is just too ruthless for comfort. Ellen and Lady Macbeth? Nothing in it!’
Valerie’s garden interview with Eleanor Darcy
Q: SO YOU STAYED happily married to Bernard for fifteen years?
A: Journalists always make the assumption that to be married for a number of years is to be happily married for those years. What has the length of time to do with it? Couples stay together for any number of reasons other than happiness: questions of money, children, accommodation or idleness, depression, habit, fears above all: fear of what the neighbours will say, fear of loss of status—fear of going without sex being chief amongst them. And I daresay the worry about what to do with the cat or the problem of finding spare time in the executive diary keeps other unhappy couples together. But yes, as it happens, Bernard and I were happily married for fifteen years, in the face of all likelihood, and against the prognostications of our friends.
Q: To what do you attribute this success?
A: Success? Why do you equate being happily married with success? However, we’ll let that pass. I attribute it to frequent and energetic sex, to our not having children, to my habit of deferring to him, and lying about my actions, my whereabouts, my politics, my emotions and my orgasms.
The day was bright. They sat in the back garden at Eleanor Darcy’s insistence. Trains passing the other side of the wooden fence interfered with the recording. Brenda’s children played in the paddling pool. Valerie faced into the sun. Eleanor wore a pretty straw hat. Valerie wore a little scarf around her neck to hide Hugo’s love bites. She could not see the state of Eleanor’s neck because Eleanor wore the collar of her crisp white blouse up. Why, on so hot a day?
Q: But isn’t this dishonest?
A: Of course. You asked me how I stayed happily married and I replied. The reply is honest; you just don’t like it.
Q: But isn’t marriage about partnership, trust?
A: Yours may be. Mine are not.
Q: But surely women have a right to sexual fulfilment? Men should work to achieve it. The woman ought not to lie about these things, or how will men ever learn?
A: There is no such thing as a ‘right’ to anything: Right to Life, Right to Choose, Right to Housing, Right to Orgasm—all it means is ‘it would be nice if only’. Of course it would be nice. It is just that so many desirable ends are incompatible. Or, if interests overlap, they do not necessarily coincide. What is good for the child is often not good for the parent, and vice versa. What is best for father and child may be perfectly horrible for the mother. And where sex is concerned it is perilous to talk about shoulds and oughts. Shoulds and oughts end in far too many impotent and guilty middle-class men writhing around hopelessly in the beds of friends and strangers. The upper and working classes, being less verbal, less given to talk of shoulds and oughts between the sheets, have less trouble, if you’ll forgive me, simply getting it up and putting it in, to the relief and satisfaction of everyone concerned. In Darcy’s Utopia there will in general be little talk of ‘rights’. And in sexual matters men and women will aspire to individual pleasure not proper behaviour, and go about it however they see fit, and with any luck without too much talk about it.
Q: I am interested in this Utopia of yours. I am sure our readers would like to hear more about it.
A: Then bully for you and bully for them, though I suspect you’re lying. Now I know Utopianism has recently had a bad press. Unrealistic, naïve, elitist to envisage a better society, a perfect state, and work towards it. We have decided human nature is bad, that people only work for money, respond only to the profit principle, and must be controlled by threats and punishments. They forget that it is ‘we’—or ourselves on a good day, ‘society’ as we call it—who understand that punishment is appropriate. In other words, that we are good. When we get it together to be so. And what else are we to do, not just as individuals, but as a society, but plan some kind of future for ourselves? Drift on as we have been: in our sour, brutish, dangerous cities, in our pesticide-soaked countryside: the will of the people increasingly triumphant, and not its best will, likely as not