Utopia. But how about the side benefits! How religiously, if only in order to obviate neighbourly interference, the Darcian woman would observe contraceptive precautions! If she wanted a baby, what a good neighbour she would be, if only to keep in well with them: how she would feed her neighbours’ cats, take in her neighbours’ mail, refrain from drunken disturbance! My Sophie, for example—if she were in Darcy’s Utopia and in a couple of years were to become a teenage primigravida, which is perfectly on the cards—I reckon the neighbours would know better than Lou or me if she was fit to be a mother or not. As it is, it’s the family who takes responsibility for denying the baby existence, though permitting its death rather than allowing its life. ‘Family physicians’ enjoy the most extraordinary regard in our society: somewhere in our joint head we need to see them as knowing, honest, trustworthy, benign and caring folk—the truth of the matter being that they are as forgetful, spiteful and drunk as the next person—and as likely to grow old, lecherous and incompetent as anyone else. Your family doctor may know one end of a thyroid gland from another—with any luck—but no especial wisdom is granted him because he sits in a surgery seeing one coughing person after another all day; peering into ears and wombs and hearing tales of insomnia and worms. I have been indecently assaulted by many a wise old family physician in my time: the passion for mammary examination—which has saved almost no lives at all over the past few years, it now appears—has been fomented and encouraged by male doctors. I wish Hugo would come back. My thoughts are growing wild. He somehow nails me, pins me, centres me in one spot like a butterfly spread for inspection, wonderful, beautiful; he steadies me. This time he did not want to make love to me when he dropped the tapes off, and in truth I was a little tired. It would be nice to have some conversation as well as sex—dinner out somewhere, say. But his editor had to see him.
If Eleanor Darcy can manage a private room in a prison, perhaps she manages one in the local pub as well? But this is paranoia; of the kind her poor Bernard suffered from. The breathing lake, into which suspicion drops, like a stone, the ripples spreading! I trust Hugo, of course I do. My body is his, his is mine: one flesh. What was it Eleanor Darcy said? Love is the evidence you need which proves the benign nature of the universe. Love lets you know you are alive. Fate weaves its heady patterns all around; good luck attends you, nobody fools you: Hugo does not repair with Eleanor to the back room of the pub. Of course not.
Babies by licence only! There’d be abuses, there always are abuses: those with money would do what they wanted. Except that money, in Darcy’s Utopia, will count for nothing: just as it counts for nothing in Moscow today: where pockets are stuffed with roubles but there is nothing to buy. In Darcy’s Utopia money will be as meaningless as coconuts in a country where they fall from the trees: it will cease to be a corrupting cause. Would my neighbours have let Lou and me have Sophie and Ben? Of course they would. I am a good citizen, a nice person; I am just at the moment in the grip of a sexual passion, in the throes of love; I am alive: I who have been so nearly dead for decades, which is why I am currently neglecting them, just a little.
The phone goes. It’s Ben. How did he know I was here? ‘Mum,’ he says. ‘Dad said to call you if we wanted anything. He’s out at a concert. Sophie and me haven’t got a babysitter. There’s just us. Sophie’s got a pain—’
Sophie always has pains. It’s her age. I tell Ben to tell Sophie to put a hotwater bottle on it. How dare Lou leave them on their own? He either has to give up music, or organize live-in help of some kind. Where is Kirsty Bull? She can share his bed for all I care. Bath from ten forty-five to eleven; teeth for five timed minutes, lights out by eleven fifteen. Love from eleven twenty to forty on Tuesdays and Fridays should there be no concerts on either of those nights: otherwise do without. I