Mantrapped. Fay Weldon
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too was over—drugs now made her dizzy and alcohol made her sick—the court found against her, and Rollo—with his wife the economist now in government—was given care and control of Spencer. And Trisha, though she should have been upset, found that she was not. Spencer was a hyperactive child who yet had a weight problem, and she knew she failed him.
Trisha tried to be angry with Rollo. Her friends thought she should be, and she tried, but when she looked inside she found a rageless hollow. She lost quite a few friends this way. Why didn’t she fight the bastard? What sort of unnatural mother was she? (This from friends who would no more dream of getting pregnant than they would look after their old mothers.) The fact was she was a man’s woman even though the man had left her. She was just instinctively on her enemy’s side.
And Rollo was so very convincing and charming in court, and such a good actor, that she was quite persuaded by him along with everyone else of her own unfitness to rear a child, and clapped when the judgement against her was given. She had to be stopped by her own lawyer. His name was, fetchingly enough, Hardy Acre, but there are more than enough names already for you to focus on.
To wit: Trisha and her six-year-old son Spencer, her husband Rollo, and her lover Thomasina. No doubt there have been more and other transient relationships: Trisha is, after all, a thespian, and thespians have a kind of life fluency, a need to be all things to all people; they are prone to sudden mood swings, fits of irresponsibility and changing fortunes. They are the playthings of writers, and whom the writers love they destroy. In the parallel real life there is Fay, the Dane, two Rons, my mother Margaret, my aunt and uncle Mary and Michael, my father Frank and his ghost, Graeme MacDonald, Elizabeth Smart, George Barker and Rosie. All were prone to self-destruction, without need of writers.
Trisha was reared in the confident days before herpes, AIDS, and fear of secondary smoking swept the Western world; the days when we could drift through our lives, taking what came along on trust. We assumed that politicians were wise, that food was safe, that pension companies paid up and scientists knew what they were doing. But there can be no more drifting: today’s world punishes those who do not take care to look after their future. It is increasingly difficult to know how this is to be done.
Trisha has certainly not looked lively enough. She has met her come-uppance, and the credit has run out. The day the cashpoint refused to give her any more money she put the house on the market. It stayed stubbornly unsold for a year. What she thought was a desirable residence to too many others apparently looked like a supermarket, all false gables and unseasoned wood. The swimming pool grew an unusual sort of mould, which turned the water murky grey within hours of filling. Her creditors moved in and forced a sale. The house filled up with little men with weasel faces who claimed to be bankruptcy advisers.
It was found that in some mysterious way the deeds had Rollo’s name upon them, and not a mention of her own. She had a recollection of promising one evening to look after Rollo for life and he must have taken her seriously and she have signed a document in a fit of drunken sentiment. That was when he had sprained his ankle in a fake car crash and was depressed, thinking he would never be an effective stuntman again, and then became the official face of the sensitive man about town, and had only to worry about his looks, not his survival.
Drinking made Trisha effusive and emotional, given to absurd gestures, giving things away to friends: ‘Take this, and this, darling, and this, because you need it. Take this holiday, this camera, this house. By all means borrow my Valentino suit, it suits you better than me.’
Trisha spends many days in front of the judges of the family court: the house is to be Rollo’s, they decide, though she can keep the contents. It seems fair enough. Rollo has little Spencer to bring up. What with one thing and another the £3 million has simply dissolved away and now Trisha has to live like other people, worse than other people. The papers have lost interest in her. She must interpret herself now from her face in the mirror, not the one in the newspapers, from the words on her lips, not the ones in the headlines. She is an ex-celebrity, and what can be worse?
Also to blame in my opinion are Trisha’s lawyer Hardy Acre—she has told him so often not to pursue her interests through the courts he has come to believe her. There is also Trisha’s accountant Vera Thicket, who, while holding a few hundred thousands of Trisha’s money in her client’s account, ran off to Chile with a conman and all the money. Easy come, easy go: Trisha of course blames no one but herself. Trisha chose both her accountant and her lawyer because their names appealed to her. Some would say in that case she deserves what she gets, but your author is very fond of Trisha.
Trisha is valiant, defiant, and uncomplaining. Drink may make her forgetful and silly but she is never nasty-drunk. Your writer does not have a drink problem, in case you’re wondering. She is far too sober most of the time for her own good. Nor does she smoke, not because she has given up like so many through nobility and strength of purpose, but because she never got the habit in the first place.
Later on in our lives, whenever I could wrench my socialist mother out of the council houses and flats where she was determined to live to be at one with the people, I would house her in what (to me) were more suitable surroundings. Instead of being harassed by the guard dogs of her neighbours, alarmed by the noise of domestic violence through thin walls, and distressed by the backbiting of neighbours, I would deliver her into rose-covered cottages and pretty houses where she would have a garden and neighbours to appreciate her wit and style. She was very wise in everything other than her own life. Here she could enjoy her guilt to the full and feel free to exclaim in horror every time I took a glass of wine (such a waste of money, save it and give it to the poor, if you don’t need it yourself) or served anything other than plain food. (Such a waste of time: you should be reading and writing: nothing nicer than cabbage, fast cooked, with pepper and butter: it only takes five minutes.) I did not doubt my love for her or hers for me.
But there was a time when she was really fed up with me, and my sister Jane too. Mama had tried to escape us; she had put a pin in a map and fled to St Ives: she had given us twenty years of her life and that was enough. Or so she thought. But we would not let it rest at that.
She’d launched us into the world as bright girls with student grants, and then gone off to leave us to our own devices. (My annual grant was £167, over £3 a week, which my mother saw as great wealth. She gasped in admiration at the generosity of governments. The whole family, grandmother included, had managed on far less from time to time.) We were well-brought up, sensible, clever, friendly girls, but not good at thinking for ourselves. Our mother had done that for us. I’d been reared in an all-female household, gone to an all-girls school, and had scarcely talked to a man in my life, let alone ‘dated’. I had no idea how to conduct myself. Soon enough I was pregnant. Jane had at least the grace to marry Guido Morris, a man respectable in the world of the arts—a member of the St Ives set, his work now in the Tate—albeit penniless and irresponsible with several families to his name already and twenty-five years her senior. The father of my child was a penniless orphan, once a boy bandsman in the army, now a singer of folk songs in the Mandrake Club in Soho. I think Jane and I both assumed our mother would save us from disaster, and when she did not we resented this backsliding on her part. Not that I can remember Jane and I ever discussing our mother. She was too much part of us to be seen as a separate entity.
Other girls at least managed to fall in love with possible partners. Jane and I courted disaster. Perhaps we felt the need to fill the space in our mother’s life, to compensate for the exhiliration we had felt in at last leaving home. At any rate we felt obliged to bring her our babies back, for her to look after, to fill the vacuum we had