to charm and wheedle his workers if he wants them to work for him: he will have to sing and dance to entertain them: enthuse them with pleasure for their daily toil: they will be paid with the world’s respect, and all around them there will be abundance. We will not be wage slaves any more. We will not need our wages. We may accept them, to oblige: to save another’s face. But that’s all. In Darcy’s Utopia there will be no wages, there will be no money.
Q: Oh come now! Easier said than done.
A: Not at all; it could be done even here—merely increase the supply of money until it becomes something of little value, as plentiful as grass: let it grow on every street corner, pour from the high street banks: see how little by little it is of less and less value: soon it is only stuff fit to engage the attention of those who love to indulge in the act of recycling: we will probably find that, pulped, bank notes are an excellent media for growing acorns into oaks. My husband Julian and I went on our honeymoon to Yugoslavia—annual inflation ran at 350 per cent. A hyper-inflationary economy. Yet people ate, drank, sang, laughed, rejoiced, loved and were happy. Talked—how they talked! The streets were noisy with greetings, chatter and friendship. It was there my husband and I began to develop our theories, Darcian Monetarism as it came to be called: that the answer to our current economic ills is not to control inflation but to encourage it until we cease to be a money economy altogether.
Q: Perhaps, being on honeymoon, you wore rose-tinted spectacles?
A: It is true we had a perfectly wonderful time. As I say, sex is the source of all pleasure, money is the source of all pain.
At this point the tape clicked to a stop. Neither Hugo nor Valerie attended to it. It had been running on unheard for some time, in any case.
LOVER AT THE GATE [2]
Apricot loses one mother and gains another
‘YOU CAN’T GO OUT like that,’ said Wendy to Apricot when she was four, ‘it’s freezing,’ and little Apricot, in nothing but vest and pants, ran straight out into the street and down the long suburban road to the small playground which a benign council had made for the children in the sharp triangle of land where the railway line intersected the water-purifying plant. Wendy ran after her child but her spiked heels slowed her, so she gave up and came back home and made herself a cup of coffee and read the stories in the back of her magazine. Or perhaps she took a swig of sherry.
That was in the sixties, in the years when it was safe for a small girl child to play unsupervised in a public playground, even in her underwear; all anyone had to fear was that she might catch cold. Those were the days: oh yes, those were the days.
When Ken got up that afternoon—he hadn’t come home till three in the morning—Wendy said, ‘I’ve really got to go back to work; I’m drinking too much: this life is driving me mad.’
‘What’s wrong with your life?’ he asked. ‘You have everything a woman wants. Why don’t you change places with me? Me, I’d love to do nothing.’ And he thrust his banjo into her hands and little Apricot, watching, winced.
‘But I can’t play the banjo,’ said Wendy, which irritated Ken even more. He made a gesture: she took it literally. But then all his audiences, these days, were unsatisfactory. He had his own band now; he was trying to make a go of it full-time, and it was difficult. No one wanted to pay for music; the general feeling was that it should flow free from the celestial spheres. Now he was off to a nine p.m. to one a.m. British Legion do: they’d hired a Dixie Band but when it came to it would want Country and Western: six in the band and a twelve pound fee. If you charged Musicians Union rates no one hired you: if you didn’t, your fellow musicians hated you: and to stand up there on a platform for four hours disappointing a room full of people was not his idea of living.
He’d given up woodwork, having driven a splinter through his thumbnail. It was too dangerous. His main income came through music. He needed his hands.
‘I suppose if I had another baby, Ken,’ said Wendy,