Free Darcy's Utopia by Fay Weldon Page A

point.
    ‘You are all outsiders,’ said Liese’s father. ‘That’s why you stick together.’
    ‘Liese isn’t an outsider,’ said all but Liese. ‘She doesn’t have free dinners.’
    ‘She’s half-German,’ he said. ‘That’s more than enough.’
    ‘How do you win?’ asked Apricot.
    ‘Men never do,’ he said. ‘Once an outsider, always an outsider. But girls can marry in.’
    His wife was Jewish, he had converted to Judaism. There’d be soft tomato sandwiches for tea, and chicken soup and dumplings for supper. The lights were soft, the carpets thick, hot water flowed from taps; everyone liked to be comfortable.
    ‘You English,’ he said, ‘hate to be comfortable. You think it will stop you getting to heaven. You would rather stand in the rain any day than in a bus shelter.’
    ‘Bloody foreigners,’ said Ken, though he mellowed when he heard Liese’s family was Jewish. Blacks, musicians and Jews, all victims of an oppressive society, were of the same family of misfortunates as himself. There were eleven taps in Liese’s house—Apricot had counted—including the garden tap. Taps, she reckoned, were the real symbol of wealth and success. At 97 Mafeking Street there were four; and think yourself lucky. Many of the houses had no bathrooms. Ken kept his sheet music in the one he had constructed in the small back bedroom, so fear of splashing kept it on the whole unused. There was carpet in the living room, lino elsewhere; gas fires downstairs and no heating in the bedrooms. The beds were damp and the floor cold when you put your bare feet out in the morning.
    ‘What do we want money for?’ asked Rhoda. Now she smoked eighty cigarettes a day. ‘You, your dad and me!’
    ‘So I can turn on the gas,’ said Apricot.
    Gas flowed to cooker and fires when coins were put in the meter, not otherwise.
    ‘Put on your coat,’ said Rhoda, ‘if you feel the cold,’ but Apricot never would. She went round to Liese’s instead, where there was central heating. Brenda and Belinda went too. Belinda sucked sweets and read Tennyson aloud. Brenda talked about boys and Liese’s mother provided food.
    ‘That girl’s an opportunist,’ said Ken.
    ‘I don’t know what that means,’ whispered Rhoda, ‘but I’m sure you’re right.’ She lost her voice quite often. Mr Rowse said he was helpless in the face of the extravagance of her sin.
    It was unusual for anything in particular to happen in Mafeking Street. The residents now took for granted the shuffling queue outside Mr Rowse’s surgery, or temple. Someone would get a new car, or a new cat: a tree would be lopped: the milkman’s horse bolt. A baby would get born and an upstairs window be lit at night: an old man would die and the hearse arrive, and a gap be felt for a while, but the very pressure of ordinariness, or whatever it was, soon healed it up. Ken would annoy the same neighbours by slamming the same van door twice a week in the same early hour. Now Rhoda had stopped work she would go down to the newsagent on the corner for her cigarettes at the same time every morning, each day a little lighter on her feet. She was now scarcely seven stone.
    ‘At least I don’t have to watch my weight now,’ she’d say. ‘Not like you, Ken.’
    In the afternoons she would go and see Mr Rowse. She was allowed in by the back door. She didn’t have to queue. ‘I’m a priority case,’ Rhoda said. ‘He’s wrestling with my sin.’
    ‘He doesn’t want the others to catch sight of you,’ said Ken. ‘They’d all be off home!’
    Rhoda looked at herself in the mirror and said, ‘I don’t see much wrong with me. Nice big eyes at last!’
    When Apricot was three weeks away from the examinations which were, in theory, to get herself, Belinda and Brenda out of school, away from home and into a preferable social and intellectual environment—Liese was happy enough to fail hers, and be allowed to stay cosily at home and be married off to someone