brought the letter, addressed to Hugo, up to Room 301. Hugo wasn’t there. Jack offered to take the envelope down to room service and steam it open. Valerie accepted the offer, recognizing a woman’s hand.
She is now talking of buying a new car, a BMW, and the man from the garage calls her Alison—always a sign that she’s about to be off. I’ll be sorry when she goes. I know I’m just the one in Apricot’s life who brings in the coffee and takes the clothes to the cleaners—but all the same she brings a kind of light with her, and what she has to say is interesting: there’s a lot in it, though it’s sometimes hard to tell when she’s joking and when she isn’t.
I’m writing because I want to put my point of view. I take this business of Utopia seriously, and I want you to do the same. Not Darcy’s Utopia; that’s Apricot’s crazy vision: but let’s say Brenda’s Utopia, a kind of toned-down version of Apricot’s. I want a world fit for my kids to grow up in. Look, I want a world fit for me to grow up in. I don’t want us to go back to anything, I want us to go forward to something. I want to believe that my daily life has a purpose which is more than just me. I used to be a real peacenik during the crazy time when we all thought we’d be pulverized by nuclear war, that the future was just rubble. I’d stand around in the town square with banners, with a lot of chalk marks on the ground for bodies, scaring everyone; saying if we don’t do something we’ll all be dead. And that really kept me going, believing I was right and everyone else was wrong. In fact the more wrong I could make them be, the more right I’d be. Those days, in retrospect, were dead easy. It was dead easy. Then Gorbachev came along and swept the ground from under our feet: and it began to look as if we had a future after all, but if so, what was it going to be? And we hadn’t got a thing worked out, not a thing. Down here in the outer suburbs we just sort of stand about, dazed, trying to make a living, and having babies (if you’re me) because it’s the only positive single thing we can think of to do, and even that’s suspect because the world can’t stand the weight of its population any more. Who can you work for who isn’t corrupt? Where can you go to get out of a climate of lies and hypocrisy? I want to rebuild the world, and I’m stumped as to how to do it: but at least Apricot is trying. When you write your articles don’t laugh her out of court completely. And a word of warning—though I suspect it’s too late—people who have anything to do with Apricot do seem to keep getting into emotional muddles: she’s a love-and-muddle carrier, the way some people are typhoid carriers. I’m inoculated from it, by virtue of general running exhaustion, I daresay, and the effort of trying to make ends meet can de-sex a girl fast. I do worry sometimes about Pete. Now he’s a mini-cab driver, he meets so many new people, women out shopping with money to spare and a whole lot of them are going to be better-looking and more lively and better conversationalists than me. And we do, the three of us, sit down to supper in the evening. Though perhaps Pete is safer on the road than he ever was at the poly. That place was a hotbed. I was relieved when Pete was made redundant; the shock waves from the closure of the media communications department just kept on coming. Jed was the only one who seemed to survive. I’m just saying beware: keep your hands on the steering wheel, your eyes on the road. The fever goes when Apricot departs, and you can be left in an awful mess. That’s all for now. With best wishes,
Brenda Steele
Valerie had some trouble finding matches to burn Brenda’s letter; she went down to the hotel bar for the first time, ordered a drink and purloined a cigarette lighter; returned to 301, used the bathroom basin as a grate, and put the ashes down the WC.
LOVER AT THE GATE [10]
Julian overdoes it
IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER Graduation Week that Julian turned