Mantrapped (11 page)

I was an impostor, an upstart. I had no business dabbling in serious matters.

'Novels have inner form,' he said, practically stamping his foot. 'They have shape, purpose, profundity. They are not constructed like this. This is just and then, and then, and then, as if a child were writing it. Worse, it is written in the present tense, as if it were some film script.'

I had to admit that the book was indeed a TV play of mine I had novelised. Its roots were showing, like Mrs Kovac's on a bad day. It was true that all I had done was move from scene to scene after the fashion of a TV script.

I had been writing TV dramas in my spare time but had become discontented, fed up with having less than total control of what happened on screen. The director had fallen out of love with me, and broken my heart, and the actors would put the wrong expressions on their faces; the designers would unreasonably up-grade the sets, the producer had impertinently taken out a line or two 'because of length'.

It came to me in a flash of light the way not to be interfered with was to rework the play in novel form. I could elaborate as I went along. The characters would now be mine, not what the casting director, on the grounds of cost and practicality, had decided they would be. Their problems were mine, not what the director had inferred that they were.

But the chief reason for my defiance was the simple exhilaration of writing a novel: I had done the play, the skeleton of the plot was sound, from now on what I wrote became almost automatic writing. The muse descended from the skies. The sum added up to more than the sum of the parts, so long as I followed my instinct and tried not to let reason get between me and what I wrote. This conclusion, however wrong-headed, gave me confidence.

I remember writing 'The End' on an A4 pad, wide lined, with a Pentel pen, on the top of a bus going down Regent Street. I was on my way to my office in Brettenham House on Waterloo Bridge. I remember the feeling of exaltation as I wrote those two satisfactory words, 'The End'. This was my
metier
. This was what I was meant to do. This was what I had been born for. This I would do to the end of my days, and there was so much unsaid in the world I could go on saying it for ever.

But looking through
The Fat Woman's Joke
, now so proudly published, Louis Simpson merely groaned. He said this was simply not how novel writing was done. I had a terrible feeling he was right. That the original play had been produced by Granada TV only because the director hoped, not without reason, to get into my knickers. (The euphemism of the time.) He did. The publishers, MacGibbon and Kee, had published the novel version only because they were hoping to amalgamate with Granada and it suited their contract to deliver me up to their new owners. George Melly, musician and art critic, had given the book a rave review in the
Observer
, only because he was friend of Ron's - and hoped to buy antiques from him at a favourable price. Or so Ron told me was the case. The public, I could see, had been thoroughly misled and that was why they were buying the book. It had all been a terrible, humiliating mistake. I had better stick to advertising.

But the next novel,
Down Among the Women
, had already been written, and was at the printers. How was I to avoid the disgrace of fresh exposure? I had been presumptuous. I had stuck my head over a parapet only for it to be shot at. I retreated next door, grateful to still have my domestic life, glad that it was my habit to underplay such small successes I had had so far in the literary world. Grateful that I had children to sing lullabies to, and things I should better spend my time on, such as writing ads and cleaning the burnt copper pans without scratching them yet more, so they didn't leak heavy metal into our food and poison us.

When the proofs of
Down Among the Women
came through the post I almost didn't show them to Louis, though he had relented enough to ask me to, and when I did I was sorry. They seemed to make him even angrier.

'This is just a rip-off of Mary McCarthy's
The Group,'
he complained - a novel which also followed the adventures of a group of feisty college graduates as they disappeared into marriage. I said I didn't think Mary McCarthy could own the idea. Wasn't
The Three Musketeers
much the same, young men off on a mission, learning what life was like? The fruit of a novel was in the execution, surely, not the plot. It sounded okay though I was not sure what it meant. Louis complained that I was argumentative, but was obliged to take my point.

'For another thing,' he said, now on firmer ground, 'there are eight characters on your opening page. This is absurd.

Characters are meant to be introduced slowly, one by one, so readers can get used to them. You just throw them all in and list them. You are meant to be kind to your readers, not defy them.'

This is a conversation thirty-five years old, but I remember its detail, burned into memory.

'Nobody's objected so far,' I said. 'Readers have to do some work too. It can't be all me. Me and my readers are in this together.'

'I and my readers,' he said, but he softened. 'So what you are doing in these novels is engaging in alienation techniques?

Is that right?'

'Of course,' I said, boldly. What could he mean?

'Okay,' he said grudgingly. 'It's new but that doesn't mean it works. Eight characters on a page are still too many.'

I took his point. And that is why, though I still tend to introduce characters with abandon, in this novel I re-cap the cast from time to time, putting new characters in heavy type as one does in a film script, to make it easy for readers. Not only Doralee, but all her ill-named sisters and the dog Rex too, and Trisha and her lesbian lover, and the wicked accountant Vera Thicket. And no doubt why now I refer to them as 'the cast', rather than as 'characters'. Over the next year Louis continued to let slip words of remonstration and advice, of which I took good heed, and for which I continue to be grateful.

Thus I remember, though fitfully, Louis' complaints that he had no idea what any of the characters in
Down Among the Women
looked like. I have at least remembered in
Mantrapped
to describe Trisha - but have had to go back to pay the same courtesy to Doralee and Peter. You shall have the cast clear in your mind's eye, as is my responsibility, as clear as if I held a camera, not a pen.

Doralee is, I'll swear, pure invention, but I admit I did have a great aunt Sylvia who lived in a
menage a trois
with a man known in the family as Willy Beach the Jam King, and another man whose name I cannot recall, but I believe he was a pillar of the community. Sylvia was born in 1867, and when a girl, along with my grandmother Frieda, was a model for Holman Hunt the painter. She and Frieda both had the clouds of fizzy fair hair and the strong jaws the Pre-Raphaelites loved. What's new? Doralee, Sylvia? I have made Doralee look like my great aunt, and she is to end up living with Peter and Trisha in their switched bodies. I met Sylvia only once but she made good scones, as I remember. I'm sure Doralee would too, if only she owned a proper oven and didn't have to make do with a microwave, and convenience food, and wasn't so busy she hardly knew whether she stood on her exuberant tendril-haired head or her nicely defoliated heels.

At the dry-cleaners'

Envisage this. Trisha, the hopeless case of earlier pages, the one who's fallen on hard times after winning the lottery, is now living above the dry-cleaners' in Wilkins Parade. She wonders whether she made a wise choice, whether it might not have been better to put down the phone and accept when Mrs Kovac said she couldn't have the flat, instead of throwing herself upon the woman's mercy. Mrs Kovac's mercies may turn out to be like the gifts of the grateful when dead, not quite what you expect or want. Abandoned needles and nasty bits of cellophane swirl around the recycling centre down the road, and though Harrods vans draw up outside High View Apartments, it is clear to Trisha that the area is fighting a civil war with itself, and both sides are fighting hard. Are property prices going up or down? Not that it matters to her, since she is renting, but she likes to live in a neighbourhood which is improving, not deteriorating. Who doesn't?

Trisha does not mind eking out a living doing odds and ends of mending for Mrs Kovac. Landladies always have to be pacified, in her experience. In return for accommodation they require gratitude as well as rent and she doesn't mind going through the motions. But Mrs Kovac is taking advantage. The day before yesterday Trisha was expected to darn cashmere gloves, which was tricky work, and then Mrs Kovac complained that the darns showed. What did she expect? The physically impossible? She accused Trisha of getting nicotine stains on someone's white lace collar - her fingers were a bit sweaty, it was true; it could get very hot and airless in the flat - and cigarette ash on some guy's jeans who needed a button sewing on. But it was Mrs Kovac's attitude that got up Trisha's nose. There was no respect. She walked in without knocking or piled garments up in a black plastic bag and left them outside the door without comment, which was almost worse. She shouted at Trisha up the stairs as if Trisha was a servant, of no account. She had reduced Trisha's rent by only five pounds a week, and since she set the rent in the first place, who is to say if this amounts to anything at all? Trisha, in fact, is hopping mad, for someone of so normally benign a nature.

Downstairs, Mrs Kovac too is in a state. It is not surprising. Mrs Kovac not only inhales more carbon tetrachloride than is good for her, but is lucky to get six hours sleep a night, and her efficiency and her temper suffer as a result, as is the case with Doralee. Mrs Kovac is now giving a final press to Doralee's mattress-cover, but has set the machine at too 1 high a temperature, under too great a pressure. She hears a slight sizzling sound, and gets a whiff of melting rubber as the old-fashioned buttons which fasten the cover melt and fuse into the fabric below and above. The buttons are now useless, the cover cannot be closed.

Mrs Kovac has various options open to her: she can pretend that all is well, return the cover without comment and hope no one notices; she can offer compensation, or she can
I
replace the buttons at her own expense. She decides to do the latter, and to ask Trisha to do the sewing. Trisha is in no position to dictate terms, Mrs Kovac knows, since Trisha will no doubt be claiming a full rent allowance from the benefits office, whilst not handing the full amount over to her landlady, but paying a proportion in kind.

Mrs Kovac's mistake lies in her decision to hold back the entire delivery for Doralee and Peter - three shirts and a dress as well as the mattress-cover - instead of only the mattress-cover. This means Doralee does not get the little black dress with thin-plaited shoulder straps (which Mrs Kovac hates, because the straps keep slipping from their hanger and must be fixed with a ribbon), in time for Doralee to take the dress with her to the office to wear for Heather's baby shower.

Heather is a colleague who until recently ran
Oracle's
books page. Doralee likes to change her clothes a lot - Ruby in her time, when the children were small, would drag on the same old skirt and black jumper day after day. The equivalent in Doralee's life is not to bother to change for an office party, and is not a good idea.

The hatred Mrs Kovac feels for the black dress is irrational but sometimes over-familiar garments do invoke paranoia in the hearts of those who service them. Let the bitch wait, thinks Mrs Kovac. Blame the carbon tetrachloride, for making her head achey and her breath sour. Blame Mr Kovac. Blame anyone for her bad temper. She should have been more careful with the ironing machine. Mistakes cost money: that was the first. The second was to try and wring more work out of Trisha than Trisha felt was appropriate.

Trisha loves needlework, or used to at school, when she was in love with her needlework mistress, Miss Little, which is why she offered to help Mrs Kovac out in the first place. It is a pity that such good will and happy memories should be reduced to this sourness, but it happens.

And no doubt about it, Trisha had had a hard time recently, from rags to riches with indecent speed and back again. Vera Thicket used to help Trisha out in these matters but since Vera abandoned her lesbian lifestyle and fled to different loves and other continents, Trisha is on her own.

Now she pulls the bulky linen cover out of the black sack and in so doing tears one of her nails down to the quick, and then another. Seized by a sudden fit of self-pity - not something to which she is prone - she even snivels a little. She has risen above the trials of the last few days well enough, but now suddenly the reality strikes her. She has lost husband, child, lover, lottery, home, career and nearly all her worldly possessions.

She had imagined that at least her long, elegant, crimson, and perfectly manicured nails, a source of pride, a beacon of hope for the future, would always be secure. Now suddenly they are torn and sore, and she sees herself as what she is, not the heroine of her own life, but a woman alone, on benefits, no longer young, with nothing. She weeps. The karma round here is off key today. And anger is boiling up.

Doralee gets back from work and calls Kleene Machine to enquire where (the fuck, by implication, though she doesn't quite use the word) her dry-cleaning is. It is meant to have been left in the porter's lodge for collection and there's no sign of it. Mrs Kovac says she is waiting for the order to be complete, as is her policy. Doralee points out that it is not a coherent or consistent policy as she has often had half orders delivered in the past. Mrs Kovac says the delay is because she is replacing the buttons on the mattress-cover free of charge as a gesture of goodwill. Doralee says she doesn't detect much goodwill in Mrs Kovac's tone. 'I need the dress for tonight,' says Doralee, though it's a lie. 'You've let me down.'

'Your buttons damaged my machines.' It is Mrs Kovac's instinct to attack when faced with criticism. Get in first! 'They're rubber. I could sue.'