Darcy's Utopia (2 page)

That is enough for today, Mr Vansitart. Foolish questions, patient answers. Though I daresay you see it the other way round. I must help my friend Brenda put her children to bed.

L
OVE STRUCK LIKE A
whirlwind. I was not expecting it. I did not want it. I, Valerie Jones, a married woman in a good job, with as contented a home life as could reasonably be expected, went in a very ordinary little black dress to a Media Awards Dinner, and was seated next to Hugo Vansitart. I was about to say ‘quite by chance’ but it was of course our destiny. He arrived late: too late for the prawn pate—lucky him, I said—but in time for the chicken. There was an instant rapport between us. My husband Lou had not come with me: he hates these affairs: the massing together, as he describes it, of the chattering classes. Or was it because he was in Stuttgart, or Stockholm, or somewhere, playing his violin? I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. Nor was Hugo’s wife Stef with him. She was in Washington, interviewing the Pope. Or someone, somewhere. I just remember thinking that’s the wrong person in the wrong place, how odd. Would it have made a difference if Lou had been there, or Stef had been there? I don’t think so.

Of course I knew Hugo Vansitart by his by-line. He is one of our leading political journalists. When I saw his name on the place card I thought, Oh dear, he’ll be bored by me. He’s much too clever for me. I am features editor of a leading women’s magazine—a weekly.
Aura
. We’re intelligent enough, I hope, but naturally, considering our market, are more concerned with matters of human interest than anything particularly intellectual. I didn’t want Hugo Vansitart to hold my magazine against me: define me by my employers. I had not expected him to be so good-looking. I scarcely liked to look at his face, at first. He just sat down beside me, brooding, dark, vaguely squarish, decidedly male, filling an empty place which had made me feel uneasy. He was late, he said, because he’d done the first of a series of interviews with the Bride of Rasputin out in the suburbs somewhere beside a distant railway line. It had taken him forever to get back to the centre of things. ‘Good heavens!’ I said. ‘Eleanor Darcy! I’m to see her tomorrow. What a coincidence!’

He laid his hand on mine and said oh, dear, he thought he’d had an exclusive: the editor of the
Independent
wasn’t going to like this one bit: I said, well, everyone likes to be the only one, in newspapers as in life, but I didn’t think he should worry. We might overlap but we would not coincide. He was no doubt doing his pieces on the Bridport Scandal and the phenomena of Darcian Economics: I had been commissioned by my magazine to do a serialized biography of Eleanor Darcy herself. A kind of docudrama for the lay reader.

‘Did she approach the magazine, or the magazine approach her?’ was the first thing he asked.

‘She approached us.’

He did not ask me how much
Aura
was paying, though I knew he badly wanted to. I told him later, in bed. She had asked for a hundred thousand pounds: we were paying half that. Though an interest in Darcian Economics persisted, my editor’s opinion, when presented with the demand, was that the public had begun to shift its attention from Eleanor Darcy. Rasputin, Julian Darcy, was famous: the Bride of Rasputin, rightly or wrongly, notorious. Fame is worth twice as much as notoriety. She asked for a hundred thousand pounds, she got fifty thousand pounds. There seemed a kind of journalistic sense in this.

‘How do you find Mrs Darcy?’ I asked. ‘What kind of person is she?’

‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘She talks a lot, not always about what one wants to know. Be sure to ask her about the Devil.’

‘Better,’ I said, ‘that she talks too much than too little. Easier to cut than to pad.’

He said he supposed so. He said how remarkable it was that we should be sitting together. Himself about to write the gospel of Julian Darcy according to Hugo Vansitart, myself the gospel of Eleanor Darcy according to Valerie Jones. Great trust had clearly been put in us. His forefinger moved over mine. It was strange. So sudden, so unlikely, and yet so right, so fitting. I sat there in my boring little black dress, rather too thin and flat-chested for fashion, too old for comfort—as thirty-nine is—my hair cut too short that very day, in a wrong-headed attempt at sleekness, and felt my whole being lurch out of one state into another. I was all confident spirit—no longer blemished flesh. Then I heard my name being called. I’d actually won Feature Writer of the Year, Women’s Media Division. I got to my feet, worked out my route to the top table—I had in no way expected this honour—looked back at Hugo, and we exchanged smiles—or rather committed some kind of Act of Complicity, in which he summonsed and I acquiesced. I had never done such a thing before.

‘All treats,’ Hugo said, when I returned with my metal statuette—no cheque, alas—‘all treats tonight. Would you like to hear my Eleanor Darcy tapes?’

I said I would and we went to a Holiday Inn together, one of the rather grand, central city ones, which are anonymous as well as luxurious, and hideously expensive, but the beds are huge and the bathrooms good. I listened to Eleanor Darcy’s tape and tried to concentrate upon it. ‘She should not be so insulting to women’s magazines,’ I remember saying. Then it was all extraordinary. Why me, I kept thinking, why me, this is so amazing, so out of character, this is not the way I live. One early boyfriend, one husband, now this: myself, surprised by joy.

In the morning he said, ‘What will they say at home?’

I said, ‘I don’t care. What about you?’

He said, ‘Neither do I. Shall we stay here? Live here? Together?’

I said, ‘Why not? It could hardly be more expensive than living at home.’

And we both knew I lied but who cared?

He said, ‘Without home to distract us we could both do our pieces on Eleanor Darcy without others complaining, without children demanding. My tapes will help you, your tapes will help me.’

I said, ‘We’ll distract each other.’

He said, ‘But only in a supportive kind of way. We’ll get the balance right. We’re both workaholics. We’ll fuse.’

They had good office services at the Holiday Inn. They even provided us with word processors, IBM compatible; one each, it being a double room. I went down the road to Marks & Spencer for clothes. Mostly just satin slips and wraps and so on—I didn’t see myself going out much. What for? I called my number. Lou had put the answerphone on. The children would have got themselves to school. They were competent enough. My main function in the home, I remarked to Hugo, was as Witness to the Life. I left a message to say I had left home.

I gave my new telephone number to
Aura
, and settled down to love Hugo and prepare to write the life and times of Eleanor Darcy. Hugo went home once to fetch a suitcase, and was back within the hour. We did not wish to lose a minute of each other’s bodies, each other’s company, if it could possibly be helped. We had each other, we had our work, we had room service—what more did we need? We were well and truly happy. I had never felt the emotion before: nor, he said, had he.

A
: I WILL NOT
overburden you with my views on Darcy’s Utopia, the multiracial, unicultural, secular society the world must aim for if it is to have any hope of a future. I know you will simply leave it all out when you come to write your history of my life. I know you are concerned with what you call the human-interest angle, how I came to be who and what and where I am. But I have been created by a society interacting with a self: you can’t have one without the other. You will hold me up to other women as an example, how to start life in a back street as Apricot Smith, an untidy, misbegotten child; be promoted to Ellen Parkin, working wife of the ordinary down-at-heel hate-the-government kind; and to become the true love and wife of Professor Julian Darcy, Vice Chancellor of the University of Bridport.

You don’t care that Darcian Monetarism and the Bridport Scandal changed the thinking of nations: you just want to know how it was that in three decades God and the Devil between them managed to promote me from Apricot to Eleanor, by way of Ellen. And yes, it was promotion. As Eleanor Darcy I can go anywhere: it’s like a little black frock: you can dress it up with diamonds, dress it down with a cotton scarf: it always looks right. As Ellen Parkin I was only fit to run down to the corner shop in my slippers, or queue up for family benefit. And who would be interested in Parkin’s Utopia? Darcy’s Utopia has a much more convincing ring. Parkin smacks of small back streets and long-term illness—what’s left when the Devil has flown, sucking love out of you as he goes, leaving a burned-out patch behind. Names are magic, believe me. Better to be out of love as Eleanor Darcy than Ellen Parkin. The Ellen Parkins of the world love only once, and if it goes wrong give up.

Q: But you don’t change your nature by changing your name, surely?

A: Oh yes, you do. My advice to everyone is to change their name at once if they’re the least unhappy with their lives. In Darcy’s Utopia everyone will choose a new name at seven, at eleven, at sixteen and at twenty-four. And naturally women at forty-five, or when the last child has grown up and left home, whichever is the earliest, will rename themselves. Then life will be seen to start over, not finish. It is a perfectly legal thing to do, even in this current fearful and unkind society of ours; no deed poll is required. So long as there is no intent to defraud, anyone can call themselves anything at all. But so many of us, either feeling our identities to be fragile, or out of misplaced loyalty to our parents, feel we must stick with the names we start out with. The given name is a dead giveaway of our parents’ ambition for us—whether to diminish or enhance, ignore us as much as possible or control us forever—and the family name betrays our social origins. No, it will not do. It will have to change.

Q: I see. You spoke earlier of the Devil. Our readers are not so domestic as you suppose—any article on Good and Evil enjoys high readership figures. Do you believe in the Devil?

A: Of course. It’s unsafe not to. And what a grand creature the Devil is in himself! How he sucks energy even from where he stands! He is all temporary fire and sparks, terror and drama, whisked up out of nowhere: but when he flies off you see the real damage that has been done: something permanently denatured, altogether seedy and totally ignoble. To believe in God is to believe in the Devil. It is quite an insult to God to deny the Devil’s existence.

In Darcy’s Utopia, men will believe in the Devil in the sense that they will be sensitive to the forces working away within even the best planned of their social structures, bent on their destruction. As it is with people, so it is with these social structures—by which I mean the government, the church, the civil service, educational and caring organizations, lobbies, societies for this and that, quangos and so forth and so on. Wherever, in fact, people are gathered together in the interests of the better and more humane organization of society, there the Devil lurks. The greater the striving for good, the nearer the approach to it, alas, the harder and sharper the fall. In Darcy’s Utopia everyone will understand that the more extreme and present the good appears, the more pressing the danger that it will be promptly overthrown. Oh yes, in Darcy’s Utopia we will be on our guard. We will be vigilant and, what’s more, will understand what we must be vigilant about. We will not hide behind abstract terms such as ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’, ‘justice’, ‘dignity’. We will have lesser words, with more meaning.

Q: Talking about words, Mrs Darcy, what a pretty and unusual name Apricot is. How did you come by that? Was your mother particularly fond of fruit?

A: There was not much fruit about when I was a child. Sometimes we had sliced peaches for afters. So far as I’m aware, my mother named me after her brushed nylon nightie.

Q: You have a very soft voice. The tape recorder may not be picking up everything you say. I wouldn’t want to lose a word of it. Can you speak more closely into the mike? Her brushed nylon nightie, did you say?

A: That is what I said. There are a number of press cuttings which will help you as to the detail of my early life and times, and here in this folder are a few brief autobiographical sketches I happen to have written over the years. I hope you can read my writing. Do what you can with the material you have, and come back to me with any questions, or just for a chat. I have been rather out of circulation lately, preparing my magnum opus for publication. It’s good to be back in the world again.

Q: A magnum opus?

A: A blueprint for Darcy’s Utopia.

Q: You’ve found time for that as well?

A: As well as what?

Q: The court case must have taken up quite a lot of nervous energy.

A: My husband was on trial, not I.

Q: But Darcy’s Utopia is a kind of memorial to your husband?

A: He is not dead, Miss Jones, merely in prison. I am sure he would argue very strongly against many of my proposals, were he around to do so. I have borrowed his name because I like it, for no other reason. Besides, it is my name as much as his. After all, we are married.

Q: Of course. I’m sorry.

A: I think it is time to draw this interview to a close. We are going out for a healthy walk. I hear Brenda putting on the children’s wellies, against their wishes. Children do so like to go barefooted in the rain. Do you have children, Mrs Jones?

Q: I have two.

A: Lucky old you. I have none. Will you show yourself out? I have been sitting on my leg, and it’s gone to sleep.

I
AM NOT USUALLY
nervous about my work. Compared to home, in fact, work is a piece of cake. Many women report the same thing. It is easier to please an employer than a family: a liberation to have a job description, a joy to be free of the burden of peace-keeping. Mediating in the home is like trying to knead a piece of dough the size of a house: get it down here and it surges up there. Compared to all this employment is a piece of cake, yes indeed: or rather a nice firm crisp yeastless biscuit. And I take the view that those who employ me must take some of the blame when things go wrong. I am what I am—I do what I can. If I can’t, more fool them for asking me in the first place. And because I am not anxious, I do well. Me, Valerie Jones, Features Writer of the Year! The pleasure which suffuses out from between my agreeably bruised and battered loins is, when I can get round to defining it, the more intense for this unexpected infusion of worldly accomplishment. Valerie Jones, a success!