He had shaved off his beard. His chin jutted sexily forward.
‘The criticism of religion leads naturally to the criticism of social relations,’ observed Ellen. ‘How wise Marx is: how everything applies: as true now as then!’
They rivalled each other in anti-deist sentiment. She worshipped him for worshipping Marx, or appeared to.
He had torn the little gold cross from around her neck, during love, with such force she was left with a welt which never ever seemed to vanish. She didn’t mind one bit, she said. She was proud of it: proud of his masterful nature—or appeared to be.
‘The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness, meekness—’ she read aloud from the early works of Marx, which she had never returned to the library, property being theft, and knowledge free for everyone.
Bernard looked robust rather than pale: had lost his translucency along with his soul. He looked others straight in the eye, he shouted their arguments down. ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heathen world; it is the very soul of soulless conditions,’ he harangued his erstwhile comrades in the streets, the vestries. They crossed themselves and prayed for him. This was what happened when you married a non-Catholic.
‘Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the prophets to the capitalists!’ he declaimed to his fellow students in the college library. Unlike Ellen, though, he always returned his books on time, so the librarians put up with him.
Bernard now argued with his teachers about his grades. Fainthearted, they took his essays back for remarking and upgraded them, as an airline always will a seat for a vociferous passenger. He plotted to overthrow the senior lecturer in psychology who was fifty-two and had not rewritten his lecture on Piaget for fifteen years. He worked up a cabal against poor old Professor Litmus, who taught statistics and never did anyone any harm, but droned on, and on, and at least never minded when his students slept. If Bernard could change, the world could change: and the sooner the better. He sat in smoky rooms like like-minded friends, talking late into the night. Wives and girlfriends made coffee. They rooted out revisionists, pilloried Trotskyists, jeered at the Anarchists, and even burned the works of Kropotkin in public. They chose Guy Fawkes’ night to do it and the gesture went unnoticed—he found a lesson even in this.
Brenda and Belinda were both by now feminists. ‘You shouldn’t make those men cups of coffee,’ they told Ellen. ‘Let them do it themselves.’ Belinda had lost two stone, given up her married man and was speaking to Ellen again.
Ellen put the point to Bernard.
‘As Jenny Marx said in 1872,’ she observed, ‘“in all these struggles the harder because the pettier part falls to women. While the men are invigorated by the fight in the world outside, strengthened by coming face to face with the enemy, we women sit at home and darn.” What do you say to that, Bernard? Or do we have to stay fixed in 1872? Is it revisionism to see some improvement in the human consciousness since then?’
‘I doubt it was 1872,’ Bernard said tenderly. ‘You’re just making that up, the way you make so much up. And I certainly don’t expect you to darn my socks. I have other things to worry about besides socks. Coffee’s different. Someone has to make it, and the women just sit smiling and nodding so it might as well be them. Just remember that as the State withers away, so will the many evils which accompany the capitalist state. Sexism included. Only work for the socialist revolution and you work for justice for everyone; blacks, women, oppressed minorities everywhere. Even musicians like your father. What did Marx say in his letter to Kugelmann? “Everyone who knows anything about history also knows that great historical revolutions are impossible without female ferment. Social progress can be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex—the ugly ones included.” Why don’t you ask Brenda and Belinda to come along to Friday meetings? I don’t think Liese would get much benefit from them.’
‘Brenda and Belinda are separatists,’ said Ellen, ‘and don’t go to meetings attended by men.’
‘You mean they’re lesbians?’
‘I do not,’ said Ellen. ‘Was that Marx’s joke about the fair sex, the ugly ones included, or yours?’ asked Ellen. ‘Marx said it,’ Bernard said. ‘Why?’
There was a feeling at the Friday meetings—more men than women attended—that sexual possessiveness between men and women was out