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