Mantrapped. Fay Weldon
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they were nervous of making political statements which related to the present, or so I have heard it said.) In 1968 Nicolas was to be thrown out of his grammar school for staging a political protest. His headmaster of the time had been discovered doing much the same thing as Mr Bateman a decade earlier—only writing reports on students, not staff, warning admission secretaries not to take certain pupils, whom he saw as troublemakers and activists. Whatever changes?
I said yes to the headmaster and waited for my mother to say ‘But you can’t possibly!’ She said nothing, so I married him, in Ealing Registry Office, in a too-tight blue dress, to the barely disguised winces of my friends. And I was as unsuitable a wife for him as he was a husband for me.
It was during the time of my marriage to Mr Bateman in the late Fifties that I met my mother by chance on my way up to town. It was on the platform of South Kensington Underground Station. I was travelling north from Acton, the sorry suburb where I now lived with my new husband and my child, having exchanged one small flat for another—albeit owned not rented—and a restless mother for a grizzled husband. But I was full of resolutions; I distinctly remember my determination that not a month of my life would go by in which I was entirely celibate. Oh, I was a monster! It would not be my husband: he had voyeuristic tendencies but no interest in actual sex. This kind of thing one found out in those days only after the wedding ceremony.
On South Kensington Station my mother Margaret looked me in the eye, and turned away, expressionless. She cut me dead. My cry of greeting died away. I was devastated. Margaret wore a navy greatcoat, staff issue, London Underground. It drowned her. She was a little thing to contain so much intelligence, fanaticism and fierce morality. They ate her away, that was the trouble. I clouded my body with fat: she was thin, bare to the winds of tragedy. Had I reduced her to this? Surely it was the other way round, and it was all her doing? I always did what she said, didn’t I? She had encouraged me to marry the headmaster, and that puzzled me. It was such a stupid, desperate, death-welcoming thing for a daughter to do, and just a word from her and I would not have done it, but she would not say the word. She wanted her life back too badly.
Until that moment at South Kensington Station I had not realised that I existed in any kind of reality at all, or any that impinged on others. I had thought I was a figment of my own imagination, at the very best my parents’ bright idea, gone sour. Most realise this at about twelve: I took rather longer.
Margaret had celebrated her new freedom by getting a job on the London Underground, saying in effect, ‘Now see what you’ve made me do!’ Jane and I had let her down. I was turning into a lower middle-class housewife, a kind of Jerry Springer case, and her elder child, Jane, the poet, had taken up with a penniless artist, and had two small children and nowhere to live. Was this what the sacrifice of Mama’s youth had come to? She could have been a writer, should have been a writer, had been a writer—and then she’d had two daughters and they had ruined her life. And for what?
The job wasn’t all bad. She even liked it. There are advantages to being a public servant: at least you are doing something useful. The posters of the time, luring people into the tunnels, advised, ‘ Warmer Underground,’ and they were right. It was. At least underground, my mother said, she was never cold. She was a good and conscientious employee, the one to approach the snarling dog, pick up the fluttering bird, face the mugger, step forward and brave danger when others drew back. I think she rather fancied the foreman, one of the West Indian immigrants the London Transport Executive shipped over from Jamaica to solve the staffing problems of the day, though nothing came of it. Men always fancied my mother, so witty and bright and kind, but she would have nothing to do with them: principle got in the way, or perhaps it was that she could not endure too much emotional pain.
We will not see her like again. We have learned prudence, and what is right behaviour and proper thinking, and what is not: we understand the mechanisms of our own behaviour: we are cursed by therapy even as we are saved by it: it de-natures us. We can’t be forgiven because we know only too well what we do, and forgive ourselves in advance. My mother, born 1907, seeing her century out, thought and felt from first principles. Cut dead by her, in 1957, I stumbled back home to my peculiar husband and my crowded home and rethought my life. ‘Tough love’ they would call it nowadays, and it is not nice to be on the sharp end of it.
But see how the very existence of the phrase ‘tough love’ cheapens and weakens the very concept it stands for? We know how to explain ourselves to ourselves well enough, but with every handy phrase, every useful shorthand, we lessen the complexity and interest of our lives. If every young woman in every bank looks alike, every TV presenter seems to have the same face, one young man at a party is indistinguishable from the next, if as we think alike, so we look alike, who can be surprised. Our everyday language has become too skilled, too dismissive of complexity, for our own good. We like things nailed and certain. The cleverer we get, the more stupid.
I see the platform in my head: South Kensington, open air, not my mother’s base station, Gloucester Road. She must have been transferred for the day. Jane’s husband Guido was to get a job announcing at Victoria—he had a beautiful, plangent, actor’s voice. He enunciated beautifully, in the fashion of his parson forebears. Jobs were easier to come by then: in the days of high employment no one wanted GCSE certificates, proof of residence or bank references, wages came in a brown envelope, no questions asked: just a ridiculously high proportion taken away by the tax man to pay for pensions which were never to materialise except in benefit form, and doff your cap while asking.
The event stays sealed in my memory. I had always liked South Kensington Station where the train emerges from the tunnel before burrowing into it again. Now I see my mother in her uniform on the platform, doing whatever platform staff do, and I hop off the train in excitement, and she sees me, quite clearly she sees me, and whatever she sees she does not like, and she turns her face away, in calculated indifference. We were never to mention the episode again, either of us.
At the time of this maternal rebuff I was sharing my marital home with Jane and her two small children. They crowded into the living room, leaving us the rest of the house. It was in fact only half a small terrace house in Acton, the ground floor having already been let off to Doreen, a very fussy woman who wore her curlers until five each evening, complained about the noise of stomping children above her, and who regarded me as no better than I should be. She was accustomed to tall, thin, quiet, lonely, stooping, respectable Mr Bateman upstairs, and he had suddenly acquired, and was allegedly married to, a vigorous, poshlyspoken young woman with a small child of uncertain origins, and now her sister and two more children under five had come along too. Doreen complained with perfect reason, and if she was without sympathy what was she to know of the complexities of my life? What were we all up to? Sometimes I would leave the house in the evenings—driven by my husband in his souped-up little pale blue Ford Popular—dressed up to the nines, low-cut dress, very high heels, net stockings and tightly belted waist. (The difference between bad girls and good girls, so far as their dress went, was in those days clearly delineated. Good girls dressed so as not to be noticed: bad girls drew attention to their assets.) And Doreen must have noticed when I went out dressed for Ladies’ Night at the local posh hotel. My husband that year was Grand Master of his Masonic Lodge. I was Lady of the Lodge. I hired a kind of evening dress in mauve tulle for the occasion and the masons and the wives looked at me oddly. (Was it that the marriage itself seemed strange to others, or was it the dress? I will never know.) Sometimes I went out as wife to the Musical Director of the local Operatic Society, wearing some scruffy skirt and laddered tights. And all the while, by day, the thump, thump, thump of little children racing across floors. Doreen was confused, but no more confused than I. How had I come to this pretty pass?
I tried to engage Doreen in a scheme by which all the households down the road would serve dinner from a central cooking pot—it pained me that every day twenty housewives prepared meat and two veg from the same butcher and the same greengrocer, it seemed such a waste of time. We could make enough for everyone and they would run down the road to us for their portion, and we would share costs. She