Darcy's Utopia (15 page)

They sat in a fashionable Italian restaurant in the city. At nearby tables people nudged one another and whispered ‘Eleanor Darcy’. There had been a month or so where her face had been seen almost daily on TV: they had not yet quite forgotten. She changed seats with Hugo so that she sat with her back to the other diners. She had told him that Brenda was obsessively vegetarian, and that she longed for red meat: would he take her out? It was her idea, in other words, not his.

Q: You don’t imagine the TV industry would take kindly to its abolition?

A: Oh, we don’t have to be quite so drastic. Let them make programmes for each other. They do it anyway. Just let them not transmit them. I’ll have the lemon sole.

Q: But I thought you wanted meat?

A: Only in theory; when it comes to it. Faced with the actuality of change, one avoids it. One likes what one knows, and knows what one likes. Now when I was with Julian, my second husband, I was a great meat eater. Julian was fond of steaks: we got through jars of mustard. While I was with him I even developed a liking for steak tartar. Bernard was a pork and beans man, with a weakness for the occasional Irish stew, on the greasy side. Rhoda and my father lived on sausages and mash, and little crisp frozen chicken pies.

She wore a dress of fine and flowing black fabric and many long strings of blue crystal beads and a rather affected little red hat. Her hands were small, long-fingered and strong. The tape recorder sat on the table between a fluted glass containing an artificial rose and the giant black pepper grinder the waiter had inadvertently left behind. The more he required her to talk about herself the more he longed for her to ask him about himself.

Q: But what are people going to do all day in this TV-less world? Can you give me some idea as to their sexual and marital mores? I take it second husbands are allowed?

A: There, you see! Trying to catch me out again! The fear of governments always is that if people are not occupied playing competitive sports or watching TV they will be
at it
all the time. That there will be copulating and fornicating wherever you look—beneath the counter of the wool shop, behind the grille at the bank, in the schools’ staff rooms—everywhere you look there will be limbs writhing in ecstasy: only look upwards and you will see the mighty outspread wings of the Devil casting their reddish glow over all the land, and from the black and foaming pit of his fanged mouth the dreadful word will issue: ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’

Diners glanced surreptitiously over their shoulders. Eleanor’s voice rose. ‘Hush,’ he implored her. She apologized at once and moderated her voice. He thought she was glorious, glorious. Her green eyes glowed.

But no. It will not be like that. The inhabitants of Darcy’s Utopia will have as much or as little difficulty getting together as anyone else. Fear of rejection will inhibit many, others will cringe before fear of complications, responsibility, hurting others, failing to perform adequately, or having to reveal physical imperfections. Cellulite of the thighs keeps many a woman chaste: a potbelly keeps a man on the straight and narrow like nothing else. Most will stick to a partner chosen in the madness and self-confidence of youth, as they do outside Darcy’s Utopia. Women will continue to choose men—or men women; each sex always believes it is the other which does the choosing—the man being a little older, a little richer, a little more decisive than the woman, for this is how the majority of the human race pairs itself off, and why the myth of female inferiority is so prevalent throughout the world—it being the direct experience of so many children in so many households that Daddy knows best and Mummy’s a fool. The woman searches—though these days she doesn’t know it, matters of procreation being so far from anyone’s thoughts—for a good father for her young, adequate in looks, more than adequate as a provider; the man searches for a good, kind and competent mother for his children, not such a dog as to make copulation a problem—both settle for the best he or she can do. We rank ourselves amongst our peers very early on, so far as our physical attractiveness is concerned: we make our sexual moves within the group appropriate to our vision of ourselves. In Darcy’s Utopia people will make up and change their minds, try something new, retreat to the familiar, suffer from requited and unrequited love as much there as anywhere else: how can it be otherwise? But what they will be is discreet about it all. ‘What the mind doesn’t know the heart can’t suffer’ will be inscribed above every double bed in the land. No man will publicly humiliate a woman because she is ‘old’ or he finds her sexually unattractive: no woman will deride a man for his sexual insufficiency or because he is ‘weak’ or ‘wet’ or a ‘wimp’. It will simply be unthinkable so to do. Thus happiness and self-esteem will be maximized. Did you know, by the way, that statistically a woman tries out a new partner once in every two thousand copulations?

She ordered her fish unfilleted. Delicately and discreetly she parted flesh from bone. Her nail varnish was pearly pink. He thought of Valerie waiting for him. He did not think of Stef at all. His children were safely in Norfolk, with his mother, so why should he?

Q: Really? What is the figure for men?

A: I don’t know. I’m sorry. In Darcy’s Utopia, however, though love will flourish, and pleasure abound, furtive alliances be formal and reformed, and sexual excitements be breathless and secret and glorious, marriage will be beset around with difficulties and obstacles and deep seriousness: only the very determined will marry. Livings together will happen in abundance, of course; but marriage will be another matter: marriage will imply intent to procreate. Of all matters in Darcy’s Utopia only procreation will be subject to rules and regulations. It will be a most serious matter. You cannot have women popping new people out of themselves just at random, when and where they want. In Darcy’s Utopia there are bound to be children, but their parents will be carefully selected, and being in short supply they will grow up in a world which loves and admires children and finds them interesting, and doesn’t herd them together in schools to get them out of the way, dunk them in front of obscene videos to keep them quiet, and slap them about and threaten them in the streets, which is what happens in this society of ours which you seem to find both perfectly ordinary, and, worse, inevitable. Well, I don’t. How many children do you have, Mr Vansitart?

Q: Three. A little boy of eight and four-year-old-twins, girls. Loved and wanted children all of them. I find what you say monstrous. I cannot believe you mean it. You’re joking.

Hugo looked up in alarm as a woman in a black belted mackintosh and beret pushed her way through the restaurant towards him. He got to his feet. ‘Stef!’ he pleaded, but she slapped his face, there and then, in front of everyone. ‘Your mother brought the twins back. I’m taking Peter with me on holiday. The twins are in the buggy outside,’ she said. ‘You’d better bring them inside before someone steals them.’ And she left. Eleanor Darcy said, ‘Don’t bother about me. I’ll find my own way home.’

R
ECEPTION RANG THROUGH AND
said there was a lady waiting to see me in the foyer. I was in the bath. In the better hotels there is always a telephone by the bath—the sense of importance of those who soak in the provided scented foam being thereby increased. ‘Look, I am the sort of person who is always in demand—always! Why, I can’t even take a bath without being pestered for my time and attention. I’ll come to your hotel again, and tell all my friends.’ And I said, ‘Ask her to come up,’ without thinking too much about it. It might have been my colleague Ann—who knew my whereabouts—or even my editor, come to congratulate me on the first pages of
Lover at the Gate
which I had faxed through from the hotel’s secretariat—or even Sophie, come to apologize, though I hardly imagined she had been promoted from child to lady in the few weeks of my absence.

And I stepped out of the bath and wrapped myself in one of the big white towels in which these places specialize, and, with an innocence born no doubt of the habit of the past, opened the door.

A small indeterminate woman in a lightly belted black raincoat slipped in past me: she had wispy fair hair and I could see at once from whence the twins had inherited what I can only describe, as their nebulousness—a sense of the nebulae or star cluster that is better seen out of the corner of the eye. If you look too hard it disappears altogether into a kind of wistful, disappointed light in the night sky. Yet she managed to be a rather successful financial journalist. Perhaps all the figures permuting in her head had somehow sapped her reality.

‘Can I help?’ I asked, rather wishing I had more clothes on.

‘I am your lover’s wife,’ she said, and then I was glad I had so little on. I felt like flinging aside the towel. Hugo kept telling me my body was glorious and I had come to believe him. Lou never even looked, on Tuesday and Friday nights, any more than he looked at the instrument he played. He knew it too well. Just as he practised the violin every morning between nine thirty and ten thirty, so I always had the sense he practised his lovemaking on me, getting ready for the real thing, only this with me was not it: I was not it. With Hugo, I was quite definitely the performance: Stef, the more I looked at her, obviously a mere rehearsal. I was surprised when she said:

‘Eleanor Darcy I could understand. But
you
! What goes on here?’

‘I didn’t ask you here and I don’t want to see you and I have nothing to say to you,’ I said, showing her the door but, alas, she seemed to have no intention of going through it, so I capitulated rather too easily and offered her a drink from the mini bar. She said she’d have a sherry, a nebulous drink itself, so I poured her as dark and sweet a one as I could find in the little tight tiny rows of sinister bottles, and while she drank it I put on trousers and sweater.

‘Hugo likes really thin women,’ she said, ‘when he likes women at all. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that he’s a closet gay.’ I said I didn’t think her opinion was worth very much: if that was the opinion she had of her husband then naturally he preferred someone who admired, loved, trusted and desired him, and why didn’t she just go away?

‘I’ve been to see your husband,’ she said—I didn’t like that at all—‘and he asked me to tell you that if you don’t return home by the end of the week he is going to join forces with Kirsty Bull: she’s coming to live in and look after your children.’

Kirsty Bull is a friend of mine whose husband left her six months back. I know Lou admires her. She plays double bass, and I reckon Lou is quite stirred by the sight of the hefty instrument so sturdily placed between, let’s face it, equally hefty legs. She tends to wear full denim skirts with lace borders and her hair falls over her face while she plays. Not a style I wish to emulate; I prefer a kind of brisk straight-lined tidiness; but of all the women in the world Kirsty Bull is the one I would prefer not to move in to babysit. It is one thing to move out—not to be able to move back in because one’s place has been usurped is quite another. I didn’t like that one bit.

‘And Hugo will come back to me because he always does,’ she said, ‘when the guilt gets too much. So I’ve just come out of the goodness of my heart to warn you to save yourself while you can: you’ll lose Hugo—where is he, by the way? Not here? No. I can tell you where he is. Chatting up Eleanor Darcy in a flash restaurant. She’s next. Not only will you lose Hugo you will lose your home, husband and children as well.’

She was trying to frighten me off, of course. I didn’t believe a word she was saying. The phone went. It was Hugo. ‘Your wife’s here,’ I said.

‘The bitch,’ he said. ‘Don’t believe a word she says. She said the twins were outside in their buggy and she was lying. By the time I got back inside Eleanor Darcy was gone.’

So I didn’t believe a word Stef said. She went, and I got on with the life of Ellen Parkin, about to emerge from her chrysalis, to spread her wings as Eleanor Darcy.

‘E
LLEN,’ SAID BERNARD ONE
morning at breakfast, ‘I have made a breakthrough. Nerina is going to stay on to take her degree.’

‘Nerina?’

‘I’ve told you about Nerina. Her family is from Pakistan. But her father’s a lawyer and her mother does part-time filing work in the college office.’

‘What does she look like?’

‘The mother?’

‘No. Nerina.’

‘Stunning.’

‘So she’s not covered up with bits of black in case she turns you on?’

‘Ellen, she wears bits of jeans and bits of T-shirts like the rest of the group. There is more than a touch of racism in your assumption.’

‘Yes, well you’re liberal-racist. Why don’t you say right out “this middle-class westernized Pakistani girl called Nerina”? You can’t bring yourself to do it. It’s the little “but” gives you away. “But” her father is a lawyer.’

They were both trying to give up smoking.

Presently Ellen said:

‘What sort of stunning?’

‘A perfectly oval face: large almond eyes: rather like one of those plaster Madonnas made in India.’

‘Like the one you jumped on?’

‘No. That was Italian.’

‘You’re just saying that. You’ve no idea where it was made. I expect you’d just rather it was Mediterranean because it would feel less racist.’

‘Perhaps you’d better have a cigarette, Ellen.’

‘Yes, I will.’ They both did.

Ellen finally said:

‘Okay, what sort of breakthrough?’

Bernard told Ellen that Nerina had come to him in tears. Her brother had joined the fundamentalists, and was putting pressure on the family to withdraw her from college and marry his friend Sharif.

‘What’s Sharif like?’

‘Ellen, I have no idea. It is hardly the point.’

‘If I was one of your students and you lot were counting up your staff-student contact hours, working to rule and refusing to mark exam papers, I might well prefer to give up the course and marry my brother’s friend Sharif. If he was halfway good-looking.’