Darcy's Utopia (12 page)

I
WAS TRYING TO
make sense of my notes, and dabbing lotion on a nasty wasp sting on my finger, when Hugo turned up with the twins, two untidy little girls with red noses and pale wispy hair. They were, fortunately, not identical, though why I should be pleased they were unidentical I don’t know, as identical twins are conceived of the same coupling; unidentical very often of two separate couplings, and so far as I was concerned the less sexual congress Hugo and his Stephanie had the better. Stef was turning out to be very trying; she seemed unable to accept that one love can finish just like that—poof!—and a new one begin. She believed, wrongly of course, that Hugo was infatuated by Eleanor Darcy. The timing of his leaving would naturally suggest just such a conclusion.

‘Valerie,’ he said to me, ‘I’ll have to take these two to my mother again,’ at which the little ones set up an ungrateful wail, ‘but I’ll be back as soon as possible. I’m sorry but Stef is really behaving in an impossible way. The children were her idea, not mine.’

I set aside
Lover at the Gate
to attend to the children’s needs—Coke and hamburgers from room service soon quietened them. Stef, Hugo pointed out, was dead set against junk food. It is unwise for mothers to be too ideologically sound in matter of diet—it makes it so easy for rivals to the children’s hearts to worm their way therein, and win.

A taxi was called and Hugo and the children left for Liverpool Street and I was left alone with my own thoughts, in a state of mind I could only describe as lustless. It occurred to me that I should perhaps wait for my daughter Sophie outside her school, to make sure she understood that I had not abandoned her, had merely left Lou for a man who loved me and would make me happy; that things would presently calm down, and as soon as Hugo and I had sorted things out a little and established our new home she could join us. In the meantime she was more than welcome to share the facilities of the Holiday Inn—room service and swimming pool and sauna. Sophie was after all thirteen, and it’s a rare contemporary child—especially born to parents in the communicative arts, that being the only umbrella heading under which both Lou and myself could suitably cluster: though he saw, probably rightly, greater sensibility and sensitivity in a Bloch quartet than he did in a
Sunday Times
editorial—who can expect both parents to live permanently and companionably together.

I left the hotel, feeling rather like the Lady of Shalott, breaking the spell, leaving her room, her castle, going only to the river’s edge, there to drown herself, and made my way to the Navimore School for Girls. One by one they sauntered out, or clustered together for safety in great rushes: all in theoretical navy and white, but with such imaginative variation in those two colours and where and how placed, and in what fabric, as to make their apparel singularly unalike. The girls were, however, very much alike: wide-eyed, glossy-haired, with a hunch of shoulder and ease of hip that made them all the sisters they longed to be. And there, yes, that
was
Sophie. She had a little mole above her pretty upper lip, so I knew it was she. I approached. ‘Sophie—’ I said.

And she cut me dead. My own child looked through me with her wide, hazel, dark-fringed eyes and cut me dead.
Was
it Sophie? She swung round and I recognized the broken metal heel guard on her right shoe. Yes, it was Sophie. She would not part with her shoes for long enough for me to have them properly repaired. ‘Sophie,’ I begged, but she walked on, with a flick of a navy pleated skirt on which I recognized a cigarette burn. Lou smoked three cigarettes a day: it was his one bad habit—and on one occasion Sophie’s skirt and a stub had somehow come into contact.

What had Lou told Sophie? What had he said to her? How had he betrayed me? Poor child, she must be suffering. What had I done? I saw Sophie swing lithely on to a bus before it stopped moving. How many times had I told her not to do it?—to
wait.

But she was right: if you didn’t get on the bus while it moved, you didn’t get on it at all. The driver seemed to be playing some kind of survival game with the girls of the Navimore School: he slowed down out of courtesy to the bus stop sign, but took it no further than that. He drove, they leapt, all survived.

I stood, shaken, watching after the departing bus. A dog, some kind of uneasy black and white mixture between collie and labrador, trotted happily towards me. It looked at me in the kind of easy, assessing way dogs on their peculiar errands do look at strangers—and then looked again, and stopped dead: his hackles rose: he backed, he made a kind of howling noise, turned tail, and fled.

Abashed, I made my way back to the Holiday Inn. I passed a church on the way and really believe I would have gone in to sprinkle myself with holy water—but it was locked, as churches are, these days, against vandals. It was left to the glass, chrome and carpets of the Holiday Inn, the sense of un-exotic, common-sensical luxury, to sustain me. The third floor was a no-smoking floor or I think I might have started smoking again after six years’ abstinence. The ambience presently calmed me. The sense of order, of human needs being comprehensible, in fact meetable, was reassuring. Plentiful towels, hair dryer, little bottles of everyday necessities—shampoos, conditioners, shoe horns—whoever uses shoe horns?—our one suitcase each, the few clothes neatly hung: our personal computers, reference books—the tools of our trade. What else could a man and a woman need, I repeated to myself, except each other?

Poor little Sophie would by now be suffering pangs of guilt for her behaviour towards me. I wondered whether to call and say I understood, I forgave her; we’d meet next week some time. I decided I would. I called home. Lou answered. On hearing my voice he put down the phone. I was devastated. Forget Sophie, who was given to drama and tantrum anyway, what about Ben, my little boy? Apple of my eye? Perhaps Lou had told him the monstrous lie that I didn’t love him any more? Of course I loved him. It was just that I loved Hugo more. I had met Hugo at a party and unforeseen and overwhelming emotions had consumed me. That was all. The love of man and the love of children are different things: the one does not exclude the other. Surely Ben would understand that, if Lou explained it properly? Ben spent so much time playing computer games, barely pausing to eat, that lately I’d sometimes wondered if he knew I existed at all. He seemed scarcely even to register the changing faces of au pair girls.

I looked at myself in the mirror. I am not bad-looking, but no beauty: too thin, too earnest, too practical, I had always thought, to inspire sudden, romantic love. And yet I had! When the two halves, separated by that terrifying law which parts the two who were never meant to be divided, defy that law and meet, there can be no gainsaying them. Hugo and Valerie.

There was something wrong here, something I didn’t understand. I wanted Hugo to return at once, at once, to keep the niggling doubts down where they belonged: what was going on? I noticed I had my pen in my hand again. When I wrote a line or two of
Lover at the Gate
I felt at ease, buoyantly happy, confident. Put down my pen and I heard in my ears the howl of the fleeing dog, saw the metal flash of Sophie’s shoe—I could not bear it. I picked up the pen. Anxiety dispersed.

The phone rang. I ran to it but it wasn’t Hugo. It was Eleanor Darcy.

‘How did you know I was at the Holiday Inn?’ I was puzzled. ‘Is that where you are? What a strange place to
be
! Do you really like hotels? I hate them. I just called the number Brenda gave me. She’s good at names and addresses and details. I’m hopeless. I think we’ve got an arrangement to meet tomorrow. I’m sorry, I can’t make it. It’s visiting day for Julian tomorrow, in prison. It quite went out of my head. I know what you’re thinking: fancy forgetting a thing like that! The trouble is, it’s quite easy. Out of sight is out of mind, when it comes to people as curse objects.’

‘Curse objects?’

‘Well, that’s what Julian is, I’m sorry to say, in relation to me. My falling in love with Julian was nothing to do with me, nothing to do with Julian, but part of the curse put on Bernard that his wife would become the love object of a man more attractive, more wealthy, more intelligent and of a higher status than he, so he didn’t stand an earthly. What chance did I have, fond of Bernard as I was, but also, as I daresay you have concluded, and like so many, including I daresay yourself, bored? How is
Lover at the Gate
coming on?’

‘I keep getting interrupted. Personal matters intervene.’

‘I expect they will. It’s hot stuff you’re dealing with. Is Julian standing at the gate yet, knocking?’

‘Not quite. Just about. I have to get Bernard into Marxism and out the other side. I’m still not sure what you mean by a curse object. Sex objects, love objects—but
curse
objects?’

‘It was none of our faults. Though I do blame Bernard, for getting himself mixed up with ethnic minorities. After he gave up Marxism, and was out there all on his mental own, as it were, without fear of hell or counter-revolutionary thought, it went to his head. He became irresponsible—’

‘Would you mind if I taped this conversation, Mrs Darcy?’

‘Look, I’m not giving an interview. All this is off the record. I thought that would be understood. I called merely to say I couldn’t meet up with you tomorrow. I’m sorry. But if you’d like to come over this evening—?’

But I couldn’t. I was waiting for Hugo.

‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘Hugo’s coming over tomorrow anyway.’

Hugo had left a full packet of cigarettes by the bed. He left them around to prove to himself that he really didn’t smoke. I broke my faith and smoked one. Just one.

‘I
’M SO PROUD OF
you,’ said Ellen, and meant it. Bernard hammered and puttied, putting their home to rights, at one with the worker, his brother; no longer above manual toil but now rejoicing in it. He who had palely loitered, fearful of moral contamination, now boisterously stamped through practicalities.

‘Man’s self-consciousness is the highest divinity,’ he said. ‘There shall be no other Gods beside it.’ He had shaved off his beard. His chin jutted sexily forward.

‘The criticism of religion leads naturally to the criticism of social relations,’ observed Ellen. ‘How wise Marx is: how everything applies: as true now as then!’

They rivalled each other in anti-deist sentiment. She worshipped him for worshipping Marx, or appeared to.

He had torn the little gold cross from around her neck, during love, with such force she was left with a welt which never ever seemed to vanish. She didn’t mind one bit, she said. She was proud of it: proud of his masterful nature—or appeared to be.

‘The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness, meekness—’ she read aloud from the early works of Marx, which she had never returned to the library, property being theft, and knowledge free for everyone.

Bernard looked robust rather than pale: had lost his translucency along with his soul. He looked others straight in the eye, he shouted their arguments down. ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heathen world; it is the very soul of soulless conditions,’ he harangued his erstwhile comrades in the streets, the vestries. They crossed themselves and prayed for him. This was what happened when you married a non-Catholic.

‘Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the prophets to the capitalists!’ he declaimed to his fellow students in the college library. Unlike Ellen, though, he always returned his books on time, so the librarians put up with him.

Bernard now argued with his teachers about his grades. Fainthearted, they took his essays back for remarking and upgraded them, as an airline always will a seat for a vociferous passenger. He plotted to overthrow the senior lecturer in psychology who was fifty-two and had not rewritten his lecture on Piaget for fifteen years. He worked up a cabal against poor old Professor Litmus, who taught statistics and never did anyone any harm, but droned on, and on, and at least never minded when his students slept. If Bernard could change, the world could change: and the sooner the better. He sat in smoky rooms like like-minded friends, talking late into the night. Wives and girlfriends made coffee. They rooted out revisionists, pilloried Trotskyists, jeered at the Anarchists, and even burned the works of Kropotkin in public. They chose Guy Fawkes’ night to do it and the gesture went unnoticed—he found a lesson even in this.

Brenda and Belinda were both by now feminists. ‘You shouldn’t make those men cups of coffee,’ they told Ellen. ‘Let them do it themselves.’ Belinda had lost two stone, given up her married man and was speaking to Ellen again.

Ellen put the point to Bernard.

‘As Jenny Marx said in 1872,’ she observed, ‘“in all these struggles the harder because the pettier part falls to women. While the men are invigorated by the fight in the world outside, strengthened by coming face to face with the enemy, we women sit at home and darn.” What do you say to that, Bernard? Or do we have to stay fixed in 1872? Is it revisionism to see some improvement in the human consciousness since then?’

‘I doubt it was 1872,’ Bernard said tenderly. ‘You’re just making that up, the way you make so much up. And I certainly don’t expect you to darn my socks. I have other things to worry about besides socks. Coffee’s different. Someone has to make it, and the women just sit smiling and nodding so it might as well be them. Just remember that as the State withers away, so will the many evils which accompany the capitalist state. Sexism included. Only work for the socialist revolution and you work for justice for everyone; blacks, women, oppressed minorities everywhere. Even musicians like your father. What did Marx say in his letter to Kugelmann? “Everyone who knows anything about history also knows that great historical revolutions are impossible without female ferment. Social progress can be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex—the ugly ones included.” Why don’t you ask Brenda and Belinda to come along to Friday meetings? I don’t think Liese would get much benefit from them.’