Darcy's Utopia (7 page)

Q: Were you brought up in any particular religious or political persuasion?

A: My father was converted to Communism when I was eight. I would stand on street corners with him while he sold copies of the
Morning Star
. He would instruct me in the history of the world while the people of the world walked by, ignoring the salvation we offered them, and the icy wind blew around our ankles. In the evenings we would have readings from
Das Kapital
. Yes, we did what we could to save the world, my father and I.

Q: You were very fond of your father?

A: I adored him. There was no denying he was forgetful. He forgot to hand in such little money as he collected from sales of the
Morning Star
; they prosecuted and he was put on probation for two years. That upset him very much. He felt keenly the ingratitude of the Party and lost his faith. During those difficult years, when he drank rather more than he should, he would sometimes even forget on the way home from gigs I was his daughter and not just an ordinary groupie.

Q: You mean you were a victim of child abuse?

A: How simply you put it. Never quite. Often nearly. But who isn’t, at least in their own minds? That is all for today. It is tiring to think about the past. How are you getting on with
Lover at the Gate
?

Q: I am not sure that it’s an appropriate title. Why are you so keen on it?

A: Because of the way life changes when the lover at last appears. Haven’t you found it to be so? In most people’s lives the lover stands there, at the gate, faithful, waiting, unnoticed. All we need do is ask him in. Not all of us have the courage, of course.

Q: But you had, Mrs Darcy?

A: Oh yes, and still have. So have you, Mrs Jones. One little push and the whole world’s one, no woman’s better than the next! Here’s Brenda with more coffee. Or is Jones your maiden name? Many women choose to work under their maiden names.

Q: Jones is my married name, as it happens.

A: I can see that might in the end cause some complications.

Valerie Jones made her excuses and left—she had had more than enough coffee. She felt sleepy rather than tired, as a result, she told herself, of having had so little sleep of late. She felt rather superior to Eleanor Darcy on this account and left Brenda’s house in good humour.

E
LEANOR DARCY TOLD ME
I was welcome to call her if necessary; if I needed any further factual details for my
Lover at the Gate
. She didn’t go so far as to give me her telephone number, but I prudently copied it from the instrument at a point during the interview when she was distracted: when one of Brenda’s children had somehow slipped into the room to find a drum stacked halfway down a pile of similar toys. My own children, Sophie and Ben, managed their early childhood well enough without the help of noisy, let alone musical, toys. My husband Lou was musical—a professional musician, in fact—and, I suppose understandably, couldn’t endure the sound of good instruments badly played, or bad instruments played at all. I notice I refer to him in the past tense.
One speaks of ex-spouses in the past tense. Don’t you do the same?
But Lou is still legally my husband: Sophie and Ben are certainly my children, not my ex-children. The title outruns even death. I suppose if a court denied me access to them, I might speak of them as ex-children. But that kind of thing doesn’t happen now. It used to, of course. Adulterous mothers would be prevented from ever seeing their children again, lest they spread the contamination of sin. Then I suppose they did turn into ex-children.

Lou is a kind, understanding and reasonable man: friend as well as spouse. All that has happened is that I met Hugo at a party and came to understand that, as well as having friend and spouse, a woman needs the excitement of a lover from time to time: a re-basing, as it were, in the physical: the reincarnation of the carnal self in a body which gets, over the years, far too controlled by spirit and mind. The customary sex of the marriage bed does so little to stop the mind working, and the mind must stop working if the flesh is to have its due gratification; the acknowledgement of its glory.

I called Lou. It seemed to me I owed him some explanation. Besides, he might be worrying about me. It was 10.23 according to the Holiday Inn’s radio alarm clock, which flashed on and off on the bedside panel, redly. I wished it would just steadily and quietly glow. My nerves were a little on edge. Shortage of sleep was beginning to tell. Lou would be in the middle of practice. He was—is—a man of regular habits: up at seven thirty, breakfast at eight, mail at eight thirty, and so on. Even his phone calls were planned and made on the half-hour. I should have postponed the call for seven minutes. It might have gone better.

‘Lou,’ I said, when I heard his quiet, familiar voice on the phone.

‘I think I’m possessed by the Devil.’ It wasn’t what I meant to say, but that’s the way it came out.

‘General belief is,’ he said, ‘that you’ve gone mad. My advice to you is to see a psychiatrist. I’m in the middle of practice, as you surely know. Have you anything important to say?’

‘How are the children?’

‘As well as children are when their mother fails to come home from a party because she’s shacked up with some gorilla in a cheap hotel. The children have rather a low opinion of you, I imagine.’

Lou is a slight, controlled man with a sensitive face: Hugo large, grizzly and loose-limbed.

‘Lou, you haven’t
told
them?’

‘We agreed to be honest with the children, I seem to recall.’

I could have taken him to task about how he was defining ‘agree’ and ‘honest’, but just somehow didn’t.

‘The Holiday Inn is far from being a cheap hotel,’ was all I could think of to say. ‘On the contrary, it’s rather expensive. They’ve taken a print of Hugo’s Amex, but I don’t somehow think he’s on good personal terms with them, and you know how tight everyone is on expenses, these days.’

‘You just stay in the media world you know and love,’ he said. ‘It’s all you’re fit for. Leave me and the children in our little patch of civilization. Roll round in the gutter as much as you like, but don’t call me to tell me all about it. We’re doing just fine without you.’ And he put down the phone. No, it was not a good phone call. It brought back to me the reality of the life I had so abruptly left behind: I had somehow assumed it would fade out of existence when I wanted, fade back in when convenient, unchanged. That was what years of impeccable behaviour earned you. A holiday. Apparently not! The clock flashed 10.27, 10.27, 10.27. I wondered if Lou would take up his bow and play until ten thirty, or whether he would extend his practice time for four minutes. He would probably do the latter, and hurry through the change of clothes which would prepare him for the half-hour’s weight-training which he did between ten forty-five and eleven fifteen every Tuesday and Friday. Today was Tuesday. I had not seen Hugo for three hours. Already my body was beginning to feel restless: demanding reunification with the object of its yearning. I could feel Hugo’s body similarly missing mine. What confidence, what pleasure this physical certainty of need and equal need begat. I felt my breath come short, my eyes seemed to roll in my head: I wore no clothes. I stalked the room naked. I, Valerie Jones, ex-wife of Lou; poor Valerie, uptight Valerie, Valerie of mind triumphant; ex-mother of Sophie and Ben: the phone rang: it was Hugo, of course it was.

‘Darling.’

‘Darling. Christ I miss you. I can get there at one. Only for half an hour.’

‘Make it thirty-three minutes.’

‘Why thirty-three?’

‘Any time without a nought on the end.’

‘You are all mystery. Stef was never a mystery.’

Stef was his wife. He’d used the past tense.

The phone call eased the torment of desire a little. I found that if I settled down to the tape and the life of Apricot Smith, I became quite comfortable.

Presently I remembered that it was when I had been about to call Eleanor Darcy and confirm the year of her marriage to Bernard Parkin, when I had found myself calling Lou instead, on impulse. I called the number. Brenda answered. Eleanor Darcy was out. No, she could not confirm the year of Eleanor Darcy’s marriage to Bernard.

‘But you were Mrs Darcy’s school friend.’

‘I can’t remember; I’m sorry.’

‘When will Mrs Darcy be back?’

‘I don’t know: I’m sorry.’

‘I wonder whether you could help me a little, Brenda. I’m writing a pen picture of Eleanor Darcy’s father Ken.’

‘I’m not able to help you in that area. I’m sorry.’

So much for leading questions. I wondered where Eleanor Darcy
went
. I had somehow supposed her to sit in that room forever, real only when Hugo or I were with her. I could see that writing
Lover at the Gate
had implications more profound than I had supposed. The boundaries between the real world and its imaginary reconstruction became stretched thin, almost invisible. Already I had ceased to be sure which side I was on. Even Lou’s piranha snapping now began to seem like something read rather than experienced.

I put my conversations with Lou and Brenda from my mind, at least for the time being, and had switched on the WP and was enjoying the little moans and buzzes of its warming up, when there was a mighty banging on the door and there stood Hugo. ‘Why weren’t you in the corridor with the door open, waiting?’ he asked.

I scarcely had time to close it before he was upon me. For some reason I thought of President Kennedy, bounding down the corridors of power, forever chasing the flick of a skirt, the back of a knee, the glorious in pursuit of the grateful. It was a couple of hours before I could get back to Eleanor Darcy.

A
PRICOT WAS IN THE
sixth form doing her A levels. Rhoda had a nasty pain in her stomach but refused to see a doctor. A faith healer, Ernie Rowse, moved in to No. 93 Mafeking Street, two doors down from Ken, Rhoda and Apricot. On Sundays men, women and children would collect in Mr Rowse’s back garden, dressed in white robes, singing strange hymns and raising their hands to heaven. They were collecting, they claimed, divine energies for Mr Rowse to dispense during the coming week. They would shake their empty hands over a barrel lined with tinfoil, from which he could at a later date draw out benison. They saw gold and silver dust drift downward from their hands, they told Rhoda. Rhoda was forty-eight, blonde, buxom and so cheerful Ken said she ought to be a barmaid. Rhoda could not see the heavenly dust, but liked the idea of it. Mr Rowse’s followers said when she was whole she would see it. During the week supplicants, bent, bowed, ill or in pain, fell in line down the path between the narrow rosebeds and out into the street, in search of a miracle cure. Every ten minutes, when Mr Rowse was working, the line would shuffle forward one place. When Mr Rowse took a rest, the line stayed as it was, sometimes for hours. Occasionally, in the evenings, Mr Rowse would catch up with himself and the line would clear altogether. But it wasn’t uncommon for clients to stand waiting all night.

‘Just like Harrods’ sale,’ said Rhoda.

‘Not in the least like Harrods’ sale,’ said Ken. ‘These people are destroyed by the system, not those who lick its arse.’

‘Neither of you have ever been to Harrods’ sale,’ said Apricot.

‘Oh-ah,’ groaned Rhoda this Thursday morning in November, holding her stomach. It was a warm day for the season, though damp. The roses had given up their annual struggle to keep things cheerful and now hemmed in Mr Rowse’s path with thorns.

‘You’d better go to the doctor,’ said Apricot.

‘And sit in his waiting room and catch God knows what? I’d rather die.’

‘Then why don’t you go to Mr Rowse?’ said Apricot. ‘The line’s only as far as the gate.’

‘Ken wouldn’t like it,’ said Rhoda.

Mr Rowse’s patients, forever winding down the path, oppressed Ken with the sense of his own age and mortality.

‘Ken won’t know,’ said Apricot. So Rhoda went.

Rhoda came home without a pain, besotted by Mr Rowse.

‘When he touches you his hands strike fire into you,’ she said. ‘I’m still tingling from head to toe.’

‘Did he say what caused the pain?’ asked Apricot, who, perforce, spoke and behaved pretty much like Rhoda’s mother, rather than her granddaughter.

‘He said I’d done something bad to deserve it,’ said Rhoda. ‘And he’s quite right, I have.’

‘What was it?’ asked Apricot, interested. Burned Ken’s sheet music by mistake or on purpose, argued with him, failed to stay up till he got home, and/or have his supper waiting in the oven? Those were the normal and acceptable patterns of Rhoda’s crimes. Apricot’s were to spend too much time on homework, not to have a boyfriend, not play an instrument, talk too much and be too big for her boots.

‘You remember your sister Wendy,’ said Rhoda, ‘the one who died of drink so young? Actually she was your mother. I should never have married your father. I told myself it didn’t matter because they weren’t husband and wife but Mr Rowse said the ceremony made no difference. Sin’s eaten a hole in the lining of my gut. Now I’ve got that off my chest I feel much better. Make me some cheese on toast, there’s a dear. It will give me a pain but it’s worth it.’

Apricot made Rhoda some cheese on toast, overcooked it and shrivelled the cheese.

‘Poor me,’ said Rhoda, ‘poor me,’ and she poured herself another cup of sweet strong tea, which burned all the way down. She wasn’t looking well. Her eyes were huge, her hair grey and her skin papery, but her heart remained childlike. The longer she lived with Ken the more like Wendy she became.

‘Poor you,’ said Apricot, agreeably. There was little point in taking offence, and no time to do so in any case. She had to pass her exams.

Rhoda’s pain and Mr Rowse battled it out for well over a year. Rhoda took to table-tapping and séances and reported seeing the ghost of Wendy hovering over her bed at night. Ken was always asleep when Wendy appeared.