Darcy's Utopia (16 page)

Bernard left for college early and said no more about Nerina. Christmas was coming and Ellen took a part-time job in the college office to meet the extra costs of the season, and there met Nerina’s mother, a pleasant woman wearing a serviceable sari and black lace-up shoes.

‘I believe you have a daughter in the college, Mrs Khalid,’ said Ellen. Both women were transferring confidential student records from file cards on to computer. Occasionally, on whim, they would allow a finger to slip and up-grade exam results. ‘I’m just about coming to the Ks.’

‘Her name’s Nerina,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘N. S. Khalid.’ Nerina’s card showed two years of B pluses and A minuses in communication studies and sociology, and then a term of Cs and Ds, and then back up to straight As.

Ellen turned the Cs and Ds into Bs. The girl might yet come out with a first.

‘She went through a bad patch,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘She fell in love with her brother’s friend and wanted to leave college but we made her stay on. I think she’s over it now.’

‘Nerina’s always on at me to wear western clothes,’ confided Mrs Khalid, ‘but I like to be comfortable. I feel happier wrapped, and able to eat as many buttered tea cakes as I like. And of course it keeps her brother Fariq quiet. He’s eighteen; he’s turned fundamental at the moment. But I expect it’s no worse than being a punk. He’s at us all the time, but boys of that age do so like to be morally superior, don’t they?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Ellen. ‘I don’t have children, or mean to.’

‘You’re very young,’ said Mrs Khalid comfortingly. ‘You’ll change your mind.’

Mrs Khalid had a soft expression and lively eyes but a never-say-die-ishness that quite reminded Ellen of Rhoda. She wondered whether, if Mrs Khalid were in love with her son’s friend Sharif, would she do as Rhoda had done, try to marry off her daughter to Sharif just to keep him in the family? And thought no, probably not. Sometimes Ellen felt the need for some understanding older woman in whom to confide. Her mother Wendy hovered round the house in too petty and ethereal a form to be much use: the occasional glimmer of light where no light should be, an object in motion which by rights should be still. And Rhoda, dead and buried, stayed firmly silent, finished and underground. Perhaps the reward of the wronged was to have eternal life? Perhaps the punishment of the wrong-doers was just to be finished, kaput, over? Though to think in terms of rewards and punishments was childish. Story book notions. Nothing to do with real life. ‘I might not change my mind,’ said Ellen.

‘A woman without children might as well not be born,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘It was to have children that Allah put her on this earth. Can you think of any other reason?’

‘No,’ said Ellen. ‘Not really. Unless we lateral think and it wasn’t him put us here.’

‘I wouldn’t want my son to hear a thing like that,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘Especially not as you’re wife to a member of staff. It might be dangerous.’

‘Tell me more about Nerina,’ said Ellen to Bernard, over breakfast. They had both settled down to non-smoking. He put down a volume of Hume—he no longer read the daily papers, but was working through the world’s philosophers, from Plato onwards, and had now reached the Scottish humanists. ‘What about Nerina?’

‘Why did she go from As and Bs and then down to Cs and Ds and then to steady As.’

‘I’m not having a relationship with her,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you think.’

‘That is not what I thought,’ said Ellen, ‘but it must have crossed your mind or you wouldn’t have brought it up.’

‘It is not possible,’ he said, ‘to move amongst these nubile girls and have no reaction whatsoever.’

‘I absolutely understand,’ said Ellen. ‘Any more than it’s possible for me to work up at the college with all those strapping lads running round in jockey shorts and have no reaction whatsoever.’

‘All brawn and no brain,’ he said. ‘Of no possible interest to you. Even Nerina worries about the sudden jump to straight As. It’s happened since she joined the black magic course. She finds it disconcerting.’

‘Black magic? The poly now teaches’ black magic? It is that desperate for students?’ Under the new educational regulations any increase in students meant a concomitant increase in funding.

‘Of course we don’t teach black magic. Jed is running a course in the psychology of group reaction. Mass hypnosis, mass psychosis, as related to auto-suggestion. That kind of thing. It is the students who refer to it as the black magic course. Please, Ellen, I’m reading.’

‘And they stand around in pentacles trying to raise the Devil?’

‘I really don’t know what they do. Please, Ellen, I’m trying to ascertain the nature of reality.’

‘Bully for you. And all of a sudden she got straight As? Does she have a thing for Jed, or Jed for her? That would be a more likely explanation.’

Bernard put Hume down. He had been paying more attention than she thought. He had shaved off his beard again. She liked the tender line of his lip: she could see now what he was thinking.

‘Jed is a married man,’ said Bernard, ‘of considerable integrity. He does not have affairs with students and if he did it would certainly not affect their grading.’

Windscale the cat jumped off his lap and sat on Ellen’s. It had never properly mastered the art of sitting on humans. It faced outward, not inward, and kept its claws out to keep itself locked on. ‘Ellen,’ as Bernard sometimes observed, ‘puts up with more from cats than she does from humans.’

Bernard, Ellen observed, had become rather thin. He ate as much as usual, but gesticulated more. He waved his hands around a lot. She hoped that when he stopped smoking he would fill out a little and his knees would be less likely to bruise hers in bed, but no. He went to bed late and rose early, and the space in between was lively with frequent, prolonged and energetic sex.

‘Sometimes,’ she said to Brenda, ‘I wish he’d just stop.’

‘I always wish Peter wouldn’t begin,’ said Brenda.

Belinda said, ‘I told you so. Now he’s not a Catholic, now he’s not a Marxist, there’s no control at all. Why do you think he had those belief structures in the first place?’ Liese said, ‘Len and I are totally happy.’

The springs in Ken and Rhoda’s bed twanged apart and jutted sharply through the mattress. Ellen wondered if she should perhaps look for a replacement, but put it off. Money was tight, and the Christmas season approaching. She thought they might have a Christmas tree; for the first non-ideological season for many years.

Nerina called in at the office to see her mother. Mrs Khalid introduced her to Ellen. Nerina was beautiful, in a languid kind of way. Her palely dark skin glowed with the light of youth. She was serene. Perhaps too serene, Ellen thought: there was something static in her expression, as if the skin had been plumped out by a layer of silicone wax beneath, and made her doll-like. Her bottom lip pouted. She moved slowly and gracefully, conscious of a femaleness it would, Ellen could see, be quite natural to want to drape with fabric rather than exhibit. Her bosom was too large, too suddenly plump, to fit neatly inside its T-shirt. Her jeans were very tight, her feet tiny and her heels high.

‘Thank you,’ said Nerina, ‘for what you did with my records. My mum told me.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ said Ellen. ‘In fact don’t ever mention it.’

‘Okay,’ said Nerina, ‘but I guess I owe you a favour, all the same. A lot of us do.’

‘Nerina,’ said Mrs Khalid, ‘supposing your brother saw you wearing that T-shirt.’

‘My brother,’ said Nerina, ‘can go to Saudi Arabia for all I care.’

‘Or Sharif?’ her mother pleaded. ‘You know you like Sharif. What would Sharif say?’

‘He won’t see me to say anything,’ said Nerina, ‘will he? I hope you don’t suppose I’m insane!’

‘Since she started at the poly she’s been very difficult,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘I’m not sure about education for girls.’

‘My mother’s quite right,’ said Nerina. ‘I used to have a head quite full of interesting things. Now I’m at college there’s only a kind of vacuum. I fill it up with facts and theories, but it’s going to take forever: it’s a deep, deep well.’

‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ said Ellen. ‘You’d better be careful. All kinds of things can come rushing in to fill it up.’

‘So I’d noticed,’ said Nerina. ‘Well, I’ll be off,’ and she swayed away, leaving a drift of rather heavy scent behind her.

‘You’re in her good books,’ said Mrs Khalid, ‘that’s the main thing. She can be quite tiresome when crossed. I wish she’d wear trainers. Those shoes are so bad for her feet.’

Now that Bernard left industrial action to others, the heart had quite gone out of the staff’s work-to-rule and normal relations were resumed. Neither side won. A draw was declared. But now both the academic board and the management team viewed Bernard with some apprehension, fearing where his energies would next take him. It was with some relief that they assented to his desire to take over outreach work in the local community. It was on his prompting that ethnic drop-out youths were now accepted onto college courses without formal qualifications; it was on his urging that examinations were now being set and marked in Urdu and other minority languages, the faculties shamed at last out of their insistence that English was the only language in the world that counted. Bernard was triumphant. The college was at last loosening up. The Faculty of Art and Design now ran courses on graffiti in conjunction with the Faculty of Social Sciences. ‘The Role of the Magic Mushroom in Primitive Cave and Contemporary Wall Art’ won its author a first. When Bernard went to the canteen there was a stir, a breath of recognition. The young, the bold; the lowly paid and overworked, acknowledged him as their spiritual leader. The few, the old guard, who could see what generations of scholars had endured for, struggled for, thus lightly swept away, were not so happy. Notions of excellence, of the primacy of scholarship, the victory of steady thought over wild opinion, the sense of generation building upon generation, all thus abandoned in the craven desire to please the student, entertain the student, keep the college in funds. The few were shrewd, powerful, influential and dined in high political places; Bernard knew it, and did not care. Indeed, he found it energizing. ‘No one worth their salt,’ he said, ‘but does not have enemies. Once the mind is free from its self-imposed shackles anything is possible. Even changing the world.’

Mrs Parkin came to stay for a week and went after a day. Bernard would not let her set up Jesus, Mary and Joseph on the mantelpiece even though Christmas was coming.

‘Look, Mum,’ he said, ‘I can just about stand Christmas dinner as a family get-together. But I will not have idols in the house.’ Mrs Parkin left, blaming Ellen for having turned her son from a faith that had sustained her family through death, famine, hardship, war, bereavement. Ellen said it was nothing to do with her, but she was lying, and Mrs Parkin knew it. Once she was gone Bernard and Ellen were able to ask Jed and Prune round for Christmas dinner. Prune was pregnant again and wore a murky green long woollen smock. Ellen wore a skin-tight gold dress with black glittery trimmings.

‘Isn’t that dress rather low cut,’ asked Bernard, ‘for a simple Christmas dinner with friends?’

‘I bought it at Oxfam,’ said Ellen, as if that excused everything. But Bernard paid the matter little attention. There was a kind of dance of thought going through his head: he had to keep in step. He couldn’t stop it.

‘The synapses are twanging,’ he complained, on occasion to Ellen. ‘They get out of step. The rules are gone: the safety nets. Everything links, from cosmology to microbiology. When it finally does link up the computer will explode.’

‘I hope you don’t talk like that at college,’ she said.

‘Of course I don’t,’ he said. ‘I’m not mad.’

Sometimes his eyes would glaze over for a second or two as if he were out of their world altogether. Ellen wondered if he had petit mal and looked it up in a medical dictionary—neither of them went to doctors if they could help it—but the entry was not very helpful, and it seemed in any case the kind of symptom it would be better to be vague about, not define, not name, for fear the naming made it worse, less likely to evaporate out of existence. And sometimes Bernard would wake shivering, from a restless sleep, dreaming of punishments.

‘Well,’ he said in the new year, a couple of days after term had started, ‘I’ve certainly been and gone and upset Nerina, of all people. And over such a trivial thing.’

‘Now what have you done?’

‘I told her God didn’t exist and she took offence.’

‘But she must allow you your opinion.’

‘On the contrary. You must remember Nerina’s background. The ideological war is as real to her as any war with guns and tanks. If your idea is contrary to my idea your idea must be eliminated, especially if it starts getting a territorial foothold, and might just possibly catch on.’

‘Excuses, excuses, the girl’s a fool.’

‘Don’t
say
that, Ellen. Don’t even think it!’ He looked round anxiously, as if for bugging devices. ‘Now listen, Ellen, we’ve unhinged her from her original faith. We shouldn’t have done it. Mention Allah, mention the Prophet, she laughs. It’s dangerous. She worships the Devil, Ellen, and that’s the truth of it. To say aloud that God doesn’t exist is to thereby negate the Devil. What’s more, you see, Jed’s group is on the point of bringing Satan into corporeal existence. She blames me because it’s taking so long. I know she does.’

‘Have you said anything about it to Jed?’

‘I know what he’ll say. He’ll say it’s all part of continual assessment: the whole point of the course is mass hysteria. The control group will be perfectly sane.’

Married to a madman, thought Ellen. If I don’t look at it, it will go away.

‘Perhaps I’d better say something to Jed.’

‘Don’t, don’t. Nerina might find out.’

‘I should just let them get on with it,’ said Ellen lightly, ‘so long as they don’t start sacrificing goats. On the other hand perhaps they should. Then the Animal Rights Activists can campaign against them, and let you off the hook.’

‘You’re not taking this seriously, Ellen.’

‘No.’