Darcy's Utopia (22 page)

‘It’s interesting you should say that,’ said Brenda. ‘Personally I blame Jed. You know I had this affair with him—’

‘I didn’t,’ said Eleanor.

‘It was nothing special. I worried because I didn’t like sex with Pete. I thought if I tried it with Jed it might be different.’

‘Was it?’

‘No. It’s just me. Apparently if you do too much sport when a girl. you never become—well—properly sensual.’

‘I’ll never have that problem,’ said Eleanor.

‘I noticed,’ said Brenda.

‘What is this to do with the magnification of my moral weakness?’

‘Jed is trying to set standards of positive religious tolerance throughout the college. The new policy is that from the Moonies to the Muslims by way of the Jesus freaks all Gods are equal, and if they want to worship the Devil that’s okay too. Mind you, the Academic Board only okayed it by one vote. A group of students have set up a black magic group and they’ve got a drawing of you up there and they go over it with a magnifying glass and that’s why you’re the way you are. A fornicating adulterous zombie. Night of the Sexy Dead.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘Yes I am. But they are experimenting in black magic in Jed’s media communications course and he is having an affair with one of the students, and that’s always trouble.’

‘Nerina?’

‘Yes. The Brat Nerina. It makes me feel furious, I can tell you. Not to mention tall and gawky and ugly. Pete and Bernard are the controls, Nerina says; they being the least pervious to suggestion, by virtue of their education and integrity. Or else because Jed’s got it in for Pete and Bernard.’

‘Why should he?’

‘Because Pete’s my husband and Bernard’s your husband, idiot. Don’t think I don’t know about you and Jed. Mr Kiss-and-Tell himself. Of course it may be unconscious on Jed’s part.’

‘How’s Peter?’

‘Pete’s just fine. So am I. We’re impervious to the flesh. But you and Bernard are susceptible because you’re at it all the time.’

‘Who says so?’

‘Jed.’

‘Brenda, susceptible to what? Black magic?’

‘Of course not, idiot. Suggestion.’

Eleanor thought there was not much future in the conversation and put the phone down. She opened the press file and searched for and found the photograph taken at the conference; herself near the head of the table, her head bent over her notes, and it was true that the light shone through from the great arched quasi-ecclesiastical window behind her and gave her hair a bright outline, but scarcely a halo. Julian Darcy sat at the head of the table, as chairman, with the potentially ferocious, fleshy, rather pudgy amiability that characterizes men of power in their middle age. He was, on the face of it, not the kind of man to excite sexual passion in anyone other than his wife, and that only by force of habit and custom. She took a magnifying glass from the desk drawer, left there by her predecessor—Julian had had to let go a junior clerical assistant to make way for Eleanor—to examine the rather strange patterns made by the light from the window. What she had taken as a composition of trees and clouds in the window she could now interpret as an alarmingly goatish face; slit eyes, hair, horns and all. The winter sun shone through the magnifying glass and focused on to the glossy paper. A small circle began to smoke, to crinkle, to hole, to burn, to curl—she blew the flame out as soon as she had worked out what was happening, that this was fire—and though she remained, as if trapped forever writing minutes, both the field in the window and Julian Darcy had ceased to exist.

She put the photograph back in the file and swept away the little pile of embers with her hand. Julian liked her hands dirty. Georgina was always so clean. She called Belinda.

‘Do you believe in the Devil?’ she asked.

‘Of course I don’t,’ said Belinda. ‘I believe in the one, the eternal, the wholesomeness of light and all that junk. Frank believes in it, that’s to say, and it’s easier for me to take it all on board than fight it, what with the baby and all.’

‘If you’d stop breastfeeding,’ said Eleanor, ‘you might get a little intellectual rigour back, not to mention your figure, and be more help.’

‘You don’t need help,’ said Belinda. ‘It’s Bernard needs help. You’re a real pig to him, Apricot. And to me. You know I’ve always had a weight problem.’

‘Sow,’ said Eleanor, ‘and my name’s Eleanor,’ and put the phone down. Liese was out. She rang Ken, but his line gave a high-pitched buzz. He had not paid the bill. This was what came, she thought, of not not-believing in your own mother’s ghost. One thing led to another. Astrology today is witchcraft tomorrow. Give the occult an inch and it took an ell. Sections of Mafeking Street were prone to subsidence: if things fell off the mantelpiece it was because the earth moved.

Julian came in and said, ‘You haven’t got your boots on. Or your stockings. If you put your feet too close to the fire you’ll get chilblains,’ and he went down on his knees and took her toes in his mouth. She felt puzzled rather than excited: it occurred to her that when with Julian she usually felt more puzzled than excited. His mouth worked up her legs.

‘I don’t think any of this is quite right,’ she said. ‘There’s more going on here than meets the eye. I think I’d better give up the job,’ and she looked up and Georgina was standing watching. Julian hadn’t locked the door. Julian never locked doors: it was beneath him so to do.

Georgina was wearing a prickly wool skirt in a dreary blue with grey patches which reminded Eleanor very much of Bernard’s scarf, which she had last seen lying in a murky pool of melted snow. But her green cashmere sweater was so admirable Eleanor thought she’d look better in it than Georgina, whose bust was rather small. Negligible, as Julian would put it. Georgina said, ‘Well, I knew something was going on. I didn’t know it would be so disgusting. I am leaving now. I am filing for divorce.’ And she left.

Julian said, ‘Do you think you could organize the various graduation ceremonies, Eleanor?’, and Eleanor said, ‘I don’t see why not.’ And Julian said, ‘The senate won’t like it, but I will. How empowered love makes one feel.’ Julian spoke a lot of ‘one’ when others would say ‘I’: it was something to do with his class and age. Just to hear him speak made Eleanor’s spine tingle: they resumed their lovemaking. It can only be a marriage of true minds, thought Eleanor: forget his paunch, the hairs in his nose, the softness of the upper arms. Outside in the antechamber to his office, faculty heads waited unduly long for their appointments, even by Vice Chancellor’s standards. ‘He’s busy,’ said Miss Richards, the faculty secretary. They looked at each other but no one said anything. What could they say?

Eleanor went home to tell Bernard that events had precipitated her decision and she was going to leave him and live with Julian forthwith, and Bernard, with unexpected calmness, said that Julian would be expected to resign and Eleanor said no, if any man was irreplaceable in his work, in his field, that man was Julian Darcy. What was more, by virtue of his contract, he could only be dismissed from office by reason of insanity or depravity and to love a woman other than his wife was neither insane nor depraved. Bernard said, ‘You’ve worked all this out,’ and Eleanor said ‘Yes.’ Bernard said alas, his own contract of employment was not so secure; it contained a ‘failure to carry out duties to the satisfaction of the college’ clause. What was more, he said, he had that very day been asked to resign: the director had sent for him. For a long time, it appeared, management had been assembling a dossier of complaints against Bernard: accusations came from friends and foe alike—allegations of academic negligence, imprudent memos, and, now, it seemed, and totally unfounded, of misconduct with female students. What it really meant, said Bernard, was that they had him pigeon-holed as a political agitator. The truth of the matter was irrelevant. They simply wanted him out. His face no longer fitted. They just didn’t like him. And now, as he had predicted, he was a man without a car, a job, or a wife. Of course he was fighting it: he would go on teaching till they forcibly removed him, but what would he do for money? The union ought to support him, fight his case, but they too had deserted him. And he had lost his scarf, the blue one with the grey squares he was so fond of.

‘I’ll go and find it,’ said Eleanor, ‘but it will be the last thing I do for you.’

‘You won’t get rid of me so easily,’ he said. ‘I am your conscience. I am the real you. There is a little of me left to fight Nerina.’

‘Bernard,’ said Eleanor, having one more try, ‘a man’s misfortune lies not in the events that happen to him, but in his reaction to those events. Why can’t you just rejoice in the fact that I’m leaving you? Then it could seem to be a blessing, not a curse.’

But the pebble tears began to run down his cheeks, and she packed the nice new clothes he hadn’t noticed, and left. What else could she do?

She went by the polytechnic grounds and picked up Bernard’s scarf. No one else had bothered. It was wet. She would dry it out in Georgina’s airing cupboard and post it back.

Q
: YES, BUT COME
along, surely a perfect society isn’t possible?

A:
HOW DO YOU
know? Why shouldn’t we have heaven on earth? You really make me tired, sometimes. You’re so full of ifs and buts, and looking for flaws, no wonder nothing ever happens: we all just drift on in the way we always have, bowing under legislation which builds on old legislation, precedent which builds on existing precedent: saying because this didn’t work then it won’t work now. But ‘then’ isn’t ‘now’. In Darcy’s Utopia everyone will understand that the lessons of history are nonexistent. No doubt history will be taught but in classes, remember, made up solely of children who wish to be in them, and teachers who enjoy imparting information and rejoice in the excitement of new ideas, who have a sense of the flow of mankind’s history: how we have progressed out of primitivism, barbarity, into self-knowledge and empathy with others; how in the spite of our natures we have achieved at least an attempt at civilization.

In Darcy’s Utopia nostalgia will be out of fashion. We will look back into the past with horror, not with envy and delight—we will stop our romantic nonsense about the rural tranquillity of once upon a time, which is, if you ask me, nothing but the projected fantasy of old and miserable men who, looking back into their own childhoods, see paradise. But it is a false paradise, falsely remembered. Wishful thinking clouds our memory. Times were better then, we think. We assume that what is true for us individually is true for society too. But it isn’t. The antithesis is true. One by one we grow old and decline, but our societies increase in vigour, grow richer in wisdom, stronger in empathy, as we hand our knowledge down, generation from generation. Our own individual fate clouds our vision: we stumble and fall, exhausted, but pass the baton on, runners all in this great race of ours. We should not get too depressed about it. I, Eleanor Darcy, have no children: children are the great cop-out, the primrose path to non-thought, to destruction. Leave it all to them, the fecund say, that’s all we have to think about. Wave after pointless wave, generation after generation, looking backwards, saying better then. Mine is the pebbly, difficult, problematic path, thorny with impossible ideas, genderless; here you get spat upon, jeered at, derided, but it is the only path which leads forward to heaven upon earth.

And why should we not have it? I tell you, if you look back, you will get burned, like Lot’s wife, to a pillar of salt; Lot’s wife, nostalgic for the past. In Darcy’s Utopia it will be very bad form to hark back; collecting antiques for the domestic home will be
outré
. A museum will be the only place for the artefacts of past ages, and let them be as gloomy and dismal as can be. In Darcy’s Utopia it will be accepted that museums will be very boring places indeed. If you want to subdue the children you only have to take them on a visit to a museum, and they will behave at once, for fear of being taken there again.

Room service had brought breakfast, and the mail. Valerie sat up in bed, Hugo still asleep beside her, and read the transcript. What bliss, she thought, what paradise, thus to live. Someone else to cook and clean, and bring the food: to be a man’s lover, not his mother/wife. She would live in the present. She would avoid forever the trap of nostalgia. She could see that the pleasure of this moment could, so easily, turn into pain, simply because it no longer existed. How was that to be avoided?

Q: But won’t that make for a heartless, soulless place? Surely we need the resonance of the past in order to enrich the present?

A: There you go again! Well, it’s understandable. Set foot outside your door, outside your little patch of safety, and lo, chaos waits; disease, poverty, madness, hurt, ebbs and flows all around: you’re knee deep in it. If you don’t get mugged your conscience gets pricked: the beggar at the door offends, the homeless in the alley hurts; drunkards sleep in every alley, the mad stand on the motorway and shake their fists. Those that have not reproach you: those that have, braying about profit and self-interest, offend you. You cannot believe that the past was worse than this. Rather, you don’t
want
to believe it was. Wars lay waste a generation, they say: fear of war has wasted one of ours.

And how we made them feel it, our young, with our talk of nuclear winter and Armageddon! The revenge of the old upon the young, to deprive them thus of all hope of the future. Look at them now: how they appal you! Hollow-eyed, white-faced, black-clothed, they walk like zombies round the streets, puffing in or shooting up the dreary stuff, which makes the present real, enables them to smile, and lift a languid hand in salutation to their friends. They vomit if they can, they sick it all up: and if their digestions in spite of all abuse stay sound, they drop their litter instead: walk ankle deep in discarded Coke cans, beer tins, fast food packs, dust and rubbish of every kind, not to mention the excreta of rats and dogs, and they don’t care one bit. It even seems to cheer them up a trifle. Looking at all this, you are assailed by guilt and confusion, and you think, what’s happened can only be this: that once there was a golden age, and everything ever since has been a falling away from that. Well, it shows a niceness of nature. You believe there’s something good somewhere: if only by process of polarity: that is to say, your profound belief in the existence of opposites; that if there is bad, there is also good.