Q: It’s good of you to see me this evening. I’m very sorry about the disturbance at the restaurant and that we had to cut the interview short. I understand from Valerie – I’ve been seeing quite a lot of Valerie, as I think she’s indicated – that you were visiting your husband today. You must be tired. I imagine such prison visits are very trying?
A: No. Sometimes they can be quite heartening. Julian has lost a good deal of weight. He works out with dumbbells in the prison gym. A non-academic life suits him. Nowadays when his eyes light up for love of me, they are somehow clearer and brighter than they used to be; the lighting up is the more flattering. Julian used to be a good-looking man somehow clouded, dispersed, by layers of fat and the radiation of pure thought; now he is simply a cadaverous, eagly, extraordinarily randy man. We managed a cell on our own for over an hour.
Q: How on earth did you manage that?
A: Some of the prison officers are friendly. He has converted quite a few to Utopianism. Many thought it a cruel injustice that Julian should have to go to prison at all.
Q: I am reminded of Chernechersky, that most fierce and feared of Russian revolutionaries, who was put in prison and then converted the guards to Communism. They simply opened the prison gates and let him walk out.
A: If a thing can happen once it can happen again. I suppose you could describe Julian as that most fierce and feared of monetary theorists. To every age, its terrorist.
Q: Valerie has asked me if you could answer a few questions on her behalf. She is getting on well with Lover at the Gate, but sometimes the clues you provide are, well, enigmatic. Of course my piece will be very different from Valerie’s: I wouldn’t want you to think there was duplication: that we were taking up your time unnecessarily.
Hugo was beginning to feel oppressed by his surroundings. The shiny black sofa, the shabby furniture, the dull suburban road the other side of a forlorn garden, seemed some kind of irony. He did not believe Eleanor Darcy lived here. She merely pretended to; he felt the minute he left she and Brenda packed up themselves and the children and took off to more exotic surroundings. Yet was not this how most of the world lived, and thought themselves lucky to do so? – once survival was accomplished the struggle for ordinariness began.
A: You mean Valerie wants to know more about the role of children in Darcy’s Utopia? I thought she would.
Q: Well, you did speak of selection. Her liberal antennae were alerted.
A: Tell her all babies will be automatically aborted unless good reason can be shown why they should be allowed to proceed to term.
Q: Isn’t that a little drastic?
A: Yes. Even in Darcy’s Utopia it will take quite some getting used to. The decision to ‘choose’, or not to ‘choose’ will be taken away from the parents and left to an ad-hoc committee of neighbours. Are these two (or this one) not so much capable of loving a baby, as of being worthy of a baby’s love? If the verdict is that they are not, there can be no baby. Down the plughole with it, this little glob of potential life, this putative devourer of the world’s resources! The root of delinquency, the alienation, the violent and despairing habits of today’s young, has very little to do with the fact that their parents failed to love them – most adults look round quite desperately for something, anything to coo over, however erratically – but that their parents failed to be worthy of their love. Babies are born with a sense of fairness, justice, morality, and a great capacity for kindness and forbearance, and it is sheer disappointment in the character and nature of parent and world that changes this eager infant into a murderous teenager. Some survive, of course: time heals a few wounds, wounds a few heels. The teenager gets older, encounters some nicer, more controlled, more kindly people than he or she ever found at home – most people behave worst in their own homes – and with any luck comes to understand, yes, there is an aspiration or so floating around out there, and, if he, she, hasn’t seen too many horror movies, been too beaten up in body and mind, regains a little faith in a world at least potentially redeemable. He, she, grows up into a mortgage-paying, law-abiding adult who at least wants to give his, her, own children a better chance. And may or may not have the resolution, the constancy, so to do. Not to love, which is easy, but to be in truth, in fact, in deed, lovable. I hear the divorced parent saying, ‘Oh, the kids are all right. They know I love them,’ but it isn’t true. The kids are not all right. You may love the kids, but you are not worthy of their love. You look after yourself, not them. You have betrayed them, and they hate you for it.
Q: Well, that is a matter of opinion. And this notion of an ad-hoc committee of neighbours, with power of life and death, is surely very eccentric.
A: What are juries but ad-hoc committees of neighbours? Juries saw no problem deciding whom they were to despatch from this world: let similar bodies decide who is to come into it.
Q: It seems to me that the citizens of Darcy’s Utopia are going to be kept very busy.
A: Indeed. Idleness, in this nation of no work, will not be encouraged. There will be no ‘training in leisure’. Darcians will be hard at work, repairing the past, safeguarding the future; they will have no need of theme parks. Darcy’s Utopia has a Mission Statement, as does any corporate enterprise in the business world. ‘We are working towards a secular, unicultural, multiracial society.’ When citizens are called upon to make up their minds, pass laws or make regulations – their decisions will be infused with the light cast by this statement, and so by and large will work towards this end. It may be hard to take a step in the right direction, but it will be still harder to take a step in the wrong. We have a time scale, too. We give ourselves two hundred years to achieve it. If it doesn’t work, we rethink.
Q: Secular? But isn’t religion a civilizing force? Aren’t many of our social problems due to the decline of religion?
A: Now look. Nice orderly home-and-family-loving people are the ones who believe in God and even still go to church. They are nice people: they believe that everything ought to be fair, that is to say that virtue is rewarded and villainy punished. Since they can’t see it happening on earth they invent a heaven in which it does. And a kind of consensus develops amongst right-minded people in your neighbourhood, that if you keep to certain rules and rituals then by God, by magic, you’ll get to heaven, you won’t even have to die. Eat the wafer, chant the lyric, bow to Mecca: please God and he’ll be kind. But these people are not nice, orderly, home-and-family-loving because they believe in God. The temperament comes first. Acknowledging God is effect, not cause. And institutionalize the religion, any religion, and you’re in trouble. Nice people become guilty people, cruel people, unhappy people, trapped in belief structures their temperaments don’t agree with, taught peculiar beliefs in school, threatened by hell and afflicted by superstition. And what terrible damage they do, have done through the centuries, from the Inquisitor General to Stalin, to your young neighbour in the IRA who believes in the Catholic God and uses that to justify his murdering you in your bed, to the Mullah who whips up the faithful to civil strife in the name of Allah, to the Moonie who steals your children’s money and affections.
People like rules: it is not good for them to have them. The individual must come to his, her, own decision as to where morality lies. Do what you like in your own home, worship whatever God you please, but shut up about it in public. In Darcy’s Utopia church services of various denominations will exist, and blind eyes will no doubt be turned. Common sense will prevail. But the jury of neighbours who decide upon your fertility might not look too kindly upon you if they think you are going to bring up your children as Jehovah’s Witnesses or Servants of Baal, or use the terror of hell as a way of controlling them: or beat the soles of their feet if they get the Koran wrong.
Q: Won’t terrible injustices ensue?
A: Chance and luck will be a factor in Darcy’s Utopia, as elsewhere. But good luck attends the happy. Darcians will try to be happy, to avoid self-righteousness. The self-righteous seldom smile.
Q: Would you describe yourself as happy?
A: I’m getting there. I don’t have children, which makes it easier. To have these hostages to fortune wipes the smile from many a woman’s face. Consider Brenda. In Darcy’s Utopia parents will have some reassurance in the fact that at least the neighbours thought they were fit to rear children: some of the responsibility for failure, should failure there be, will rest with the community. But I like to think the neighbours, the ten just persons, men and women both, who have seen you in the shops, who have watched you cross a road, who understand your body language, will make the right decision.
Q: Could we get back to this uniculture of yours? Don’t you mean monoculture?
A: No. Monoculture assumes the domination of the single majority culture: that ‘they’ will be subsumed into ‘us’. That the eaters of curry must learn to love fish and chips, that husbands of four must become husbands of one, that young blacks must drive cars in the fashion of elderly whites: that the custom and laws of the majority will prevail. In a uniculture this is not the case. A uniculture is a matter for rational decision: we will be prepared to make value judgements. Better a culture in which men have one wife and women need not shroud themselves in black, we’ll say. Or perhaps we won’t. Better one in which marriages are arranged than left to love. Let us all sing the Darcian Anthem every morning at ten a.m. Let men wear skirts, not women trousers. Let us all change our names four times in our lives. Let us take our education in our middle not our opening years. Or whatever is decided. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll change it. And if you don’t like it, you can live somewhere else. And we might even divide Darcy’s Utopia into four and have a different Mission Statement in each, and citizens can move to the one they prefer: or work to change the one they’re in, if they prefer. Oh yes, Darcy’s Utopia will be all freedom and hard work, and all alive and energetic with a perpetual sense of achievement. Who will need religion when heaven is here on earth?
Q: This unicultural society of yours. Isn’t it going to be rather dull? What about the richness, the diversity of the multicultural society in which all decent non-racist folk take such pleasure?
A: Goodness, how you do sometimes remind me of Bernard! How all-pervasive is the orthodoxy of right-thinking people. I have never heard a member of an ethnic minority obliged to dwell within the barbarous framework of a powerful, prosperous, white, allegedly Christian culture talk about the richness of the multicultural society. That is left for members of the host community to do, as it busies itself ghettoizing the minority; and as it ghettoizes it mumbles, and if you listen carefully you can just discern beneath the self-righteousness, the self-congratulation, the following: ‘Okay, okay, so you were having a hard time in your own country. You poor things! Come over here and join us by all means – but not too many of you, so we’ll vet you as you come in; and not make getting in pleasant or easy; and just please stick to your own districts, and keep your own religion and dance away to tambourines, or bow to the East, or whatever you like to do to remind you of home – or home as it used to be a hundred years ago but certainly isn’t now – and aren’t we clever, and kind, and good, the way we give you your roots back?, and with any luck your children will grow up well-behaved and pleasant; ours certainly aren’t; because your children come of a society which, being somewhere else and a long time ago, is probably better than ours. And speak your own language, please: we’ll even teach it to you in our schools to prove how understanding we are, just so long as you do our dirty work for less wages than our own kind are prepared to accept: just so long as you keep yourselves to yourselves, and don’t let your children marry ours, because what we’re all terrified of, so terrified the word’s gone out of the vocabulary. Let me whisper, can you hear? MISCEGENATION. The mixture of races! The future, in other words.’
In Darcy’s Utopia no one is frightened of the future. We welcome it. Because this is the world’s future, and we must hurry towards it with open and welcoming arms. There will be no black, no white, no yellow; no Asiatic, no Caucasian; we will all, individually, be multiracial, multicultural; and then indeed there will be a wonderful diversity, and God’s will done upon earth. So don’t come to me, Mr Hugo Vansitart, with your ‘rich diversity of language and culture’. The richness and diversity will be when your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, are of mixed race, mixed ancestry: look at each other with fondness and love out of eyes which slant every which way and who compare the shade of their skins with interest, not envy: because the paler the skin no longer means the longer-lived, the more prosperous, the more educated, the more capable of reaching the fullness of human potential. And when that has happened, why, we might be able to invent a God as good, as moral, as human beings. That is quite enough for today.
Q: Could I just ask, before I go? You have on occasion referred to someone called Nerina –
A: Is your tape switched off? Good. Nerina remains off the record. Things are stirred up enough as they are, don’t you think? Nerina was someone – is someone – whom Bernard tried to help. He shook religion out of her mind, as it were, and into the vacuum rushed something rather disagreeable. Nerina is a very pretty, very bright girl; of Muslim background, though no one in the family actually ever went to a mosque – well, only her brother. You know how fanatical the young can be. Unfortunately and unwittingly Bernard angered her. And that is why Julian is in prison. And why I sit here, husbandless, dependent upon social security supplemented by such pitiful amounts of money as I can wring out of the national press, and Bernard genuflects once more, fled back to his baptismal church, terrified by the very notion of living outside it. All this, you might say, was Nerina’s fault – if only it was not clear to me that Nerina was the symptom, not the disease: the pustule, not the pox: that to this end, without need of her intervention, all would still have come. It is a terrible thing to laugh a person out of faith.
Q: A woman’s faith, too?
A: As I said, the greater includes the lesser.
Q: When you say that I think you’re laughing at me.
A: Now why should I do a thing like that? You are the most serious person in the world, Hugo, with your very neat suit, your very quiet tie, your hotel laundered shirt. I can tell from its whiteness, its crispness. Let me feel! Yes. You have to be careful of hotel cleaners: things come back very white, but don’t last long. Perhaps Valerie would wash them for you? Sometimes they have little bottles of stuff called Softwash on hotel shelves, which the guests take with them on leaving. Shall we go to the pub and have a drink?