Free Darcy's Utopia by Fay Weldon

married your father. I told myself it didn’t matter because they weren’t husband and wife but Mr Rowse said the ceremony made no difference. Sin’s eaten a hole in the lining of my gut. Now I’ve got that off my chest I feel much better. Make me some cheese on toast, there’s a dear. It will give me a pain but it’s worth it.’
    Apricot made Rhoda some cheese on toast, overcooked it and shrivelled the cheese.
    ‘Poor me,’ said Rhoda, ‘poor me,’ and she poured herself another cup of sweet strong tea, which burned all the way down. She wasn’t looking well. Her eyes were huge, her hair grey and her skin papery, but her heart remained childlike. The longer she lived with Ken the more like Wendy she became.
    ‘Poor you,’ said Apricot, agreeably. There was little point in taking offence, and no time to do so in any case. She had to pass her exams.
    Rhoda’s pain and Mr Rowse battled it out for well over a year. Rhoda took to table-tapping and séances and reported seeing the ghost of Wendy hovering over her bed at night. Ken was always asleep when Wendy appeared.
    ‘I’m surprised she bothers,’ said Ken. ‘I’m surprised she isn’t too busy delivering milk bottles in the sky.’
    ‘She’s like she was the day she had Apricot,’ said Rhoda. ‘Her hair all frizzed out like a black halo and ever so sweet. One thing you could say for my daughter, she never let herself go. Even when she’d had a drink or so too many she still had her stocking seams straight.’ Since Wendy had taken to hovering over the bed, Rhoda had reclaimed her as a daughter and now spoke freely of the past.
    ‘She should have consulted me about Apricot’s name,’ said Ken. ‘She had no business not doing that.’ Some things out-rankle death.
    ‘Are you sure you shouldn’t see a doctor?’ asked Apricot, as Rhoda’s cough grew nastier. She smoked sixty cigarettes a day. The white paint on the window frames was encrusted with black. ‘What can a doctor do for her?’ said Ken. ‘When your number’s up your number’s up.’
    Money was tight. Ken found it hard to adapt to the new age. Music was now for the young, not the middle aged: folk had taken over from jazz as the language of the radical and the sentimental. Ken’s band dissolved and reformed under a succession of names. The Dixie Syncopaters, Jazzorola, Folkwise, Folkways, the Red Resolution, and back to Dixie Railroad; too many musicians chased too few gigs: that’s the way it was. Rhoda had to give up work, and no sickness benefit was available since Ken had never let her succumb to the system and pay national insurance. Not that she’d ever wanted to, as she told Apricot.
    ‘Better to live in the present, dear,’ she said, ‘while you can. That’s your father’s motto and he’s right, as usual.’
    Apricot sometimes wished she lived in as ordinary a household as did her neighbours; though the more she considered the neighbours the less ordinary they seemed. Mr Rowse the healer at 93 Mafeking Street, a Miss Potter and sixteen cats at No. 95, themselves at No. 97, a Mr Hill in a ménage à trios at No. 90—perhaps all the normal people lived down another street? She had good friends at school: Brenda, Belinda and Liese. Brenda and Belinda, like herself, were scholarship girls, in a school where the others paid. Their names went up on a list on the school board as being entitled to free lunches. Liese’s father owned a chain of garages: he’d been a prisoner of war, had married an English girl. Liese was a vague, sweet girl who had all the pocket money she needed and kept Apricot, Brenda and Belinda in clothes and shoes. Belinda, short and fat, knew most of Keats by heart, and large chunks of Shelley. Brenda, tall and languid, was captain of the netball team. Apricot came top of everything. But they were still the scholarship girls, objects of envy because they were not ordinary, objects of pity because they were poor, their accomplishments scarcely the