Darcy's Utopia (20 page)

‘The dog shit was real enough.’

‘No doubt it was. But the dog population of this town is phenomenal. You probably mistook the concern of two perfectly ordinary people in the gentleman’s toilet—you look dreadfully pale—for sexual overtures. Anyway, here you are, safe and sound.’

‘Why do you try and avoid it?’ said Bernard. ‘I have had a curse put upon me by Nerina. Look what’s happening to poor Jed’s wife. There’s no doubt about it at all.’

‘Well,’ said Ellen, ‘this morning I feel singularly blessed, so there you are! I am surprised at you, Bernard. You’re such a rationalist, and here you are talking about curses. I expect you’re still a little shocked after the accident, and somehow the feeling-tone of your childhood has returned. All that heavy, doomy religion. Punishment round every corner.’

‘I expect that’s what it is,’ said Bernard, cheering up. ‘God, I’m glad to be home.’

Brenda made the generalized motions to leave that the wife’s friend is expected to make on the return of the husband. Ellen said she’d run her to the bus stop only their car was a write-off. Brenda said she thought perhaps she’d call Peter and he could run her to the hospital. She thought labour might have started.

And so indeed it had. Brenda’s baby was simply and safely delivered, happy and healthy and not noticeably premature. Whatever had been going on in the Parkin household had at least not affected Brenda, or her baby.

A
: PUNISHMENT, YOU ASK?
Perhaps it’s because I’ve never been a mother that thoughts of ‘punishment’ do not spring at once to mind. What kind of punishment will be meted out to evil-doers in Darcy’s Utopia? Good heavens, it will simply be exile from the place. To know that ‘punishment’ entails being kept away can only make a place more desirable to those who live there.

Q: But where will these exiles go?

A: To any of the other traditional societies which will no doubt abound: to places where they lock murderers in death row for years while debating whether or not to kill them, or child molesters with violent gangsters who love little children, or imprison maintenance defaulters who cannot bear to finance their ex-wife’s boyfriend, while letting others off who simply abandon all responsibility for their children: where the horrors of TV are the reward for good behaviour, and large sums of money for the sin of usury. Let defaulters be sent out to live for a while in the grimy, exhausted, baffling society we take for granted: where we must travel in underground tunnels to get to our place of normally quite unnecessary employment (unnecessary for the group other than to keep the wheels turning; necessary for the individual to provide the money which must be made but brings so little pleasure), to be consumed therein, like as not, by flash fires; let our troublemakers-in-exile go but for a breath of fresh air and camaraderie on a boat upon the river—to find the rules of navigation so irrational, so clouded by the custom and practice of the past that even to do something so human, so natural, is to endanger life itself—they will soon reflect on the errors of their ways. The wheels of industry outside Darcy’s Utopia turn to make products no one wants or needs, from nuclear warheads to teabag squeezers. What is wrong with fingers when it comes to tea bags? Let them hop about a bit in the heat of the moment, it will do them no harm, and under those turning wheels the human spirit, the human love of doing nothing for quite a lot of the time, except tinkering a bit here, fixing a bit there, lulls in activity which alternate with periods of hard and concentrated work, is crushed. I hope
Aura
pays your telephone bills at the Holiday Inn?

Q: Yes. You were saying?

A: I was saying I wasn’t sure that it was morally sound thus to ask
Aura
to support you in your love nest. I think the
Independent
should foot at least some of the bills. If you were living in Darcy’s Utopia your punishment would be being required to slip out to Birmingham, say, for a day or two, to wander around the concrete walkways that intertwine above its tangled motorways, and breathe in the fumes, observe the struggling sun. You certainly wouldn’t do anything to threaten your stay in Darcy’s Utopia again—or at the very least you would keep your telephone calls short.

Q: You mean there are to be no cars in Darcy’s Utopia?

A: There will be a few cars, many bicycles, and recycling stations on every street corner. There will be a free restaurant in every square—and tree-lined squares will abound which will refresh the ozone layer—where such local people as love cooking will compete in the culinary arts.

Q: Hang on a bit. Who’s doing the cooking? Whoever it is isn’t doing it for wages, because there aren’t any wages.

A: The cooks are working out their Community Unit. How does that grab you, Valerie? No more income tax, merely a Community Unit charge. We will not be taxed out of existence, will not watch the noughts wiped out on our bank statements, as happens wherever as a group we try to make things fair, but into existence. We will not pay our taxes in money—what will be the point, for money now pours in a ceaseless stream from the high street cashpoints? Yes, Valerie, that is what it does.

Q: Not just on Sundays, as your husband advised the Treasury in those heady days of the Bridport Scandal?

A: He did not go far enough. Every day of the week. It is how we make the transition from the money economy to Darcy’s Utopia. And nothing will taste better than food cooked by the community cooks—the healthier, the cleverer, the more energetic you are, the more work will be required of you. As things are, twenty-five per cent of us work to support the seventy-five per cent who do not. I don’t think we will see much drop in production—merely in anxiety. And of course if work is unpleasant you will cross off your Community Units really quickly, and be free to do as you like.

Q: I still think people only work for money.

A: Do you? No. You work because you like to do it. Mrs Khalid worked to get out of the house, for company. Her husband, the lawyer, I daresay worked from a sense of Commitment. Nerina worked to earn the attention of Jed. Her black magic circle worked to raise the Devil, and I’m sure without thought of monetary reward. You may say ‘you are talking about professional people, self-conscious people, the clever and the intelligent’—and yes, I am, but we have machines to do work, and people whose intense pleasure it is to make these machines. Any man who will only work for money let him not work at all. I don’t mind keeping him. It seems a small price to pay to live in Utopia. As it is, now that money buys so little, now the thrill of owning a car better than your neighbour’s, a better designed pair of jeans, begins to wear off, people work not for money but for the status money brings. Valerie? Are you still there?

Q: I was just moving the phone to my other hand.

A: You did call me. I didn’t call you. Where were we? Competition in the culinary arts. Yes, Brenda is a terrible cook, but a very good mother. She will expend her Community Units in childcare, not the communal cooking pot. Cooked food can of course be taken away to eat within the family unit, or eaten on the spot with friends. There will be little loneliness in Darcy’s Utopia. Solitude for those who seek it, company for those who need it. The old and the young will mix freely: the young won’t hate the old any more because the old will be more than just a reminder that the flesh is mortal and youth and life itself a passing thing, because the old will no longer be miserable; they will not feel their uselessness: they will be full of tales not of the good old days, but of the bad old days before Utopia, and so they will be loved and not abhorred. There will be no granny beatings in Darcy’s Utopia.

Q: But if there were, if I can return to this subject of punishment, because I don’t quite share your trust in human nature, would simple exile really be sufficient punishment?

A: You worry about exile. Perhaps you feel exiled yourself? Unable, because of your behaviour, to return home; obliged to live forever in the Holiday Inn. How are you getting on with my life story? How far have you got? Has Julian turned up on the scene?

Q: Yes. He has. How long was it after his declaration of love that you left Bernard? I realize you don’t like these direct questions, and use them as a starting ground for your preoccupations, but perhaps subjects such as exile are really more suitable for discussion with Hugo. The readers of
Aura
are more accustomed to thinking about matters of the heart: they like to know about
you.
Do you believe in short, sharp shocks for offenders, in abortion, in fidelity and so forth? What life has taught you, in fact? Personally I find Darcy’s Utopia fascinating, but my readers aren’t at ease with politics.

A: More’s the pity. Let them become so. Let each and every one of them consider the nature and purpose of punishment. Do we imprison other people to satisfy our desire for vengeance, to deter others, or to reform the wrongdoer, by making prison so horrible he never does it again? We know this latter seldom works but we go on trying it as a solution. There will be no prisons in Darcy’s Utopia. I advise you to have none in this society of yours you seem so proud of. Close them! Simply open the doors and let everyone out, into the streets of your horrid societies, littered already with the homeless, the lost, the indigent, those who have had the misfortune to be three days without washing—after that clothes and body smell so there is little chance of either employment or rehabilitation: they will be back out on the streets anyway as soon as their sentence is up. Why wait? Why hang about? If any prisoners are by common consent truly and irrationally violent let them be shut up in secure hospitals, but kindly dealt with in the most pleasant circumstances possible. Ugliness in the external world is the cause of much internal ugliness. Deglamorize crime, say I: define the criminal as insane, and he may be less anxious to be a criminal. The heavier the sentences for rape, the more rape there is. Hadn’t you noticed?

Q: You have that the wrong way round. Surely?

A. No, I have not. A man rapes a woman because he wants to do something very nasty to her, pay her whole sex out for not managing to save him from distress, for not being worthy of his love—and the nastier the community tells him it is, the more likely he is to do it. Of course it is a horrible thing for a man to do, but nothing is gained, practically, by underlining this fact—except I suppose it comforts women to feel the judiciary begins to take their woes seriously. Eight years slopping out! Ten years! Twelve! But it doesn’t stop rape. On the contrary. There will be very little rape in Darcy’s Utopia: generation by generation it will fade away, as only women fit to be loved by their children are allowed to bear them. And since if you want money you have only to stand outside a cash disposal unit to receive it, on any day of the week, so there will be little point in crime. That is enough for today.

Q: Don’t go. Let me get this straight. You are seriously relying on the distress of exile to deter the wrongdoer?

A: It used to be considered so. The newspapers of my childhood were full of the sufferings of exiled kings. To be sent from the kingdom, never allowed to return, was considered a fate worse than death. And we have so very many exiles these days—dissidents, political refugees—people who have escaped or been sent away from oppressive regimes, never to be allowed to return, and yet we fail to acknowledge their distress. The Iranian taxi driver in New York weeps for the land of his childhood, the friends he once knew: the family he once had: he has had to start his life again; he will never be a whole person, and he knows it. But he does not have the word for it: the word that defines it, explains it, and in the explaining makes it just a little better, as when a doctor diagnoses a pain. Exile. It is what the wife feels when her husband locks her out of his life: the husband likewise. That is why changing the locks on the door of the marital home is so powerful and horrifying a symbol. The erring partner is sent into exile, both real and emotional.

Q: I’m sure Lou wouldn’t change the locks.

A: I wasn’t speaking personally. Good heavens! Here comes Brenda with the coffee. We drink decaffeinated: she insists. I seem to remember the Holiday Inn coffee as being rich, powerful stuff. Don’t drink too much of it: it’s bad for the nerves.

Q: Thank you for the warning, Mrs Darcy.

A: Do call me Eleanor. Ta-ra.

Q: Ta-ra.

M
AKE NO DOUBT ABOUT
the pull of habit: the anxiety that ensues if any regular, familiar, pattern of event is disrupted, let alone stilled, however disagreeable the pattern of events might be. The first few mornings in Hugo’s company—usually a flurry of sexual activity, followed by a pleasant languor—prevented me from feeling any sense of early morning loss. As the flurries became a little more familiar, a little less accompanied by the shock of the new, indeed in general rather less, thoughts of home began to obtrude. I missed, of all things,
breakfast
. I missed Lou’s petulance, Sophie’s agitated search for missing garments, Ben’s repeated refusal to feed the cat with canned meat but only with tinned salmon: his apparent motive laudable—if he was a vegetarian, of the kind who eats fish, so should the cat be—his real motive to irritate his father, who was daily irritated.

I missed the hassle, the subdued indignation of a woman who, her husband insisting on a ‘sit-down breakfast for the family’ and not one taken merely on the wing, on the grounds that a family that eats together stays together, has on that account to spend twenty minutes every morning getting up and down from her chair, fetching fresh coffee, making more toast, answering the phone, removing the cat from the table, irritating that same husband every time she does so, because he likes peace while he eats.
Must
have peace, he, the creative artist, having barely recovered from last night’s concert, already tense about the next. Why of all times of day should I miss this particular dreadful hour? Had there been some real achievement here, after all, in the ritual sopping up of breakfast aggro in the interests of happy family life? Which seems so often, in spite of all theory and effort, to be the maternal and not the paternal role? When I had finished
Lover at the Gate
I could perhaps persuade the editor of
Aura
to run a piece on the problem; I didn’t want to write it myself—I just wanted to know; to be told, for once, what everything was all about, not to be the one who did the telling.