Mantrapped. Fay Weldon
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I acknowledged my part in my own misfortune. I really think my father heard. Whether he was there of course I have no idea: I do know that I spoke to him.
At any rate it was after that my life turned: within days I fell out of love with the Dane, upon his confession of a drunken act of infidelity with a passing Danish tourist, waved goodbye to him as he set out for Ibiza to deliver some rich man’s yacht, without dropping a single tear—the girl from Denmark had somehow lifted my moral responsibility to the wife, the miscarriage seemed a boon from heaven. I met Ron Weldon at a party, left my poor mother behind me, acquired a house and a home and a man of my own, and finally unafraid, grew rich and famous.
I wept in public fifteen years later on the steps of White Centre at BBC TV when Graeme MacDonald told me that Smoke Screen, my just-screened Play for Today—Wednesday nights, an audience of some thirteen or fourteen million—had not been a success with the audience and the BBC weren’t going to commission me to do another. Not for a time. That was in 1969. The first reports into the link between smoking and lung cancer were emerging. The play had been successful enough with the audience, but not with BBC management. Their feeling was that I was causing trouble, stirring up unpleasantness, frightening the audience. I should stick to writing about women, not venture out into the great male world of important matters. Smoke Screen was about an advertising man, working on a cigarette account, who dies of lung cancer. My hero, puffing away, had a family to support, and insurance premiums to meet before he died, and felt that his duty to his family was higher than his duty to the public. And so by and large it is. What can a man, or indeed a woman, do in the face of necessity? What was I doing in advertising myself? The necessity of so doing was fast fading. I could keep myself in other ways.
The ad agency, no doubt irritated by my lack of loyalty, my intransigency, called my bluff after Smoke Screen and asked me to work on the Players account. It was a challenge, and I declined it. My boss Douglas Haines, the handsomest man in advertising and a good friend ever since, told me my duty was to my employers rather than society. Docile though I thought I was, I found this difficult to accept. My employers’ enthusiasm for me dwindled, as well it might, and eventually I was ‘let go’. That, and no doubt my habit of filling in my hourly time sheets as a consultant so that I earned what I thought I deserved, rather than the ceiling limit suggested by an eight-hour a day week, finally drove my employers to action. I was filling in 30 or 50 hours a day, out of the available 24, and they took no notice, or pretended not to, until finally I went too far.
‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold!’ as the girl who marries Bluebeard in the fairy story is warned. I was too bold. Not only was there trouble at the office, but on the mythical BBC Honours Board my name was now in black, not gold, which meant ‘Don’t use her: trouble’ and I hadn’t even been trying. Disgrace, at the BBC, usually lasted for two years or so; after that time everyone up and down the corridors had been promoted or changed jobs, and had forgotten, and when your name came up again at a meeting there was no one who remembered the awful things you had done to speak against you.
Morality, for all of us, tends to be what we can afford. Nobody wanted to believe what had to be believed. Smoking was nice, and natural, and had a gentle tonic and hygienic effect, and we all went round in a cloud of smoke and since we all smelt like old ashtrays it didn’t bother anyone. The only people who didn’t smoke were those who couldn’t afford to, which for many years had included me.
Graeme MacDonald professed himself very surprised that I should cry. He said I did not seem the crying sort. I think I must have exuded an air of infinite good cheer, infinite resilience.
Television was always only a transitory medium, of course, that was its point. Flickers on a screen in the corner of a room. I shouldn’t have wept, and it was humiliating. But somehow Graeme MacDonald, now dead and gone, still lingers on the steps, palely grey, intense and handsome, gay at a time when no one was meant to be, standing there, grave and confused and embarrassed by me, caught up in time and preserved, like Rosie Smart at the party. It is extremely difficult to believe in mortality while people live on in these acute snapshots of themselves. Graeme MacDonald, Rosie, dead? I don’t believe it. Death is nonexistent: it is just some peculiar and aggravating wrinkle in time, our false perception of the nature of past, present and future, which insists that one has to be over before the next can begin.
And then I didn’t weep for ages, not really weep, other than everyday and unmemorable tears of petulance and anger, of course, until 1991 when I wept for a whole two years because after thirty years my life with my husband Ron was over, and by his doing, not mine. That took me down a peg or two. At that juncture my new husband-in-waiting took me down to the Embankment and made me look at Boadicea with the knives on her chariot wheels and said ‘That’s what your readers think you’re like,’ so I pulled myself together and stopped crying. God knows what fate has in store next: today is all ancient Abbey grounds and morning sunlight, tomorrow it may be Wilkins Parade and Mrs Kovac, and day by day time is running out.
Trisha had been playing Polly Peachum at the Lyric Theatre the day she won three million pounds in the lottery. The notices for the show had been good. This had been her big break after years of small parts, temping and bar-maiding. If she had known then what she knew now—the things she would not have done when it came to winning the lottery! She would have remembered to tick the no-publicity box. She would not have consented to a public ceremony when she went to collect her cheque. She would not have replied, when a journalist thrust a microphone in front of her and asked what she was going to do with the rest of her life, ‘Spend, spend, spend.’ And then added, almost as an afterthought, ‘and fuck, fuck, fuck.’ She had thought it was only radio but there were TV cameras there too. The clips were excerpted into the opening credits of a successful girlie TV show, and ran for a month before anyone told her, turning her into a kind of mini-celebrity until the public got bored. She sued and won another £50,000. To them that hath, etc. It also ruined her chances of being taken seriously ever again in the acting profession. When the show transferred to the West End she was not asked to go with it.
Other things Trisha should not have done: she should not have had a baby by a humble stunt man. She should have chosen a bank manager. She had gone for looks, not income, thinking she had more than enough of the latter. But of course she had not. Once pregnant, she should not have married the father. As it happened Rollo had his own stroke of good fortune and soon became the face of a range of men’s toiletries. Now that he could pick and choose amongst women, he thought he could do better than Trisha. Within six weeks of their marriage being written up in Hello and three days after discovering Trisha was eight weeks pregnant, he left her for a Page 3 girl with a degree in economics, famous for having once allegedly slapped Elizabeth Hurley’s face. He divorced Trisha, married her successor the day Spencer was born, and disappeared from her life.
Trisha was brave publicly, and cried privately, and gave birth to Spencer with only her mother in attendance. People came to visit her to drink free drink and eat free food and use her pool but she thought they did not care about the real her. Men would use and abuse her and demand presents. She thought women might be kinder than men and took up with Thomasina Deverill, and gave money away to lesbian causes. Thomasina was a success at the Edinburgh Fringe with a one-woman cabaret show about the awfulness of men, and when she came back had taken against little Spencer, mostly on the grounds that he was male. Thomasina wanted Trisha to have Spencer adopted and have a female test-tube baby by a gay friend instead. Trisha refused, Thomasina left.
A year later, when Spencer was four, Rollo turned up again. He had been converted to born-again Christianity, and wanted to claim custody of his child and bring him up in decent surroundings, by which he meant free from lesbian taint. In vain for Trisha to say that had been just a passing phase. By then Trisha also had a