a student—she had been asked to leave, having flung a pot of paint at a visiting Minister of Education. She had planned both the paint-throwing and the expulsion. She really could not bear to sit and listen for a minute longer, as she explained to Bernard, to the lies of the imperialist lackeys. Besides, she wanted to give more time to the Focus. ‘But Ellen,’ said Bernard, ‘if you’d only stuck it another month, you’d have got your degree and we could have begun to live quite comfortably.’
‘I don’t work to be comfortable,’ said Ellen. ‘Why should we be comfortable when all around us are living in poverty?’ On Friday nights, when Bernard thought she was supervising Karate for Girls at the Christabel Focus, she met Jed in a motel. He fumbled and humped and heaved and never mastered the art of supporting himself on his elbows so she would arrive home quite squashed and breathless; which was only appropriate.
Bernard’s second sister went to Corfu for a holiday and came back with holiday snaps.
‘Sometimes,’ said Bernard, ‘I too feel like going to a hotel somewhere and looking out over a blue Mediterranean sea, You and I could have breakfast in bed, Ellen. Wouldn’t you like that?’
‘And who would bring us our breakfast, wash our dishes?’ she asked briskly. ‘The underpaid, the overworked, the exploited? How about us going to the study group on Marx and the Hegelian Fallacy next month in Blackpool? That’s by the sea.’
They went. Bernard fell asleep mid-seminar, and Ellen wept, or was seen to weep, from the shame of it.
There was an unfortunate incident at the Christabel Focus: two young girls, aged six and eight respectively, hitched up their trousers to better climb a rope ladder in the presence of a visiting male observer from a possible funding body. Flesh had been exposed. The elders of the local Muslim community objected: the girls were withdrawn from the playgroup. Bernard, by now spokesman for the local race relations committee, accused the Christabel Focus of racism: of wilfully offending the religious sensibilities of a minority group. Then a group called ‘Mothers in the Majority’ accused the Christabel Focus of lesbian activity—not without some justification—in front of the children; Ellen accused Bernard of being anti-feminist, and attempting to ghettoize ethnic minorities; he accused her of racism and white elitism. Bernard slapped Ellen. Ellen slapped Bernard back, and the next day, after a meeting of all parties at which the local Director of Social Services tried to please everyone and offended everybody, lingered after the meeting, provocative and yawning amongst the filing cabinets, until he caught on, locked the door, and embraced her thankfully. That affair continued for some months. She felt the balance of her marriage with Bernard was thereby restored.
Bernard and Ellen went to visit Belinda, who had renounced her separatist tendencies sufficiently to marry a graphics designer. He was poor when she married him. Now he was rich. They had an expensive apartment of minimalist decor: spindly lamps, metal and glass furniture, real paintings on the wall and not a pot plant in sight. Bernard loved it, and said so, as they returned to the dingy familiarity of Mafeking Street. ‘Bourgeois decadence,’ sneered Ellen, and he shut up.
They went to visit Liese. Liese’s father had died. She had inherited a chain of garages. Leonard had given up architecture to help with the business. It flourished. There wasn’t a book in the house, but there was an indoor fountain,
‘Inherited wealth!’ said Ellen when they got home, before Bernard could say a word. ‘The very prop of capitalism.’
They went to visit Brenda and Peter. Brenda was teaching PT in a secondary school. Peter was now a colleague of Bernard’s at the poly. They had a new car, and went to the cinema and ate out. ‘These days it takes two people’s wages to keep one household going,’ observed Bernard.
‘We’ll manage on one wage,’ said Ellen. ‘That is to say, yours. I have no time to work, I’m far too busy.’ Ellen had retired from the Christabel Focus over a question of principle. The polytechnic staff were now on a work to rule, though only at local level—a vote or so at national level having gone against them in spite of a good deal of cooking of the agenda—and she was, as she said, too busy getting a strike fund to so much as think of earning, let alone working; let alone getting to bed before Bernard had long since