Darcy's Utopia (11 page)

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!’

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.