Eleanor Darcy speaks to Hugo, and Valerie listens
A: WHY ARE YOU so buttoned up, Mr Vansitart? So singularly ungiddy? You have a love bite on your neck, yet you go on asking me for my views on the multicultural society, on secularism, on Darcian Monetarism. What you really want to know is what men always want to know about women, namely would she, if asked, and if not, why not. And would they want to, if she would.
‘I meant to start the tape a little further on,’ said Hugo to Valerie. ‘However, let me assure you that the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.’ ‘I should hope not,’ said Valerie, but the thought was now in her mind. They sat up side by side in the bed, naked, listening, but Valerie no longer felt safe.
But your training is at stake, your professionalism: you cannot ask the question: so few can. Like everyone else you must have your face-saver; yours in particular being that, in the quality newspapers at least, the mind is interesting, the body is not. Well, keep your face-saver; stay buttoned up. Don’t ask; I won’t answer. So many things you refrain from asking that you’d love to know. For example, how does it happen that I married a good Catholic at seventeen and here I am at thirty-something, childless? Is it because I am a bad woman, a selfish woman, the kind who chooses to stay childless: or am I an unhappy woman, an unfortunate woman, and can’t have them? Barren! Or just an unlucky woman because it just so happened my Catholic husband was infertile? Let me answer, at least this one unasked question.
Certainly it was Bernard’s initial belief, in the early days of our marriage, that contraception was a sin: Papal authority held it to be so, and Bernard’s allegiance was to the Pope. Because the Pope, according to Bernard and his friends, alone among all men had the ear of God, and God, it seems, thinks the more people down here on earth the better. God is the Great Factory Farmer in the Sky; closer and closer we are crammed together, the Pope our Bailiff, hatching our young for his profit, for, as the Bishop said to Marie Stopes, the purpose of man is to increase the flow of souls to God and to stand between God and his purpose is surely sin. And men like my husband Bernard, full of love and trust, look up to heaven with adoring eyes, victims of the phenomena of positive transference which the tortured so easily develops for his torturer, and plunge about in female flesh crying, ‘Only procreate and all will be well.’ Men do so long for someone to be in charge. In Darcy’s Utopia each man will attempt to read the mind of God and not rely on others to do it for him.
Q: Are you telling me that Darcy’s Utopia will be a secular society?
A: Yes, Darcy’s Utopia will be a secular society. Men and women can believe whatever they like about the nature of God, and worship whomsoever they like, from trees to cows to Mohammed, but in the privacy of their own homes.
Q: As in the Soviet Union in the heyday of religious persecution?
A: No. As in Darcy’s Utopia, in the future we aspire to. There are few lessons to be learned from history. Because things went wrong in the past does that mean they will necessarily go wrong again? Of course not! Because we are different! Do we not know more than we ever did about crowds, power, group behaviour, motivation, national and religious hysteria and so forth? We know ourselves, as once we did not. I promise you, we have progressed! Had those early Communists received their education in a contemporary society, understood themselves and others better, they would have laid down a rather different and more workable framework for the new society. We contemplate past failures of humankind in its search for the perfect society and become depressed. It will never work, we say! But it will, it will! What did we expect? That we’d get it right first time round? How could we? It may take a couple more hundred years, a thousand, but we will get there. Let me repeat, in Darcy’s Utopia Church and State will be firmly separated: religious broadcasting will be forbidden on the grounds that it is divisive, racist, sexist, and an incitement to violence as belief structure clashes with belief structure—Christian at the hands of the Jew, Hindu the Muslim, Protestant the Catholic, Sikh of Buddhist, Capitalist of Communist, and of course vice versa—and no doubt the Moonies and the EST-ites will soon be kneecapping one another with a clear conscience. Incitement to non-thought, conversion to blind belief, will be considered the most antisocial of all crimes. It is from closed minds that so many social evils flow.
Q: I thought you said money was the worst thing?
A: You try and catch me out, Mr Vansitart. The streams of evil flow and merge: their source is myriad. Are you hot? Why don’t you take off your jacket? Here …
Valerie listened for suspicious sounds on the tape, and despised herself for so doing. But only the occasional innocent—so far as she could tell—twang of the springs of the hideous black and red sofa punctuated the interview.
A: Mr Vansitart, what courage it takes to think! To acknowledge that we stand alone on this whirling ball of rock which we call earth, hurtling God knows where through space, and that there is no God to hold our hand! God not so much the Prime Mover—we can do without him—but the God who understands what’s going on. There must be some really nice, other, stationary, less-inconceivable place, we think, than the world; some permanent non-whirling static heaven somewhere where fairness and justice triumph. Surely! If we can conceive of it, it must exist. And it would be really nice to think that the ones who keep the rules are going to get there. So we dream up sets of rules, we try and live by Holy Books, from the Ramayana to the Koran to Das Kapital by way of the Bible. Words are magic, words are power.
Don’t you think, Mr Vansitart, that the really nice thing about human beings is the notion we do have that things ought to be somehow fair—though nowhere in nature do we have evidence that God understands the concept at all. Justice simply does not seem to be built into the system. All I can conclude is that the human race, at its best, is really very much pleasanter and kinder than this God it invents to hold its hand. The closer men get to God the nastier they get: the more judgemental, the more punitive, the more murderous in their determination to have got God right, and everyone else to have got God wrong. The Pope says that since God initially made us multiply, as is obvious from looking around even the famine fields of Ethiopia, we’d better do as much of it as we can. God needs his nourishment, his daily fix of souls as by the million every day we drop off the perch, and so Bernard and Apricot—renamed Ellen as a condition of marriage—if they’re to do God’s will, must reproduce till the cows come home, though nowadays of course the cows never leave home in the first place, they’re linked up permanently to milking machines. So how can they come home? In and out, in and out, him into her, after the pub—drunkenness is encouraged in Catholic societies: another incitement to non-thought—bang, bang, whoosh, and bingo, there’s another one. If you don’t look out.
Q: I take it you wouldn’t describe yourself as having a maternal nature?
A: How right you are. Congratulations on a comparatively giddy question. Fortunately during the first few months of our marriage Bernard, how shall I put it, practised asceticism—I had no chance of getting pregnant, or very little, and after that he was converted to Marxism, and though we were at it all the time for years, he stood over me daily to make sure I ingested a contraceptive chemical. ‘Ellen! Time to get up! Time to take the pill!’ It was our duty, he felt at that stage, to desist from overpopulating the planet. And what sort of world would we be bringing children into? It wasn’t fair on them to give them life. Better not to exist at all. Spared the curse of life! With Bernard, if it wasn’t one thing it was another. In Darcy’s Utopia the paradox of procreation is dealt with very simply. But I think you’re still much too stiff and male and professional: I will talk about that with Valerie, when she can be bothered to come along. What I do so like about Valerie is how relaxed she is! I have talked more than enough for today. Shall we ask Brenda for a cup of coffee? Or I have some vodka in the fridge.
Q: Vodka? What a brilliant idea.
Here the tape ran out. Hugo told Valerie that nothing else of import had been said. ‘What did she mean by relaxed?’ demanded Valerie. ‘I’m not in the least relaxed.’ He did not reply, merely smoothed her lips closed with his fingers, only to part them again with his tongue. ‘Incitement to non-thought!’ ran through her head as she went under, into the soft seas of non-self.
Valerie suffers from emotion
I’VE NEVER FELT SEXUAL jealousy before. I have seen it in others, and despised it. What a lack of self-belief is here displayed, I have thought; what lamentable failure of nerve. I have noticed women at parties distracted and uneasy, seen them leave the group they’re in to join another, where their partner, they fear, is having too good a time, his attention too focused for comfort on another woman. Men do it too, of course, but I think women do it more often. Perhaps they are just more practised in forethought, especially if they have children. Act now, save trouble later! But this particular act is counterproductive: it brings trouble nearer. The man knows quite well what’s going on, sees his freedom restricted, his dignity insulted, his lust observed, if lust it is, and is angry and resentful either way. And how public—
Jealousy—destructive, pointless, pitiful, pathetic! Or so I thought, in the good days, the wonderful days, before I felt it. Now I see it’s the energy that makes the world go round. Mine, mine, you can’t have it! Hugo is mine, not Eleanor’s. Hugo is visiting Stef, his wife; I don’t mind that so much, not quite so much. Perhaps I acknowledge some former claim. Wives are boring things. How I must have bored Lou. Always there, never jealous. Never valuing him enough to be jealous, never arriving suddenly to catch him out, never finding his mail interesting enough to steam open! Nothing more insulting than a non-jealous partner.
‘So there you go, Lou, off to Amsterdam with the Philharmonic! Have a nice time. See you Wednesday.’ Never even thinking what sort of nice time. Isn’t she rather attractive, the girl harpist: has he noticed the bend of her white swan neck, the discreet flicker of her fingers; wondered how the neck would seem, the fingers flicker, in more intimate a situation? Or Lou, jealous of me? Is he jealous now? Does he suffer? I think not. This is what irks, what irritates. I have gone, and Lou doesn’t mind, hardly notices.
Lou and I have always presented a good public face: we make a happily married couple, a busy professional pair; she in the media—seen as a little suspect, a little too clever for her own good—he in the interpretive arts: sensitive, hard-working, dedicated: often away. Just as well, they say, that Valerie has the children and her work to keep her occupied. Perhaps, in retrospect, rather a dull pair to have at a dinner party. Lou and Valerie. Most of the friends are from the music world, not the media: they don’t mix easily. Orchestra talk is very different from newspaper talk, and, as so often, the husband’s occupation wins. Musicians are by their very naming good—media folk are noisy, rackety, flip.
Lou, Valerie, Sophie, Ben. One of the strangest things is how little I think of Sophie and Ben. As if I were not one person as I had always thought, but divide very simply and cleanly into two—the erotic and the maternal. The erotic has swept in and taken over: split the maternal off, like a tree split by lightning—one half stands and grows, the other simply falls and dies.
I say I do not mind Hugo visiting Stef but why is he so long away? It’s time he came home to me. I do not like the thoughts in my head. I need his presence to drive them away. He said it was to discuss the children but what was there to discuss? She will look after them, no doubt, as Lou will look after Sophie and Ben. Let him communicate with her by letter, if he must: let solicitors arrange money matters. Stef has a good job: she can support herself. She is a financial journalist with her own by-line. She is a cold, unfeeling and unresponsive woman: she must be, or Hugo would not have left her for me. She was his youthful mistake: she is in the past tense. She lives in time: Hugo and myself out of it. I wonder if I were to kill her, if she were dead, if she were knocked over by a car, would that make the jealousy, that mixture of anxiety, grief and fear of exclusion, simply stop? Is it Eleanor’s notion or mine that sex in itself is a drug: that its effects are like heroin? In which case I can see jealousy as one of the nastier withdrawal symptoms. Only Hugo, once again in me, part of me, driving in like a needle into flesh, will stop this particular distress.
I look Stef and Hugo up in the telephone book. I punch out the numbers. The hotel phone sings its special little sickly Stef-and-Hugo tune. A child’s voice answers. No doubt Peter, aged eight. The eldest. The other two are twins; aged four, I seem to remember Hugo saying. Peter ought to be in bed. What kind of a mother is she? I find I am lost for words: put down the telephone, but not before a woman snatches the phone and says, ‘Who’s that? I know who that is! Bitch!’ before I cut her off. She shouldn’t speak like that, behave like that, in front of her own children: No wonder Hugo prefers Valerie the Comparatively Well Behaved.
Presently the phone beside the bed goes. It is Hugo. He can come for an hour. Why only for an hour? Isn’t he living here with me? Never mind, never mind.
I hear his step; I open the door into the hotel corridor. It has a timeless, placeless look: it could be anywhere in the world. There is not enough air on earth for me to breathe: my love is consuming all the oxygen in heaven. We are on the floor together: the door has to swing to on its own, as it is designed to do, though more for the sake of security than lovers. Oh, the fix, the fix!
Now I am myself again I can get on with Lover at the Gate.
LOVER AT THE GATE [4]
Bernard and Ellen’s Catholic months
‘YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT,’ SAID Ellen to Bernard on the first night of their wedded life. ‘Sex is not only sinful, it’s disgusting.’
‘You shouldn’t not do it because it’s disgusting,’ said Bernard, ‘but because it’s carnal.’
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘The more you pay attention to the body, the less attention you’ve got left to pay the soul. I really do understand that.’
She agreed with him whenever possible. That way, she imagined, domestic harmony would lie. They took the little house two doors away from Ken and Rhoda; her own to play with, to sweep and dust and arrange as she liked, and meals for two to cook at her discretion, and her father and grandmother just down the road so she had both a respite from them and could keep an eye on them, not too close but not too far. Though what the eye saw was increasingly dismal. Then one day Rhoda went off like a damp squib into eternity: and after that it went into a sort of déjà vu double vision, watching Ken and his ex-saxophonist’s widow get together. She slept a good deal.
‘But, Apricot,’ protested Brenda and Belinda, ‘you can’t just give up and do nothing. Not after all that.’
Brenda was going to a college where there was an excellent women’s hockey team, and Belinda to university to read English literature. Liese was doing a secretarial course, but they’d all rather expected that.
‘I’m not doing nothing,’ said Apricot. ‘I’m getting used to a new life. And I have a really nice little part-time job at an optician’s. Goodness knows where it might not lead.’
‘You’re the receptionist,’ observed Brenda. ‘It will lead precisely nowhere except sitting around will give you a fat arse.’
‘She’ll never have a fat arse,’ said Belinda. ‘Not like me.’
Bernard came in and they moderated their language. He had that effect on people.
For their parting present, before they went off into their futures, they gave Apricot six months’ supply of contraceptive pills.
Brenda’s brother was a certified drug addict and stole more prescriptions from doctors than he ever needed to use.
‘I don’t need them for the moment,’ said Apricot, ‘because Bernard and I don’t do it. He says we can’t until we’re properly married in the eyes of God as well as man; he says it’s worth waiting for. I certainly hope he’s right.’
Belinda said it was and Brenda said it wasn’t. Liese said she was not in a position to say. Bernard said, ‘Ellen, the sooner your friends stop coming round and chattering the happier I will be.’
Brenda said, ‘Apricot, how can you do it? He won’t even let you have your own name!’
Ellen said, ‘I prefer Ellen to Apricot. Apricot was my mother’s fantasy and my mother was an alcoholic who deserted me. She had no sense of responsibility, no vision of the future. She was even worse than Rhoda.’
Liese said, ‘But, Apricot, you can’t speak like that about your mother. Anyway she didn’t desert you. She came back as a ghost.’
‘I’ll have no talk of ghosts in this house,’ said Bernard, ‘that’s for sure.’
She liked him to be masterful. She liked to be frugal: to have money and carefully dole it out. She would never be feckless; not like Wendy, not like Rhoda, not like Ken. She listened to Bernard’s account of his faith with increasing mystification. She liked Bernard. She liked the way his mind went back and back in layers: how he tried to justify emotion with reason. She enjoyed figuring it out. She liked his torments, his inability to be happy, his sense that he must be busy saving the world. Where Ken wanted to jolly the world along, Bernard wanted to push it and shove it for its own good. He knew, or thought he did, what was right and what was wrong, and she was glad he did, or thought he did. She knew otherwise. He was taking a degree in sociology. He had a government grant to do so. As a married student he received extra money. She wondered if he had married her to get the better grant. As she had married him to get away from home, she could scarcely complain if he had. She thought his Catholicism, the emotion he mistook for faith, was a pity. As soon as she had recovered from the months of Rhoda’s illness, and come to terms with her death, and adjusted to the sudden change in her circumstances, she would do something about it.
They slept in twin beds in the front bedroom of 93 Mafeking Street. There was lino on the floor and lace curtains at the window. There was no bathroom, but a bath in the kitchen covered by a shelf. Bernard would lie awake for hours waging his nightly battle with carnality, slapping it down, groaning. Ellen just went to sleep.
‘You’re unnatural,’ he would complain.
‘I expect I am,’ she would say. Then one day she said, ‘Please, Bernard, I want to become a Catholic.’
‘It’s not possible. You have no religious instincts. I’m not blaming you. You were brought up in a hotbed of superstition and anarchy: you can’t help it but it’s hopeless.’
‘But I do believe; I do have faith: I have recovered from my childhood. Honestly, Bernard. I believe what you believe, that God came down to Mary, who was a virgin, in the form of a dove—or was that to her mother, so that Mary could get pregnant and be an immaculate conception, which had to happen on account of how sex is so polluting, and give birth to Jesus? That way everyone born after that particular time would have their sins forgiven so long as they believed in Jesus. I don’t want to go to hell because I don’t believe in Jesus. I wouldn’t even go to limbo, Bernard, because I know about Him and haven’t converted: I’ll have to go to hell. Please, Bernard, let me be converted or we’ll be separated after death and I couldn’t bear that.’
‘You’re not sincere!’
‘I am, I am! I’m your wife. If you don’t let me be converted, then you’re sinning. You’re depriving God of a soul.’
Night after night she’d nag, and in the morning would peck his cheek affectionately if he walked by the cooker where she was frying up his bacon and eggs for breakfast. She dressed trimly for work; neat white blouse, tight black skirt, bright seventeen-year-old eyes: no ladders in her tights now she was settled and happy. He didn’t like her going out looking so smart and cheerful. Who might she not meet? He didn’t trust her. ‘You aren’t serious,’ was all he could say.
‘But I am, I am. Isn’t this what you believe? Haven’t I got it right? Well, I believe it too.’
‘Not put the way you put it.’
‘That’s why I have to have instruction, Bernard. So I’ll put it properly. And then He cursed the fig tree because it was barren: I don’t want to be cursed, Bernard. So I suppose one day sooner or later we’ll have to do this disgusting thing in order for me not to be barren, but I don’t look forward to it. Do you? And then He was crucified and three days later rose from the dead, and at Mass the bread and wine actually turn into flesh and blood, so you shouldn’t have breakfast that morning but take it on an empty stomach. And when the Virgin Mary died she rose from the dead too; not just her soul went up to heaven, but her body too.’
‘No, Ellen, that is not the case.’
‘It is, Bernard. The Pope declared it in 1954. Transubstantiation of the Virgin Mary. And it hasn’t been rescinded. It took them nineteen hundred years to decide, but then God dwells in eternity, and the Church too, so there’s no hurry. Fancy that, Bernard! Isn’t that somehow just neat? Do you think she went up with her arms raised; I kind of see her that way. And were they old arms or young arms? Would they change on the way, or before her body began to rise? I wouldn’t like to rise to heaven except in my prime. Would her wishes be taken into account? I do need instruction, Bernard. Where is heaven, anyway, for her to go to in the flesh? I’d always seen it as in some other dimension. Can flesh move from one dimension to another? I am so ignorant I can’t bear it!’
He locked away his books on Catholic theology but she took the bus to the Westminster Cathedral and bought more from the bookshop there. When he came home from college she’d be reading The Catholic Mind. She read the Catechism in bed at night, occasionally sighing; she would turn towards Bernard and her long hair—she wore it up for work, half-down in the home, fully down in bed—would fall over her face, over her white shoulder.
‘We’re not going to succumb, Bernard,’ she would say if he made a move towards her, and she’d toss her head back in a swift, moving, golden curtain. ‘You and I are going to be strong against temptation. We are going to nurture our souls, not give in to lust. We aren’t animals—God has blessed us with free will. By sacrifice and submission and by the Grace of God I mean to become a truly serious person, fit to make a new beginning and become a Catholic and a proper wife to you. We’ll be married in the Catholic Church, and I’ll teach all our children to be good Catholics. I’ll have eight, I think. After that we’ll stop having sex.’
Bernard’s mother sent a Christmas card and in the name of Catholic family unity Ellen invited her to stay. Bernard cringed. Mrs Parkin smoked. Bernard, who neither smoked nor drank, had to keep opening the windows. She was a widow, fleshy, piggy-eyed, slack-mouthed, with a taste for sweet sherry. She wore a cross around her reddened crinkly neck, wore black as befitted her widowed state, and her hair in tight grey curls between which lines of white, stretched skin showed. She brought as a present a portrait of Mother Mary as she appeared to the children at Fatima, executed by someone of sentimental disposition, and a statue of the Virgin Mary, the mould fashioned by someone of a melancholy and austere frame of mind. Ellen put them in pride of place above the fireplace in the front room downstairs. The fireplace held a gas fire; the walls were a figured cream paper: the three-piece suite of maroon uncut moquette. There was a glass-fronted mahogany cupboard where Ellen insisted on keeping Bernard’s family photographs, which she had found at the bottom of a suitcase. The Parkins had migrated from Dublin when Bernard was eight, young enough to take advantage of an educational system which allowed bright children to climb up and out of their allotted place in society. Bernard’s father had been a builder, his two elder brothers were house painters; his older sister was married to a carpenter: another just left nursing to be married; his two younger sisters were still at school and planned to go to college against their mother’s wishes.
‘They’ll never find husbands,’ complained Mary Parkin, ‘if they’ve too much knowledge in them. It’s unsettling for a girl.’ And she crossed herself. A touch to the forehead, a touch to the left of the chest, the right, and the solar plexus: rapid, never quite touching self: Jesus crucified an inch before the body, forever.
‘It certainly is!’ agreed Ellen. ‘Look how I gave all that up for Bernard! It’s so important for a wife to be able to look up to her husband. It’s because she can’t we get all these divorces.’ And she too crossed herself.
Mrs Parkin would take quick sidelong looks at her new daughter-in-law, hoping to catch her out, but there she’d always be, merry as a chicken, tra-la-lahing amongst the pots and pans in the kitchen, or lipsticking her lips in the frameless octagonal mirror in the parlour, or telling her rosary in front of the Virgin, apparently more devout even than Bernard, the most devout of all her sons. She’d hoped Bernard would grow up to be a priest: now he’d taken up with a woman. She didn’t trust Ellen one bit. ‘You mustn’t worry about my not being Catholic,’ said Ellen. ‘I’m going to convert the minute Bernard thinks I’m serious enough. Do you think being serious is the same as being unhappy, Ma?’
Bernard’s mother was not accustomed to such questions: she shook her head and took another fag and another cup of tea and longed to be off to stay with her eldest son. She felt uneasy amongst non-smokers and a home without children didn’t feel right, and Bernard didn’t look happy.
‘Your mother’s bound to go to heaven,’ said Ellen to Bernard on the afternoon of the morning his mother left. It was teatime. She had made scones. ‘She never misses Mass. Lucky her, a proper Catholic! And I expect if your father hadn’t died she’d have had at least twenty children! The salt of the earth, your mother.’ She stirred four spoons of sugar into her cup. ‘What a pity cirrhosis got to him so early!’
‘Don’t do that,’ he begged. ‘You’ll get fat.’
‘I’m not vain,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t want me to be vain. Vanity is a sin.’
‘You’ll get just like my mother.’ In the past, he had only ever spoken well of his mother, when he spoke of her at all.
‘I’d be proud to be like your mother,’ said Ellen, and she glanced towards Mary smiling on the mantelpiece and crossed herself.
Bernard put down his scone. He had lost his appetite.
‘My mother,’ said Bernard, suddenly, talkative at last, ‘is a mean-spirited, disgusting bitch; a big fat mammy, and to think that I was born from between her legs makes me want to vomit. She made my life hell. She sneered and bullied and slobbered: she nagged my father to death, and when she wasn’t nagging she was muttering. I hate her. Why did you ask her here? What are you trying to do to me, Ellen?’
And he got to his feet, skin white beneath his little beard and his brown eyes desperate, and swept the Virgin Mary to the ground, where she failed to break.
‘Just as well she’s plastic,’ said Ellen placidly. ‘It must be very unlucky to break the Virgin. More bad luck years even than breaking a mirror. But that’s superstition, isn’t it? I hope it isn’t a mortal sin, for your sake.’
Bernard jumped upon the Virgin and she cracked and flattened.
‘I don’t think you should,’ said Ellen doubtfully. ‘You weren’t like this when I married you. Jumping on poor Mother Mary. It won’t diminish her powers one bit!’
He wept, his head upon her knee, and presently his hand crept up between her knees and she didn’t even pull away with a ‘Sweet Jesus, what do you think you’re doing?’ but drew the curtains to and lit the gas fire to warm them both. She had an approved menstrual calendar and knew it was more or less—or at least with an acceptable risk factor—her safe time of the month.
‘It was worth waiting for,’ she told Brenda. ‘You were wrong and Belinda was right.’
The next day Bernard went to talk to Father William, and came home to say yes, it was okay, Ellen could take instruction and, if all went well, could become a convert to Catholicism. They would be properly married in church: they’d discuss the question of children later. Ellen undressed for bed and fell on her knees and prayed, instead of getting into it.
‘Now what?’ he demanded. ‘Are you thanking God?’
‘I’m praying to Mary to restore my virginity,’ said Ellen. ‘Don’t interrupt.’
‘What are you talking about, Ellen?’ he demanded, grabbing her by the hair. ‘Are you insane?’
‘She can do it, honestly,’ said Ellen. ‘It says so in a little book I got from Our Lady’s Bookshop. She can restore virginity not just in the soul—well, anyone could do that—but in the body, if you pray enough and feel sufficiently remorseful. Actually in the flesh, the way she went up to heaven. I simply adore Mother Mary. I wish I could make an unconditional “yes” to God the way she did. I do so want to be pure in body and mind. She had a head start, of course, what with her mother being immaculate too. I don’t somehow see Wendy as having me that way. We succumbed to temptation once, Bernard, but I’m sure Mary will forgive just so long as we never, ever do it again.’
Bernard let her hair go.
‘You win,’ he said. ‘I’ll become an atheist.’
‘That’s going too far too fast,’ said Ellen, getting into bed. ‘The position mightn’t hold. How about an agnostic?’
But he felt that position to be untenable. It was cowardly. If you lost your faith you lost your faith, and that was that. He understood the absurdity of his beliefs. He regarded them now as he regarded other ordinary but embarrassing habits of youth: odd hair styles, a passion for cheap cologne, eccentric dressing, strange obsessions—all things to be grown out of. He even thanked Ellen for this new, sudden, unexpected leap into maturity. But some few weeks later she happened to bring home from the library a volume of Marx’s early writings.
‘It was a conversion experience,’ said Ellen to Liese. ‘His hand shook, his mouth fell open. He believed.’
‘Well,’ said Liese, who was now engaged to a nice young architect called Leonard, and who was proud and plump and stuffed as full of delight as a feather cushion—over-stuffed, Brenda remarked—‘I suppose it’s better to believe in something than nothing. Leonard isn’t orthodox, thank goodness, or I’d have to shave off all my hair. He worships me, I’m glad to say.’
A bust of Lenin stood on the mantelpiece where once the Virgin smiled. The theological books went to the jumble sale; political science took their place. Friends no longer came to gather in prayer, but to further the revolution. Bernard believed. He understood that heaven and hell were here on earth, and that little by little heaven would drive out hell, and that the efforts of men of intelligence and goodwill should be dedicated to hastening that process; and that even the word ‘should’, with its implication of duty and overtones of guilt, was in this brave and newly discovered world, inappropriate.
‘“The abolition of religion as the ‘illusory’ happiness of men is a demand for their ‘real happiness’,”’ he read aloud to Ellen. ‘“The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.”’ How bright his eyes were. His shoulders squared and straightened. He no longer walked in guilt, but in hope.
The twin beds went. The saxophonist’s widow refused to lie in Ken and Rhoda’s bed, so Ken offered it to Bernard and Ellen: they took the offer, rightly, as a gesture of approval, and the four of them carried it one very early morning from No. 97 to No. 93. ‘You can’t lie in that bed,’ said Brenda, ‘it isn’t decent. It’s the bed your mother and your grandmother slept in with your father.’ She was engaged to a lecturer in economics: a straightforward young man. They were saving to get married. They would have everything new.
‘I like the idea of it,’ said Ellen. ‘It gives me a sense of continuation.’
The bed was old, soft and lumpy. She felt she would draw strength from it. She needed strength: her and Bernard’s nightly love play would go on for hours, limbs lurching and surging in some kind of gladiatorial combat as if the one who weakened first lost. Oddly, she felt less happy, less content, less well able to go about her daily business than she had in the three painful months of her sexual abstinence. Perhaps sex was a drug. The more you had the more you needed. First the relief, then the surge of pleasure, then the peace: then the niggle of dissatisfaction growing into active discontent, into a sense of loss, of desperation, of craving—and then the fix. People would do anything to others in order to get the fix. But perhaps she was just short of sleep: there were other ways of looking at it.
‘Marxism is to Catholicism as methadone is to heroin,’ said Ellen to Belinda, ‘but enough of an improvement to count.’
Belinda said she didn’t have a boyfriend, but Brenda, Liese and Ellen knew she was having an affair with a married man.
‘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 given 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.’
‘Curse objects?’
‘Well, that’s what Julian is, I’m sorry to say, in relation to me. My falling in love with Julian was nothing to do with me, nothing to do with Julian, but part of the curse put on Bernard that his wife would become the love object of a man more attractive, more wealthy, more intelligent and of a higher status than he, so he didn’t stand an earthly. What chance did I have, fond of Bernard as I was, but also, as I daresay you have concluded, and like so many, including I daresay yourself, bored? How is Lover at the Gate coming on?’
‘I keep getting interrupted. Personal matters intervene.’
‘I expect they will. It’s hot stuff you’re dealing with. Is Julian standing at the gate yet, knocking?’
‘Not quite. Just about. I have to get Bernard into Marxism and out the other side. I’m still not sure what you mean by a curse object. Sex objects, love objects—but curse objects?’
‘It was none of our faults. Though I do blame Bernard, for getting himself mixed up with ethnic minorities. After he gave up Marxism, and was out there all on his mental own, as it were, without fear of hell or counter-revolutionary thought, it went to his head. He became irresponsible—’
‘Would you mind if I taped this conversation, Mrs Darcy?’
‘Look, I’m not giving an interview. All this is off the record. I thought that would be understood. I called merely to say I couldn’t meet up with you tomorrow. I’m sorry. But if you’d like to come over this evening—?’
But I couldn’t. I was waiting for Hugo.
‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘Hugo’s coming over tomorrow anyway.’
Hugo had left a full packet of cigarettes by the bed. He left them around to prove to himself that he really didn’t smoke. I broke my faith and smoked one. Just one.