Darcy's Utopia: A Novel by Weldon Fay

Author:Weldon, Fay [Weldon, Fay]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781480412699
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2013-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

Hugo’s further interview with Eleanor Darcy

Q: IT’S GOOD OF you to see me this evening. I’m very sorry about the disturbance at the restaurant and that we had to cut the interview short. I understand from Valerie—I’ve been seeing quite a lot of Valerie, as I think she’s indicated—that you were visiting your husband today. You must be tired. I imagine such prison visits are very trying?

A: No. Sometimes they can be quite heartening. Julian has lost a good deal of weight. He works out with dumbbells in the prison gym. A non-academic life suits him. Nowadays when his eyes light up for love of me, they are somehow clearer and brighter than they used to be; the lighting up is the more flattering. Julian used to be a good-looking man somehow clouded, dispersed, by layers of fat and the radiation of pure thought; now he is simply a cadaverous, eagly, extraordinarily randy man. We managed a cell on our own for over an hour.

Q: How on earth did you manage that?

A: Some of the prison officers are friendly. He has converted quite a few to Utopianism. Many thought it a cruel injustice that Julian should have to go to prison at all.

Q: I am reminded of Chernyshevsky, that most fierce and feared of Russian revolutionaries, who was put in prison and then converted the guards to Communism. They simply opened the prison gates and let him walk out.

A: If a thing can happen once it can happen again. I suppose you could describe Julian as that most fierce and feared of monetary theorists. To every age, its terrorist.

Q: Valerie has asked me if you could answer a few questions on her behalf. She is getting on well with Lover at the Gate, but sometimes the clues you provide are, well, enigmatic. Of course my piece will be very different from Valerie’s: I wouldn’t want you to think there was duplication: that we were taking up your time unnecessarily.

Hugo was beginning to feel oppressed by his surroundings. The shiny black sofa, the shabby furniture, the dull suburban road the other side of a forlorn garden, seemed some kind of irony. He did not believe Eleanor Darcy lived here. She merely pretended to; he felt the minute he left she and Brenda packed up themselves and the children and took off to more exotic surroundings. Yet was not this how most of the world lived, and thought themselves lucky to do so?—once survival was accomplished the struggle for ordinariness began.

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