by Fay Weldon
And yes, as it happens, Doralee Thicket is related, though distantly, to Vera Thicket, Trisha's runaway accountant. This is mere coincidence: a matter of the few degrees of separation which link us to so many unsuitable people. Doralee is Vera's second cousin: her father Graham being a first cousin.
It was obvious to Graham's family from the start that Vera was unscrupulous. £pa child she stole: no one's pockets were safe. The rest of the Thicket clan - a moral lot, at least on the male side - were to have little to do with Vera, or she with them. She was known to have stolen someone else's husband, and then qualified in accountancy. Next Vera was to run off with a smooth-talking yuppie from the Lebanon, also married, and was the subject of an unsuccessful Interpol search, during the course of which she emptied her clients' accounts, and went to Brazil. Trisha's funds were down to some £6,300 by the time that had happened. Rollo and Thomasina between them had managed to get through far more than Trisha had ever anticipated. How could other people be so expensive? But Rollo needed a lot of orthodonty before he got to be the male face of a big cosmetic company and Thomasina's one-woman show in London needed funding. It turned out she needed backing from a rap group, all twelve of whom demanded Musicians' Union rates.
But the connection between Doralee and Vera is, to date at least, no more or less meaningful than two people at the same party happening to share a birthday, which is statistically more likely than most people realise. Doralee is scarcely aware of Vera's existence. Her father Graham once mentioned that there was a criminal in the family, but since he had only seen her once or twice in his life, and had nothing more interesting to say on the matter, Doralee took no notice. Those who have not had children believe in nurture more than nature.
The Thickets bred profusely. Families these days are smaller. The birth rate falls beneath replacement level. Doralee and her Peter will be lucky to have one child between them, and that child will be lucky to have a cousin to its name. And first they have somehow to get over the event which is to bring these two disparate households together, brought about when Peter and Trisha brushed against one another as they passed on the stairs, and their souls were switched.
Who are we to blame for this event? There must be someone, something. Blame the stairs; blame the narrowness of passageways; blame the continuing existence of buildings which should never have been built in the first place. Once Wilkins Parade was a market garden which supplied the City with fruit and vegetables - apples, plums, melons, asparagus, peas. The fields of Wilkins' farm were dug up in the 1880s and became a tenement slum, jerry-built, and now despoiled by graffiti. It was in the 1880s that the High View apartment block was an orphanage. There was a surplus of children then: scuttling around, uncounted and uneducated, dying young. People in those days put their trust in quantity, not quality.
Or blame the fact that the Kleene Machine domestic agency has a history too and the past is never over. In the 1930s it was a fish-and-chip shop for a time, and the smell of poverty and battered fish frying in stale oil still hangs round the old brickwork of the stairs. Before that it was a pawnbroker and perhaps human distress has eaten into its brickwork. Perhaps none of us are as firmly rooted in the here and now as we assume. My son Sam, who has a great sense of fairness, and came into the world, as Wordsworth would have it, 'trailing clouds of glory', asked me when he was three when it was his turn to be a girl. I told him that didn't happen, but I can see that perhaps in some parallel universe down the road gender swap, soul swap, happens all the time. Perhaps Trisha is the bit-part player in some other greater drama, and the Great Scriptwriter in the Sky - the GSWITS, lord of the new fictional religion which I invented in a novella called The Rules
of Life, has plans for her, which is why she has had to sell up her house and now lives here, with windows which rattle when a truck passes by and floors which slope so that her mattress keeps sliding down towards the door at night.
Better anyway that the conservationists had not interfered, and Wilkins' place been torn down and carted away to some landfill complete with dust, cobwebs and history, and something new, bright and concrete put in its place, and then perhaps the whole thing would never have happened. Blame the Gods of misrule, who are everywhere these days, blame everyone, blame anything, but not yourself.
Fading customs
I received no official training as a writer: I attended no creative writing courses: I did not study English literature at college. Having been so bad at the subject at school, I took up economics instead. My only tuition, and that was informal, happened when Louis Simpson, a poet, critic and Professor of English Literature at Stony Brook in New York, moved into the house next door. That was in 1968.
Time folds and crumples. I have leapt years ahead here from the days with the Dane, who retired to live on the coast and run a sailing school and live happily ever after. I would never have made a sailing woman. It feels dangerous enough to be in a car, let alone a boat.
And I am now living with Ron, and have been for some years. We have a son, the second child for both of us, called Dan. We are still living in Primrose Hill round the corner from the shop, and my life has turned from a disaster area to a bright new development, as has High View Flats in Mantrapped. Or at least a very superior and complete internal conversion, if only the smell of the past didn't keep creeping through to the present.
These changes happen so fast. One day there's a derelict makeshift factory: then there's High View. One day there's a derelict runaway headmaster's wife, the next there's Fay Weldon, copy consultant, writer of TV plays, and would-be novelist. Just because she fell in love with a man she met at a party and married him. It hardly bears thinking about.
I had just had my first novel published. Louis was charming, handsome, intense, he knew all there was to know about literature and poetry. He knew how it should be done. I saw his face on the Internet the other day and my heart leapt to my mouth. He was, is, a really good poet. Our conversations were so many years ago he may well have forgotten that he ever knew me. But I have not forgotten him.
Way back then I showed him the novel I had just had published, The Fat Woman's Joke. I thought to win his good opinion. 1 too, the housewife next door, could write, and here was proof of it. I went off daily to work at Ogilvie and Mather, the big advertising agency, but I hoped that somehow Louis hadn't noticed. Advertising was considered a low occupation for persons of any sensibility, shallow and trashy, and anyway a working woman was earning pin money and should stay home and take better care of the children. I also brought shame on my husband by writing a cookery column, an advertisement for the Metal Box Company in disguise, for everyone to see. It appeared every week in a Sunday newspaper, under a former name, Fay Bateman, beneath a picture of myself. Fay Bateman says. In my column I advised the public how to cook with cans. ''just dunk a whole chicken in a can of condensed chicken soup and bung it in the oven,' I'd write, 'Delicious!' And in my mother's footsteps, 'Just a little short-cooked cabbage and some butter - what could be better? Serve with a ham souffle: just add eggs to your can of soup and it's done!'
At home Ron, a gourmet cook, would spend hours on a cassoulet, or a bouillabaisse, or a boeuf en daube, using the garlic and mushrooms which had only recently become available in the shops, and tossing a chicory salad. How he despised my timid habit of peeling mushrooms: what harm did a little dirt do anyone? Our kitchen surfaces were littered with pans and the floor with discarded oyster shells, and I would clean up, and write my no-fuss cookery columns. The pans were copper and never properly tinned. I worried about metal poisoning but was laughed out of court.
All his life Ron fought a bourgeois heritage in which food was meant to be white, pale and bland, and like sex was not to be enjoyed, lest the pleasures of the flesh overwhelm the spirit and lead to dissolution and disgrace.
The tendency to cook fish in parsley sauce, from which Ron's mother, and indeed mine, suffered, the idea that even white pepper was suspect lest it overheat the blood, was to be soo
n rooted out of society (along with the class system) and the artists, that is to say Ron and company, were to lead the foodie onslaught. And I, one of the wives, was engaging in such careless culinary treachery. 'Cooking with cans - this way the future lies. Just open a can and go out to work!'
Be that as it may, all that cooking and guilt aside, I had hoped for Louis' approval, but the novel I gave him seemed only to make him angry. 'But this is not a proper novel,' he said, waving The Fat Woman's Joke around, 'and what a monstrous jacket!' Indeed, the book had a jacket so terrible - two great rows of chomping shiny white teeth against a staring red background - that I destroyed every one I came across. I would root them out in bookstores and slip the jackets off and trash them every one. I had neglected to do so on this occasion, feeling an urge to present Louis with the truth, warts and all.
These jackets, if in perfect condition, are now in great demand, I am happy to report, I having so rashly destroyed so many of the first edition. The book has never been out of print. I have its current jacket in front of me now; bright pink with a line drawing of a not very fat woman on the front. Once she was all luscious folds of fat. Nothing these days can be extreme. The passage of the years has turned the book from a revolutionary document, first blast in the feminist fusillade, to all but chick lit. The novel now seems to be about a woman with eating problems (a syndrome much spoken of now but un-invented at the time of writing) brought on by a surfeit of domesticity: pleasant enough but not in the least incendiary.
To me these early novels are historical documents, though the publishers say they remain relevant enough. But I suspect they say that because these young persons, not having lived through a pre-feminist world themselves, have no idea of its full horrors.
'If it isn't a novel what is it?' I asked Louis. It is my normal policy to agree wholeheartedly with my detractors, thereby deflating them, but for once I felt defiant. 'My publishers thought that was what it was,' I told Louis. 'It's what they call it in the shops. A novel. People are reading it, and turning the pages. Many even like it.' But I can remember my shock; the terrible feeling that Louis Simpson was right.
I was an impostor, an upstart. I had no business dabbling in serious matters.
'Novels have inner form,' he said, practically stamping his foot. 'They have shape, purpose, profundity. They are not constructed like this. This is just and then, and then, and then, as if a child were writing it. Worse, it is written in the present tense, as if it were some film script.'
I had to admit that the book was indeed a TV play of mine I had novelised. Its roots were showing, like Mrs Kovac's on a bad day. It was true that all I had done was move from scene to scene after the fashion of a TV script.
I had been writing TV dramas in my spare time but had become discontented, fed up with having less than total control of what happened on screen. The director had fallen out of love with me, and broken my heart, and the actors would put the wrong expressions on their faces; the designers would unreasonably up-grade the sets, the producer had impertinently taken out a line or two 'because of length'.
It came to me in a flash of light the way not to be interfered with was to rework the play in novel form. I could elaborate as I went along. The characters would now be mine, not what the casting director, on the grounds of cost and practicality, had decided they would be. Their problems were mine, not what the director had inferred that they were.
But the chief reason for my defiance was the simple exhilaration of writing a novel: I had done the play, the skeleton of the plot was sound, from now on what I wrote became almost automatic writing. The muse descended from the skies. The sum added up to more than the sum of the parts, so long as I followed my instinct and tried not to let reason get between me and what I wrote. This conclusion, however wrong-headed, gave me confidence.
I remember writing 'The End' on an A4 pad, wide lined, with a Pentel pen, on the top of a bus going down Regent Street. I was on my way to my office in Brettenham House on Waterloo Bridge. I remember the feeling of exaltation as I wrote those two satisfactory words, 'The End'. This was my metier. This was what I was meant to do. This was what I had been born for. This I would do to the end of my days, and there was so much unsaid in the world I could go on saying it for ever.
But looking through The Fat Woman's Joke, now so proudly published, Louis Simpson merely groaned. He said this was simply not how novel writing was done. I had a terrible feeling he was right. That the original play had been produced by Granada TV only because the director hoped, not without reason, to get into my knickers. (The euphemism of the time.) He did. The publishers, MacGibbon and Kee, had published the novel version only because they were hoping to amalgamate with Granada and it suited their contract to deliver me up to their new owners. George Melly, musician and art critic, had given the book a rave review in the Observer, only because he was friend of Ron's - and hoped to buy antiques from him at a favourable price. Or so Ron told me was the case. The public, I could see, had been thoroughly misled and that was why they were buying the book. It had all been a terrible, humiliating mistake. I had better stick to advertising.
But the next novel, Down Among the Women, had already been written, and was at the printers. How was I to avoid the disgrace of fresh exposure? I had been presumptuous. I had stuck my head over a parapet only for it to be shot at. I retreated next door, grateful to still have my domestic life, glad that it was my habit to underplay such small successes I had had so far in the literary world. Grateful that I had children to sing lullabies to, and things I should better spend my time on, such as writing ads and cleaning the burnt copper pans without scratching them yet more, so they didn't leak heavy metal into our food and poison us.
When the proofs of Down Among the Women came through the post I almost didn't show them to Louis, though he had relented enough to ask me to, and when I did I was sorry. They seemed to make him even angrier.
'This is just a rip-off of Mary McCarthy's The Group,' he complained - a novel which also followed the adventures of a group of feisty college graduates as they disappeared into marriage. I said I didn't think Mary McCarthy could own the idea. Wasn't The Three Musketeers much the same, young men off on a mission, learning what life was like? The fruit of a novel was in the execution, surely, not the plot. It sounded okay though I was not sure what it meant. Louis complained that I was argumentative, but was obliged to take my point.
'For another thing,' he said, now on firmer ground, 'there are eight characters on your opening page. This is absurd.
Characters are meant to be introduced slowly, one by one, so readers can get used to them. You just throw them all in and list them. You are meant to be kind to your readers, not defy them.'
This is a conversation thirty-five years old, but I remember its detail, burned into memory.
'Nobody's objected so far,' I said. 'Readers have to do some work too. It can't be all me. Me and my readers are in this together.'
'I and my readers,' he said, but he softened. 'So what you are doing in these novels is engaging in alienation techniques?
Is that right?'
'Of course,' I said, boldly. What could he mean?
'Okay,' he said grudgingly. 'It's new but that doesn't mean it works. Eight characters on a page are still too many.'
I took his point. And that is why, though I still tend to introduce characters with abandon, in this novel I re-cap the cast from time to time, putting new characters in heavy type as one does in a film script, to make it easy for readers. Not only Doralee, but all her ill-named sisters and the dog Rex too, and Trisha and her lesbian lover, and the wicked accountant Vera Thicket. And no doubt why now I refer to them as 'the cast', rather than as 'characters'. Over the next year Louis continued to let slip words of remonstration and advice, of which I took good heed, and for which I continue to be grateful.
Thus I remember, though fitfully, Louis' complaints that he had no idea what any of the characters in Down Among the Women looked like. I have
at least remembered in Mantrapped to describe Trisha - but have had to go back to pay the same courtesy to Doralee and Peter. You shall have the cast clear in your mind's eye, as is my responsibility, as clear as if I held a camera, not a pen.
Doralee is, I'll swear, pure invention, but I admit I did have a great aunt Sylvia who lived in a menage a trois with a man known in the family as Willy Beach the Jam King, and another man whose name I cannot recall, but I believe he was a pillar of the community. Sylvia was born in 1867, and when a girl, along with my grandmother Frieda, was a model for Holman Hunt the painter. She and Frieda both had the clouds of fizzy fair hair and the strong jaws the Pre-Raphaelites loved. What's new? Doralee, Sylvia? I have made Doralee look like my great aunt, and she is to end up living with Peter and Trisha in their switched bodies. I met Sylvia only once but she made good scones, as I remember. I'm sure Doralee would too, if only she owned a proper oven and didn't have to make do with a microwave, and convenience food, and wasn't so busy she hardly knew whether she stood on her exuberant tendril-haired head or her nicely defoliated heels.
At the dry-cleaners'
Envisage this. Trisha, the hopeless case of earlier pages, the one who's fallen on hard times after winning the lottery, is now living above the dry-cleaners' in Wilkins Parade. She wonders whether she made a wise choice, whether it might not have been better to put down the phone and accept when Mrs Kovac said she couldn't have the flat, instead of throwing herself upon the woman's mercy. Mrs Kovac's mercies may turn out to be like the gifts of the grateful when dead, not quite what you expect or want. Abandoned needles and nasty bits of cellophane swirl around the recycling centre down the road, and though Harrods vans draw up outside High View Apartments, it is clear to Trisha that the area is fighting a civil war with itself, and both sides are fighting hard. Are property prices going up or down? Not that it matters to her, since she is renting, but she likes to live in a neighbourhood which is improving, not deteriorating. Who doesn't?