fallen asleep. They had no television, of course: Ellen scorned it. The new opiate of the people, she jeered; now that religion had failed, TV had taken its place: the gods and goddesses of the new world were the stars and staresses of soap: the bosses’ latest plot to keep the minds of the proletariat addled. Bread and circuses! Holidays and TV! There was enough political theory for Bernard to read, God knew, without turning on the box. Let him get on with Das Kapital! ‘Praise Marx,’ Ellen was fond of saying, eyeing Bernard, ‘and pass the ammunition.’
One day Bernard sat up in bed and noticed the bruises on his wife’s neck. He didn’t think he had put them there but couldn’t quite be sure. He shook her awake. ‘Ellen,’ he said.
‘I have to sleep,’ she said. ‘So do you. We have an important meeting in the morning. If we’re clever we can win a procedural point on the Matters Arising Item 4 (2).’
‘Ellen,’ he said. ‘You win. I don’t think I can describe myself as a Marxist any more. I am resigning from the strike committee. I want a proper life the way other people have it. I want a car, a nice home, a working wife, a child, and to go on holiday.’
‘Capitalist swine,’ she murmured, and sank back into a sleep in which she tossed and stretched and he was sure muttered someone else’s name, but in the morning went with him to a garage and they actually bought a car, albeit second hand, and she let herself be dragged into a travel agency and they booked a holiday to Spain just like anyone else. And for some time after that they went to bed at the same time and Ellen gave up both Jed and the Director of Social Services; and when both threatened, in grief, spite and unreason, to report her infidelity to Bernard, said, ‘Tell away!’ and neither of them did, which rather disappointed her.
She felt no particular guilt: merely that marriage was a kind of old-fashioned scale: a tray on either side in which the fors and againsts had somehow to be kept in balance, and that extramarital sex had sometimes to be heaped on one side just to keep it steady because indefinable things were piling on the other. Were Bernard to be unfaithful to her, she was convinced, she would leave him at once. But she did not think he ever would be. Now he could see the world ranging round him, as it were, free, exciting and full of possibilities, neither limited by the encircling arms of Jesus, nor somehow squared off in a kind of boxing ring, with Marx, Engels, Lenin and Hegel fierce at every corner, barring all the exits. Now he could go inward, freely, into his own mind, Ellen had great hopes for him. She thought they could even be happy.
She thought she could in the end be legitimized, be more than just the girl who had married the first man who came along in order to get away from home: daughter of a mother who’d shacked up with her own mother’s boyfriend at that own mother’s unconscious behest—and had thereby had her life negated forever. Wendy betrayed by Rhoda’s desire for Ken: betrayed by the author of her own being: no wonder she had faded out of the world so quietly and gently and quickly, as if understanding it were better she had never been born. Apricot the accidental: Ken the instrument: Rhoda the foolish but all-powerful. Apricot, who, like Wendy, should never have been born. Apricot, now Ellen, reborn. Windscale the cat stopped coming into the bedroom: lay on one of the new chairs in the living room instead. At least that didn’t keep moving all night.
Hugo’s restaurant interview with Eleanor Darcy
Q: WOULD YOU SAY that feminism played an important part in your life, Mrs Darcy?
A: As I have already explained to your colleague from Aura, Mr Vansitart, I was a feminist of the socialist variety. Don’t the two of you discuss me? I have a feeling you have become quite close. Giddy, even. Perhaps too close, too giddy, to allow much time for discussion? Let me say I believed that the wrongs of women were interconnected with and subsidiary to the wrongs of man; that to work for the revolution was to work, indirectly, for women. That as the State withered away, so would sexism, racism and all other unpleasant social evils. Our