Mantrapped
Fay Weldon

London, New York, Toronto and Sydney

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Trisha leaves home

Writer’s note

Trisha and her mattress

Riches to rags

Trisha faces the future

Novels are not enough

Times I have cried in public

Trisha’s mistakes

On the anger of mothers

Trisha starts a new life

A selection of antecedents

Life in the slow lane

Fading customs

At the dry-cleaners’

A lifetime of keeping clothes clean – three pages the nondomestic reader is free to skip

To the Novel!

Peter collects his dry-cleaning

On the question of souls

Opening salvos in a marriage, that is to say, my own

Consequences. The past catches up

Doralee waits

Gynaecological dreams

A gynaecological history

Still waiting

All that bad stuff

And more waiting

On the villainy of women

A good explanation for absence

Back to the past

Doralee, Trisha and Peter

What will happen next?

Trisha, Doralee and Peter visit the psychiatrist

On psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists—and how to lose readers

Trisha, Doralee and Peter visit the parson

Feminist!

At Kleene Machine

Strange things do happen

Doralee is tired

Selling up and moving on

Making good

Trying to get out of the city

Doralee adjusts

A home to go to

Temptation

Home and normality is restored

P.S. Ideas, interviews & features…

About the author

Split Personalities Louise Tucker talks to Fay Weldon

LIFE AT A GLANCE

FAVOURITE THINGS

A Writing Life

About the book

The Real Me? By Fay Weldon

Read on

Have You Read?

About the Author

Praise

Also by Fay Weldon

Copyright

About the Publisher

Trisha leaves home

Trisha had been rich and Trisha had been poor and she knew it was better to be rich. Now she was to be poor again.

The mattress Trisha slept upon was the most expensive on the market: she took consolation from that. Madonna had one like it. Trisha bought it after she won the lottery, nine years back. The claims the manufacturers made for it were true. When she woke in the morning her joints were not stiff and she had no trace of back-pain. She might on occasion wake weeping but she did not wake hurting.

Now she was to ache again. There would be no room in her new abode for so large and lavish a bed as hers. She had thought herself so resolved and steady of purpose, so unsentimental, so unattached to belongings, but now suddenly she felt weak at the knees and wanted to cry. She was alone in the world, without even a decent bed or permanent pillow on which to lay her head. Life once had seemed so easy. You did your best and it worked out all right. The advertisement in the catalogue had shown a young woman sitting alone on a bed with a glass of wine sitting beside her on the pink and gold floral fabric of the mattress. It had passed ‘the wine-glass test’, proving how the springs adjusted themselves to sudden changes in the distribution of weight.

That was how life ought to be, glossy and properly worked out for those who had the money.

Now, nine years later, when push had come to shove, and the creditors were banging on the door, and everything had to be sold, she looked at the mattress and doubted that it was even saleable. There is not much of a market for used mattresses in a prosperous society. The suspicion is always there that the previous owner has died upon it and that it would be more auspicious to start afresh. And the mattress, Trisha could see, showed all too much evidence of a hard-living, on-going life, far too much for a potential customer’s comfort. It was stained with the traces of nine years of careless living, flecked by blood and semen, marked by the breaking waters of pregnancy; it was impregnated, if she put her nose to it, with the soft fumes of marijuana and the acrid after-scent of cocaine.

People had got so fussy. Not just about things but about their bodies. Once a woman had been happy to look as God decided. Virtue lay in playing a good hand no matter what cards were handed out at birth. Greasy hair, put up with it. Big nose, large bottom, too bad. Smile and be grateful. Now it was off to the cosmetic surgeon to defy God’s will. Bodies were kept under better control than once they were. They were thinner, cleaner, better exercised, healthier: people of the New Millennium had the energy and will to keep the corners clean. This was a mattress from the Former Age, the old century, and it showed. If a cover had come with the mattress—and at that price it surely should have—she had never bothered to put it on. The help never spoke English, and Trisha wasn’t one to ask and burden servant lives further with extra toil. Sheets were understood in Latvia and Estonia but mattress-covers? She, Trisha, did not have the gift for creating order around her and she was prepared to admit it. In her new life she would try to do better.

In the months after the lottery win she had bought and bought and bought, all the things she had ever done without, to make up for years of too-thin saucepans, too-cheap sheets, badly-stitched clothes, and over-perfumed soap. She had bought the best, and not thought about money, other than to avoid bargains. Now everything had to be sold and would go for a fraction of what she had spent. But the pleasure of the antique Buddha, the double-pile carpets, the cocktail cabinets, the ice-making fridge, the serving table which talked back to you and wiped its own surface clean, the little unauthenticated Picasso sculpture of a bull, had lain in the buying, not the owning. So who cared? The money had run out, and credit too: now she would earn her own living like everyone else. She was not new to penury. She had scraped along for years on benefits and occasional work as an actress. Now she would take a computer course and do temping, forget how much she hated office work, being cooped up. Others managed, so would she. It had been good to win the lottery, good to attract the men who went with it, but it would be good to live honourably once again. The nouveaux riches were lonely; they looked over their shoulders all the time to make sure no one was cheating them, taking advantage, but they tended to look in the wrong direction. Those born rich had it easier, they knew the rules and how to keep them, were trained at their nanny’s knee never to break into capital, never to lend money, to stick to their own class, rules devised over centuries for their protection. It was only recently she had realised what capital was. It was the stuff in the bank which others more secure than she lived on.

But she had her assets. People liked her. She was forty-four but could pass for ten years younger: she had good, long, skinny legs: she was plump-bosomed, large-nosed and smiled easily. Her hair was thick and naturally curly, henna-enriched. She was flexible: she could touch her toes with her hands flat on the floor in front of her. She looked available: she knew that: nothing much she could do about it: the truth was inbuilt: she looked as if a man might only give her but a little push, and she would fall easily back upon the bed and not complain about it. Round-heeled, her mother had called her once, when she was thirteen and had started going out with boys. Other girls were somehow stiffer in the middle, not given to bending: they got given presents, jewellery, flowers. Not Trisha—she always seemed to be the one giving things—little gifts, cards and so on, hoping to please. She looked good in little waisted jackets with fake fur collars. Tarty, her mother complained. So what? Wearing high heels with jeans meant there was never any shortage of men around, and a shortage of men was what Trisha most feared. Or had until the last couple of months. Perhaps she was traumatised, more upset by recent events than she realised: whatever it was, the thought of having a man about appalled her, someone telling her what to do, watching her every move, interfering with her decisions. She wanted her body to herself, while she worked out what to do next. The idea of strange male fingers approaching her flesh, which until lately would have had her instant positive attention, now gave her the shivers.

She knelt beside the mattress and the idea of praying occurred to her. She put her hands together and closed her eyes. ‘Dear God,’ she said, as she hadn’t since she was seven. ‘Help me now in the hour of my need. Forgive me my sins.’ But really she had no idea how she could possibly have sinned. She had only ever done what circumstances required of her, and kept a little back for herself. Wasn’t that allowed?

No voice from God came in reply, only that of the auctioneer’s young assistant. ‘So is the bed to be in the sale or out of it?’ he asked. Trisha got to her feet at once. He would assume she had been examining the mattress: it would not occur to anyone these days that people kneeled by beds and prayed. She hoped he noticed the quality, and overlooked the stains. He spoke through his nose, though that was probably not his fault. He was in the habit of despising others, she could tell. It narrowed the nasal passages. Nothing was ever worth as much as people hoped and it gave him a feeling of superiority. He earned his living dealing in other’s people’s disappointments. He was a tall, pale, stooping young man: how did such a person come to have the job he did? She was in a perpetual state of marvel at the way the new world worked. He had qualifications, she supposed, in Art History. He had been trained to tell a Manet from a Monet, no doubt, but she did not think he would make it in the wide world. He had too little generosity of spirit. Too many planets in the lower half of the astrological chart, as hers were, to rise to great heights. Too long spent handling what amounted to repossession sales—turn up, turn up, knock down prices, everything must go. One person’s bargain is another person’s loss. Wrong end of the market, buster, down here among the totters, the knockers, the hearse-chasers, the hungry end of the dealing trade. Up the top end, Bond Street and the antique trade, and at the bottom, the skip; in the middle, eBay and the car boot sale. Look at this, darling, just right for the baby in a couple of years. What was sold early morning down the wrong end of the Portobello Road for a fiver went for twenty quid at the top, by evening. In the meanwhile the traders helped themselves to a living. Ordinary punters, idle and ignorant, never knew what they were doing: it was their role in life to be ripped off. While the professionals, the lawyers, the accountants, the designers, not to mention the daily help, helped themselves to what was left, and that was before the taxman got the lion’s share. Well, now she didn’t have to worry. It could all go. All the stuff now piled up in the garden and the front rooms, the over-shiny repro furniture, the stacks of unopened fashion magazines, the garden roller no gardener could be bothered to use, the frilly swing seats—she always thought she’d conceived little Spencer in that one—and the mirror and glass serving-trolleys with boule decoration, a snip at £7000—and the only single thing she regretted was the bed, with its used mattress. ‘I haven’t decided,’ she said to the auctioneer. ‘It might come with me.’

‘It won’t fetch much in a sale,’ he said. ‘Mattresses never do. But I could take it off your hands for a fiver. It would clean up. My girl-friend’s only got a futon.’

Perhaps he wasn’t so bad. They were all in the survival game together.

Writer’s note

So far so good. You can start a novel like this. Lottery Winner Faces Hard Times. Rags to riches is better, but riches to rags will do. It is heartening in fiction to watch people making good, but facing up to their just or unjust desserts has its attractions too. I remember thinking this in the days of my frivolity, when I was the BBC’s darling, and anything I could think of to write they would produce, without argument or committee meetings or worry about ratings. In the days when script editors were there to make writers happy and bring them cups of tea, and not tell them what to do, and my income was great—by my standards—even though my debts were often greater. That lasted for fifteen years, on and off, and ended in the mid-Eighties.

Trisha and her mattress

The young auctioneer went off to harangue the men who were trying to manoeuvre a pool table from the so-called rumpus room down the stairs, and had already broken the banisters. Trisha went to the linen cupboard where a sign now said Assorted Linens—£25 and extracted an Egyptian cotton sheet from a packet of six, still wrapped, that had cost her £435 from Harrods, and used it to cover the disgrace of the mattress. Here was a decade’s worth of personal history. At least she’d had some. Many didn’t. Here was the large red wine stain where she had tried the wineglass trick and it had failed. One of the lovers—was it Gregory or Thomasina? Or one of the husbands—was it Alastair or Rollo?—had lunged at her and that had been that. Spoiled, no longer virgin. The bed had been sold on the premise of comfort and hygiene, not the bonus of sexual activity, so she could not take the manufacturers to court under the Trades Descriptions Act. She noted she had begun to see litigation as a way of raising money. She would like to be able to sue God for making her the way she was. See there, a trail of yellowish stains left by little Spencer who as a one-year-old had liked to climb into her bed and sleep there, rather than in his cot, sucking last night’s bottle.

That was in the days before Rollo claimed Trisha was an unfit mother. It was not an accusation easy to refute. She was not fit. Good mothers used mattress-covers which could be easily laundered, they breast fed not bottle fed, did not drink too much, go to bed with women if there were no men available, not even to cure a broken heart. She hoped she was a nice mother, but she knew she was not a good one.

The solution occurred to her. She would leave the bedstead and take the mattress. It was as good a memoir of her life as she was likely to get. She would go easy on herself and not start altogether afresh. The mattress would go with her to her new address in Wilkins Parade, the living room, bedroom and kitchen above a domestic services agency, called for some reason Kleene Machine, where she was now obliged to live. The landlady had promised the flat to her, though there was nothing in writing. The rent was cheap: housing benefit would cover it. The area was just about possible, still with a majority of non-ethnics. She had to face it: nothing was going to turn up in the next couple of hours to save her from the squalor of living above a shop. That kind of thing only happened when you were under forty. No former lover, no knight in shining armour, was going to gallop over the horizon and rescue her. She had no choice but to call up the landlady before she changed her mind, and say, yes, she would take the flat, she would move in at once.

It would be okay. She would make the new place into a love nest, cosy and sweet, she would pick up fabric from charity shops and drape the walls: she would drown the smell of damp and mould with scent. She had at least thirty bottles of expensive scent, all opened, all tried, most discarded. They would come with her in the van in which she would drive away from her old life and begin the new. Of course she would take the mattress; it represented her past. She would live to cavort upon it in style once more. The strength was returning to her legs. They were good legs, not as long as they could be, but shapely. Life after all was a great adventure.

Riches to rags

I came to the riches to rags idea in a taxi on my way to a commissioning meeting at the BBC. That was 1985. I was unprepared. I would have to wing it, and did. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘there was this woman living happily in the country when…’ and made it up as I went along. Okay, they said. These days I would need to take along a twenty-page synopsis, fully-illustrated, to such a meeting and the life would have gone out of it before I even began. That was The Heart of the Country, which ended up as a TV mini-series and which I later novelised. Frivolity can be a great asset to a writer: delinquency is part of the calling. I thought it would only really interest recipients of housing benefit in the Shepton Mallet area of Somerset, where I then lived, but it ended up winning the LA Times Fiction Prize. A great many people are very conscious of riches to rags; it is their fear and, more often than you would think, their experience.

There was an auction in that novel, too, when my heroine’s belongings were sold up. Bereft of a husband to protect her, and innocent of the ways of the world, she was thoroughly cheated by the local small businessmen, from the antique dealer to the estate agent to the lawyer. First they slept with her, then they profited by her. Trisha will not be so foolish. She knows only too well which side her bread is buttered.

That auction is vivid in my mind because, having written it, I was there at its filming for TV. If you write enough fiction, you can have trouble telling the difference between what you did in real life and what you wrote, and filming makes both more vivid. The rectangle of charred earth where I once fictionally burned down my own home, in a novel called Worst Fears, written in 1995, is seared painfully into my mind, and the passing of ten years has not muted the pain. I drove past the house the other day and was astonished to see it still standing and was not at all pleased.

Nearly everything you write about, you realise one day, has its roots somewhere in the past. What, for example, is this preoccupation with mattresses? True, this morning I changed my own. Over, end to top, side to side, heavy work. I did it myself without help. I did not want witnesses. There is no mattress-cover. Perhaps I am piling my own housewifely guilt into poor Trisha. I am reluctant to go out and buy a new one: I don’t know what kind of shop stocks such things and I would have to find tape, pen and paper to take the measurements and I am upstairs and they are downstairs—you know how it goes. And besides, I have other more pressing things to think about. Easier to write another paragraph about Trisha’s life.

My mattress, like Trisha’s, is nine years old and expensive. Unlike Trisha’s it is in not too bad a state. But mattresses are not the proper stuff of fiction. Beds are trivial on the page, if not in life. When, after thirty years of marriage, doing what all women are warned not to do (Wronged wife: ‘I want nothing from you, nothing. All I want is my freedom!) I left the matrimonial home, my then husband at least had the grace to give our brass bed away and not share it with his mistress under what used to be our joint roof. I am grateful for that.

Sometimes I wonder who has the bed now—like in that story A Day in the Life of a Penny, which all children used to be required to write and I loved to do and others to my surprise hated. In whose pocket is the penny now? In whose home the bed?

I hope it brought them luck, I daresay it did. Luck stayed with me for perhaps longer than its usual run, and may it do the same for them: I cross my fingers. I also hope that though keeping the bed itself they junked the mattress. It had nearly thirty years of life with us, and heaven knows where it came from before.

We do so much in bed, lying down—if we are lucky, that is—get born, conceive others, die—and if it doesn’t happen in a bed that’s usually bad. Born in a taxi, conceived in an alley, died in an accident—needs must, but bed is best, safe, familiar and dull. Too dull, perhaps, for novels. Fiction is about the exceptional, not the normal. Fiction is focused real life, with the boring bits cut out. Otherwise, just live life, don’t read about it. Let alone write about it. Back to business.

Trisha faces the future

So Trisha calls Kleene Machine and tells Mrs Kovac, who is the owner of the property, that she will take the flat. Kleene Machine’s shop-front has been recently repainted in deep crimson, lettering in gold. It is not unattractive. The firm charges top prices. It used to be a betting shop. Mrs Kovac hires out domestic and office cleaners from Eastern Europe and farms out the dry-cleaning on a commission basis. Kleene Machine’s little crimson and gold van, driven by Mr Kovac, beetles around the area and is a familiar sight, if a rather surprising one in this mixed area, in which piss-stained, concrete walls and broken windows are still evident. This particular branch of Kleene Machine, an organisation which has so far made good profits by judging the property market and being the first to arrive in up-and-coming areas, was leased by the Kovacs as a concession two years ago. The neighbourhood is becoming popular with the media classes—journalists, film makers, ad men, minor celebrities and so on, who are less frightened of gun crime than the professionals—lawyers, doctors, accountants—and are the foot soldiers of the class war, as they prepare to drive out the riff-raff, ethnics of many varieties, take over and gentrify. The media game in London is to buy property cheap and sell dear by virtue of blessing the area with their presence and their spending power.

The police have gone before, making life uncomfortable for drug-dealers, whores, beggars and the gangs of youths, who, listless at best and depraved at worst, used to hang around Wilkins Square and its environs, bringing down the price of property. Now they cluster a quarter of a mile further out and make life miserable for another set of residents. They’re restless, they didn’t want to go. Wilkins Square has been the province of the uprooted and dispossessed for hundreds of years. Tradition draws them; they drift back, thwarting the police in their attempt to clean up the area. It is touch and go who wins.

Trisha has to rent: she can’t buy. She has no money, other than what she makes from the sale, and that will have to go to pay off the last remaining debts. The auctioneers will want their commission; the tax man will want his last remaining pennies before the benefit agencies take over and pay out what the tax man has brought in. Everything will be recorded on computer and camera. Trisha’s face will be studied by security cameras as she stands in line at Job Centres and welfare services. No one will let Trisha go free but no one will let Trisha starve. Trisha, by her careless living, has created quite an amount of work for all kinds of people to do, which is to the greater good, no doubt, and just as well, since the human race is in search of meaningful employment, and caring for others, making a difference, is what it likes to do.

Trisha makes the phone call she has been putting off. ‘Hi there, Mrs Kovac,’ says Trisha. She uses her mobile: the landline has long since been disconnected, and the instrument added to the others in the pile flagged Assorted Electronics, £30. ‘Remember me? Trisha?’ She speaks cheerfully. No point in dispiriting others. ‘I’m the one about the flat. Thanks, I’d love to take it.’

‘You’re too late,’ says Mrs Kovac. ‘I told you to ring before midday. It’s gone to the next person on the list. Flats round here are like gold dust. I was doing you a favour not wanting a yes or no there and then.’

Some people enjoy the power that owning the roof over others’ heads entails: to be able to be kind and offer it, or to be mean and snatch it away at will—yes, that can be rewarding. Mrs Kovac finds it so. Trisha has met all too many of her kind lately, power freaks, the kind that cluster in banks or call centres, or wherever desperate need reveals itself. The officials concerned with her bankruptcy—she had offered them chocolate biscuits out of the generosity of her heart and been told she was buying them at other people’s expense; there must henceforth be only digestive—enjoyed her helplessness: so did the social workers, who spoke with the soft, consoling voices of the habitually cruel, which belied hard eyes, and the contempt which seethed within. Sensitised now to the unspoken words: How have you come to be in this fix? Serve you right! Now you, who thought yourself so grand, are brought as low as us! Mrs Kovac is another. Trisha realises she had done it wrong. As with landlords, so in doctor’s surgeries, as in all places where you depend upon others for help, it is wiser to weep, wail, and show distress than to display good cheer. Allow those in charge to show mercy, and then they will. But first, crawl.

Trisha weeps and snivels on the phone. She tells herself it is planned and calculated. It is not. She weeps real tears. Oh please, Mrs Kovac, please! She wants the flat, needs it. It is cheap and dirty and damp but it will do. It smells violently of carbon tetrachloride. Mrs Kovac undertakes ‘spotting’—removing the worst stains by hand—in the back of the shop, before sending other people’s dirty clothes off and away to the mysterious places where soiled rags are restored and returned crisp and clean and plastic wrapped. But there are worse smells to live with. Carbon tetrachloride at least smells of improvement, renewal, hope.

Mrs Kovac previously imported uneducated girls from the Far East, two a penny in their own land, where girls were on the whole disregarded. They were brought in on cheap flights, and allocated where Western need most lay. The clever ones were whisked off into banks, the pretty ones landed in the sex industry, the careful ones became nannies, the kind ones carers, and the daft and docile ones, Mrs Kovac’s speciality, became cleaners. Now she ran Kleene Machine she would trust the most dextrous to do mending and repair work: replace buttons, patch, take up hems, let out seams—there is a lot of such work to be done: these days, with exercise done or neglected, diets working or otherwise, people change their shape rapidly. Fat today, slim tomorrow: wide-muscled shoulders on Saturday night, soft and sloping a week hence. But good mending girls were in short supply: the art of careful, delicate and precise workmanship was dying in the East as it long since had in the West. ‘Repairs’ were a good little money earner if you got it right but finding the staff was an increasing problem.

A few of Mrs Kovac’s best girls had got away to good jobs in the fashion industry in Paris, where they commanded good wages. Now they had learned the route, too many others followed. Lately the bottom had fallen out of the Far East market: girls from Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand were earning their living at home, their national economies were better. Times were better. Eastern Europe and Russia was the new market for girls. Soon that too would dry up and she would be left with the British, who were too disdainful to exert themselves at such mundane and badly-paid tasks. Poles were hopeless at sewing but good cleaners. It was a Communist upbringing mixed up with Catholic guilt that did it, in Mrs Kovac’s opinion. They scrubbed both to cleanse their sins and benefit the community. But she could see that someone like Trisha, who had let slip about her past in embroidery, and was clearly in reduced circumstances, might be persuaded to join the mending army.

What Trisha had liked about the flat on her earlier brief inspection of it was that it had its own side entrance. You didn’t have to go through the shop to get to it. It was private. She could make it nice. A few throws, some cushions and a scented candle or two and it would be just fine. She’d turn it into a little love nest. The area was marginally worrying. There was a Starbucks just around the corner, true—a sign that the district was going up in the world; but there was also a pile of broken syringes outside Kleene Machine waiting for a street-cleaner who never came to sweep them up in his little machine. Touch and go, Trisha thought, but she wouldn’t be there for long. This was just a staging post between one good life and the next—with any luck. First, Mrs Kovac had to be persuaded.

‘Please, please,’ said Trisha, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do; I’ve got no one to be there for me, nowhere to live. I don’t know how my life has come to this but it has.’ And so forth.

Mrs Kovac said she couldn’t change her mind, she always kept her word, and besides, the new tenant was prepared to do bits and pieces of mending and sewing in part return for rent.

‘I can do that!’ said Trisha. ‘It’s just up my street!’ and indeed this was true. She had been to the London College of Embroidery for a term, between school and Drama College. She’d written this on the statutory form provided by the Rental Accommodation Office, which she’d given Mrs Kovac, and which gave the life details everyone seemed to want these days.

‘If it means all that to you,’ said Mrs Kovac, grudgingly, ‘I’ll put the other person off.’ So that was that, arranged. Fate took away with one hand and gave it back with the other, albeit finding the recipient a little more shop-soiled by age and experience each time it happened. Trisha didn’t suppose her mending duties would be onerous, since Mrs Kovac was prepared to reduce the rent by only five pounds a week. She would meet that problem when she came to it.

On her way to her new home, riding in the front of the van with the removal man and her bits and pieces behind, she felt exhilarated, if a little as if she were the Fool in the Tarot pack, about to walk jauntily over the cliff edge into thin air. She tried to remember little Spencer’s face and somehow couldn’t quite envisage it. He belonged to some woman who had won a fortune in a lottery and lost it all in a decade. Through her inattention, drink and gambling, he now belonged to his father. That was justice. Men should remember they are fathers too.

It is easy enough to forget children in their absence. The bonding process works best when the child is within earshot. Birds and humans are designed to go foraging for their young and to return to the nest when the offspring is needy and calls out. If the call can’t be heard the parent forgets. Other creatures need proximity of touch. Take a cow from a calf and in a couple of hours the cow forgets and the tormented lowing stops. After half a day the cat without kittens stops prowling. Why should we be different? But sometimes Trisha feels bad because she gives so little thought to her absent child.

The mattress turned out to be bigger than Trisha supposed, or else the bedroom was smaller than she remembered. You had to choose which one you wanted to open properly—the bedroom or the wardrobe door—you couldn’t have both. Trisha chose the bedroom door. Clothes were henceforth to be unimportant to her new life. She would take all her little fur-lined jackets to the charity shop: she would go to work in dark skirts and white shirts. She would be plain and useful. She was full of dreams of redemption, of absolution. She would have to clamber over the mattress, no doubt, for the odd feather stole and silky chemise, but at least her back would not hurt, only her pride. She would earn her own money and keep away from men. She would live quietly and lick her wounds until she felt stronger. She would try never again to weep in front of the likes of Mrs Kovac, never to be humiliated, never be reduced to inchoate self-pity.

Trisha’s soul was much like her mattress: soiled but comfortable.

Novels are not enough

Novels alone are not enough. Self-revelation is required. Readers these days demand to know the credentials of their writers, and so they should. Too often readers cry out for bread and are given stones: writers fail them, fob them off with thrillers, good guys on the political left, the bad guys on the right, or chick lit, first-person tales in the present tense leavened by wisecracks, feeble emotions if nifty enough plots. Writers have to get published somehow: living in garrets is out of fashion. Who would take them seriously if they did? Once writers alone in all the world had privileged information: they could read the human mind and pass the knowledge on. But these days their USP, their Unique Selling Proposition, is wearing thin. Such knowledge is no longer arcane: everyone knows everything. Freud and Jung and a host of psychotherapists have laid out the road map of the mind for all to see: the mechanics of intellectual and emotional reaction have been made clear. From Meet Yourself as You Really Are; I’m Okay, You’re Okay; Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus; The Cinderella Complex and their like, to Help Yourself to Contentment programmes on TV, everyone is now their own expert. Since Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in public, what is there left to be disclosed? It is not better and it is not worse: it is just different.

We are not short of stories, not at all. We wallow in beginnings, middles and ends: if we grow blas´ we are shocked into response. Once a severed finger was alarming, now volleys of decapitated heads fly about our screens and no one flinches. Our whole existence is threaded through with cheapo TV fiction: it is script editors, trained in counselling techniques, not writers, who dictate the lines the actors say, the tears they weep, the homosexual kisses they exchange. Our children grow up as heroes of their own lives, believing there will always be a happy ending. Even those wear thin. We would rather have reality TV.

Fiction drifts backwards into once upon a time: it is an industry, its raw material dug up where the market dictates, hammered into shape by editorial teams and committee, and each writer these days is perforce his own committee—what will the publisher think, what will my friends think, what do I dare say? The computer sniffs at swear words and underlines them with red. Thus the Stalinist Within triumphs, the free expression of thought is stifled. The Committee Without is there to pick off stragglers: can this be safely published? Will this make a profit? (The Satanic Verses would not stand a snowflake’s chance in hell today.) Since the touchstone is what has done well in the past nothing new can happen, or only by accident. But prudence does not pay off. The readers begin to yawn and close their books.

Best put your faith then in the new reality novel. Reality TV is real life lived out in a fictional context (the House): the reality novel threads the life through the fiction. Have my fiction, have me.

That off my chest, on with the story of my own life. Trisha’s is going to have to wait a bit. As she wept, pained and humiliated, so did her writer.

Times I have cried in public

I cried when I was fourteen turning fifteen and I left my father on the quayside at Wellington, New Zealand, a tall, dark figure getting smaller and smaller as the ship departed, knowing I would never see him again. Nor did I. I was off, unwillingly, to England with my brave and wilful mother. That was 1946.

I cried when I was sixteen turning seventeen and the headmistress told me that I alone of all the Upper Sixth had not been elected prefect. That was South Hampstead School for Girls and only this morning I had a letter from the current headmistress asking me to address the school on any subject of my choosing. If My Friends Could See Me Now. Some could, if they were interested, but too many have died. That was 1948, the year I realised there was no magic to protect me from misfortune.

It was a shock when I realised my school days were five years behind me. The degree of shock, if this is any consolation, remains much the same now the gap amounts to fifty-five years. The terrible realisation that the present is not always with us is a one-time event and not subject, thank God, to perpetual renewal.

Better to be grateful for the time one has, and the time one has had than lament that there is little left. If I look out of the window where I write this early morning I see the sun rising over the pollarded lime trees of what were once the gardens of the most powerful abbey in England. The trees look the same as in the sixteenth-century print someone showed me recently—the old gnarled trunks, the spurt of new, thwarted if determined foliage, like the drawing of an inexpert child. It is autumn, the most colourful autumn for years after a hot, dry summer, and the trees are coming to life with the dawn, in a kind of greeny-pink haze. A woman walks a little dog. It should be on a lead and is not. People, delinquent and otherwise, have walked here for centuries. The monument to the dead of the First World War comes into relief as sunlight breasts the wall of the church and stripes the dark grass withlight. Beyond the trees the ground falls away from the old castle ramparts, and you can see right across a wide landscape to the next ridge of hills and the little airfield which flashes its light as confidently as if it were Canary Wharf.

The Abbey was torn down by Henry VIII, in a fervour of asset-stripping, and the stone parcelled out to nobles in London to build their fine houses. But a lot was stolen in dead of night, and many old houses in these parts have chunks of Abbey stone built into their fabric. And we still have the trees, and the past showing through into the present, if you have a mind to look.

I will put a tree or two in Wilkins Parade and Wilkins Square where the addicts gather, to cheer the place up, to share my good fortune in being able to see what I have seen this morning, the old and the new, the past and the present, all merging into one another. Good fortune must be passed on.

Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour Let no night, Steal thy sense in deathly slumber ‘Til to delight Thou hast paid thy utmost blessing, Since that all things thou would’st praise, Beauty took from those that loved them, In other days.

My mother would quote that at the drop of a hat. She never went to school but she had a head full of poetry, and passed the knowledge on to me. Just before she died, at the age of ninety-five, we remembered together at least two consecutive pages of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott.

Four grey walls and four grey towers, Overlook a space of flowers…

What else are the Abbey gardens? My grandchildren’s heads are full of pop lyrics, in the same way, but I think we had the best of it.

I cried when I was seventeen turning eighteen and my father died. I had just come home from France, where I had been working in a Youth Aliyah camp for Jewish children on their way to what was then known as the Holy Land, and was staying with my aunt and uncle, Mary and Michael Stewart in Amen Court, in the shadow of St Paul’s. I was to be there for a week before taking the night train to St Andrews University. Home had vanished in my absence. My mother had left London to live in her Wild Meg cottage on the Cornish moors. Once again, I had only my suitcase and memories I preferred to forget—lost landscapes, lost friends.

Michael and Mary were Labour Party activists and were to end up in the House of Lords, he an ex-Foreign Secretary, she a very worthy Baroness. A telegram came. Mary opened it and said ‘Bad news, your father has died’ and put it down on the hall stand. She cried a little, my father being her brother, and I cried too, to keep her company. We did not touch; we were not a touching family.

‘We have grim news,’ say The Sunday Times and others when they ring up to tell you some public figure or friend has died, ‘we have grim news.’ And you reply quickly, ‘who?’ And they give you the name and it either shocks you to the core or you remain oddly and guiltily indifferent. Sometimes it is those apparently closest to you whose death does not seem to impinge much upon your own life, while the death of those you scarcely know and rarely see can strike you to the quick. Grief comes bidden or unbidden, and there is little you can do about it. It is as if the circles of acquaintance given to one in life are flawed: off-key, they overlap but do not coincide. You can spend a lot of time with others, and take very little notice. Or spend a little time, and be devastated.

I had not seen my father for three years and I think I had struck him from my psychic address book. We went to Oklahoma! that night—we did not cancel, and it was my birthday treat. Life, my aunt said, must not be disturbed by death. That was 1949: there had been a war. Amen Court stood alone amidst rubble. The times were drastic, and still out of joint.

I met my mother a few days later in a Lyons Corner House: brief reference only was made to my father’s death. She did say she shouldn’t have left him, and he was the only man she had ever loved. She seemed surprised I was disturbed in any way by his death. But then she never reckoned fathers much. And since she didn’t see why I should take his loss personally, I tried not to. I did cry on the way back to Amen Court and a lady on the bus asked me if anything was the matter and I remember saying, ‘I have no home and now no father.’ Then I cheered up. I had a sense of drama, but could not keep self-pity up for long. On the night train up to St Andrews I took off my black armband and that I thought was that. He shouldn’t have gone and died if he wanted my love. Fatherless—so what was new anyway?

Black armbands—strips of black satin bought at the haberdashers—had become fashionable in the war, replacing the wearing of black clothes to signify a family bereavement, and my mother, as a concession to the event, had bought them for Jane and me to take to university. Our new friends would treat us more tenderly, or perhaps find a useful way of striking up a conversation. Jane—having left school at fourteen and finished the correspondence courses which were to earn her a matriculation certificate—that wonderful document which qualified you to get to University—and now living in a bed-sitting room—set off for Exeter as I set out for St Andrews. I don’t know whether Jane wore her armband, or not. We did not discuss such things, or indeed, ever talk about my mother as if she were not in the room, which precluded discussion of my father’s death. And as Jane went South and I went North, my mother went West, to St Ives in Cornwall, having decided all places under the sun were equal, and St Ives was where the pin struck that she had held over a map of the land, and let it fall. Almost off the map, not quite. Which is why it happened that Jane met her husband Guido the artist in St Ives, and they begat Christopher, Rachel and Benjamin, who begat Alexander, Isobel and Imogen, Nat, Jake and Henrietta—and all of them come to Christmas dinner, long after Guido and Jane are gone. And all live in houses which do not vanish under their noses: we work hard at it and keep the gardens nice.

I remember the armband so vividly. 1949. I stepped aboard the train in England wearing it, and off the train in Scotland without it. I remember the act of will it took to take it off. I felt ungrateful and disobedient, but I meant to be a person without a past, only a future. Of course it is not so easy.

To wear black at all—now the mainstay of most wardrobes, and a symbol of smart practicality—was still seen in the Forties and Fifties as unlucky. (As for white lilies, ‘funeral flowers’—they should never be brought into a house. The association with coffins was too strong, not to mention the white waxiness of the blooms themselves, too like the corpse itself to be countenanced.) The armband was a kind of halfway house, between the excesses of Victorian mourning and today’s way of achieving ‘closure’ as soon as possible, by way of Bereavement Support Groups. It was an explanatory statement to strangers. ‘Forgive me if I’m not as polite or considerate as I should be. If I cry in the street, on the bus, I am not mad. Someone close to me has died.’ It should be revived: I should not have taken it off.

The quad at St Andrews was bleak stone and the green grass formal, and the paths formed like a saltire cross. It was a long way from home but there was no home anyway. Ghosts stalked the town and haunted the long beaches, but we students wore red flannel gowns to keep out the cold, and sat in lecture halls where our predecessors had gathered for five hundred years, bringing sacks of oats to pay for their tuition, and slept as they did from too much wine and debauchery. There were crosses in the cobbles to mark where prelates had been burned to death for their beliefs. All could have recanted and been saved, but they preferred not to. They would rather be right about the transubstantiation of the Virgin Mary. For lack of a family, I daresay, I regained a sense of ‘we’ which has never left me. ‘We’ students, in defiance of our teachers, ‘we’ workers in defiance of the bosses, ‘we’ writers in defiance of the TV moguls, ‘we’ women in defiance of men. And in the meanwhile I found friends and chattered on.

I cried when I was twenty-five rising twenty-six and had run away from what I saw as a bad husband (I think in retrospect I was a worse wife than he ever was husband) with my little boy tucked under my arm. Now I needed to get him into a nursery school, so I could be free to work. The husband, headmaster of a secondary school, married to provide a roof over our heads, was the ‘no wife of mine works’ kind of man, prevalent in the Fifties. I had flung myself into a hostile world with no means of support, not even from the State. My mother was in a sorry state, living as a companion to an elderly woman with whom she did not get on, and had only a single room to her name. I would be no more welcome in that house than my mother had been before I was born, in the hospital where my father, her husband, had found a live-in job as a single man. Lithe single women can be slotted in anywhere, sneak in and out of institutions at night, but not women with children. (No wonder the birth rate falls as women everywhere learn how to look after their own interests.) Somehow, now, I had to earn. Just another runaway Fifties wife, I wept in front of the woman who ran the school, and didn’t want to admit my child and so encourage immorality. That was in August, 1957. I was really low, so sorry for myself. ‘Somewhere to live’, difficult enough today, was even more difficult then, and the State even more reluctant to help.

I was staying with friends, Laura and Stephen Cohen, in Yeoman’s Row, in Knightsbridge, in the flat Laura’s father, Wells Coates, the Bauhaus architect, had designed. They were good to me in the hour of my need, and took me and Nicolas in without a thought for their own convenience, dreadful cold in the nose and all. It was the kind of cold one gets when relieved from a great pressure and strain, and the body allows itself to give up its defences and descends into welcome illness. It was spectacular.

That day at the nursery school I wept, and sneezed, and sneezed and wept, and the headmistress relented, and Nicolas was allowed in her day care centre. Weep and plead, as a woman, and it shall be given to you. I see I have taught Trisha the same sorry lesson. But sometimes one can’t help it: the tears flow unbidden. The first time at the therapist it is normal for the client to cry and cry. The story of one’s life, told by oneself to a sympathetic listener, induces great self-pity and indeed childishness. Afterwards one is ashamed.

As it happened I only sent Nicolas to the centre for a single day. The children were so pale and sad, the weather so cold, little stiff arms pushed into winter coats, the weeping when the mothers departed so distressing. I could see that the idea of childcare was fine in theory but appalling in practice: that the interests of children and parent overlapped but as so often did not coincide, and what was good, and indeed necessary, for the mother was not automatically good for the child. Unless of course the parent is so horrible in the first place—and a few are—that being at a distance from them can only be advantageous. I took Nicolas out of his nursery that evening and never took him back. I wanted my freedom: I wanted to live unobserved and uncriticised, I wanted to be free of husbandly and motherly interference and control, but want, I could see, must be my master for a time yet. I wrote to my mother and asked her if she would leave companioning her old lady and help me with Nicolas and she said she would. Of course she did; I knew she would. We might be back to where we’d been before I had been panicked into marriage with the headmaster but at least times were better. The baby was now a child and easier to look after, and I had the promise of a better-paid job, one more fitting my graduate state, found for me by my lover and mentor, the Dane.

I wept and wept when the Dane, a yachtsman copy writer, author of Bridge That Gap With Cadbury’s Snack and other famous sayings, went on holiday with his wife on money I lent him for the purpose. That was in 1957. How could I refuse? He had found me the job, that of a trainee copy writer, at Crawfords, a proper big time agency situated in High Holborn. It had the Milk Marketing Board account—Drinka Pinta Milka Day—amongst others, and I loved him, and was (minimally) guilty because he was married. 1958, and my mother and I found a flat on the top floor of a house in Earls Court. There were five flights of stairs and no lift, no carpets and almost no furniture, but it was somewhere to live. We still had dark grey army surplus blankets on the beds, under which the Dane would join me, secretly, so as not to upset my mother, and his wife. And at least there was now a little surplus money for me to be able to lend it straight back to him. I had become pregnant, miscarried, and he had wept.

1959, and I was at Crawfords and shared an office with Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. She was a kind and beautiful woman and a fine writer, and I was a great blubbing bulky thing and a panicky one. The Dane had used his influence to get me the job in the first place: now Elizabeth taught me how to write advertising copy. How to forget the verbs and sprinkle adjectives, and try to make them pertinent, and never to use words for the sake of words, that every one has to mean something or you excise it. She taught me the value of exactitude, though I think I had an instinct for it anyway. She loved George Barker the poet, a dysfunctional relationship, in today’s terms, and had four brilliant children by him, and when I miscarried the Dane’s baby she was sympathetic and did not say ‘just as well’, though it was. She became the gardening correspondent for Vogue and wrote remarkable poetry, and when George wrote The Dead Seagull—his answer to Grand Central Station—there was a great literary hoo-hah. Elizabeth won on points, because of her prose and the heart-rending nature of the then emotional subjugation of women to men, which she caught on the tide, just as the tsunami which was women’s liberation began to gather force. This misery, this indignity, really cannot go on any more.

Elizabeth and George’s fourth child was called Rosie. She was fourteen when she first came to a party of ours, in the Sixties, precocious—though not by to-day’s standards—thoroughly charming and astonishingly beautiful. She was to have a baby which was to be born addicted to heroin—now a common enough occurrence, then it made headlines. Elizabeth looked after the baby, but Rosie died soon after from an overdose, to everyone’s distress.

I find I pray for Rosie from time to time: she is on an internal list of the missing and remembered. The grief of parents we know is shared: it is to be borne and faced by all. And Rosie carried with her so focused and vivid a personality—perhaps the shortage of available time to live sharpens the quality of the living—she is not forgotten. No wonder that Shelley gang, with their poetic intensity and their early deaths, are still spoken and written about.

We were all pre-feminists then: it simply did not occur to us that if men misbehaved, the answer was to have nothing more to do with them. That ‘love’ was a trap not worth falling into. The female response at the time was still to feel more love, have more babies, write more poetry, sink yet further into masochism. My problem was, I could see, that unlike Elizabeth I was not doing it with any style. I lost some weight and put on heels, and after work one day, after as I remember choosing a selection of adjectives for Simpson’s store in Piccadilly and naming a women’s department ‘Young and Gay’—what innocent days they were—I sat on a bench in Holborn and reproached my dead father for leaving me. I made contact with his spirit as he whirled around with the autumn leaves that fell amongst the traffic of New Oxford Street that day. I made a pact with him. It was time he looked after me, I said. He had failed to do so in life—other than sending his mistress Ina to tell me he was turning in his grave—let him do so in his death. He had left me no money, no home, he had not protected me from my mother. Let him see to it. I for my part would stop sulking, stop playing games, stop waiting to be protected from my own folly, stop whining ‘Now see what you made me do!’ 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’s mistakes

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 well-documented drink and drugs problem, and though that 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.

On the anger of mothers

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 left behind us.

Mama had no visible means of support, either, at the time. She had run an advertising agency in New Zealand in the war, but had hated every minute of it, and had turned down all suitors out of pride and the determination that she would never, never rely on the support of a man again. So now, since she had to eat, she wove reed baskets on the moors outside St Ives. She’d pluck the reeds, weave the baskets, walk to Penzance, sell the baskets, buy the week’s food with it, and commune with nature to her heart’s content. Larks and sunsets bought her real delight.

Old Meg she was a gypsy, And lived upon the moors: Her bed it was the brown heath turf, And her house was out of doors.

But still we trusted her to look after us when it came to the crunch, and she did. (You thought you could do this to us, mother: but we are your problem not our own! Look after us!) She left the moors and joined us in London, and then moved us all to Saffron Walden, a place chosen because she liked the sound of the name, and we would be amongst strangers, without witnesses to our disgrace, where she hoped our delinquencies would go unnoticed, but of course they were not. On the contrary. To have relied upon the anonymity of London would have been more sensible. My poor mother. She would wake early in a state of anxiety, brood for an hour or two, come to an unnecessarily complex solution to a simple problem by breakfast time, and put it into action by lunchtime. Her solution this time had been that I was to change my name by dead poll to that of the baby’s father, tell my friends and colleagues I had married, and then give up my job, move out of London where I was not known, and start my life afresh. That it was ten times more difficult to earn a living in the country than in the city, that I could have stayed where I was in the Foreign Office and fought my way up to higher grades and better wages (they could only fire you for immorality, I later found, if you were unmarried and had three babies by more than two different fathers), and was far too talkative and indiscreet to start again anywhere with a secret past, and was not likely to forswear my friends, did not occur to her. It did occur to me but she had a powerful personality and I assumed she knew best. I did as she suggested. I was horrified to be then sent a wedding present to my new Saffron Walden address by my Foreign Office colleagues: surely this was taking gifts on false pretences? I ought to return it at once with apologies for misleading them. But my mother was against it. I must stick by the story, she said. Say the marriage had been called off, anything. I imagine w hat I did do was simply put off writing the thank-you note until the time to do so decently had passed and I was so pregnant nothing seemed to matter other than what was going on inside my own body. But I cannot remember. It remains on my conscience. A bad patch. A bad girl. How terrible children can be. Bad behaviour is not a one way street. And certainly, if the mother leaves early, the children linger longer. But we had no such overview at the time, of course not. Those were the pre-Freudian days.

March 1954, and there I was with a baby, the dramas of pregnancy and childbirth over, with the reality of a small child to face. Guido came to claim Jane and her new baby Christopher, and installed them in a cottage in deepest Sussex and brought marrow bones home every weekend. ‘Lots of nourishment in these, my dear. I am going to theological college so must be away most of the time. They don’t know I’m married, so don’t tell them.’’ My friend Belinda, who had come to join Jane and me in our sibling pregnancies, was rescued by the father of her child, who very soon married her. I remained unmarried and unrescued, and, dreams of self-sufficiency over, let alone the hope of running a little cake shop (mother’s idea, but no customers came), commuted to London every day, by train, to Fleet Street, where I answered readers’ questions on Hire Purchase problems for the Daily Mirror. My stepmother had sent me a cheque for £200 from my father’s estate, and I had spent £100 on a typewriter and used it to write job applications. Now I worked and earned in a world still not properly adjusted to the fact that some women did not have men to support them and with a wage structure that echoed that fact. This meant leaving at 6.30 in the morning and coming back at 8.30 at night, to be finally driven out, along with my mother, by a ghost who wept up and down the twisted corridors of our 17th century house, and fleeing to London. But at least at Liverpoool Street station I had been able to afford and buy weekly copies of Amazing magazine. ‘Alienation in time and space,’ as my psychoanalyst Miss Rowlands was later to describe my passion for the science fiction of the time, ‘and no doubt a comfort.’ Those were the great mid-Fifties days of science fiction—Heinlein, Azimov, Frederick Pohl, Philip K. Dick—philosophers and sociologists all. I came across them by accident, in search of a cheap, fast read, tearing off the lurid covers so as not to be observed reading rubbish in the train, and this was my good fortune.

My mother was not happy in London: our tiny rented flat in Chiswick, all I could afford, was too dull to have so much as a ghost. Landladies were reluctant to rent rooms to women with children and no husband or visible means of support. You took what you could get, especially if you had no deposit, no three months’ rent in advance. My mother chafed. Granted I was going out to work, but if she had to stay home and be bored, why did I feel entitled to go to parties in the evenings? Why did I need these friends of mine, with their chattery, frivolous ways? Should I not stay home of an evening and keep her company? Couldn’t I just settle down?

I found another job in London in a tiny ad agency in Dover Street, Scott-Turner, which paid minimally more than the Mirror. ‘Did you know you have 200 bones in your foot? No wonder sometimes they hurt!’ But still the job only barely paid the rent: and all I wanted to do was go to parties and meet men and fall in love like anyone else, but I couldn’t. My mother’s disapproval was too strong. I had made my bed: now it behoved me, she thought, to lie upon it. I ate plentiful cheese rolls bought from the shop next door to the office. There was a brothel above the sandwich shop—the bad girls, dressed up to the nines, came and went through the Mayfair streets around. (The sex industry at that time was booming: provenance of Maltese gangs.) I had to take my shoes to the menders, unable to afford new. There was no television—too early in the world’s history for possession of such a thing to be normal. What could I do in the evenings but cook and eat? I grew fat and then what was the point of parties anyway? I stayed home with my mother and the baby. The commuting days in Saffron Walden, ghost and all, now seemed in retrospect like heaven.

Little Nicolas was robust, energetic and now two years old. Babies are easy enough to deal with when they lie there and smile at you, or at anyone who comes in sight. But then they grow older and cry when you leave them, and wrap their little arms around your legs to make you stay with them, and resolution collapses. He had rosy cheeks and pale blond hair: he was beautiful but exhausting. He cried noisily and bitterly when I set off in the mornings, and my mother’s face was like stone. My best friend Judy Anderson met and married my colleague at Scott-Turner’s, Michael Birmingham, with whom I had had many a depressed if interesting conversation and after that I had to work alone, in silence. ‘Did you know your foot has 200 tiny bones in it and all the sorry things that could happen to them unless you took care. True, the Institute of Contemporary Art had the floor beneath our offices and naked girls bounced upon trampolines in the name of art—‘happenings’, they were called—but it might as well have happened a thousand miles away. None of it seemed to have anything to do with me. I was depressed, and fat. I was being courted by the headmaster of a technical school in Acton, Mr Bateman, a maths graduate, twenty-five years older than myself. He asked me to marry him.

I could see the many advantages. Anything would be better than life as it was. Marriage would make him happy, and my mother too: she could escape, and I could ease over to lie in a respectable bed, free from the disgrace of unmarried motherhood. Not, frankly, that my status bothered me. The disgrace of being married to an elderly headmaster, and having to introduce him to my college friends, seemed worse. ‘What, can she do no better than this?’ But I would have housekeeping money; I would have my soul back, I would no longer be for ever worried that the State would turn up, declare me an unfit mother, and send Nicolas off to Barnardo’s. True, the headmaster had also warned m: ‘No wife of mine works’ and said I could not join the Labour Party. ‘ I must be seen in my position to be above politics’ Though indeed it turned out later that he was writing reports about any untoward political activity observed or communist sentiments uttered on the part of his staff. (But that was par for the cold-war course. The war for hearts and minds was on and if those Fifties writers took to science fiction it was because, after the McCarthy witch-hunts, they were nervous of making political statements which related to the present, or so I have heard it said.) In 1968 Nicolas was to be thrown out of his grammar school for staging a political protest. His headmaster of the time had been discovered doing much the same thing as Mr Bateman a decade earlier—only writing reports on students, not staff, warning admission secretaries not to take certain pupils, whom he saw as troublemakers and activists. Whatever changes?

I said yes to the headmaster and waited for my mother to say ‘But you can’t possibly!’ She said nothing, so I married him, in Ealing Registry Office, in a too-tight blue dress, to the barely disguised winces of my friends. And I was as unsuitable a wife for him as he was a husband for me.

It was during the time of my marriage to Mr Bateman in the late Fifties that I met my mother by chance on my way up to town. It was on the platform of South Kensington Underground Station. I was travelling north from Acton, the sorry suburb where I now lived with my new husband and my child, having exchanged one small flat for another—albeit owned not rented—and a restless mother for a grizzled husband. But I was full of resolutions; I distinctly remember my determination that not a month of my life would go by in which I was entirely celibate. Oh, I was a monster! It would not be my husband: he had voyeuristic tendencies but no interest in actual sex. This kind of thing one found out in those days only after the wedding ceremony.

On South Kensington Station my mother Margaret looked me in the eye, and turned away, expressionless. She cut me dead. My cry of greeting died away. I was devastated. Margaret wore a navy greatcoat, staff issue, London Underground. It drowned her. She was a little thing to contain so much intelligence, fanaticism and fierce morality. They ate her away, that was the trouble. I clouded my body with fat: she was thin, bare to the winds of tragedy. Had I reduced her to this? Surely it was the other way round, and it was all her doing? I always did what she said, didn’t I? She had encouraged me to marry the headmaster, and that puzzled me. It was such a stupid, desperate, death-welcoming thing for a daughter to do, and just a word from her and I would not have done it, but she would not say the word. She wanted her life back too badly.

Until that moment at South Kensington Station I had not realised that I existed in any kind of reality at all, or any that impinged on others. I had thought I was a figment of my own imagination, at the very best my parents’ bright idea, gone sour. Most realise this at about twelve: I took rather longer.

Margaret had celebrated her new freedom by getting a job on the London Underground, saying in effect, ‘Now see what you’ve made me do!’ Jane and I had let her down. I was turning into a lower middle-class housewife, a kind of Jerry Springer case, and her elder child, Jane, the poet, had taken up with a penniless artist, and had two small children and nowhere to live. Was this what the sacrifice of Mama’s youth had come to? She could have been a writer, should have been a writer, had been a writer—and then she’d had two daughters and they had ruined her life. And for what?

The job wasn’t all bad. She even liked it. There are advantages to being a public servant: at least you are doing something useful. The posters of the time, luring people into the tunnels, advised, ‘ Warmer Underground,’ and they were right. It was. At least underground, my mother said, she was never cold. She was a good and conscientious employee, the one to approach the snarling dog, pick up the fluttering bird, face the mugger, step forward and brave danger when others drew back. I think she rather fancied the foreman, one of the West Indian immigrants the London Transport Executive shipped over from Jamaica to solve the staffing problems of the day, though nothing came of it. Men always fancied my mother, so witty and bright and kind, but she would have nothing to do with them: principle got in the way, or perhaps it was that she could not endure too much emotional pain.

We will not see her like again. We have learned prudence, and what is right behaviour and proper thinking, and what is not: we understand the mechanisms of our own behaviour: we are cursed by therapy even as we are saved by it: it de-natures us. We can’t be forgiven because we know only too well what we do, and forgive ourselves in advance. My mother, born 1907, seeing her century out, thought and felt from first principles. Cut dead by her, in 1957, I stumbled back home to my peculiar husband and my crowded home and rethought my life. ‘Tough love’ they would call it nowadays, and it is not nice to be on the sharp end of it.

But see how the very existence of the phrase ‘tough love’ cheapens and weakens the very concept it stands for? We know how to explain ourselves to ourselves well enough, but with every handy phrase, every useful shorthand, we lessen the complexity and interest of our lives. If every young woman in every bank looks alike, every TV presenter seems to have the same face, one young man at a party is indistinguishable from the next, if as we think alike, so we look alike, who can be surprised. Our everyday language has become too skilled, too dismissive of complexity, for our own good. We like things nailed and certain. The cleverer we get, the more stupid.

I see the platform in my head: South Kensington, open air, not my mother’s base station, Gloucester Road. She must have been transferred for the day. Jane’s husband Guido was to get a job announcing at Victoria—he had a beautiful, plangent, actor’s voice. He enunciated beautifully, in the fashion of his parson forebears. Jobs were easier to come by then: in the days of high employment no one wanted GCSE certificates, proof of residence or bank references, wages came in a brown envelope, no questions asked: just a ridiculously high proportion taken away by the tax man to pay for pensions which were never to materialise except in benefit form, and doff your cap while asking.

The event stays sealed in my memory. I had always liked South Kensington Station where the train emerges from the tunnel before burrowing into it again. Now I see my mother in her uniform on the platform, doing whatever platform staff do, and I hop off the train in excitement, and she sees me, quite clearly she sees me, and whatever she sees she does not like, and she turns her face away, in calculated indifference. We were never to mention the episode again, either of us.

At the time of this maternal rebuff I was sharing my marital home with Jane and her two small children. They crowded into the living room, leaving us the rest of the house. It was in fact only half a small terrace house in Acton, the ground floor having already been let off to Doreen, a very fussy woman who wore her curlers until five each evening, complained about the noise of stomping children above her, and who regarded me as no better than I should be. She was accustomed to tall, thin, quiet, lonely, stooping, respectable Mr Bateman upstairs, and he had suddenly acquired, and was allegedly married to, a vigorous, poshlyspoken young woman with a small child of uncertain origins, and now her sister and two more children under five had come along too. Doreen complained with perfect reason, and if she was without sympathy what was she to know of the complexities of my life? What were we all up to? Sometimes I would leave the house in the evenings—driven by my husband in his souped-up little pale blue Ford Popular—dressed up to the nines, low-cut dress, very high heels, net stockings and tightly belted waist. (The difference between bad girls and good girls, so far as their dress went, was in those days clearly delineated. Good girls dressed so as not to be noticed: bad girls drew attention to their assets.) And Doreen must have noticed when I went out dressed for Ladies’ Night at the local posh hotel. My husband that year was Grand Master of his Masonic Lodge. I was Lady of the Lodge. I hired a kind of evening dress in mauve tulle for the occasion and the masons and the wives looked at me oddly. (Was it that the marriage itself seemed strange to others, or was it the dress? I will never know.) Sometimes I went out as wife to the Musical Director of the local Operatic Society, wearing some scruffy skirt and laddered tights. And all the while, by day, the thump, thump, thump of little children racing across floors. Doreen was confused, but no more confused than I. How had I come to this pretty pass?

I tried to engage Doreen in a scheme by which all the households down the road would serve dinner from a central cooking pot—it pained me that every day twenty housewives prepared meat and two veg from the same butcher and the same greengrocer, it seemed such a waste of time. We could make enough for everyone and they would run down the road to us for their portion, and we would share costs. She looked at me as if I was mad and I daresay I was. I had yet to learn that other people do not necessarily want to do what is in their best interests. I was properly chastened.

Twenty years later, on holiday with the children in the Gambia, visiting a Muslim household where there were four wives and four cooking pots over four separate fires, one in each corner of the same cooking hut, all cooking rice in a room temperature well over 100 degrees, I suggested to the husband that they could surely take turns to cook the rice, and do it over one fire in one big pot. He said, ‘But each wife competes to please the husband.’ I daresay those women felt the same way as the women of Acton. It is all just a matter of degree.

We were oddly happy, Jane and I, living together with the children for those few months, and it was good of the headmaster to give her shelter—Jane and Guido never had the money to pay for any fixed abode: he loved her but was not a good provider. There was no doubt however but that we were crowded, even by 1957 standards. Guido made it a condition of his joining Jane that we shelved the living room (we would pay) so that he had room for his books. I at that stage owned one book: Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God, of which I had bought a first edition for two-and-six, stolen from the housekeeping money, a book I kept under the bed. I still have it—the only possession left from my young womanhood I did manage to keep.

Fed up with my chaste first marriage as I was, I had taken to sleeping on the sofa in the living room, where I was racked by a bronchitic cough (‘Cough it up, girl, cough it up, what ails you?’), but now with Jane’s arrival I had to return to the marital bedroom and get up to cough in the loo. I wrote a television play in that loo, I remember (those were pencil and paper days, not computer), about a prostitute, in which I explained to an uninterested and easily shocked world how easy it was for a girl to come to such a pass. It was returned from the BBC with a note saying they could not contemplate dramas on such a subject, ‘no matter how well written’. I treasured that phrase but wrote no more: I did not want to ‘be’ a writer; I just wanted to earn enough money so I could live other than by the kindness of men. Men were frequently kind, but they could also be very odd.

It was shortly after this that I determined to run away from home. I was not five but twenty-five, or more, but you would not have thought it. I would leave my sister to fill my place. She could look after my husband, cook his boiled beef and carrots, iron his shirts. I felt my father egging me on. Had he not just sent Ina to trace Jane and me to Acton, and declare herself horrified in his name? ‘If your father could see you now, he’d turn in his grave?’ And she didn’t know the half of it. I was moved to take action. I resolved to leave secretly in the middle of the night, telling no one, not even my sister. In retrospect there was no need at all for secrecy, but women who feel they are behaving badly often fear the violence of men. Mr Bateman had shown absolutely no signs of violent behaviour heretofore. And later he was to sound genuinely confused, rather than angry, at my leaving him thus. ‘But why didn’t you tell me you were unhappy. I would have helped you leave.’

Be all that as it may, I tucked my child under my arm and ran away in the middle of the night, stealing four pounds from his wallet, and took grateful refuge in Laura and Stephen’s snazzy flat in South Kensington. If your mother fails you, and your father is dead enough to turn in his grave, you have no option but to look after yourself.

There were, of course, other reasons for my feeling justified in leaving home. As so much that happens in this life is, it was a matter of convergent dynamics, rather than a simple answer as required in murder cases. ‘But why did you do this?’ ‘Because, your honour, because…’ The because is never single-stranded, it is a whole tassel of factors: you have to extract the brightly-coloured one and offer that as explanation. My becauses in this case included it seeming wrong to me to live with one man while being in love with another—the Dane, that is to say, the sailor ad-man. My father sending a messenger from the grave. My husband’s averring that after we were dead we would live together in the hereafter, just him and me, in a little cottage on a mossy bank by a river. Forever. ‘ I saw it in a vision, darling.’ You could play grandmother’s footsteps with fate as much as you liked, but when the music stops and you are playing pass the parcel you must on no account be caught with the wrong man. Or they might be with you for eternity. That too was a very bright thread in what I would refer to as the knotted tassel of reasoning that leads to action.

Young women are beyond belief. I wish I could report less superstitious nonsense on my part but I can’t—not and still speak the truth of my experience.

Trisha starts a new life

The stairs which led up from the dry-cleaners to Trisha’s new living quarters were very narrow. It is unlucky to pass another person on the stairs, for fear that in brushing up against them your souls will be exchanged, and you will reach the top of the stairs, or the bottom, a different person. That day Trisha Perle crossed on the stairs with a stranger to her, Peter Watson, whom you have yet to meet. Both, at the time, were in a bad, ungenial mood.

Well-behaved, handsome, de-natured Peter Watson, thirty-six, lived as it so happened with Doralee Thicket, journalist. They had been together for six years. ‘This is Peter Watson, you know, Doralee’s feller?’ Not that Doralee was particularly famous, or rich, or in any way unusual, just that somehow she seemed more vivid than he. Once upon a time women were indignant to be introduced as someone’s wife, daughter or sister, as if they had no identity of their own—these days the insult is more likely to be offered to men. Women are so vivid and mettlesome these days, so vigorous in their being, even when like Trisha down on their luck, I am surprised they do not subsume the whole male race.

If I describe Peter Watson as de-natured, as one describes a piece of much-laundered fabric, it is because one has the sense that once there was more stuffing to him. Yet he has a handsome enough, thinking, empathic, executive face, is over six foot and goes to the gym religiously, as does Doralee. He does not look unlike Russell Crowe but wears glasses. He seems to have a promising future before him and one feels life has gone comfortably enough so far, but that perhaps his mother, or someone, has made him anxious and a little jumpy in childhood, and over anxious to please. But you would be glad enough if he had the window seat in the aircraft, the one given to an able-bodied man so he can open the door in case of an emergency and a chute landing. The barber uses a number two clipper on his hair, so it is short-cropped in the modern style, and his clothes are smart and clean. His hands, unlike Trisha’s, are not nicotine stained.

Peter Watson works for a daily newspaper: indeed he is deputy head of its research department, and sees himself as being ‘in the loop’. He goes to senior editorial meetings. It is not as exciting as being in features or on the news desk, but the whole place so pounds with energy the job is more than good enough for him for the time being. He is the one who knows the facts behind the facts, and the detail behind the sweeping statements newspapers love to make: he is consulted on international affairs, the mood in the Congo, the state of the Albanian Air Force, whither Europe, and why Gibraltar. If he does not know he will find out. He is relied upon and trusted, and the Editor does not shout at him.

Peter’s partner Doralee is pretty and smart, and more ambitious than he. You could accuse both of smugness, but that would be unkind. They have both had parents who loved them, and no reason to believe the world won’t go in the way they have experienced it to date: they love the nanny state and feel that nanny is perfectly well suited to looking after them, and that so long as they behave like everyone else all will be well. They talk out any emotional problems that might arise, and look after their health. They drink bottled water, and choose flat not fizzy: bubbles seeming to the young couple to be somehow chemical, trivial and false. Tap water was to be avoided: it had been recycled through other people’s bodies too many times for comfort, and was full of their hormones.

It is true that Doralee sometimes swigged a glass of tap water in secret, in desperation, having read that over-chlorinated water contributes to the current rise in infertility. It wasn’t that she didn’t want a baby, she did, indeed, she was ‘trying’, like so many of her colleagues at Oracle, the woman’s magazine for which she worked. It was just that sometimes courage failed her, and she would like to put motherhood off for a year or so, while seeing herself as the kind of person who never goes back on a decision, and not wanting her partner to see her as a ditherer. The occasional glass of tap water seemed to take the responsibility of choice away. Anyone is entitled to an off day, and to have doubts about the wisdom of procreation, let alone its expense, and act upon these doubts. And sometimes when the water from the shower was blue from excess chlorine, she’d wonder what kind of unhealthy chemical world was this to bring children into, anyway? She did not tell Peter of these concerns: he wanted a baby even more than she did, and would only quote statistics at her to demonstrate that this was an ever-improving world, and not even overcrowded. Indeed, the latest demographic trends showed a falling population rather than a rising one – except in China – and they had a duty to spread their genes as plentifully as possible. Then Doralee would think, ‘but we aren’t living in China’ and mutinously swig some more tap water. She would leave it to chance.

Trisha’s world scarcely extended beyond what she could see around her, let alone encompass the problems of China. She thought that so long as she was happy she would be healthy, forgetting it was a long time now since she had been happy. She dieted furiously from time to time but not for long. One glass of wine and she forgot about the future and lived in the present – and what is dieting but living for the future and declining to enjoy the present – and the diets she chose were always ones which allowed her to drink alcohol. She smoked dope on occasion, and drank Chablis in the years when she could afford it. One can always remember the name and vintages are not a bother. She seldom took cocaine – as Peter and Doralee would occasionally, and in moderation, the better to keep up with their smart friends. Trisha preferred to be soothed, cooled out, rather than speeded up.

Both Peter and Doralee were very aware of the dangers of stress, and did what they could to avoid it. Peter had learned deep-breathing techniques and Doralee always meant to go back to yoga classes though actually the thought of the boredom entailed was in itself stressful. Trisha on the other hand, by the manner of her living, the general messiness of her life, seemed to invite stress in. If nothing happened she panicked: perhaps nothing would ever happen again. So naturally her life was full of untoward events. When what happened, happened, Trisha was the one to face it with greater equanimity.

A selection of antecedents

My suspicion is this – that just as one day Peter and Trisha cross on the stairs, so one day there is bound to be an actual crossover between the novelist’s actual life and the alternative reality as presented by that novelist. That the times have finally and sadly come to this, that a novel simply no longer feels meaty enough without the input of the writer’s life and sorrows. All my writing life I have argued that fiction and autobiography are separate. ‘Good Lord,’ I have been in the habit of saying at literary festivals and in interviews, where writers are so frequently these days required to bare their souls, ‘if any of what I wrote was true I would be in prison or dead.’ Now I can see that I ought to have been in prison or dead, if I were to get my just desserts, that is to say if to lust in your heart is as sinful as the act itself, as St Matthew reports. All these monstrous acts I have written, all the murders, crimes I have conceived, are as good as done. I who was accustomed to saying earnestly to my audience, ‘If you want to write a novel you must lose your good opinion of yourself’, should repent. It is a terrible thing to say. I have been urging others to be as bad as their characters. Late-Victorian novelists felt obliged to present noble characters capable of good deeds, Soviet writers would only be published if they provided worthy role-models for their readers, the Chinese to find excitement in the fulfilling of the factory quota. Our writers fostered discontent and rebellion. Those women who read my novels in the Seventies and come up to me at literary gatherings still and say, ‘But your novels changed our lives. It was you who gave me the courage to leave my husband, ’in fact bear witness against me. But what I wrote was all true, true, true. I never slept with my father, as Praxis does in the novel of that name, written in 1977, but I daresay that if like her I met him in a bar and he picked me up, and I didn’t know who he was, I would not hesitate. Like would surely call to like. Think it and it’s done.

It has not been the habit of writers to show their hand too clearly. Flaubert writes about his own father when in Madame Bovary he describes the good Doctor Bovary’s disastrous attempt to cure a club foot by breaking all the bones in it and stretching it until the foot gets gangrene and all but drops off. Flaubert couldn’t bear to keep the incident out, though it meant Dr Bovary had to behave out of character for a whole chapter. ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi,’ Flaubert famously says, giving the game away. I daresay Chaucer had an affair with the Wife of Bath, gat teeth and all. But Chaucer’s not going to declare that, either.

Just as the world of screen and airwaves blends and melds into real life, so too, today, must the creations of the printed page. There are elements of me in Trisha, and parts of Rollo and Peter in every man I have ever known. Mind you, men of the Newer Age have to be learned: they are not the ones I grew up with. Men of the Former Age tended to be without emotional conscience, like George Barker, or Ted Hughes or my husband of many years Ron, but at least they produced art.

If Rollo, the ex-stuntman now born-again Christian and conscientious father, or Peter, the bottled drinking water (still, please) newspaper man were to write a poem, you’d know in advance it would be fairly terrible – mealy-mouthed, sentimental and commonplace. When it comes to the reformation of the world, Rollo believes in the efficacy of the new overarching social-worker-Jesus, Peter in the Power of Purchasing. Both are victims of the Pelagian Heresy: that we are all nice people at heart, really, so it’s only others who come along and muck things up. George Barker and the Dane, of an earlier generation, knew only too well about Original Sin: they revelled in it, and were loved the more because of it.

Charlotte Brontë, dealing with men of the Former Age, did not attempt Mr Rochester from the inside out: she observed him from the outside in, and very erotic the result is. That was when men and women were differently reared. Far easier these days to write about men from the inside out. Now they are just more people, it is rather disappointing. So they were like us all the time.

Mind you, some things don’t change. Good behaviour never gets a woman anywhere: bad behaviour gets a man everywhere. I say this from long experience of husbands, lovers, sons, both of the Former and the Newer Ages. But then I would, wouldn’t I. If I were a man I would no doubt reverse the genders.

Life in the slow lane

The day before Trisha’s worldly goods went under the auctioneer’s hammer, Doralee Thicket allowed a vase of water to spill onto the foam mattress she shared with her partner of long standing Peter Watson. This may not have been a good omen. It was six thirty in the morning, and high summer, but there was quite a wind, the unexpected kind that blows up sometimes in the early morning of a day in which thunder is expected, and gives you a glimpse of the intentions nature has for a globally-warmed humanity.

Doralee and Peter lived in High View, in Wilkins Close, just around the corner from the Wilkins Parade branch of the dry-cleaners Kleene Machine. Money has been spent on Wilkins Close – the council has beautified the street, putting in cobbles, fancy street lights and decorative railings, and will get round to the Parade and eventually to Wilkins Square, if the intransigency of the locals allows. But the area is, as they say, ‘mixed’ and the council may change their mind about the ability, and indeed the willingness, of sufficient of those living around to pay tax, and withdraw supportive funding at any moment, and then windows will start to get broken as the Goths and Vandals sweep in, and the barbarians take back what was so long theirs.

But from the outside High View looks solid and grand enough. It has recently been converted from the factory it once was to luxury apartments, but keeps many of the original features, including its large windows, and interior corridors still in the original small red brick. There is a doorman, George, who lives on the premises. Doralee and Peter are lucky enough to have the penthouse flat – a mere five floors up, but still giving them a view to the west of the city and an expanse of sky, from which they can observe the brilliant sunsets of the last days of Empire. They do not see it like this, of course, though Doralee’s father Graham sometimes gloomily mutters words to this effect. Rather they see themselves as living on the brink of a bright new world, in which all will be fair, and the nations of the earth glad and wise, and as one.

When Doralee flung open the window to air the room, the edge of the curtain blew in and caught the vase – long red roses given to her by Peter when he came back from work the previous evening – and toppled it.

The bed would have to be stripped and the mattress exposed to the air to dry: she would be late for her Pilates class. She felt vaguely vengeful: the vase would have to go down to Age Concern. There was no time in her life for the agents of misrule; for accidents or inefficiencies, or cheap vases with not sufficient weighting at the base. Everything has to go. She sponged the mattress down, first unbuttoning the cover and removing it, but a water stain would undoubtedly be left. Fortunately the roses, though perfect, long stemmed and without thorns, seemed to have very little to do with nature and had not clouded or coloured the water at all. She asked Peter to drop the cover down to Kleene Machine round the corner in Wilkins Parade, together with her once worn black dress with the thin satin straps, on which some idiot had dropped champagne, and a couple of Peter’s shirts.

Kleene Machine offered a next-day delivery service. Doralee suspected she paid over the odds for it, but completed work could be left downstairs with George the doorman, and that was convenient. If he wasn’t at his desk in the lobby, as sometimes happened, you just opened his cupboard yourself and took the clothes from the rack. The other tenants – there were eight flats in the building, a new conversion of what had been originally a children’s home, then a sweet factory, then a makeshift warehouse, and was now a much-sought-after apartment block – had so far shown themselves respectable and honest. Someone had once taken her Armani white blouse with the frilled cuffs but she accepted it had been a genuine error and George had been able to run the culprit to earth. Sometimes on a hot day you got a waft of a sweet spicy warm smell that seemed to permeate the corridors. Doralee worried about the drains but George said that was only the Indian sweet factory asserting itself and perfectly pleasant. Once she swore she could hear children playing up and down the corridors, and complained to George, but he said that was just sound waves still drifting in from the time when it was a children’s home. He had an explanation for everything, Peter remarked, so long as it enabled him to do as little as possible and go back to sleep.

The instructions that had come with Doralee and Peter’s foam mattress claimed that unlike the products of old-fashioned competitors this mattress did not have to be turned. Doralee turned it nevertheless, every Saturday morning before she went to the supermarket, just to be on the safe side. Peterloo – her pet name for her partner Peter – would help her. They’d turn the mattress together, loving the thump it made as it bounced after falling onto the wooden base, and the little spurt of dust which followed, which proved the claims of the manufacturer to be in error. Foam rubber does attract and absorb dust – not to the extent that upholstered mattresses do, of course, but perhaps, as Doralee feared, more than enough to harbour the mites and other tiny creatures which settled around all larger ones. By such small shared pleasures are good marriages made. True, this was not a marriage, but a close and even harmonious partnership, albeit unblessed by higher powers.

If Doralee was a stickler for efficiency and hygiene, it was perhaps because her mother Ruby had been the opposite. These things are meant to go in sequence, each generation over-compensating in the interests of a balance which never arrives. Ruby, the mother, had been generous-hearted and affectionate to her children and, after her husband had gone, to a number of men, all of whom Doralee detested.

Ruby, born a bright and wilful girl in Liverpool, had married the son of a country parson and come to live in the country in her thirties. She had embraced county life with enthusiasm, even as her husband learned to eschew it. She rode to hounds while Graham joined anti-vivisection movements, and she turned litter louts of travellers from her land as he fought for the human rights of nomads. She became high church as he declared his faith in socialism and humanity, and ran the parish council as he turned his vision to the outside world and non-governmental organisations. Graham worried about population density while Ruby had baby after baby. Her energy was extraordinary and her goodwill too: she battered through opposition and hostility, to be accepted in the end by both village and gentry, who asked her to their cocktail parties if not always their dinners.

‘Ruby and I both do good works, but our idea of Good is very different,’ as Graham explained to Eve, the yoga teacher with whom he eventually ran off.

Ruby now lived in the vicarage in which Graham – who had a surprising eye for the main chance for one so technically virtuous – had been reared, and which Graham had been prudent enough to buy in the Seventies, when the Church Commissioners rather unwisely sold off all their properties at rock bottom prices.

Graham, in Ruby’s eyes, had left home babbling of true love and leaving five children. In his own eyes he had left home to save his soul and the world. Ruby, in Doralee’s eyes, was guilty of sins of commission and Graham of sins of omission. Mother shouldn’t have done this and that; Father should have done that and this. Doralee herself simply wanted to get things right. She could not understand why balance was so hard to achieve.

Peter seemed better able to accept his family. Although his mother was Jewish, he felt unburdened by his past. Two generations since her family had given up practising their religion, and Holocaust guilt had barely touched him. He was one of two brothers: their father had died of cancer when he was seven but he had been well insured, not particularly close to his family and his mother Adrienne was a competent woman. She had not encouraged grief or self-pity, and had put both boys into boarding schools and got on with her life. Now she worked for a property company, and it was through her good offices that Doralee and Peter had acquired the loft apartment at a good price. It was a neighbourhood which could go up or could go down, his mother had warned, but her firm reckoned it was going up – indeed, they were investing pretty heavily in their belief that it would – and Peter’s mother seldom got that kind of thing wrong. She had friends in the Planning Department.

Doralee was neat and small, and conventionally pretty, other than that she had wild frizzy pre-Raphaelite hair, which burst plentifully from her head as if all her bottled-up subversive energy was determined to get out. Usually such hair is red, but Doralee’s was straw coloured. She had to colour in her eyebrows to seem to have any at all. She was notable for her shapely behind, once publicly compared by Peter’s editor at the newspaper’s Christmas party to that of Kylie Minogue. It had been touch and go whether Peter’s female colleagues would enter a complaint against Peter’s editor for sexual harassment in the workplace, but since Doralee was not actually an employee of the newspaper, merely an employee’s partner, the matter had been dropped, to Peter’s relief. He just wanted to get on with his work, which he liked: he didn’t want to make a fuss. He was well informed and well-educated: his mother had got him to a good public school, though this was not something he thanked her for. He kept quiet about it: best in the new world to have risen from the ranks in the face of adversity, but it could not be helped. He would rise above the disadvantage.

He went hand in hand with Doralee through a sensible and controllable life, and thought her bum was better than Kylie Minogue’s and had not in the least minded the editor saying so, but kept quiet about that too.

Doralee, who took her degree in pharmacology, had worked for a few years as a freelance journalist in the medical press, and then eighteen months ago had become a commissioning editor for Oracle

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