weakness for the occasional Irish stew, on the greasy side. Rhoda and my father lived on sausages and mash, and little crisp frozen chicken pies.
She wore a dress of fine and flowing black fabric and many long strings of blue crystal beads and a rather affected little red hat. Her hands were small, long-fingered and strong. The tape recorder sat on the table between a fluted glass containing an artificial rose and the giant black pepper grinder the waiter had inadvertently left behind. The more he required her to talk about herself the more he longed for her to ask him about himself.
Q: But what are people going to do all day in this TV-less world? Can you give me some idea as to their sexual and marital mores? I take it second husbands are allowed?
A: There, you see! Trying to catch me out again! The fear of governments always is that if people are not occupied playing competitive sports or watching TV they will be at it all the time. That there will be copulating and fornicating wherever you look—beneath the counter of the wool shop, behind the grille at the bank, in the schools’ staff rooms—everywhere you look there will be limbs writhing in ecstasy: only look upwards and you will see the mighty outspread wings of the Devil casting their reddish glow over all the land, and from the black and foaming pit of his fanged mouth the dreadful word will issue: ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’
Diners glanced surreptitiously over their shoulders. Eleanor’s voice rose. ‘Hush,’ he implored her. She apologized at once and moderated her voice. He thought she was glorious, glorious. Her green eyes glowed.
But no. It will not be like that. The inhabitants of Darcy’s Utopia will have as much or as little difficulty getting together as anyone else. Fear of rejection will inhibit many, others will cringe before fear of complications, responsibility, hurting others, failing to perform adequately, or having to reveal physical imperfections. Cellulite of the thighs keeps many a woman chaste: a potbelly keeps a man on the straight and narrow like nothing else. Most will stick to a partner chosen in the madness and self-confidence of youth, as they do outside Darcy’s Utopia. Women will continue to choose men—or men women; each sex always believes it is the other which does the choosing—the man being a little older, a little richer, a little more decisive than the woman, for this is how the majority of the human race pairs itself off, and why the myth of female inferiority is so prevalent throughout the world—it being the direct experience of so many children in so many households that Daddy knows best and Mummy’s a fool. The woman searches—though these days she doesn’t know it, matters of procreation being so far from anyone’s thoughts—for a good father for her young, adequate in looks, more than adequate as a provider; the man searches for a good, kind and competent mother for his children, not such a dog as to make copulation a problem—both settle for the best he or she can do. We rank ourselves amongst our peers very early on, so far as our physical attractiveness is concerned: we make our sexual moves within the group appropriate to our vision of ourselves. In Darcy’s Utopia people will make up and change their minds, try something new, retreat to the familiar, suffer from requited and unrequited love as much there as anywhere else: how can it be otherwise? But what they will be is discreet about it all. ‘What the mind doesn’t know the heart can’t suffer’ will be inscribed above every double bed in the land. No man will publicly humiliate a woman because she is ‘old’ or he finds her sexually unattractive: no woman will deride a man for his sexual insufficiency or because he is ‘weak’ or ‘wet’ or a ‘wimp’. It will simply be unthinkable so to do. Thus happiness and self-esteem will be maximized. Did you know, by the way, that statistically a woman tries out a new partner once in every two thousand copulations?
She ordered her fish unfilleted. Delicately and discreetly she parted flesh from bone. Her nail varnish was pearly pink. He thought of Valerie waiting for him. He did not think of Stef at all. His children were safely in Norfolk, with his mother, so why should he?
Q: Really? What is the figure for men?
A: I don’t know. I’m sorry. In Darcy’s Utopia, however, though love will