Mantrapped (31 page)

Jane Bown came to photograph me. I was honoured. Jerry Bauer, too. Lord Snowdon as well, though I think that might have been later. I remember the good and talented Lord rifling through my wardrobe to find something suitable for me to wear, and finding nothing but a quilted coat in a pretty sprigged material fashionable at the time which would do to wrap around me. He set me under a tree and put a dog beside me, so I daresay that was indeed later, in a more rural phase of life. Wind swept through my hair.

A film crew making a documentary about the new feminism came to the house and found the electricity switched off, no furniture and me with scrubbing brush and mop. I take care to clean all the houses I leave as best I can, as evidence of my willingness to be a good citizen, earn the respect of others. That was one of my mother's legacies. She moved house as often as she could, always in search of something better, and always left them spotless and herself exhausted. I knew it was the thing to do. But it was so cold.

The day came when the new owners moved in. Ron went off to the shop as usual with a few things thrown in the back of the car. I wrote another sentence or so of
Little Sisters
. It was about a nineteen-year-old girl off on an illicit weekend with an antique dealer.

Elsa is abundantly lovely. She weighs twelve stone four pounds and is five feet eight inches tall. Her swelling bosom and rounded hips give promise of pneumatic bliss… Ah, she's beautiful, lush but not louche. 'You would have forgotten these,' says Victor, handing her the pink sachet of contraceptive pills. He'd picked them up from where they were hiding between the claws of a nine-foot Yogi bear.' 1 wouldn't,' she protests. But she would if she could.

I went to the new house and turned on the heating. It did not work. I went to collect Tom from his infants' school on Primrose Hill, and we went home to our cold new little concrete house. When Dan came back from school it was here he had to come. And the white cat got out and ran away and we looked and looked but couldn't find him. That evening Ron came home. But without his accustomed house around him he seemed denatured; I had never known him without it. I could hardly recognise him as having anything to do with me and I daresay he felt the same when it came to me. We went out to dinner with our friends Evie Williams and her new husband Anthony Perry and came back to the freezing house and Ron stayed the night. And in the morning he said he could not possibly live in such a place, what had I been thinking of, it was made of concrete and he was going to live in the shop until there was somewhere proper for us to live. We looked some more for the cat but couldn't find it.

So I found a house to rent in Rothwell Street, No. 5, which backed onto 3 Chalcot Crescent and was similar in every way, except it was not ours. We left the concrete house empty and moved in. My mother, my sister and the children moved in to take our place. From Rothwell Street I could see right through our old house to the Crescent beyond. It was so nearly home. But Ron said he did not like here either, he could never feel at home in such a place, the paintings on the walls were bad and of the African veldt, he would stay in the shop. Three months passed: I fretted and grieved; Tom and I walked into a lamppost on our way to school and we both knocked ourselves unconscious. It was snowing so hard I could not see. Indeed, I could not see. I went on with the book.
We are all of us nice, charming enough people
, I wrote,
until tried by circumstances and hard times, and then, and only then, do we find out what we really are
.

But I still did not find out. I wore a watch fashionable at the time. It defined your mood. I consulted it as if it were a charm. If you were unhappy or depressed the face was black: if you were cheerful it turned green or blue. I would go down to the shop and spend the night with Ron on the futon on the floor between the refectory tables and the marble washstands and the face of the watch would turn from black to bluey green. I liked to see that. I took it as a clue from fate that true love would win out in the end.

I caught a glimpse through two sets of windows of a white shape sitting on the Chalcot Crescent pavement and ran round to No. 3 as fast as I could. It was our white cat, toothless and thin and ragged: he had found his way home over railway lines and busy roads. I held out my arms and he leapt into them. I took him back to Rothwell Street. But he kept trying to get back into the Chalcot Crescent house, where he was now not wanted.

I could see Ron would never come to Rothwell Street, because of the bad paintings, so I rented the top floors of a house only six doors down from No. 3 Chalcot Crescent, where the cat consented to stay but Ron did not. Now I was paying one mortgage and two rents. I could no longer avoid it: it was nothing to do with any of the houses, I was the one Ron did not want to live with: I had just been very slow in realising it. I shut my eyes to dawning realisation. I went on with the novel. I give Elsa a happy end. She escapes from would-be murderers.

Elsa walks a good half mile down the road, unkempt, barefoot, and distraite, before a garage van going in to London picks her up. She is home by half past eleven, in time for the epilogue on television, and cocoa with her brothers and sisters.

But where was home? I'd told a story in
Down Among the Women
of a ship's magician on the
Titanic
. Every day he gives a children's party, does his tricks, makes a parrot disappear.

'Where did the parrot go?' cry the children. 'Here!' cried the magician, and there the parrot is, on his wrist. The
Titanic
strikes an iceberg and sinks, the magician and the parrot drift alone on a raft, day after day. For three days the parrot says not a word. On the fourth day it speaks. 'All right. I give in. Where'd the bloody ship go?' I was the parrot. Ron, Ron, I finally said,
where'd the bloody home go
?

Had he planned it in advance? How to unhook yourself from a clinging wife, old style? He told me once a friend said the way to let a woman down gently was to be so horrid to her she'd finally be glad to leave of her own accord. That shocked me so greatly I had wicked Angie and her even nastier lover Clifford do just that to sweet Helen in
The Hearts and Lives of Men
. In
The Heart of the Country
the antique-dealer has a room at the back of his shop where he entertains passing lovers. Easier to write it than to live it. In retrospect I see I spent a lot of time writing missives to myself which I then failed to read. 'Oh,' I say, 'I never go back to any of my books after they're written.' Pity.

Yet though often suffering acute fits of jealousy, they were, as it were, unspecific. I believed in Ron's fidelity, in his good sense, and in his standards. I thought that the normal rules of conduct did not apply to me, and that I was somehow special and would be saved. That once you have found true love it will be yours for ever. I was like a girl who chooses to believe, because she wants to believe it, that you don't get pregnant 'if you do it standing up'. I believed that all the fame stuff - and it was after all a very minor fame, and you were only ever as good as your last book - was of no real importance to anyone and that Ron would see it the same. That he had married me for better or for worse anyway, and if his musician friends addressed him as Mrs Weldon, and they would do that, meanly, sometimes, he would simply ignore it, because it couldn't be helped and what I did earned our living. And actually I was right.

Come August, and Ron wrote to say he had found an old farmhouse on the side of a hill, and had bought it, and needed my signature, and would I and the children come down and join him. The house was called Orchardleigh, it had a garden and fields and was in Somerset, and you could see Glastonbury Tor large and clear if you lay on your back on the attic floor and craned your neck to see past the roof ridge to the skyline. His choice. That was all it needed.

Twenty-five years later, in
Worst Fears
, I was to raze the house to the ground. Passing it a month or so back I was surprised to see it was still standing. I had thought I would see nothing but a rectangle of charred ground, with a garden and fields. But real life is stubborn: its nature is to persist.
Worst Fears
was only a book, words on paper, for once about what had happened, not what was going to.

Temptation

That night Doralee had trouble sleeping. She looked in on the Peter body where it lay sleeping, just as usual, on its back, arms flung wide and welcoming. The Trisha body lay curled foetus-like on the office sofa, making snuffling noises. Doralee sat at her desk and found the Internet and kept the volume down. The Trisha body did not wake. She looked up the nature/nurture debate on Google as it related to gender and found all kind of interesting things about the hard wiring of the species nature, about woman the nestbuilder and man the protector of the nest, and how human babies are the only creatures along with birds who call the parents back to the nest when in need, and at what time gender-specific behaviour cuts in - and made a note or two of background information for the book that would make her fortune and career. But there was nothing directly to the point. How could there be? Vast masses of ill-digested and agonised guff on transexualism, and transvestites, and rather more lucid stuff on hermaphroditism, all on the nature side, totally ignoring nurture; and how babies can be born without the mother's DNA because they have absorbed from a lost twin's inheritance, not the mother's. But a whole personality transfer, memories and all, and only the sympathetic nervous system left, as if the actual brains had shifted from one body to another - nothing. It was in no one's experience. She marvelled. Peter and Trisha might indeed be the only people in the world to whom this had happened, even if you included the vast populations of China. It was a frightening feeling, thus to be the lone witness to the future, walking on glass in a kind of drug psychosis which would never end, and yawning chasms of nothingness underneath, yet awesome. She would be on so many TV programmes it didn't bear thinking about. The cover of
Time
, even - of course they might try to use Peter and Trisha but they wouldn't get much sense out of them, and she, Doralee, was certainly more photogenic than Trisha.

She got through to alien abductions: perhaps sometimes people were swept up as one sex, and returned as the other? But there was nothing there either. A note came up on her e-mail. It was from Dr Otterman. He was sorry he had been unable to help but he had passed on the relevant details to the Department of Neurology at UCH, where there was a specialist department devoted to phenomenology and the study of consciousness, and giving her a phone number. Doralee deleted the message. Later, when the book was published, when she was the one who knew everything, and the whole world was aware of it, others could investigate all they liked. She would not be dog-in-the-mangerish. She opened a new file. Doralee/
Soul Switch/ Work in Progress
.

Her body was restless, full of vague desires; it missed Peter's body, even if she didn't. There was no real Peter. But she kept flicking back to wanting him, as the caps lock key on an overused keyboard will flick into uppercase unasked. She could join him on the bed easily enough. It was her bed. But was this a permitted exercise? Because it was Trisha really and would count as lesbianism. It would be being unfaithful to the real Peter, who was stuck in Trisha's body. They had none of them really discussed the matter of sex, just skirted it. She couldn't think why: it was enthralling.

If she were Trisha and had a man's body the first thing she would do would be to try it out: if she were Peter he could be excused for wanting to see what it felt like to be a woman. Perhaps in this new state of existence the sexes didn't get together: they did it to themselves, like snails, which everyone knew were hermaphrodite.

Doralee heard a female voice talking from the bedroom. Had someone broken in? She hurried in but the Peter body was sitting up in bed, bare-torsoed, and seemed to still be asleep, other than that he was talking in a high, chattery little voice. 'I'm not the kind to take advantage,' the Trisha voice was saying out of the Peter body. 'You know what I'm like. I'm just going to see it as a holiday, do all the things I want to do, eat what I want to eat, stop feeling bad about little Spencer, not worry about going with other women's husbands, be a man, in fact. I might go and beat up Rollo because he's a complete shit.'

Doralee ran her hand over her partner's familiar shoulders and felt the tenseness in them, and dug her thumbs into knotted muscles to relax them.

'That's lovely,' said the Trisha voice. 'Don't stop. Do you know what I think happened? I think that man who hangs around Kleene Machine, and Mrs Kovac says is her husband, comes from werewolf country, and there is a full moon. I reckon he's put some kind of spell on us, and it might be wearing off. But I suppose it's better than white slavery.' 'Just because people are immigrants doesn't mean they're white slavers,' said Doralee, primly. 'I hope you learn a thing or two from Peter while you're in there, Trisha. You've got some really odd ideas.'

It was obvious now to Doralee that Peter's penis, familiar though with a new driver, was rising and making a little peaked mountain under the sheet. She made a movement to lift the fabric but the Peter body pulled it down again and said in the female voice 'No, I'm sorry, Doralee, I don't want you to do that. And you'd better stop the massage. Why won't this thing just do as I ask? I don't want it to stand up and twitch like that. It's stupid. How can a man stop himself being a rapist? No wonder such terrible things happen in the world.'

'But I'm your body's partner,' said Doralee, seeing a chapter in danger of vanishing. 'And there's an almost full moon, and it was such a fabulous evening. We ought to celebrate.' 'Peter wouldn't like it,' said the Peter body, and the vocal cords were back in his charge. Another change was settling in, hardening, not weakening. The voice was even deeper and louder than Peter's own. Another flood of testosterone, presumably. 'Just go away and leave me to sleep, for fuck's sake.' This from Peter, who never swore.