She had a head start, of course, what with her mother being immaculate too. I don’t somehow see Wendy as having me that way. We succumbed to temptation once, Bernard, but I’m sure Mary will forgive just so long as we never, ever do it again.’
Bernard let her hair go.
‘You win,’ he said. ‘I’ll become an atheist.’
‘That’s going too far too fast,’ said Ellen, getting into bed. ‘The position mightn’t hold. How about an agnostic?’
But he felt that position to be untenable. It was cowardly. If you lost your faith you lost your faith, and that was that. He understood the absurdity of his beliefs. He regarded them now as he regarded other ordinary but embarrassing habits of youth: odd hair styles, a passion for cheap cologne, eccentric dressing, strange obsessions—all things to be grown out of. He even thanked Ellen for this new, sudden, unexpected leap into maturity. But some few weeks later she happened to bring home from the library a volume of Marx’s early writings.
‘It was a conversion experience,’ said Ellen to Liese. ‘His hand shook, his mouth fell open. He believed.’
‘Well,’ said Liese, who was now engaged to a nice young architect called Leonard, and who was proud and plump and stuffed as full of delight as a feather cushion—over-stuffed, Brenda remarked—‘I suppose it’s better to believe in something than nothing. Leonard isn’t orthodox, thank goodness, or I’d have to shave off all my hair. He worships me, I’m glad to say.’
A bust of Lenin stood on the mantelpiece where once the Virgin smiled. The theological books went to the jumble sale; political science took their place. Friends no longer came to gather in prayer, but to further the revolution. Bernard believed. He understood that heaven and hell were here on earth, and that little by little heaven would drive out hell, and that the efforts of men of intelligence and goodwill should be dedicated to hastening that process; and that even the word ‘should’, with its implication of duty and overtones of guilt, was in this brave and newly discovered world, inappropriate.
‘“The abolition of religion as the ‘illusory’ happiness of men is a demand for their ‘real happiness’,”’ he read aloud to Ellen. ‘“The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.”’ How bright his eyes were. His shoulders squared and straightened. He no longer walked in guilt, but in hope.
The twin beds went. The saxophonist’s widow refused to lie in Ken and Rhoda’s bed, so Ken offered it to Bernard and Ellen: they took the offer, rightly, as a gesture of approval, and the four of them carried it one very early morning from No. 97 to No. 93. ‘You can’t lie in that bed,’ said Brenda, ‘it isn’t decent. It’s the bed your mother and your grandmother slept in with your father.’ She was engaged to a lecturer in economics: a straightforward young man. They were saving to get married. They would have everything new.
‘I like the idea of it,’ said Ellen. ‘It gives me a sense of continuation.’
The bed was old, soft and lumpy. She felt she would draw strength from it. She needed strength: her and Bernard’s nightly love play would go on for hours, limbs lurching and surging in some kind of gladiatorial combat as if the one who weakened first lost. Oddly, she felt less happy, less content, less well able to go about her daily business than she had in the three painful months of her sexual abstinence. Perhaps sex was a drug. The more you had the more you needed. First the relief, then the surge of pleasure, then the peace: then the niggle of dissatisfaction growing into active discontent, into a sense of loss, of desperation, of craving—and then the fix. People would do anything to others in order to get the fix. But perhaps she was just short of sleep: there were other ways of looking at it.
‘Marxism is to Catholicism as methadone is to heroin,’ said Ellen to Belinda, ‘but enough of an improvement to count.’
Belinda said she didn’t have a boyfriend, but Brenda, Liese and Ellen knew she was having an affair with a married man.
‘She has low self-esteem,’ said Brenda, ‘from being so fat, and a romantic nature. That’s how it ends up.’
Ellen said, ‘Then why doesn’t she go on a diet?’
The remark got back to Belinda, who didn’t speak to her for years thereafter.
‘Apricot was one thing,’ said Belinda, ‘but Ellen