Mantrapped (10 page)

Sex for Doralee and Peter is frequent at the moment, four or five times a week, once or twice a night, and though sexual activity promotes sound alpha-wave-rich sleep, quality does not necessarily make up for quantity. Peter and Doralee both wake to an alarm clock which is more shocking to the system than they imagine. Best to let morning light wake you - early in the summer, late in winter - but employment imposes an unnatural life rhythm on workers.

Doralee is in her office by nine every morning, and thinks that's late; she tries to do better. It is a competitive world, and employers rule the roost; the employee who is seen to work longest and hardest gets promotion. Doralee gets to a Pilates class at seven thirty three times a week, and will fit in a work-out, a massage, a stint at the hairdresser and the beauty parlour, the better to arrive at work perfectly groomed. (Her mother never even got round to shaving her legs. What man is going to stand for that? And Doralee can remember all too vividly the time she saw her mother's under-arm hair, black disgusting tufts.) Doralee is a size 10 aiming for a size 8 and has the longest legs of any of her sisters: all went into the professions and are high achievers. Bobby and Robby, identical twins, now go to Art College when they are not up at the university being tested, and are performance artists. They earn very little, but have the satisfaction of high principle, which seems to be an inheritable trait, coming down through the male line.

Doralee's father Graham left Ruby on what to him were moral grounds, and what to her was an act of gross abandonment. She noisily refused to recycle their household waste, on the spurious grounds that recycling caused more pollution than landfill. This was at a time when he had, in response to the birth of the twins, just taken a new and better paid job as chief environmental officer to the council. '
Building a cleaner countryside'
it said, on the new posters. '
Revive, restore, recycle
!' Frankly, his wife embarrassed him. She had left home when she was seventeen, after changing her name from Kathleen to Ruby in the face of opposition from her parents, who were Seventh Day Adventists, and who disapproved of pop music. In vain for the girl to explain that country music was not pop music. She played her parents '
Ruby, Ruby
,' which moved through her girlish unconscious like a siren call to faraway places and romantic emotions, in the hope that they would understand, because she loved them, but all they heard was '
Don't take your love to town
.'

Despairing of ever pleasing them she had come South and met Graham, and had misunderstood him as he misunderstood her. She had thought he would love her for ever, he had thought she was a sweet and biddable little thing. He had been mildly amused at the way she had changed her name to annoy her parents, and thought she could soon enough grow out of that sort of thing, and change her name back to - perhaps not Kathleen, but something graver and more open, like Catherine. But she never would and when it came to naming her own children the impulse to upset was clearly still there. He did not have the strength of will to restrain her. Doralee, Marylou, Claudette, Glorianne! It did not help the marriage. Graham came from an Anne, Sarah, Jane background, and his mother winced noticeably at the christenings, which were performed, naturally, by Graham's father. But his mother was well mannered and did not otherwise at any time betray her dismay at her son's choice of partner.

And yes, as it happens, Doralee Thicket is related, though distantly, to Vera Thicket, Trisha's runaway accountant. This is mere coincidence: a matter of the few degrees of separation which link us to so many unsuitable people. Doralee is Vera's second cousin: her father Graham being a first cousin.

It was obvious to Graham's family from the start that Vera was unscrupulous.
£pa
child she stole: no one's pockets were safe. The rest of the Thicket clan - a moral lot, at least on the male side - were to have little to do with Vera, or she with them. She was known to have stolen someone else's husband, and then qualified in accountancy. Next Vera was to run off with a smooth-talking yuppie from the Lebanon, also married, and was the subject of an unsuccessful Interpol search, during the course of which she emptied her clients' accounts, and went to Brazil. Trisha's funds were down to some £6,300 by the time that had happened. Rollo and Thomasina between them had managed to get through far more than Trisha had ever anticipated. How could other people be so expensive? But Rollo needed a lot of orthodonty before he got to be the male face of a big cosmetic company and Thomasina's one-woman show in London needed funding. It turned out she needed backing from a rap group, all twelve of whom demanded Musicians' Union rates.

But the connection between Doralee and Vera is, to date at least, no more or less meaningful than two people at the same party happening to share a birthday, which is statistically more likely than most people realise. Doralee is scarcely aware of Vera's existence. Her father Graham once mentioned that there was a criminal in the family, but since he had only seen her once or twice in his life, and had nothing more interesting to say on the matter, Doralee took no notice. Those who have not had children believe in nurture more than nature.

The Thickets bred profusely. Families these days are smaller. The birth rate falls beneath replacement level. Doralee and her Peter will be lucky to have one child between them, and that child will be lucky to have a cousin to its name. And first they have somehow to get over the event which is to bring these two disparate households together, brought about when Peter and Trisha brushed against one another as they passed on the stairs, and their souls were switched.

Who are we to blame for this event? There must be someone, something. Blame the stairs; blame the narrowness of passageways; blame the continuing existence of buildings which should never have been built in the first place. Once Wilkins Parade was a market garden which supplied the City with fruit and vegetables - apples, plums, melons, asparagus, peas. The fields of Wilkins' farm were dug up in the 1880s and became a tenement slum, jerry-built, and now despoiled by graffiti. It was in the 1880s that the High View apartment block was an orphanage. There was a surplus of children then: scuttling around, uncounted and uneducated, dying young. People in those days put their trust in quantity, not quality.

Or blame the fact that the Kleene Machine domestic agency has a history too and the past is never over. In the 1930s it was a fish-and-chip shop for a time, and the smell of poverty and battered fish frying in stale oil still hangs round the old brickwork of the stairs. Before that it was a pawnbroker and perhaps human distress has eaten into its brickwork. Perhaps none of us are as firmly rooted in the here and now as we assume. My son Sam, who has a great sense of fairness, and came into the world, as Wordsworth would have it, '
trailing clouds of glory'
, asked me when he was three when it was his turn to be a girl. I told him that didn't happen, but I can see that perhaps in some parallel universe down the road gender swap, soul swap, happens all the time. Perhaps Trisha is the bit-part player in some other greater drama, and the Great Scriptwriter in the Sky - the GSWITS, lord of the new fictional religion which I invented in a novella called
The Rules

of Life
, has plans for her, which is why she has had to sell up her house and now lives here, with windows which rattle when a truck passes by and floors which slope so that her mattress keeps sliding down towards the door at night.

Better anyway that the conservationists had not interfered, and Wilkins' place been torn down and carted away to some landfill complete with dust, cobwebs and history, and something new, bright and concrete put in its place, and then perhaps the whole thing would never have happened. Blame the Gods of misrule, who are everywhere these days, blame everyone, blame anything, but not yourself.

Fading customs

I received no official training as a writer: I attended no creative writing courses: I did not study English literature at college. Having been so bad at the subject at school, I took up economics instead. My only tuition, and that was informal, happened when Louis Simpson, a poet, critic and Professor of English Literature at Stony Brook in New York, moved into the house next door. That was in 1968.

Time folds and crumples. I have leapt years ahead here from the days with the Dane, who retired to live on the coast and run a sailing school and live happily ever after. I would never have made a sailing woman. It feels dangerous enough to be in a car, let alone a boat.

And I am now living with Ron, and have been for some years. We have a son, the second child for both of us, called Dan. We are still living in Primrose Hill round the corner from the shop, and my life has turned from a disaster area to a bright new development, as has High View Flats in
Mantrapped
. Or at least a very superior and complete internal conversion, if only the smell of the past didn't keep creeping through to the present.

These changes happen so fast. One day there's a derelict makeshift factory: then there's High View. One day there's a derelict runaway headmaster's wife, the next there's Fay Weldon, copy consultant, writer of TV plays, and would-be novelist. Just because she fell in love with a man she met at a party and married him. It hardly bears thinking about.

I had just had my first novel published. Louis was charming, handsome, intense, he knew all there was to know about literature and poetry. He knew how it should be done. I saw his face on the Internet the other day and my heart leapt to my mouth. He was, is, a really good poet. Our conversations were so many years ago he may well have forgotten that he ever knew me. But I have not forgotten him.

Way back then I showed him the novel I had just had published,
The Fat Woman's Joke
. I thought to win his good opinion. 1 too, the housewife next door, could write, and here was proof of it. I went off daily to work at Ogilvie and Mather, the big advertising agency, but I hoped that somehow Louis hadn't noticed. Advertising was considered a low occupation for persons of any sensibility, shallow and trashy, and anyway a working woman was earning pin money and should stay home and take better care of the children. I also brought shame on my husband by writing a cookery column, an advertisement for the Metal Box Company in disguise, for everyone to see. It appeared every week in a Sunday newspaper, under a former name, Fay Bateman, beneath a picture of myself.
Fay Bateman says
. In my column I advised the public how to cook with cans. '
'just dunk a whole chicken in a can of condensed chicken soup and bung it in the oven
,' I'd write, '
Delicious
!' And in my mother's footsteps, '
Just a little short-cooked cabbage and some butter - what could be better? Serve with a ham souffle: just add eggs to your can of soup and it's done
!'

At home Ron, a gourmet cook, would spend hours on a cassoulet, or a bouillabaisse, or a
boeuf en daube
, using the garlic and mushrooms which had only recently become available in the shops, and tossing a chicory salad. How he despised my timid habit of peeling mushrooms: what harm did a little dirt do anyone? Our kitchen surfaces were littered with pans and the floor with discarded oyster shells, and I would clean up, and write my no-fuss cookery columns. The pans were copper and never properly tinned. I worried about metal poisoning but was laughed out of court.

All his life Ron fought a bourgeois heritage in which food was meant to be white, pale and bland, and like sex was not to be enjoyed, lest the pleasures of the flesh overwhelm the spirit and lead to dissolution and disgrace.

The tendency to cook fish in parsley sauce, from which Ron's mother, and indeed mine, suffered, the idea that even white pepper was suspect lest it overheat the blood, was to be soon rooted out of society (along with the class system) and the artists, that is to say Ron and company, were to lead the foodie onslaught. And I, one of the wives, was engaging in such careless culinary treachery. '
Cooking with cans - this way the future lies. Just open a can and go out to work
!'

Be that as it may, all that cooking and guilt aside, I had hoped for Louis' approval, but the novel I gave him seemed only to make him angry. 'But this is not a proper novel,' he said, waving
The Fat Woman's Joke
around, 'and what a monstrous jacket!' Indeed, the book had a jacket so terrible - two great rows of chomping shiny white teeth against a staring red background - that I destroyed every one I came across. I would root them out in bookstores and slip the jackets off and trash them every one. I had neglected to do so on this occasion, feeling an urge to present Louis with the truth, warts and all.

These jackets, if in perfect condition, are now in great demand, I am happy to report, I having so rashly destroyed so many of the first edition. The book has never been out of print. I have its current jacket in front of me now; bright pink with a line drawing of a not very fat woman on the front. Once she was all luscious folds of fat. Nothing these days can be extreme. The passage of the years has turned the book from a revolutionary document, first blast in the feminist fusillade, to all but chick lit. The novel now seems to be about a woman with eating problems (a syndrome much spoken of now but un-invented at the time of writing) brought on by a surfeit of domesticity: pleasant enough but not in the least incendiary.

To me these early novels are historical documents, though the publishers say they remain relevant enough. But I suspect they say that because these young persons, not having lived through a pre-feminist world themselves, have no idea of its full horrors.

'If it isn't a novel what is it?' I asked Louis. It is my normal policy to agree wholeheartedly with my detractors, thereby deflating them, but for once I felt defiant. 'My publishers thought that was what it was,' I told Louis. 'It's what they call it in the shops. A novel. People are reading it, and turning the pages. Many even like it.' But I can remember my shock; the terrible feeling that Louis Simpson was right.