by Fay Weldon
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 Bronte, 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 Was 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 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.<
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'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.