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.
But your training is at stake, your professionalism: you cannot ask the question: so few can. Like everyone else you must have your face-saver; yours in particular being that, in the quality newspapers at least, the mind is interesting, the body is not. Well, keep your face saver; stay buttoned up. Don’t ask; I won’t answer. So many things you refrain from asking that you’d love to know. For example, how does it happen that I married a good Catholic at seventeen and here I am at thirty-something, childless? Is it because I am a bad woman, a selfish woman, the kind who chooses to stay childless: or am I an unhappy woman, an unfortunate woman, and can’t have them? Barren! Or just an unlucky woman because it just so happened my Catholic husband was infertile? Let me answer, at least this one unasked question.
Certainly it was Bernard’s initial belief, in the early days of our marriage, that contraception was a sin: Papal authority held it to be so, and Bernard’s allegiance was to the Pope. Because the Pope, according to Bernard and his friends, alone among all men had the ear of God, and God, it seems, thinks the more people down here on earth the better. God is the Great Factory Farmer in the Sky; closer and closer we are crammed together, the Pope our Bailiff, hatching our young for his profit, for, as the Bishop said to Marie Stopes, the purpose of man is to increase the flow of souls to God and to stand between God and his purpose is surely sin. And men like my husband Bernard, full of love and trust, look up to heaven with adoring eyes, victims of the phenomena of positive transference which the tortured so easily develops for his torturer, and plunge about in female flesh crying, ‘Only procreate and all will be well.’ Men do so long for someone to be in charge. In Darcy’s Utopia each man will attempt to read the mind of God and not rely on others to do it for him.
Q: Are you telling me that Darcy’s Utopia will be a secular society?
A: Yes, Darcy’s Utopia will be a secular society. Men and women can believe whatever they like about the nature of God, and worship whomsoever they like, from trees to cows to Mohammed, but in the privacy of their own homes.
Q: As in the Soviet Union in the heyday of religious persecution?
A: No. As in Darcy’s Utopia, in the future we aspire to. There are few lessons to be learned from history. Because things went wrong in the past does that mean they will necessarily go wrong again? Of course not! Because we are different! Do we not know more than we ever did about crowds, power, group behaviour, motivation, national and religious hysteria and so forth? We know ourselves, as once we did not. I promise you, we have progressed! Had those early Communists received their education in a contemporary society, understood themselves and others better, they would have laid down a rather different and more workable framework for the new society. We contemplate past failures of humankind in its search for the perfect society and become depressed. It will never work, we say! But it will, it will! What did we expect? That we’d get it right first time round? How could we? It may take a couple more hundred years, a thousand, but we will get there. Let me repeat, in Darcy’s Utopia Church and State will be firmly separated: religious broadcasting will be forbidden on the grounds that it is divisive, racist, sexist, and an incitement to violence as belief structure clashes with belief structure – Christian at the hands of the Jew, Hindu the Muslim, Protestant the Catholic, Sikh of Buddhist, Capitalist of Communist, and of course vice versa – and no doubt the Moonies and the EST-ites will soon be kneecapping one another with a clear conscience. Incitement to non-thought, conversion to blind belief, will be considered the most antisocial of all crimes. It is from closed minds that so many social evils flow.
Q: I thought you said money was the worst thing?
A: You try and catch me out, Mr Vansitart. The streams of evil flow and merge: their source is myriad. Are you hot? Why don’t you take off your jacket? Here...
Valerie listened for suspicious sounds on the tape, and despised herself for so doing. But only the occasional innocent – so far as she could tell – twang of the springs of the hideous black and red sofa punctuated the interview.
A: Mr Vansitart, what courage it takes to think! To acknowledge that we stand alone on this whirling ball of rock which we call earth, hurtling God knows where through space, and that there is no God to hold our hand! God not so much the Prime Mover – we can do without him – but the God who understands what’s going on. There must be some really nice, other, stationary, less-inconceivable place, we think, than the world; some permanent non-whirling static heaven somewhere where fairness and justice triumph. Surely! If we can conceive of it, it must exist. And it would be really nice to think that the ones who keep the rules are going to get there. So we dream up sets of rules, we try and live by Holy Books, from the Ramayana to the Koran to Das Kapital by way of the Bible. Words are magic, words are power.
Don’t you think, Mr Vansitart, that the really nice thing about human beings is the notion we do have that things ought to be somehow fair – though nowhere in nature do we have evidence that God understands the concept at all. Justice simply does not seem to be built into the system. All I can conclude is that the human race, at its best, is really very much pleasanter and kinder than this God it invents to hold its hand. The closer men get to God the nastier they get: the more judgemental, the more punitive, the more murderous in their determination to have got God right, and everyone else to have got God wrong. The Pope says that since God initially made us multiply, as is obvious from looking around even the famine fields of Ethiopia, we’d better do as much of it as we can. God needs his nourishment, his daily fix of souls as by the million every day we drop off the perch, and so Bernard and Apricot – renamed Ellen as a condition of marriage — if they’re to do God’s will, must reproduce till the cows come home, though nowadays of course the cows never leave home in the first place, they’re linked up permanently to milking machines. So how can they come home? In and out, in and out, him into her, after the pub – drunkenness is encouraged in Catholic societies: another incitement to non-thought – bang, bang, whoosh, and bingo, there’s another one. If you don’t look out.
Q: I take it you wouldn’t describe yourself as having a maternal nature?
A: How right you are. Congratulations on a comparatively giddy question. Fortunately during the first few months of our marriage Bernard, how shall I put it, practised asceticism – I had no chance of getting pregnant, or very little, and after that he was converted to Marxism, and though we were at it all the time for years, he stood over me daily to make sure I ingested a contraceptive chemical. ‘Ellen! Time to get up! Time to take the pill!’ It was our duty, he felt at that stage, to desist from overpopulating the planet. And what sort of world would we be bringing children into? It wasn’t fair on them to give them life. Better not to exist at all. Spared the curse of life! With Bernard, if it wasn’t one thing it was another. In Darcy’s Utopia the paradox of procreation is dealt with very simply. But I think you’re still much too stiff and male and professional: I will talk about that with Valerie, when she can be bothered to come along. What I do so like about Valerie is how relaxed she is! I have talked more than enough for today. Shall we ask Brenda for a cup of coffee? Or I have some vodka in the fridge.
Q: Vodka? What a brilliant idea.
Here the tape ran out. Hugo told Valerie that nothing else of import had been said. ‘What did she mean by relaxed?’ demanded Valerie. ‘I’m not in the least relaxed.’ He did not reply, merely smoothed her lips closed with his fingers, only to part them again with his tongue. ‘Incitement to non-thought!’ ran through her head as she went under, into the soft seas of non-self.