Mantrapped. Fay Weldon
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she was ‘trying’, like so many of her colleagues at Oracle, the woman’s magazine for which she worked. It was just that sometimes courage failed her, and she would like to put motherhood off for a year or so, while seeing herself as the kind of person who never goes back on a decision, and not wanting her partner to see her as a ditherer. The occasional glass of tap water seemed to take the responsibility of choice away. Anyone is entitled to an off day, and to have doubts about the wisdom of procreation, let alone its expense, and act upon these doubts. And sometimes when the water from the shower was blue from excess chlorine, she’d wonder what kind of unhealthy chemical world was this to bring children into, anyway? She did not tell Peter of these concerns: he wanted a baby even more than she did, and would only quote statistics at her to demonstrate that this was an ever-improving world, and not even overcrowded. Indeed, the latest demographic trends showed a falling population rather than a rising one – except in China – and they had a duty to spread their genes as plentifully as possible. Then Doralee would think, ‘but we aren’t living in China’ and mutinously swig some more tap water. She would leave it to chance.
Trisha’s world scarcely extended beyond what she could see around her, let alone encompass the problems of China. She thought that so long as she was happy she would be healthy, forgetting it was a long time now since she had been happy. She dieted furiously from time to time but not for long. One glass of wine and she forgot about the future and lived in the present – and what is dieting but living for the future and declining to enjoy the present – and the diets she chose were always ones which allowed her to drink alcohol. She smoked dope on occasion, and drank Chablis in the years when she could afford it. One can always remember the name and vintages are not a bother. She seldom took cocaine – as Peter and Doralee would occasionally, and in moderation, the better to keep up with their smart friends. Trisha preferred to be soothed, cooled out, rather than speeded up.
Both Peter and Doralee were very aware of the dangers of stress, and did what they could to avoid it. Peter had learned deep-breathing techniques and Doralee always meant to go back to yoga classes though actually the thought of the boredom entailed was in itself stressful. Trisha on the other hand, by the manner of her living, the general messiness of her life, seemed to invite stress in. If nothing happened she panicked: perhaps nothing would ever happen again. So naturally her life was full of untoward events. When what happened, happened, Trisha was the one to face it with greater equanimity.
My suspicion is this – that just as one day Peter and Trisha cross on the stairs, so one day there is bound to be an actual crossover between the novelist’s actual life and the alternative reality as presented by that novelist. That the times have finally and sadly come to this, that a novel simply no longer feels meaty enough without the input of the writer’s life and sorrows. All my writing life I have argued that fiction and autobiography are separate. ‘Good Lord,’ I have been in the habit of saying at literary festivals and in interviews, where writers are so frequently these days required to bare their souls, ‘if any of what I wrote was true I would be in prison or dead.’ Now I can see that I ought to have been in prison or dead, if I were to get my just desserts, that is to say if to lust in your heart is as sinful as the act itself, as St Matthew reports. All these monstrous acts I have written, all the murders, crimes I have conceived, are as good as done. I who was accustomed to saying earnestly to my audience, ‘If you want to write a novel you must lose your good opinion of yourself’, should repent. It is a terrible thing to say. I have been urging others to be as bad as their characters. Late-Victorian novelists felt obliged to present noble characters capable of good deeds, Soviet writers would only be published if they provided worthy role-models for their readers, the Chinese to find excitement in the fulfilling of the factory quota. Our writers fostered discontent and rebellion. Those women who read my novels in the Seventies and come up to me at literary gatherings still and say, ‘But your novels changed our lives. It was you who gave me the courage to leave my husband, ’in fact bear witness against me. But what I wrote was all true, true, true. I never slept with my father, as Praxis does in the novel of that name, written in 1977, but I daresay that if like her I met him in a bar and he picked me up, and I didn’t know who he was, I would not hesitate. Like would surely call to like. Think it and it’s done.
It has not been the habit of writers to show their hand too clearly. Flaubert writes about his own father when in Madame Bovary he describes the good Doctor Bovary’s disastrous attempt to cure a club foot by breaking all the bones in it and stretching it until the foot gets gangrene and all but drops off. Flaubert couldn’t bear to keep the incident out, though it meant Dr Bovary had to behave out of character for a whole chapter. ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi,’ Flaubert famously says, giving the game away. I daresay Chaucer had an affair with the Wife of Bath, gat teeth and all. But Chaucer’s not going to declare that, either.
Just as the world of screen and airwaves blends and melds into real life, so too, today, must the creations of the printed page. There are elements of me in Trisha, and parts of Rollo and Peter in every man I have ever known. Mind you, men of the Newer Age have to be learned: they are not the ones I grew up with. Men of the Former Age tended to be without emotional conscience, like George Barker, or Ted Hughes or my husband of many years Ron, but at least they produced art.
If Rollo, the ex-stuntman now born-again Christian and conscientious father, or Peter, the bottled drinking water (still, please) newspaper man were to write a poem, you’d know in advance it would be fairly terrible – mealy-mouthed, sentimental and commonplace. When it comes to the reformation of the world, Rollo believes in the efficacy of the new overarching social-worker-Jesus, Peter in the Power of Purchasing. Both are victims of the Pelagian Heresy: that we are all nice people at heart, really, so it’s only others who come along and muck things up. George Barker and the Dane, of an earlier generation, knew only too well about Original Sin: they revelled in it, and were loved the more because of it.
Charlotte Brontë, dealing with men of the Former Age, did not attempt Mr Rochester from the inside out: she observed him from the outside in, and very erotic the result is. That was when men and women were differently reared. Far easier these days to write about men from the inside out. Now they are just more people, it is rather disappointing. So they were like us all the time.
Mind you, some things don’t change. Good behaviour never gets a woman anywhere: bad behaviour gets a man everywhere. I say this from long experience of husbands, lovers, sons, both of the Former and the Newer Ages. But then I would, wouldn’t I. If I were a man I would no doubt reverse the genders.
The day before Trisha’s worldly goods went under the auctioneer’s hammer, Doralee Thicket allowed a vase of water to spill onto the foam mattress she shared with her partner of long standing Peter Watson. This may not have been a good omen. It was six thirty in the morning, and high summer, but there was quite a wind, the unexpected kind that blows up sometimes in the early morning of a day in which thunder is expected, and gives you a glimpse of the intentions nature has for a globally-warmed humanity.
Doralee and Peter lived in High View, in Wilkins Close, just around the corner from the Wilkins Parade branch of the dry-cleaners Kleene Machine. Money has been spent on Wilkins Close – the council has beautified the street, putting in cobbles, fancy street lights and decorative railings, and will get round to the Parade and eventually to Wilkins Square, if the intransigency of the locals allows. But the area is, as they say, ‘mixed’ and the council may change their mind about the ability, and indeed the willingness, of sufficient of those living around to pay tax, and withdraw supportive funding at any moment, and then windows will start to get broken as the Goths and Vandals sweep in, and the barbarians take back what was so long theirs.