flourish, and pleasure abound, furtive alliances be formal and reformed, and sexual excitements be breathless and secret and glorious, marriage will be beset around with difficulties and obstacles and deep seriousness: only the very determined will marry. Livings together will happen in abundance, of course; but marriage will be another matter: marriage will imply intent to procreate. Of all matters in Darcy’s Utopia only procreation will be subject to rules and regulations. It will be a most serious matter. You cannot have women popping new people out of themselves just at random, when and where they want. In Darcy’s Utopia there are bound to be children, but their parents will be carefully selected, and being in short supply they will grow up in a world which loves and admires children and finds them interesting, and doesn’t herd them together in schools to get them out of the way, dunk them in front of obscene videos to keep them quiet, and slap them about and threaten them in the streets, which is what happens in this society of ours which you seem to find both perfectly ordinary, and, worse, inevitable. Well, I don’t. How many children do you have, Mr Vansitart?
Q: Three. A little boy of eight and four-year-old-twins, girls. Loved and wanted children all of them. I find what you say monstrous. I cannot believe you mean it. You’re joking.
Hugo looked up in alarm as a woman in a black belted mackintosh and beret pushed her way through the restaurant towards him. He got to his feet. ‘Stef!’ he pleaded, but she slapped his face, there and then, in front of everyone. ‘Your mother brought the twins back. I’m taking Peter with me on holiday. The twins are in the buggy outside,’ she said. ‘You’d better bring them inside before someone steals them.’ And she left. Eleanor Darcy said, ‘Don’t bother about me. I’ll find my own way home.’
Valerie meets her lover’s wife
RECEPTION RANG THROUGH AND said there was a lady waiting to see me in the foyer. I was in the bath. In the better hotels there is always a telephone by the bath—the sense of importance of those who soak in the provided scented foam being thereby increased. ‘Look, I am the sort of person who is always in demand—always! Why, I can’t even take a bath without being pestered for my time and attention. I’ll come to your hotel again, and tell all my friends.’ And I said, ‘Ask her to come up,’ without thinking too much about it. It might have been my colleague Ann—who knew my whereabouts—or even my editor, come to congratulate me on the first pages of Lover at the Gate which I had faxed through from the hotel’s secretariat—or even Sophie, come to apologize, though I hardly imagined she had been promoted from child to lady in the few weeks of my absence.
And I stepped out of the bath and wrapped myself in one of the big white towels in which these places specialize, and, with an innocence born no doubt of the habit of the past, opened the door.
A small indeterminate woman in a lightly belted black raincoat slipped in past me: she had wispy fair hair and I could see at once from whence the twins had inherited what I can only describe, as their nebulousness—a sense of the nebulae or star cluster that is better seen out of the corner of the eye. If you look too hard it disappears altogether into a kind of wistful, disappointed light in the night sky. Yet she managed to be a rather successful financial journalist. Perhaps all the figures permuting in her head had somehow sapped her reality.
‘Can I help?’ I asked, rather wishing I had more clothes on.
‘I am your lover’s wife,’ she said, and then I was glad I had so little on. I felt like flinging aside the towel. Hugo kept telling me my body was glorious and I had come to believe him. Lou never even looked, on Tuesday and Friday nights, any more than he looked at the instrument he played. He knew it too well. Just as he practised the violin every morning between nine thirty and ten thirty, so I always had the sense he practised his lovemaking on me, getting ready for the real thing, only this with me was not it: I was not it. With Hugo, I was quite definitely the performance: Stef, the more I looked at her, obviously a mere