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