have none in this society of yours you seem so proud of. Close them! Simply open the doors and let everyone out, into the streets of your horrid societies, littered already with the homeless, the lost, the indigent, those who have had the misfortune to be three days without washing—after that clothes and body smell so there is little chance of either employment or rehabilitation: they will be back out on the streets anyway as soon as their sentence is up. Why wait? Why hang about? If any prisoners are by common consent truly and irrationally violent let them be shut up in secure hospitals, but kindly dealt with in the most pleasant circumstances possible. Ugliness in the external world is the cause of much internal ugliness. Deglamorize crime, say I: define the criminal as insane, and he may be less anxious to be a criminal. The heavier the sentences for rape, the more rape there is. Hadn’t you noticed?
Q: You have that the wrong way round. Surely?
A. No, I have not. A man rapes a woman because he wants to do something very nasty to her, pay her whole sex out for not managing to save him from distress, for not being worthy of his love—and the nastier the community tells him it is, the more likely he is to do it. Of course it is a horrible thing for a man to do, but nothing is gained, practically, by underlining this fact—except I suppose it comforts women to feel the judiciary begins to take their woes seriously. Eight years slopping out! Ten years! Twelve! But it doesn’t stop rape. On the contrary. There will be very little rape in Darcy’s Utopia: generation by generation it will fade away, as only women fit to be loved by their children are allowed to bear them. And since if you want money you have only to stand outside a cash disposal unit to receive it, on any day of the week, so there will be little point in crime. That is enough for today.
Q: Don’t go. Let me get this straight. You are seriously relying on the distress of exile to deter the wrongdoer?
A: It used to be considered so. The newspapers of my childhood were full of the sufferings of exiled kings. To be sent from the kingdom, never allowed to return, was considered a fate worse than death. And we have so very many exiles these days—dissidents, political refugees—people who have escaped or been sent away from oppressive regimes, never to be allowed to return, and yet we fail to acknowledge their distress. The Iranian taxi driver in New York weeps for the land of his childhood, the friends he once knew: the family he once had: he has had to start his life again; he will never be a whole person, and he knows it. But he does not have the word for it: the word that defines it, explains it, and in the explaining makes it just a little better, as when a doctor diagnoses a pain. Exile. It is what the wife feels when her husband locks her out of his life: the husband likewise. That is why changing the locks on the door of the marital home is so powerful and horrifying a symbol. The erring partner is sent into exile, both real and emotional.
Q: I’m sure Lou wouldn’t change the locks.
A: I wasn’t speaking personally. Good heavens! Here comes Brenda with the coffee. We drink decaffeinated: she insists. I seem to remember the Holiday Inn coffee as being rich, powerful stuff. Don’t drink too much of it: it’s bad for the nerves.
Q: Thank you for the warning, Mrs Darcy.
A: Do call me Eleanor. Ta-ra.
Q: Ta-ra.
Valerie misses home
MAKE NO DOUBT ABOUT the pull of habit: the anxiety that ensues if any regular, familiar, pattern of event is disrupted, let alone stilled, however disagreeable the pattern of events might be. The first few mornings in Hugo’s company—usually a flurry of sexual activity, followed by a pleasant languor—prevented me from feeling any sense of early morning loss. As the flurries became a little more familiar, a little less accompanied by the shock of the new, indeed in general rather less, thoughts of home began to obtrude. I missed, of all things, breakfast. I missed Lou’s petulance, Sophie’s agitated search for missing garments, Ben’s repeated refusal to feed the cat with canned meat but only with tinned salmon: his apparent motive laudable—if he was a vegetarian, of the