Darcy's Utopia (8 page)

‘I’m surprised she bothers,’ said Ken. ‘I’m surprised she isn’t too busy delivering milk bottles in the sky.’

‘She’s like she was the day she had Apricot,’ said Rhoda. ‘Her hair all frizzed out like a black halo and ever so sweet. One thing you could say for my daughter, she never let herself go. Even when she’d had a drink or so too many she still had her stocking seams straight.’ Since Wendy had taken to hovering over the bed, Rhoda had reclaimed her as a daughter and now spoke freely of the past.

‘She should have consulted me about Apricot’s name,’ said Ken. ‘She had no business not doing that.’ Some things out-rankle death.

‘Are you sure you shouldn’t see a doctor?’ asked Apricot, as Rhoda’s cough grew nastier. She smoked sixty cigarettes a day. The white paint on the window frames was encrusted with black. ‘What can a doctor do for her?’ said Ken. ‘When your number’s up your number’s up.’

Money was tight. Ken found it hard to adapt to the new age. Music was now for the young, not the middle aged: folk had taken over from jazz as the language of the radical and the sentimental. Ken’s band dissolved and reformed under a succession of names. The Dixie Syncopaters, Jazzorola, Folkwise, Folkways, the Red Resolution, and back to Dixie Railroad; too many musicians chased too few gigs: that’s the way it was. Rhoda had to give up work, and no sickness benefit was available since Ken had never let her succumb to the system and pay national insurance. Not that she’d ever wanted to, as she told Apricot.

‘Better to live in the present, dear,’ she said, ‘while you can. That’s your father’s motto and he’s right, as usual.’

Apricot sometimes wished she lived in as ordinary a household as did her neighbours; though the more she considered the neighbours the less ordinary they seemed. Mr Rowse the healer at 93 Mafeking Street, a Miss Potter and sixteen cats at No. 95, themselves at No. 97, a Mr Hill in a
ménage à trios
at No. 90—perhaps all the normal people lived down another street? She had good friends at school: Brenda, Belinda and Liese. Brenda and Belinda, like herself, were scholarship girls, in a school where the others paid. Their names went up on a list on the school board as being entitled to free lunches. Liese’s father owned a chain of garages: he’d been a prisoner of war, had married an English girl. Liese was a vague, sweet girl who had all the pocket money she needed and kept Apricot, Brenda and Belinda in clothes and shoes. Belinda, short and fat, knew most of Keats by heart, and large chunks of Shelley. Brenda, tall and languid, was captain of the netball team. Apricot came top of everything. But they were still the scholarship girls, objects of envy because they were not ordinary, objects of pity because they were poor, their accomplishments scarcely the point.

‘You are all outsiders,’ said Liese’s father. ‘That’s why you stick together.’

‘Liese isn’t an outsider,’ said all but Liese. ‘She doesn’t have free dinners.’

‘She’s half-German,’ he said. ‘That’s more than enough.’

‘How do you win?’ asked Apricot.

‘Men never do,’ he said. ‘Once an outsider, always an outsider. But girls can marry in.’

His wife was Jewish, he had converted to Judaism. There’d be soft tomato sandwiches for tea, and chicken soup and dumplings for supper. The lights were soft, the carpets thick, hot water flowed from taps; everyone liked to be comfortable.

‘You English,’ he said, ‘hate to be comfortable. You think it will stop you getting to heaven. You would rather stand in the rain any day than in a bus shelter.’

‘Bloody foreigners,’ said Ken, though he mellowed when he heard Liese’s family was Jewish. Blacks, musicians and Jews, all victims of an oppressive society, were of the same family of misfortunates as himself. There were eleven taps in Liese’s house—Apricot had counted—including the garden tap. Taps, she reckoned, were the real symbol of wealth and success. At 97 Mafeking Street there were four; and think yourself lucky. Many of the houses had no bathrooms. Ken kept his sheet music in the one he had constructed in the small back bedroom, so fear of splashing kept it on the whole unused. There was carpet in the living room, lino elsewhere; gas fires downstairs and no heating in the bedrooms. The beds were damp and the floor cold when you put your bare feet out in the morning.

‘What do we want money for?’ asked Rhoda. Now she smoked eighty cigarettes a day. ‘You, your dad and me!’

‘So I can turn on the gas,’ said Apricot.

Gas flowed to cooker and fires when coins were put in the meter, not otherwise.

‘Put on your coat,’ said Rhoda, ‘if you feel the cold,’ but Apricot never would. She went round to Liese’s instead, where there was central heating. Brenda and Belinda went too. Belinda sucked sweets and read Tennyson aloud. Brenda talked about boys and Liese’s mother provided food.

‘That girl’s an opportunist,’ said Ken.

‘I don’t know what that means,’ whispered Rhoda, ‘but I’m sure you’re right.’ She lost her voice quite often. Mr Rowse said he was helpless in the face of the extravagance of her sin.

It was unusual for anything in particular to happen in Mafeking Street. The residents now took for granted the shuffling queue outside Mr Rowse’s surgery, or temple. Someone would get a new car, or a new cat: a tree would be lopped: the milkman’s horse bolt. A baby would get born and an upstairs window be lit at night: an old man would die and the hearse arrive, and a gap be felt for a while, but the very pressure of ordinariness, or whatever it was, soon healed it up. Ken would annoy the same neighbours by slamming the same van door twice a week in the same early hour. Now Rhoda had stopped work she would go down to the newsagent on the corner for her cigarettes at the same time every morning, each day a little lighter on her feet. She was now scarcely seven stone.

‘At least I don’t have to watch my weight now,’ she’d say. ‘Not like you, Ken.’

In the afternoons she would go and see Mr Rowse. She was allowed in by the back door. She didn’t have to queue. ‘I’m a priority case,’ Rhoda said. ‘He’s wrestling with my sin.’

‘He doesn’t want the others to catch sight of you,’ said Ken. ‘They’d all be off home!’

Rhoda looked at herself in the mirror and said, ‘I don’t see much wrong with me. Nice big eyes at last!’

When Apricot was three weeks away from the examinations which were, in theory, to get herself, Belinda and Brenda out of school, away from home and into a preferable social and intellectual environment—Liese was happy enough to fail hers, and be allowed to stay cosily at home and be married off to someone suitable—there was an unusual uproar in Mafeking Street. A group of students, chanting and carrying placards, milled round in the road outside Mr Rowse’s house, accosting his patients, pleading with them to go home, abjure the Devil and seek proper medical attention. Their placards announced them as ‘Catholic Youth Against Witchcraft’.

Rhoda went out to give them a piece of her mind.

‘Mr Rowse is a saint,’ Rhoda told them.

‘He’s an agent of the Devil,’ they assured her. Apricot followed Rhoda out to see what was happening. The young man whom she was to marry approached her. He was tall, he stooped, he wore a pale blue anorak and sturdy brown shoes. His eyes were bright and intelligent. He had a little beard, neatly and tidily cut. He was sincere. He explained to Rhoda and Apricot at some length the difference between religion and superstition. He said his name was Bernard Parkin, and that he was studying theology. His group were worried about the rise of superstition worldwide, and took positive action when circumstances warranted. He himself was destined for the priesthood. Rhoda nudged Apricot.

‘There’s a challenge,’ she said. ‘Nice young man like that wasted.’

‘Oh shut up, Rhoda,’ said Apricot, embarrassed, but she could see what Rhoda meant.

The police were called and required the protesters to go home, in the name of religious freedom. This caused further argument and noise. Police reinforcements arrived. Bernard took refuge in Rhoda’s house. Fortunately Ken was out.

‘Is it superstition to believe in ghosts?’ Apricot asked. Rhoda tactfully left them alone. She could be heard hawking and coughing in the upstairs bedroom.

‘There’s no such thing as ghosts,’ he said.

‘What about Jesus appearing to the apostles?’

‘That was a miracle,’ said Bernard. ‘But I’m glad to have this discussion with you. Perhaps God has sent me to help you.’

He ate all the biscuits on the plate. He said he didn’t mean to worry her but her mother did look as if she needed to see a doctor. Faith healers gained their power—if power they had—from the Devil, not God: they worked more mischief than anyone knew. Apricot explained that her mother was a ghost and Rhoda her grandmother. Bernard settled down to re-educate her. She liked his mind: she liked the quality of his convictions, although, as she explained to Brenda, Belinda and Liese, she could not agree with those convictions.

Bernard told Apricot that to believe in ghosts was to insult God: the souls of the dead went to heaven, purgatory or hell, depending, but did not hang around afflicting the living. Bernard and Apricot, at his suggestion, sat up all one night together when Ken was away to prove that the apparition of Wendy appeared in Rhoda’s head, and nowhere else. Apricot sat closer and closer to Bernard on the stairs, and he edged further away, distancing himself from temptation.

‘Sex before marriage is a sin,’ he’d already told her, ‘and if I read the Gospels right, sex after as well, unless for the procreation of children.’ He failed to quote chapter and verse when Apricot asked him to, and then said it was a personal matter, in any case: if he was going into the priesthood he’d rather do it celibate.

‘Look, look, my mother’s ghost!’ cried Apricot, pointing, though there was nothing there, or hardly anything, just a warning shimmer in the air outside Rhoda’s bedroom. Bernard looked up and Apricot made a dive to undo his zip. He shook her off and made his way, groping through a dark lit only by the red light of the fish-tank heater, to the front door and out into the street and away.

‘I didn’t think you were that kind of girl,’ he said, ‘and I shan’t see you again. But do please get Rhoda to a doctor.’

Apricot persuaded Rhoda to go to the hospital.

‘What I don’t understand is this,’ said Apricot to Brenda, Belinda and Liese, ‘why was Bernard Parkin sitting next to me on the stairs in the dark if he didn’t want sex!’

They searched for an answer but couldn’t find one. They were full of complaints. They compared notes. What was it men wanted? They asked around. Liese’s father replied, ‘True love.’ They thought this was very continental of him. Ken, when they put the question, replied, ‘A quiet life,’ but they didn’t believe that either.

Exams were approaching; and, with them, trouble on all fronts. Mr Rowse refused to see Rhoda any more because she’d been seen talking to Young Catholics Against Witchcraft. Ken chatted Belinda up so she said she wouldn’t come round any more, or so Brenda reported. Apricot had a row with Belinda. Brenda sided with Belinda, Liese with Apricot. Rhoda vomited blood over the breakfast table. The hospital said she had cancer of the stomach, the throat, the liver, the bladder and everything. Ken, upset, tried to drive his van through the line of Mr Rowse’s patients: he broke the ankle of an elderly man too feeble to jump out of the way. The police were called: arrest narrowly averted. Mr Rowse’s Sunday Angels, or someone, put a dog turd through Ken’s letter box. The council tried to take Mr Rowse to court for fraud and deception, and asked Rhoda to be the star witness for the prosecution but she refused, and had a startling remission, as Mr Rowse had promised her she would if she were only loyal. Mr Rowse left the area and set up elsewhere. He had millions in the bank, rumour went, and had never in all his life paid any tax at all. He went without even paying the cleaner.

Apricot waited until her exams were over and then went down to the Catholic church and hung about until she met Bernard coming out of confession.

‘What were you confessing?’ she asked, bold as brass, walking up to him in her everyday short skirt and torn black stockings, as if the terrible incident on the stairs had not happened at all.

‘Sins of the flesh,’ he said, ‘committed in the head with you.’ That quite compensated for the insult he had offered her on the stairs.

‘Please marry me,’ she said. ‘It’s no fun any more at home. If I don’t get out I might go under.’

He understood her predicament, of seemed to, and, much to Brenda, Belinda and Liese’s disgust, married Apricot in a registrar’s office, in a civil ceremony. She was seventeen. This would do, he told her, until such time as she became converted to Catholicism and they could marry properly. Or not, as the case might be. They set up house in No. 93, which was now to let. She would have to go out to work, it appeared, to see him through college. But at least it was no longer theological college. He could not marry and be a priest. He would be a social worker instead. ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ said Ken, who had given his consent without argument. He had started a new career as a singer. ‘Let’s hope she won’t have to do a milk round.’

When Rhoda died, a month or so later, Ken married his ex-saxophonist’s widow, who understood the rigours and demands of the musician’s life, and who had a teenage daughter. It was the kind of household he understood. Nevertheless, he felt abandoned and betrayed by the women in his life.

A
: WHY ARE YOU
so buttoned up, Mr Vansitart? So singularly ungiddy? You have a love bite on your neck, yet you go on asking me for my views on the multicultural society, on secularism, on Darcian Monetarism. What you really want to know is what men always want to know about women, namely would she, if asked, and if not, why not. And would they want to, if she would.

‘I meant to start the tape a little further on,’ said Hugo to Valerie. ‘However, let me assure you that the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.’ ‘I should hope not,’ said Valerie, but the thought was now in her mind. They sat up side by side in the bed, naked, listening, but Valerie no longer felt safe.