Okay? I’m lunching with Hugo tomorrow. Isn’t that exciting!
With all good wishes,
ED
LOVER AT THE GATE [5 Contd]
Ellen’s Marxist life with Bernard comes to an end
‘PERHAPS WE SHOULD GO on holiday?’ Bernard suggested to Ellen.
Perhaps that was what she wanted: a holiday abroad might make her eyes look at him and not beyond him.
‘Oh I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I think going on holiday is a very bourgeois sort of thing to do.’
‘How do you know? You’ve never been on one,’
‘Neither have you,’ she said. It was true. He longed to go. His elder brother had been to Yugoslavia, one of his sisters to Greece.
‘In Russia,’ he said, ‘workers most definitely go on holiday. They even get sent to health farms, to relax.’
‘The Soviet Union,’ said Ellen, ‘and herein lies the tragedy, has become a revisionist state. We can take no lessons whatsoever from the Soviet Union.’
If he lingered in front of travel agents, she hurried him on. ‘Poor exploited things,’ she’d say of the couples who entered, hand in hand, full of pleasurable anticipation. ‘How they fall for it! The sop from the bosses: the holiday abroad!’ And she’d take him off to the second-hand bookstall which specialized in the politics of the left, or to attend a useful meeting, and stand around with banners.
‘All the same,’ he said, when the spring buds burst on the seven trees that grew in Mafeking Street, along which Wendy had once half-run, half-walked, on her way to give birth to Apricot, ‘it would be nice to be somewhere different, just for a time, just for a couple of weeks.’
‘You will see the same pattern everywhere you go in the world,’ Ellen said briskly: ‘The exploitation of workers; the disruption of native cultures; evidence of the military-industrial ethos, you will walk like a fool amongst other fools: a tourist, staring at the remnants of the past, memorials to worn-out cultures, galleries dedicated to the ostentation and decadence of slave-masters. Bernard, if we have any time to spare, better to stand and gaze at the name of the very street we live in, “Mafeking”, and contemplate its significance. How many died, how many wretches suffered and starved in that particular disgraceful military episode, so that the workers should be duped yet again in the name of the Empire? Worker set against worker, race against race.’
‘You’re quite right, of course,’ he said. What else could he say?
He wanted to buy a car, but she said that was a waste of money and anyway what was the matter with buses, why should they ride, filling the air with fumes, while others walked? She put all spare money into her bank account. ‘You’ll only waste it,’ she said, and she was right and he knew it.
At the beginning of every term he filled in a form habitually distributed to all teaching staff, requiring details of authorized absences from college; for sabbaticals, or the marking of outside examinations, or simply because contractual staff-student contract hours had been fulfilled.
‘You shouldn’t complete that form,’ she said. ‘What are you thinking of, Bernard? This is nothing more or less than an abuse of your professional integrity.’
The degree of his paranoia rose and fell, easily and rhythmically, like some distant lake she had once heard of, which locals claimed breathed in, then out, as if a living thing, among pleasant groves: if she dropped in notions, like stones, when the lake was at its fullest with what power did the ripples surge and spread. Bernard took the matter of the offending questionnaire to the union forthwith: the local dispute quickly turned national: Bernard spoke to the press, rallied his colleagues; but alas, all too many wanted no more than a quiet life: Bernard confided that sometimes he had to eat alone in the staff dining room.
‘The point is not to be liked,’ said Ellen. ‘The point is to seize the day! There were times when even Lenin stood alone! If we stand firm, the bosses will collapse. All the same, Bernard, I suppose you could sometimes talk about other things.’
Ellen now worked at an adventure playground—the Christabel Focus—for underprivileged girls in an ethnically mixed section of the city. It was a wasteland of sour earth waiting development: wooden structures had been hastily erected: old tyres swung from ropes: a lean-to hut provided shelter. The Focus, as it was called, had been organized by separatist feminists. Muslim parents favoured it for their daughters because men were barred the premises. Ellen was no longer