by Weldon, Fay
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.
LOVER AT THE GATE [5]
Ellen’s Marxist years with Bernard
‘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.’
‘Brenda and Belinda are separatists,’ said Ellen, ‘and don’t go to meetings attended by men.’
‘You mean they’re lesbians?’
‘I do not,’ said Ellen. ‘Was that Marx’s joke about the fair sex, the ugly ones included, or yours?’ asked Ellen.
‘Marx said it,’ Bernard said. ‘Why?’
There was a feeling at the Friday meetings – more men than women attended – that sexual possessiveness between men and women was out of order. It was said that there ought to be more sharing and swapping, in the name of change, equality and the exploration of the self. Men and women, everyone agreed, were after all free and equal; marriage was a symbol of bourgeois oppression. One evening a row broke out when Jed Mantree slipped a beery hand into Ellen’s dress. Jed was a post-graduate student in psychology. His wife Prunella was present. She was pregnant and poorly.
‘Bastard!’ cried Bernard, belabouring Jed with his fists, splattering cheap red wine over books and walls. Ellen had to take Jed to casualty to have a cut above his eye stitched, as poor Prune was too upset to do it. They were away for hours. Bernard was in a torment of perplexity. Prune said dismally that she didn’t think it was right to stand between a man and his freedom. She went home to lie down.
‘See it in its historical perspective,’ Ellen comforted her husband when she returned in the small hours. ‘“Men make their own history,” to quote the master, “but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names and little cries in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.” Let me put it another way, Bernard, when you uttered your little cry “Bastard!” Ireland spoke through you, and your mother, and a whole history of sexual repression; the knee-jerk of an oppressed peasantry rose up in you when Jed’s fingers tweaked my nipples and you hit him, comrade in Marx though he was. You should have let him finger on. You should have been above it. All I had to do was step backwards. I didn’t mind. Neither did Prune. But how could you help it? Marx acknowledges the inevitability of your protest. Understands and forgives it, just like Jesus. I really do believe sexual possessiveness is something we should struggle against, no matter how difficult we find it. Of course Jed should not have tried to come between us; it was a counter-revolutionary act on his part, Trotskyite even, when you think about it, but in that act was Praxis, the moment when theory becomes practice, and you should not have interfered.’
Ellen had long ago given up her part-time work at the optician. She too was taking her degree in the social sciences. Bernard was by now a junior lecturer in the same college where he had taken his degree. He was in a permanent state of outrage.
‘You are quite right,’ Ellen reaffirmed. ‘What are your employers but State parasites? As Marx so aptly put it, “men richly paid by sycophants and sinecurists in the hig
her posts, absorbing the intelligence of the masses, turning it against themselves.” Nothing changes!’
‘Let it work its way through him,’ said Ellen to Brenda, ‘let it work its way through and out; the harder I put it the faster it will happen.’
‘You want him to worship you,’ said Brenda, ‘the way Leonard worships Liese.’
Liese and Leonard had a wonderful wedding; now they lived with central heating and embroidered sheets.
‘I just want him to be rational,’ said Ellen.
‘I want, I want,’ said Ellen, pinning up above their bed her favourite William Blake print. It was of a man reaching out for the moon, crying ‘I want, I want.’
‘Not babies, I hope?’ asked Bernard. ‘What sort of world is this to bring babies into? Nuclear war is inevitable.’
‘Not babies,’ said Ellen. ‘According to Marx, you are quite right, war is inevitable.’ And she got out of bed, looked up the page, and read, ‘“A reduction in international armaments is impossible; by virtue of any number of fears and jealousies. The burden grows worse as science advances, for the improvements in the art of destruction will keep pace with its advance and every year more and more will have to be devoted to costly engines of war. It is a vicious circle. There is no escape from it – that Damocles sword of a war on the first day of which all the chartered covenants of princes will be scattered like chaff: a race war which will subject the whole of Europe to devastation by fifteen or twenty million, and which is not raging already because even the strongest of the great military states shrinks before the absolute incalculability of its final result. And failing that, the class war as interpreted by Engels, a war of which nothing is certain but the absolute uncertainty of its outcome.”’
‘Do come to bed,’ said Bernard.
‘Marx and Engels, messengers of God,’ murmured Ellen. ‘I believe. Help thou my unbelief,’ and she got back into bed. Bernard and she had discovered a whole new range of fashionable sexual positions. Their minds raged free: they talked, they shared. Nothing was shameful.
She watched a vase move of its own accord along the bedroom shelf and fall off and break.
‘Subsidence,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s been a hot summer. The ground beneath the house has shifted.’
‘More like poltergeist activity,’ said Ellen. ‘Perhaps the ghost of my mother came with the bed.’
‘I am sure Marx did not recognize the existence of ghosts,’ said Bernard, ‘but please don’t go looking for the reference; not now!’
Ellen waited for something to happen, something to change, but nothing happened, nothing changed. A little struggling lilac tree in the back yard died, because, Belinda said, too many men had pissed on it, out the window, not bothering to wait for the lavatory to be free. ‘Men talk,’ said Brenda, ‘and it’s all piss and wind and ends in death.’ Ellen would lie in bed at night watching the objects on the mantelpiece in the glow from the street light, hoping they would move again: that something from another world would intervene, give her a clue as to the nature of her existence. The curtains were too thin and let the light through. But books, papers, cigarettes and matches – they both smoked now – stayed where they were. Nothing moved. She read some more books, wrote some more essays, passed some exams. Drank more coffee, poured more wine, sidestepped Jed’s hand, sometimes didn’t. Nothing changed.
A stray, dingy orange kitten came yowling up to the back door one night. ‘Don’t feed it,’ said Bernard, ‘or it will never go home,’ but she did, and the next night there it was again. She opened the back door; it rubbed up against her leg. She let it in, fed it well, took it to the vet: the animal plumped up and out: it lost its dinginess, it all but glowed orange in the dark. It lived with them. They called it Windscale, after the power station. Windscale slept on the bed, moving over reluctantly as warm comfortable pockets changed shape and form while Bernard and Ellen made love.
Ken said – he came for Sunday lunch now, often with his stepdaughter but without his wife, who felt awkward in Ellen’s presence – that it reminded him of a kitten he’d given Wendy on the day she gave birth to Apricot. Perhaps it was a descendant of that same animal. Why not? Ellen was pleased to think it might be so. It gave her a sense of history. But still she wasn’t happy. She didn’t understand it.
‘I believe,’ said Bernard, in and out of the classrooms, cafés, kitchens, street corners, pubs, while Ellen nodded and agreed, ‘I believe. That the aim and purpose is to bring about the fall of the bourgeoisie and the rule of the proletariat, to abolish the old society based on class differences and to found a new society without classes and without private property. There is no such thing, mind you, as private property for nine tenths of the population: its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence for those nine tenths. I believe that the revolution cannot just come and go but must be permanent, and it is our duty to further it. I believe!’
‘Holy Mary Mother of God,’ said Ellen, sitting upright in bed in the middle of the night. ‘I know what the matter is. I’m bored. This can’t go on!’
Valerie receives a letter from Eleanor Darcy
Jack, the Holiday Inn bellboy, came up to Room 301 with a letter for Valerie. She put aside her manuscript, opened it, and read. It took some courage to do so. Missives from the outside world had begun to make her uneasy. She, who usually looked forward to the telephone ringing, had become nervous even of that. Safety lay in words on the page. Outside, all was danger and sudden, nasty surprises.
Dear Mrs Jones,
I drew our phone call to a rather abrupt end and I am sorry. I felt we were perhaps rather straying from the point. Let me give you the text of a talk I gave to the Bridport Women’s Institute, before the Scandal, and when Julian and I were still developing our blueprint for the world of the future. They were attentive listeners. Housewives, like the readers of Aura, are not idiots! Here goes –
‘The rich have got to come to some accommodation with the poor. The poor are winning; they are all around, making themselves felt. They are victims, which means that though not necessarily good, or pleasant, they have a moral ascendancy over the rich. Those who are in the right tend in the end to win: those who are in the wrong to let them win. The war is hotting up. The poor creep out of alleyways while the rich put the BMW in for the night and hit the rich over the head and steal the tyres. The rich do not dare to be alone at night in their grand houses: who lurks to rape around the panelled corners, swings to attack from the ropes in the work-out room? Their talk is of property prices, hired bodyguards and stun guns, because the poor are at the gate, inside the gate in the form of the Mexican nurse, the Filipino maid, the Irish girl, the Yugoslav lass; the ones who stand while others sit, and wash the dishes while others eat. The ring on your finger is their dinner for a year. The homeless sleep up against the air vents of the great hotels, supping on the scent of hot fudge sundae and clam chowder.
‘Do not suppose the rich have taste: they spend for the sake of spending, to spite the poor, to say “see what I have that you don’t”. The poor have standards, dignity, taste, conviction: they live honestly, full of hate, shitting in the houses of the rich if they get a chance to break and enter. And why should they not? For the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and no one troubles to hide it any more; to shut the poor away in poorhouses, the old in almshouses, the mad in madhouses, the orphans in orphanages. They are all out in the street now, in every city in the world, and their eyes follow the rich and plan their revenge. And why not? The rich live as fearful princes: the poor live as angry beggars. And there is no pleasure left in the life of the rich: for who can tell lumpfish from caviare any more, and caviare is cholesterol-rich anyway, and forbidden: and when the rich grow old and hired nurses dab away the dribble, can you trust the nurse to love you, or does she hate you? She hates you. She will twist your poor rich senile arm to pay you out, because you have an airy house on the hill, and she goes home to a room in the damp and humid valley. No, the rich must com
e to some accommodation with the poor: must acknowledge their existence: must open their houses and their fridges and their bank accounts and let the poor in. And there will be no poor.
‘In Darcy’s Utopia this lesson will have been learned. That if the poor are hungry they will eat your food, and why should they not?: that if they are dirty they will infest you with disease, and so they should: that if you ignore them they will mug you and steal what you have, which is no more than you deserve: that if they sit barefoot at your door they will hurt your conscience and you will have to let them in. That therefore there must be no poor, and for there to be no poor there must be no rich.’
So you see, Mrs Jones, something has to be done. The proportion of the underclass to the rest rises yearly, both nationally and internationally. We have grown too good, kind and sensitive to mow them down with machine guns, starve them out of existence. We must incorporate them, or die ourselves. They’ll see to that. We must build our Darcy’s Utopia before it is too late. Our systems, our structures, have to change. I do not expect you to agree with me on everything. I do not maintain I am even necessarily right. I just want you to think about it, and the readers of Aura too. Okay? I’m lunching with Hugo tomorrow. Isn’t that exciting!
With all good wishes,
ED
LOVER AT THE GATE [5 Contd]
Ellen’s Marxist life with Bernard comes to an end
‘Perhaps we should go on holiday?’ Bernard suggested to Ellen. Perhaps that was what she wanted: a holiday abroad might make her eyes look at him and not beyond him.
‘Oh I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I think going on holiday is a very bourgeois sort of thing to do.’
‘How do you know? You’ve never been on one.’
‘Neither have you,’ she said. It was true. He longed to go. His elder brother had been to Yugoslavia, one of his sisters to Greece.