A: I will not overburden you with my views on Darcy’s Utopia, the multiracial, unicultural, secular society the world must aim for if it is to have any hope of a future. I know you will simply leave it all out when you come to write your history of my life. I know you are concerned with what you call the human-interest angle, how I came to be who and what and where I am. But I have been created by a society interacting with a self: you can’t have one without the other. You will hold me up to other women as an example, how to start life in a back street as Apricot Smith, an untidy, misbegotten child; be promoted to Ellen Parkin, working wife of the ordinary down-at-heel hate-the-government kind; and to become the true love and wife of Professor Julian Darcy, Vice Chancellor of the University of Bridport.
You don’t care that Darcian Monetarism and the Bridport Scandal changed the thinking of nations: you just want to know how it was that in three decades God and the Devil between them managed to promote me from Apricot to Eleanor, by way of Ellen. And yes, it was promotion. As Eleanor Darcy I can go anywhere: it’s like a little black frock: you can dress it up with diamonds, dress it down with a cotton scarf: it always looks right. As Ellen Parkin I was only fit to run down to the corner shop in my slippers, or queue up for family benefit. And who would be interested in Parkin’s Utopia? Darcy’s Utopia has a much more convincing ring. Parkin smacks of small back streets and long-term illness – what’s left when the Devil has flown, sucking love out of you as he goes, leaving a burned-out patch behind. Names are magic, believe me. Better to be out of love as Eleanor Darcy than Ellen Parkin. The Ellen Parkins of the world love only once, and if it goes wrong give up.
Q: But you don’t change your nature by changing your name, surely?
A: Oh yes, you do. My advice to everyone is to change their name at once if they’re the least unhappy with their lives. In Darcy’s Utopia everyone will choose a new name at seven, at eleven, at sixteen and at twenty-four. And naturally women at forty-five, or when the last child has grown up and left home, whichever is the earliest, will rename themselves. Then life will be seen to start over, not finish. It is a perfectly legal thing to do, even in this current fearful and unkind society of ours; no deed poll is required. So long as there is no intent to defraud, anyone can call themselves anything at all. But so many of us, either feeling our identities to be fragile, or out of misplaced loyalty to our parents, feel we must stick with the names we start out with. The given name is a dead giveaway of our parents’ ambition for us – whether to diminish or enhance, ignore us as much as possible or control us forever – and the family name betrays our social origins. No, it will not do. It will have to change.
Q: I see. You spoke earlier of the Devil. Our readers are not so domestic as you suppose – any article on Good and Evil enjoys high readership figures. Do you believe in the Devil?
A: Of course. It’s unsafe not to. And what a grand creature the Devil is in himself! How he sucks energy even from where he stands! He is all temporary fire and sparks, terror and drama, whisked up out of nowhere: but when he flies off you see the real damage that has been done: something permanently denatured, altogether seedy and totally ignoble. To believe in God is to believe in the Devil. It is quite an insult to God to deny the Devil’s existence.
In Darcy’s Utopia, men will believe in the Devil in the sense that they will be sensitive to the forces working away within even the best planned of their social structures, bent on their destruction. As it is with people, so it is with these social structures – by which I mean the government, the church, the civil service, educational and caring organizations, lobbies, societies for this and that, quangos and so forth and so on. Wherever, in fact, people are gathered together in the interests of the better and more humane organization of society, there the Devil lurks. The greater the striving for good, the nearer the approach to it, alas, the harder and sharper the fall. In Darcy’s Utopia everyone will understand that the more extreme and present the good appears, the more pressing the danger that it will be promptly overthrown. Oh yes, in Darcy’s Utopia we will be on our guard. We will be vigilant and, what’s more, will understand what we must be vigilant about. We will not hide behind abstract terms such as ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’, ‘justice’, ‘dignity’. We will have lesser words, with more meaning.
Q: Talking about words, Mrs Darcy, what a pretty and unusual name Apricot is. How did you come by that? Was your mother particularly fond of fruit?
A: There was not much fruit about when I was a child. Sometimes we had sliced peaches for afters. So far as I’m aware, my mother named me after her brushed nylon nightie.
Q: You have a very soft voice. The tape recorder may not be picking up everything you say. I wouldn’t want to lose a word of it. Can you speak more closely into the mike? Her brushed nylon nightie, did you say?
A: That is what I said. There are a number of press cuttings which will help you as to the detail of my early life and times, and here in this folder are a few brief autobiographical sketches I happen to have written over the years. I hope you can read my writing. Do what you can with the material you have, and come back to me with any questions, or just for a chat. I have been rather out of circulation lately, preparing my magnum opus for publication. It’s good to be back in the world again.
Q: A magnum opus?
A: A blueprint for Darcy’s Utopia.
Q: You’ve found time for that as well?
A: As well as what?
Q: The court case must have taken up quite a lot of nervous energy.
A: My husband was on trial, not I.
Q: But Darcy’s Utopia is a kind of memorial to your husband?
A: He is not dead, Miss Jones, merely in prison. I am sure he would argue very strongly against many of my proposals, were he around to do so. I have borrowed his name because I like it, for no other reason. Besides, it is my name as much as his. After all, we are married.
Q: Of course. I’m sorry.
A: I think it is time to draw this interview to a close. We are going out for a healthy walk. I hear Brenda putting on the children’s wellies, against their wishes. Children do so like to go barefooted in the rain. Do you have children, Mrs Jones?
Q: I have two.
A: Lucky old you. I have none. Will you show yourself out? I have been sitting on my leg, and it’s gone to sleep.