sits up in bed and listens to tape
Q: WILL THERE BE political censorship in Darcy’s Utopia?
A: Of course not. Why should there be? If anyone can think of any better way to organize things, let them say so: if they can get ten people to agree with them, let them put it to our parliament of popular folk (leavened, if you remember, with a few obvious and self-declared baddies) and everything will be done to accommodate them. It will be government by consensus, not confrontation: government not by power seek
ers, for where will be the advantages of power since not money, but diversion, and the pleasurable exercise of skill will be the reward of work? Government not by robber barons, for what can they rob that will be of value to them that others cannot have by simply stretching out the hand? But by those who like to see things running smoothly, and who will be able to disinvest themselves of a block of Community Units on the day they resign—the exact amount subject to popular vote. There will be no censors and, as we know, very few policemen, though sufficient well-meaning and officious folk, no doubt, to organize the short-term or long-term exile of those people others simply cannot stand.
Q: You mean to be unlikeable will be a crime?
A: Put it like that if you must. ‘Unlikeable’ in the sense of ‘antisocial’. There will be no obligation to chatter and smile, if that’s what you mean; though I hope many will feel like doing so.
Q: How large is Darcy’s Utopia? It seems, if you’ll forgive me saying so, an airy-fairy kind of place. A city of dreams, with glittering spires and no reality.
A: I suspect initially about two million people. Any larger unit will be hard to organize: we depend so greatly in our existing societies upon the accumulated traditions of the past, on the habits of custom and practice, built up to our disadvantage through history, to regulate ourselves and our behaviour. And in Darcy’s Utopia we have to start again, rethink everything, from how and why we brush our teeth to how and why we bury our dead; we must do this in the light of our new knowledge of our inner world, and our new technological control over the outer one, and we must do it by consensus. Any smaller unit and the rest of the world will say oh, it only works because it’s so small, it has no relevance here.
Q: I see. The rest of the world is watching, is going to follow suit?
A: Of course. We start small, and little by little the boundaries of Darcy’s Utopia will expand. Our only problem in the end will be there’ll be nowhere to send the exiles to, but I don’t suppose we have to worry about that for a while.
Q: Supposing it doesn’t work?
A: Supposing, supposing. It may not work. But nothing else is going to be working, not for long. Look around. The poor and the dispossessed, forget the lover, are at the gate. The third world spills over into the first, the second. Your guilt will not let you be happy or at peace. The oceans warm up: the very air gets hard to breathe. So let the community of nations try it: let Europe set aside the land: let two million with a common language and a common will there congregate. Let Europe feed, house and clothe them for five years, while they get their high-technology, low-consuming, recycling act together. Europe feeds, houses and clothes its refugees: let them do it to some purpose: let us find our blueprint for the future, our multiracial, unicultural, secular society: let us locate it in the real world.
Q: Why Europe?
A: Who else is ready for the shock of the new? And because Darcy’s Utopia is built upon the resonances, if you’ll forgive me being so pompous, of the Greco-Judeo-Christian tradition: that life should be of meaning here on earth, not just bungled through any old how in the expectation of life hereafter.
Q: There is no life hereafter?
A: I’m not saying that, another motto of Darcy’s Utopia being ‘let’s have our cake and eat it too’. But you’re distracting me from practicalities. The State of Israel was created by international consensus: why not Darcy’s Utopia?
Q: An unfortunate analogy. Look what happened there!
A: We don’t know yet what happened there. And as I have told you, you must refrain from believing you will learn lessons from history. Nothing now is exactly the same as anything then. Apart from anything else Darcy’s Utopia will be surrounded by friends, not enemies. The only thing to assault it will be a flood of ideas, suggestions, recommendations; which will be difficult to fight off, because the hope of the world goes with them, and there is a terrific energy in that, you may be sure.
Q: There will be no tourists?
A: There will be no tourists. Frankly, there won’t be much to see, there being no history to Darcy’s Utopia—no roots, and none sought. But there will be celebrations, feast days. Did I tell you how, when I was first with Julian Darcy, before he became known as Rasputin and myself as the Bride of Rasputin, I organized and catered for all the Graduation Week ceremonies at the University of Bridport? It all worked wonderfully well. Friends and relatives turned up to help. The sun shone. There were strawberries and cream, and champagne at the garden parties. We had guests to stay at the lodge—a couple of other Vice Chancellors plus wives—and they were easy with me, not condemning at all. I had expected some hostility, since they were accustomed to Georgina, not myself, at the table, but none was apparent. Mind you, Julian was then one of the most important and influential men in the Joint University Convocation. That might have had something to do with it. He had the ear of the government, of the Secretary of State himself; no one wanted to believe his judgement could be suspect. The myth was that Julian knew what he was doing. The smooth running of Graduation Week seemed to prove it. If the sun shines, and there is champagne, strawberries and cream for tea, who can doubt it? Later, of course, when Julian was being prosecuted for evasion and misuse of public funds, the champagne, strawberries and cream were held against him. It was seen as gross extravagance at a time when he knew, or should have known, that the university was in acute financial difficulties. It was alleged, quite wrongly, that I had thirty pairs of shoes in my wardrobe. Some photographer got in and took pictures of them. ‘Luxury and extravagance at Bridport’ went the caption. When husbands fall from power, the number of shoes in the wife’s wardrobe are always a source of marvel, shock and abhorrence. In actual fact most of the shoes were Georgina’s—too good to throw away, too big and boring for me to wear. She had really big horsy feet.
Q: There was always an undercurrent of feeling at the time of the trial that your husband had been framed. That some people were out to get him. Can you comment on that?
A: Of course they were. Everyone was out to get him. The government took on Julian’s proposals for a radical rethinking of fiscal policy, but compromised at the last moment with the traditionalists: the nation got the worst of all worlds, instead of the best. Inflation took off, but not the hyper-inflation Julian and I were seeking. The myth that was Julian crumpled: the rumbling discontent in the university over the question of Georgina and myself could no longer be held down: the Board of Governors discovered flaws in the accountancy system and declared the university bankrupt. Criminal proceedings against Julian followed. You might almost think, if you were superstitious, that the curse which fell upon Bernard fell upon Julian too. That is enough for today. Thank you.
Brenda’s letter to Hugo
DEAR MR VANSITART,
I don’t get a chance to get a word in edgeways when you and Apricot are talking. She’s still just Apricot to Belinda and Liese and me. We’ve seen her through her Ellen years and her Eleanor years, though sometimes, I don’t mind telling you, our patience has worn a little thin, and her recent experiences haven’t seemed to calm her down one bit.
Jack the bellboy had brought the letter, addressed to Hugo, up to Room 301. Hugo wasn’t there. Jack offered to take the envelope down to room service and steam it open. Valerie accepted the offer, recognizing a woman’s hand.
She is now talking of buying a new car, a BMW, and the man from the garage calls her Alison—always a sign that she’s about to be off. I’ll be sorry when she goes. I know I’m just the one in Apricot’s life who brings in the coffee and takes the clothes to the cleaners—but all the same she brings a kind of light with her, and what she has to say is interesting: there’s a lot in it, though it’s sometimes hard to tell when she’s joking and when she isn’t.
I’m writing because I want to put my point of view. I take this business of Utopia seriously, and I want you to do the same. Not Darcy’s Utopia; that’s Apricot’s crazy vision: but let’s say Brenda’s Utopia, a kind of toned-down version
of Apricot’s. I want a world fit for my kids to grow up in. Look, I want a world fit for me to grow up in. I don’t want us to go back to anything, I want us to go forward to something. I want to believe that my daily life has a purpose which is more than just me. I used to be a real peacenik during the crazy time when we all thought we’d be pulverized by nuclear war, that the future was just rubble. I’d stand around in the town square with banners, with a lot of chalk marks on the ground for bodies, scaring everyone; saying if we don’t do something we’ll all be dead. And that really kept me going, believing I was right and everyone else was wrong. In fact the more wrong I could make them be, the more right I’d be. Those days, in retrospect, were dead easy. It was dead easy. Then Gorbachev came along and swept the ground from under our feet: and it began to look as if we had a future after all, but if so, what was it going to be? And we hadn’t got a thing worked out, not a thing. Down here in the outer suburbs we just sort of stand about, dazed, trying to make a living, and having babies (if you’re me) because it’s the only positive single thing we can think of to do, and even that’s suspect because the world can’t stand the weight of its population any more. Who can you work for who isn’t corrupt? Where can you go to get out of a climate of lies and hypocrisy? I want to rebuild the world, and I’m stumped as to how to do it: but at least Apricot is trying. When you write your articles don’t laugh her out of court completely. And a word of warning—though I suspect it’s too late—people who have anything to do with Apricot do seem to keep getting into emotional muddles: she’s a love-and-muddle carrier, the way some people are typhoid carriers. I’m inoculated from it, by virtue of general running exhaustion, I daresay, and the effort of trying to make ends meet can de-sex a girl fast. I do worry sometimes about Pete. Now he’s a mini-cab driver, he meets so many new people, women out shopping with money to spare and a whole lot of them are going to be better-looking and more lively and better conversationalists than me. And we do, the three of us, sit down to supper in the evening. Though perhaps Pete is safer on the road than he ever was at the poly. That place was a hotbed. I was relieved when Pete was made redundant; the shock waves from the closure of the media communications department just kept on coming. Jed was the only one who seemed to survive. I’m just saying beware: keep your hands on the steering wheel, your eyes on the road. The fever goes when Apricot departs, and you can be left in an awful mess. That’s all for now. With best wishes,
