of order. It was said that there ought to be more sharing and swapping, in the name of change, equality and the exploration of the self. Men and women, everyone agreed, were after all free and equal; marriage was a symbol of bourgeois oppression. One evening a row broke out when Jed Mantree slipped a beery hand into Ellen’s dress. Jed was a post-graduate student in psychology. His wife Prunella was present. She was pregnant and poorly.
‘Bastard!’ cried Bernard, belabouring Jed with his fists, splattering cheap red wine over books and walls. Ellen had to take Jed to casualty to have a cut above his eye stitched, as poor Prune was too upset to do it. They were away for hours. Bernard was in a torment of perplexity. Prune said dismally that she didn’t think it was right to stand between a man and his freedom. She went home to lie down.
‘See it in its historical perspective,’ Ellen comforted her husband when she returned in the small hours. ‘“Men make their own history,” to quote the master, “but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names and little cries in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.” Let me put it another way, Bernard, when you uttered your little cry “Bastard!” Ireland spoke through you, and your mother, and a whole history of sexual repression; the knee-jerk of an oppressed peasantry rose up in you when Jed’s fingers tweaked my nipples and you hit him, comrade in Marx though he was. You should have let him finger on. You should have been above it. All I had to do was step backwards. I didn’t mind. Neither did Prune. But how could you help it? Marx acknowledges the inevitability of your protest. Understands and forgives it, just like Jesus. I really do believe sexual possessiveness is something we should struggle against, no matter how difficult we find it. Of course Jed should not have tried to come between us; it was a counter-revolutionary act on his part, Trotskyite even, when you think about it, but in that act was Praxis, the moment when theory becomes practice, and you should not have interfered.’
Ellen had long ago given up her part-time work at the optician.
She too was taking her degree in the social sciences. Bernard was by now a junior lecturer in the same college where he had taken his degree. He was in a permanent state of outrage.
‘You are quite right,’ Ellen reaffirmed. ‘What are your employers but State parasites? As Marx so aptly put it, “men richly paid by sycophants and sinecurists in the higher posts, absorbing the intelligence of the masses, turning it against themselves.” Nothing changes!’
‘Let it work its way through him,’ said Ellen to Brenda, ‘let it work its way through and out; the harder I put it the faster it will happen.’
‘You want him to worship you,’ said Brenda, ‘the way Leonard worships Liese.’
Liese and Leonard had a wonderful wedding; now they lived with central heating and embroidered sheets.
‘I just want him to be rational,’ said Ellen.
‘I want, I want,’ said Ellen, pinning up above their bed her favourite William Blake print. It was of a man reaching out for the moon, crying ‘I want, I want.’
‘Not babies, I hope?’ asked Bernard. ‘What sort of world is this to bring babies into? Nuclear war is inevitable.’
‘Not babies,’ said Ellen. ‘According to Marx, you are quite right, war is inevitable.’ And she got out of bed, looked up the page, and read, ‘“A reduction in international armaments is impossible; by virtue of any number of fears and jealousies. The burden grows worse as science advances, for the improvements in the art of destruction will keep pace with its advance and every year more and more will have to be devoted to costly engines of war. It is a vicious circle. There is no escape from it—that Damocles sword of a war on the first day of which all the chartered covenants of princes will be