by Weldon, Fay
‘In Russia,’ he said, ‘workers most definitely go on holiday. They even get sent to health farms, to relax.’
‘The Soviet Union,’ said Ellen, ‘and herein lies the tragedy, has become a revisionist state. We can take no lessons whatsoever from the Soviet Union.’
If he lingered in front of travel agents, she hurried him on. ‘Poor exploited things,’ she’d say of the couples who entered, hand in hand, full of pleasurable anticipation. ‘How they fall for it! The sop from the bosses: the holiday abroad!’ And she’d take him off to the second-hand bookstall which specialized in the politics of the left, or to attend a useful meeting, and stand around with banners.
‘All the same,’ he said, when the spring buds burst on the seven trees that grew in Mafeking Street, along which Wendy had once half-run, half-walked, on her way to give birth to Apricot, ‘it would be nice to be somewhere different, just for a time, just for a couple of weeks.’
‘You will see the same pattern everywhere you go in the world,’ Ellen said briskly. ‘The exploitation of workers; the disruption of native cultures; evidence of the military-industrial ethos, you will walk like a fool amongst other fools: a tourist, staring at the remnants of the past, memorials to worn-out cultures, galleries dedicated to the ostentation and decadence of slave-masters. Bernard, if we have any time to spare, better to stand and gaze at the name of the very street we live in, “Mafeking”, and contemplate its significance. How many died, how many wretches suffered and starved in that particular disgraceful military episode, so that the workers should be duped yet again in the name of the Empire? Worker set against worker, race against race.’
‘You’re quite right, of course,’ he said. What else could he say?
He wanted to buy a car, but she said that was a waste of money and anyway what was the matter with buses, why should they ride, filling the air with fumes, while others walked? She put all spare money into her bank account. ‘You’ll only waste it,’ she said, and she was right and he knew it.
At the beginning of every term he filled in a form habitually distributed to all teaching staff, requiring details of authorized absences from college; for sabbaticals, or the marking of outside examinations, or simply because contractual staff-student contract hours had been fulfilled.
‘You shouldn’t complete that form,’ she said. ‘What are you thinking of, Bernard? This is nothing more or less than an abuse of your professional integrity.’
The degree of his paranoia rose and fell, easily and rhythmically, like some distant lake she had once heard of, which locals claimed breathed in, then out, as if a living thing, among pleasant groves: if she dropped in notions, like stones, when the lake was at its fullest with what power did the ripples surge and spread. Bernard took the matter of the offending questionnaire to the union forthwith: the local dispute quickly turned national: Bernard spoke to the press, rallied his colleagues; but alas, all too many wanted no more than a quiet life: Bernard confided that sometimes he had to eat alone in the staff dining room.
‘The point is not to be liked,’ said Ellen. ‘The point is to seize the day! There were times when even Lenin stood alone! If we stand firm, the bosses will collapse. All the same, Bernard, I suppose you could sometimes talk about other things.’
Ellen now worked at an adventure playground – the Christabel Focus – for underprivileged girls in an ethnically mixed section of the city. It was a wasteland of sour earth waiting development: wooden structures had been hastily erected: old tyres swung from ropes: a lean-to hut provided shelter. The Focus, as it was called, had been organized by separatist feminists. Muslim parents favoured it for their daughters because men were barred the premises. Ellen was no longer a student – she had been asked to leave, having flung a pot of paint at a visiting Minister of Education. She had planned both the paint-throwing and the expulsion. She really could not bear to sit and listen for a minute longer, as she explained to Bernard, to the lies of the imperialist lackeys. Besides, she wanted to give more time to the Focus.
‘But Ellen,’ said Bernard, ‘if you’d only stuck it another month, you’d have got your degree and we could have begun to live quite comfortably.’
‘I don’t work to be comfortable,’ said Ellen. ‘Why should we be comfortable when all around us are living in poverty?’ On Friday nights, when Bernard thought she was supervising Karate for Girls at the Christabel Focus, she met Jed in a motel. He fumbled and humped and heaved and never mastered the art of supporting himself on his elbows so she would arrive home quite squashed and breathless; which was only appropriate.
Bernard’s second sister went to Corfu for a holiday and came back with holiday snaps.
‘Sometimes,’ said Bernard, ‘I too feel like going to a hotel somewhere and looking out over a blue Mediterranean sea. You and I could have breakfast in bed, Ellen. Wouldn’t you like that?’
‘And who would bring us our breakfast, wash our dishes?’ she asked briskly. ‘The underpaid, the overworked, the exploited? How about us going to the study group on Marx and the Hegelian Fallacy next month in Blackpool? That’s by the sea.’
They went. Bernard fell asleep mid-seminar, and Ellen wept, or was seen to weep, from the shame of it.
There was an unfortunate incident at the Christabel Focus: two young girls, aged six and eight respectively, hitched up their trousers to better climb a rope ladder in the presence of a visiting male observer from a possible funding body. Flesh had been exposed. The elders of the local Muslim community objected: the girls were withdrawn from the playgroup. Bernard, by now spokesman for the local race relations committee, accused the Christabel Focus of racism: of wilfully offending the religious sensibilities of a minority group. Then a group called ‘Mothers in the Majority’ accused the Christabel Focus of lesbian activity – not without some justification – in front of the children; Ellen accused Bernard of being anti-feminist, and attempting to ghettoize ethnic minorities; he accused her of racism and white elitism. Bernard slapped Ellen. Ellen slapped Bernard back, and the next day, after a meeting of all parties at which the local Director of Social Services tried to please everyone and offended everybody, lingered after the meeting, provocative and yawning amongst the filing cabinets, until he caught on, locked the door, and embraced her thankfully. That affair continued for some months. She felt the balance of her marriage with Bernard was thereby restored.
Bernard and Ellen went to visit Belinda, who had renounced her separatist tendencies sufficiently to marry a graphics designer. He was poor when she married him. Now he was rich. They had an expensive apartment of minimalist decor: spindly lamps, metal and glass furniture, real paintings on the wall and not a pot plant in sight. Bernard loved it, and said so, as they returned to the dingy familiarity of Mafeking Street.
‘Bourgeois decadence,’ sneered Ellen, and he shut up.
They went to visit Liese. Liese’s father had died. She had inherited a chain of garages. Leonard had given up architecture to help with the business. It flourished. There wasn’t a book in the house, but there was an indoor fountain.
‘Inherited wealth!’ said Ellen when they got home, before Bernard could say a word. ‘The very prop of capitalism.’
They went to visit Brenda and Peter. Brenda was teaching PT in a secondary school. Peter was now a colleague of Bernard’s at the poly. They had a new car, and went to the cinema and ate out.
‘These days it takes two people’s wages to keep one household going,’ observed Bernard.
‘We’ll manage on one wage,’ said Ellen. ‘That is to say, yours. I have no time to work, I’m far too busy.’ Ellen had retired from the Christabel Focus over a question of principle. The polytechnic staff were now on a work to rule, though only at local level – a vote or so at national level having gone against them in spite of a good deal of cooking of the agenda – and she was, as she said, too busy getting a strike fund to so much as think of earning, let alone working; let alone getting to bed before Bernard had long since fallen
asleep. They had no television, of course: Ellen scorned it. The new opiate of the people, she jeered; now that religion had failed, TV had taken its place: the gods and goddesses of the new world were the stars and staresses of soap: the bosses’ latest plot to keep the minds of the proletariat addled. Bread and circuses! Holidays and TV! There was enough political theory for Bernard to read, God knew, without turning on the box. Let him get on with Das Kapital! ‘Praise Marx,’ Ellen was fond of saying, eyeing Bernard, ‘and pass the ammunition.’
One day Bernard sat up in bed and noticed the bruises on his wife’s neck. He didn’t think he had put them there but couldn’t quite be sure. He shook her awake.
‘Ellen,’ he said.
‘I have to sleep,’ she said. ‘So do you. We have an important meeting in the morning. If we’re clever we can win a procedural point on the Matters Arising Item 4 (2).’
‘Ellen,’ he said. ‘You win. I don’t think I can describe myself as a Marxist any more. I am resigning from the strike committee. I want a proper life the way other people have it. I want a car, a nice home, a working wife, a child, and to go on holiday.’
‘Capitalist swine,’ she murmured, and sank back into a sleep in which she tossed and stretched and he was sure muttered someone else’s name, but in the morning went with him to a garage and they actually bought a car, albeit second hand, and she let herself be dragged into a travel agency and they booked a holiday to Spain just like anyone else. And for some time after that they went to bed at the same time and Ellen gave up both Jed and the Director of Social Services; and when both threatened, in grief, spite and unreason, to report her infidelity to Bernard, said, ‘Tell away!’ and neither of them did, which rather disappointed her.
She felt no particular guilt: merely that marriage was a kind of old-fashioned scale: a tray on either side in which the fors and againsts had somehow to be kept in balance, and that extramarital sex had sometimes to be heaped on one side just to keep it steady because indefinable things were piling on the other. Were Bernard to be unfaithful to her, she was convinced, she would leave him at once. But she did not think he ever would be. Now he could see the world ranging round him, as it were, free, exciting and full of possibilities, neither limited by the encircling arms of Jesus, nor somehow squared off in a kind of boxing ring, with Marx, Engels, Lenin and Hegel fierce at every corner, barring all the exits. Now he could go inward, freely, into his own mind, Ellen had great hopes for him. She thought they could even be happy.
She thought she could in the end be legitimized, be more than just the girl who had married the first man who came along in order to get away from home: daughter of a mother who’d shacked up with her own mother’s boyfriend at that own mother’s unconscious behest – and had thereby had her life negated forever. Wendy betrayed by Rhoda’s desire for Ken: betrayed by the author of her own being: no wonder she had faded out of the world so quietly and gently and quickly, as if understanding it were better she had never been born. Apricot the accidental: Ken the instrument: Rhoda the foolish but all-powerful. Apricot, who, like Wendy, should never have been born. Apricot, now Ellen, reborn. Windscale the cat stopped coming into the bedroom: lay on one of the new chairs in the living room instead. At least that didn’t keep moving all night.
Hugo’s restaurant interview with Eleanor Darcy
Q: Would you say that feminism played an important part in your life, Mrs Darcy?
A: As I have already explained to your colleague from Aura, Mr Vansitart, I was a feminist of the socialist variety. Don’t the two of you discuss me? I have a feeling you have become quite close. Giddy, even. Perhaps too close, too giddy, to allow much time for discussion? Let me say I believed that the wrongs of women were interconnected with and subsidiary to the wrongs of man; that to work for the revolution was to work, indirectly, for women. That as the State withered away, so would sexism, racism and all other unpleasant social evils. Our agitations were of course not so much for ourselves, for we were all comfortably enough off – that is to say we could afford a bottle of wine every now and then and very few of us rose with the dawn and laboured until nightfall — but sprang from a burning sense of general injustice or a generalized sense of burning injustice, whichever quote’s the best or whichever your readers prefer. Gladly we gave our hearts and minds to others. We were the intellectuals of the revolution: our function to rally and inspire the workers. At my suggestion Bernard tried rallying and inspiring the college support staff – the groundsmen and the cleaners and the canteen ladies – but they weren’t interested. They wanted to get home to watch telly. In Darcy’s Utopia there will be no television.
Q: In that case I imagine people will flee Darcy’s Utopia in droves. Don’t you?
A: No, actually, I don’t. I believe if you took a referendum today a majority would agree that television should be stopped forthwith. Present them with a vision of a world in which meals were eaten at a table instead of on the knees before the flickering screen; in which conversation was commonplace; political and social ideas worked out by individuals, not spoon-fed into the mind by paid commentators; a TV-less world in which we danced and sang and played charades to entertain ourselves or even popped round to the neighbours; in which our children were not fed visions of death and dead bodies on the daily news, their infant imaginations no longer turned feverish and fearful by the sobs and sorrows of the bereaved; nor subject to the cruel, disagreeable and frequently morbid fictional fantasies of others – would we not really vote for this? Are we not well enough aware that on the screen, as on the page, good news is no news? Where is the drama in easy times, good times? Where is the benefit in not raping when rape is on the cards, not killing when killing can be done? Inasmuch as “good” television is confrontational, violent, full of event — why then, I think most people would agree, on reflection, yes, communally, we could do very well without TV. We certainly don’t want to do without it if others have it, for fear of what we might be missing, but if we all gave it up – Mr Vansitart, because the human race has invented TV doesn’t mean we have to put up with it.
Q: But surely people need to know what’s going on?
A: I suppose we could have one news bulletin a month, by which time what was important and what was not would have become apparent. And the occasional newsflash, I daresay, should a swarm of killer bees approach, or a hurricane, or a radioactive cloud, might well be useful. But the race to be first with the news which so obsesses journalists is quite pointless – a childish game they play at the behest of their capitalist masters: to be there first! Why? Who cares? In Darcy’s Utopia we will make do with listening to the radio. Hearing voices in our heads, we must work to make our own pictures. Hereby our imaginations will be educated and stimulated, not grievously curtailed and made afraid.
They sat in a fashionable Italian restaurant in the city. At nearby tables people nudged one another and whispered ‘Eleanor Darcy’. There had been a month or so where her face had been seen almost daily on TV: they had not yet quite forgotten. She changed seats with Hugo so that she sat with her back to the other diners. She had told him that Brenda was obsessively vegetarian, and that she longed for red meat: would he take her out? It was her idea, in other words, not his.
Q: You don’t imagine the TV industry would take kindly to its abolition?
A: Oh, we don’t have to be quite so drastic. Let them make programmes for each other. They do it anyway. Just let them not transmit them. I’ll have the lemon sole.
Q: But I thought you wanted meat?
A: Only in theory; when it comes to it. Faced with the actuality of change, one avoids it. One likes what one knows, and knows what one likes. Now when I was with Julian, my second husband, I was a great meat eater. Julian was fond of steaks: we got through jars of mustard. While I was with him I even developed a liking for steak tartar. Bernard was a pork and beans man, with a weakness for the occasional Irish stew, on the greasy side. Rhoda and my father lived on sausages and mash, and little crisp froz
en chicken pies.
She wore a dress of fine and flowing black fabric and many long strings of blue crystal beads and a rather affected little red hat. Her hands were small, long-fingered and strong. The tape recorder sat on the table between a fluted glass containing an artificial rose and the giant black pepper grinder the waiter had inadvertently left behind. The more he required her to talk about herself the more he longed for her to ask him about himself.
Q: But what are people going to do all day in this TV-less world? Can you give me some idea as to their sexual and marital mores? I take it second husbands are allowed?
A: There, you see! Trying to catch me out again! The fear of governments always is that if people are not occupied playing competitive sports or watching TV they will be at it all the time. That there will be copulating and fornicating wherever you look – beneath the counter of the wool shop, behind the grille at the bank, in the schools’ staff rooms – everywhere you look there will be limbs writhing in ecstasy: only look upwards and you will see the mighty outspread wings of the Devil casting their reddish glow over all the land, and from the black and foaming pit of his fanged mouth the dreadful word will issue: ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’
Diners glanced surreptitiously over their shoulders. Eleanor’s voice rose. ‘Hush,’ he implored her. She apologized at once and moderated her voice. He thought she was glorious, glorious. Her green eyes glowed.
But no. It will not be like that. The inhabitants of Darcy’s Utopia will have as much or as little difficulty getting together as anyone else. Fear of rejection will inhibit many, others will cringe before fear of complications, responsibility, hurting others, failing to perform adequately, or having to reveal physical imperfections. Cellulite of the thighs keeps many a woman chaste: a potbelly keeps a man on the straight and narrow like nothing else. Most will stick to a partner chosen in the madness and self-confidence of youth, as they do outside Darcy’s Utopia. Women will continue to choose men – or men women; each sex always believes it is the other which does the choosing – the man being a little older, a little richer, a little more decisive than the woman, for this is how the majority of the human race pairs itself off, and why the myth of female inferiority is so prevalent throughout the world – it being the direct experience of so many children in so many households that Daddy knows best and Mummy’s a fool. The woman searches – though these days she doesn’t know it, matters of procreation being so far from anyone’s thoughts – for a good father for her young, adequate in looks, more than adequate as a provider; the man searches for a good, kind and competent mother for his children, not such a dog as to make copulation a problem – both settle for the best he or she can do. We rank ourselves amongst our peers very early on, so far as our physical attractiveness is concerned: we make our sexual moves within the group appropriate to our vision of ourselves. In Darcy’s Utopia people will make up and change their minds, try something new, retreat to the familiar, suffer from requited and unrequited love as much there as anywhere else: how can it be otherwise? But what they will be is discreet about it all. ‘What the mind doesn’t know the heart can’t suffer’ will be inscribed above every double bed in the land. No man will publicly humiliate a woman because she is ‘old’ or he finds her sexually unattractive: no woman will deride a man for his sexual insufficiency or because he is ‘weak’ or ‘wet’ or a ‘wimp’. It will simply be unthinkable so to do. Thus happiness and self-esteem will be maximized. Did you know, by the way, that statistically a woman tries out a new partner once in every two thousand copulations?