by Fay Weldon
I wrote a story last year, A Knife for Cutting Mangos, about a second wife going through the belongings of the previous one, who ran away, and scorning what she found. Until I wrote the previous paragraph I had not realised to what degree I wrote from experience, and out of guilt. Writing is not in the least therapeutic, but it is how you may perhaps earn the remission of sins, if acknowledging sin is to be excused from it. In writing about an unnatural event, such as the swapping of bodies, I deny myself access to my own past. Notice how the story of Trisha, Dor alee and Peter is slowing up? I fear the aridness of having nothing to relate, the desert of non-experience. I will do what I can. I read in the newspapers how ambitious women are taking testosterone to make themselves as bullish as men. Perhaps I should try, the better to know what Trisha feels like when she is Peter.
Writers write about what they once felt and did, painters paint what they see now.
When, twenty years into our marriage, Ron started painting again I would buy him canvases and lug them back on the train from London to Somerset. (We moved out of London in 1975, after various domestic and amatory upsets.) He would thank me politely but did not use them. Artists should stretch their own canvases, not take shortcuts. But he was not good at it: it took more patience than he had, and paintings would crack and peel even as he sold them. And he liked to do flower paintings, but where do you find flowers in the winter? I would buy them from the florist at Harrods and take them home and shove them in a vase and let them fall where they would - I was never sure whether an artist was meant to arrange a composition or take chance as it came and paint what you happened to see: I understand now that the answer is that you do a bit of both.
I was like Madame Bovary: trying to bribe my way into a man's affection with little gifts. I adapted the novel into a stage play only recently: it played to full houses and audiences who got to their feet and clapped, and to terrible reviews. I had altered the story. The critics hated it. The trouble was I knew the woman better than did Flaubert, and I knew the husband too, and the lovers, and what makes you spend too much, why you end up paying for your boyfriend to go on holiday with his wife, 'to make it up'. Forget Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary? C'est moi!' - c'était moi.
Ron would look at the flowers and their giver with suspicion - as Rodolphe looks at Emma Bovary; where was I coming from? But he would take both canvas and flowers up to his studio and come out weeks later with a painting that brought life and colour to the walls. And I found that he was right. The Van Gogh model was the true one, not the Rembrandt one of my hopes. You could not be an artist and a good husband too. He struggled for recognition and loathed publicity. I had no trouble getting the first, and would talk to a journalist as to my best friend. It was not a recipe for happiness.
I found one of Cynthia's mother's saucers only the other day. It was the only one left of the initial set, used over decades for a pot plant, dark brown and shiny, encrusted with a little circle of built-up lime. It and the pot plant had travelled with me from house to house and marriage to marriage. It brought back strongly the memory of the morning after Ron and I met in bed, breakfasting at the table in Chalcot Crescent, languid-limbed, the cup small but heavy in my hand, the sun shining into the windows and the green city hill just outside, Vivaldi on the gramophone, cream curling into black coffee, and the sense that I was home, finally. As I say, poor Cynthia, poor lost sister.
But how can anyone cut their own throat? What does it take? It does not bear thinking about, and I think about it as little as I can, and envisage it likewise. But it's there. It's in Evie's work, and mine too.
My sister Jane, who wrote poetry, had the same hot line to the appalling infinite as Pell, Fell and Plath, though she did not have the same sense of drama as the other two, and was fortunate enough to have my mother to remind her of the realities of her children. What my sister had was a notion that there was something out there, just beyond vision, which had to be reached no matter what. Trying to grasp it rendered a woman desperate and emotionally fragile. Before people talked so much about 'creativity' as something to be desired, before the jargon of contemporary psychotherapy came so easily to our lips, and we learned to account for ourselves in terms of self-realisation and the need for self-expression, we were left with the vague and painful mystery of ourselves. We had no language for what was wrong. What drives the artist is an urge as powerful as sex and if denied, if the times are against her, if she doesn't find the words, doesn't find her audience, looks inside and find only muddle and misery, why, it's enough to send a woman mad.
It's all swings and roundabouts, as ever. 'Art' for both women and men is less likely these days to drive you insane, but our connection to the source of inspiration is weakened and infantilised by the very self-understanding and self-preoccupation which saves us. Self-consciousness is a sickly thing, saps our strength. Post-modernism, with its look at me, look at me, see what I've done, guess what I'm going to do next, has all but destroyed us. The art of our civilisation is not what it was; our songs, books, poetry, paintings, architecture, music, are shadows of what they were. But we don't go mad, we don't end, like Cynthia, in the dustbin. Human sacrifice is rare.
Wedged between Cynthia, the mad ex-wife in the attic and my distracted sister Jane, I was left with the sense of being a dull but very sane person. I was Doralee more than I was Trisha, or hoped to be, more given to the boring foam rubber than the soiled but lively mattress. In Doralee mode I will organise the dry-cleaning and send someone round to get it if it doesn't turn up on the step. Once women ran the errands, now the men do. But I would never decide I want it now, now, now, just to annoy. That is Doralee's temperament, not mine.
Consequences. The past catches up
Trisha hears the steel shutters beginning to descend, then stopping as Mrs Kovac changes her mind about closing up. Trisha has had a hard day: she is emotionally fraught. She has sold up her life in exchange for not enough money. Her eyes are not as good as once they were. She needs a magnifying glass to thread the needle. She feels unjustifiably angry with Mrs Kovac because of it. Soon she will have to get herself some reading glasses: it is the beginning of the end, of the long crumble into old age. What has she come to? When she looks out of the window at Wilkins Parade she can see it is not the posh area she thought it was. Starbucks has a piece of cardboard stuck over a broken window. A stone, or was it done by a bullet? The TV reception is so bad she can hardly get a picture. Mrs Kovac failed to point this out. The stairs, which looked so cute, smell of pee. Cell phone coverage is patchy. She has to stand near the window if she wants to make a call. She can only afford pay-as-you-go. She applied for an account but her application was rejected without explanation. Her credit rating must be minus zero. How has she come to this? Next thing she knows Mrs Kovac is calling up the stairs as if she, Trisha, were some sort of servant. Just because she does the occasional bit of sewing. This arrangement is simply not going to work. Mrs Kovac is in a bad mood. 'Trisha! Bring that cover down right now, will you. I don't suppose you've finished it?'
Too bloody right I haven't, thinks Trisha. What am I, a slave? What did your last one die of?
Trisha pushes open the door to the stairs. She has to ease a half-unpacked box out of the way to get it open. The room is full of cardboard boxes and bin bags: she can hardly get to the cooker to make a cup of tea. Where is she going to put everything? Bin bags are depressing by their very nature, colour, texture. They resemble nothing in the growing, living world. 'I didn't quite catch that,' Trisha calls down to Mrs Kovac, though she can hear well enough. 'Some stupid idiot's coming round to collect the mattress-cover,' shrieks the other. 'I need it down here straight away.'
Trisha goes back into the flat, and finds the mattress-cover. She has already levered off five of the melted buttons and replaced them with new cheap but metal ones; there are five to go. She takes her time. She hears altercations from below. Fury boils up in her. She starts down the stairs and meets Peter on the way up. She thinks he is rather
attractive but she doesn't have time for that kind of nonsense any more, and anyway she wants to give Mrs Kovac a piece of her mind. By the time she gets to the bottom of the stairs she is feeling faint.
Trisha sits down on the bottom stair. What is the matter with her? She is staring at a man's shoe. It is on the end of her leg. How did that get there? She can see things very clearly, sharply defined. Her eyes seem to be wider open than normal. She feels different but cannot quite make out how. She has dropped the mattress-cover on to the stairs. It looks ordinary and everyday, a piece of linen fabric of the kind that never folds completely flat and is a nuisance to have around, but nothing remarkable. What a stupid thing, what a stupid piece of fabric, to be the source of such a fuss. The smell of urine is strong, too strong for comfort. She should not be sitting on these filthy stairs. She stands up. The man's shoe is still on the end of her foot. It is a good, expensive shoe. She bends to do up the lace which after the manner of thin, round, expensive laces tends to undo itself. Those are not her hands either: hers are soft and white and tender: these are knobbly and brown and have hairy patches on the knuckles. They couldn't thread a needle. The hands could bring pleasure, she can see that, but they are not hers. So whose hands are they? The fingers move up to touch her chin. She can't stop them. Curiosity seems part of her. The skin she feels is firm but prickly. A young male chin, recently shaved, but now reasserting a beard. Her crotch feels unfamiliar. She feels for it. It's bumpy, something bulky beneath fabric. She snatches the hand away: she is being indelicate. It comes to her that she is a man. The mind is having to work overtime, really hard, to make sense of the signals it is receiving, and as soon as it receives them it rejects them. She shuts her eyes. So long as she does not see she is a man she need not be a man.
In the good days Rollo once took Trisha and Spencer to see a crop circle. There were four circles of squashed corn in the corner of a flourishing field of grain, arranged in a rectangle. One of the branches of the tree above was torn and damaged. Oh yes, she thought without surprise at the time, that's obvious, a flying saucer has landed here. That's what the four engines would do to when they landed, flattening the grain beneath. The broken bit of branch is where it took off again. Only then did she remember there was no such thing as a flying saucer. The mind likes to make sense of what it sees, or else alarm ensues. Wake in the night when there's a bump on the bed: fall asleep as soon as you've told yourself it was only the cat. You don't get up to check. The mind will take risks, but only so many. Two bumps and only one cat, and you're out there with the poker, flailing.
Two male shoes on the end of her feet, and she knows she is a man. But out of whose eyes is she looking? She needs a mirror.
She sees that the other woman now standing at the top of the stairs is perplexed and pale, looking down at her. She has curly, reddish hair, rather inexpertly hennaed. Why so pale? Is she ill? She looks familiar. She could have sworn it was a man who passed her on the stairs, rather young and fanciable. What is going on? Is this an out-of-body experience? Is she dying? The woman on the top of the stairs topples and falls. She has fainted. Her mouth is open. It looks ugly, but at least she has white fillings not the old black kind. When Trisha won the lottery and had money to burn she had all the mercury fillings taken out. All the same, the woman wearing her clothes would look better if she shut her mouth. She badly needs a face-lift, too. Her chin flops into her neck. Trisha goes to the woman's aid but, leaping up the stairs, finds balancing difficult. Her body is weighted wrongly. And why is she wearing chinos? Why are her hands so large? They are definitely not hers. She would have plucked those dark hairs out one by one.
Mrs Kovac calls up the stairs.
'Trisha? He's coming up. I couldn't stop the bastard. Don't give that bloody cover back if he doesn't pay up. I wouldn't put it past him. Twenty-seven pounds seventy-five, or it comes off your wages.'
Hang on a moment, thinks Trisha. Mrs Kovac's charging him twenty-seven pounds seventy-five? Cleaning would be seven pounds seventy-five, okay, but that leaves twenty for the buttons. She pays me two quid. That's just not on. And anyway, Trisha thinks, I won the lottery. I cannot be spoken to in this way by this woman.'
Trisha finds her voice.
'Oh shut up you old bag,' she shouts, and the voice from her mouth is deep and powerful. She rather likes it.
The girl who looks like an older version of herself opens her eyes, looks up, and passes out again. Trisha drags her into the flat by her familiar shoes and shuts the door behind her, looks in the mirror without more ado and discovers that she is indeed a man.
Doralee waits
The olive oil in the bottom of the pan grows cold. The couscous, partly cooked, swells and grows stodgy. It will be inedible. A whole hour passes. Peter does not return. Doralee finds a box of chocolates and eats the lot. She feels nervous. It is a long time since Doralee waited like this for a man. On the whole men wait for Doralee. She blames Peter for taking such a long time and driving her to chocolate. It was absurd. She did not want it, did not like it, was not hungry. It was not even organic. It will give her spots and make her fat. Really she should not have chocolates in the house at all. Something like this always happened. Someone bought them for Peter for his last birthday: they would not have had the courage to offer them to Doralee. She would regard it as an attack. One of Doralee's few fears is that she will take after her mother, who was a reasonable size until she had Doralee and then never managed to lose the weight again, if she was ever trying, and just put on more and more and more. Size 22. It is inconceivable. An embarrassment. 'But at least it means she won't get married again,' says Peter.
No one wants mothers to remarry. Besides being rather a disgusting idea it complicates matters of inheritance. The court gave Ruby the house when Graham ran off with his yoga teacher, as was only reasonable. It is a very pleasant old house, in its own grounds, which was once a rectory. The church next door is not the quaint heritage site it used to be, being topped with a mobile phone aerial, and having had its pews removed, and the bongo drums and the chanting make it a noisy place on a Sunday morning - which is not good for property prices - but the rectory is still worth at least half a million. She can't expect much, of course, since there are six siblings, but she has friends whose mothers have remarried, and the new husband tends to end up with everything if anything dreadful happens. Ruby's layer of insulating fat at least protects her family from this kind of complication. If Ruby ends up in a nursing home and the house has to be sold to pay the fees, and all the money gets used up before the government steps in to pay, so be it. That's life. But the weight Ruby carries at least isn't going to increase her chances of longevity: there may be some inheritance left for the children. Doralee doesn't like thinking in this way about her own mother but you have to be realistic. It is really difficult to save.
Peter's mother Adrienne is thin as a rake and always looks good in little suits and scarves, but has no suitors, which is a relief to her family. She keeps her eyes lowered and does not lift them to meet the eyes of men, other than to stare them out at business meetings, asserting her dominance in decision-making. All her erotic energy and softness got used up in her early twenties when she married Peter's father. When he died there was not much left for anyone else, even the boys. Adrienne had a hysterectomy after a cancer scare and the doctors will not give her hormones and her skin is dry but at least she is thin and wears her clothes well. Adrienne has a lot to be proud of, and was well provided for by her husband's insurance, but that dies when she does. All the more reason for Peter to save.
And where is Peter? Doralee feels sick. It is probably the chocolates. Most were marzipan. She does not like marzipan. Why then did she eat them? She does not understand herself. She hopes she is not pregnant, and catching herself hoping it, feels mean. Peter wants a child, her mother wants a grandchild, so does Adrienne, on balance. Doralee had imagined not getting married would save her from this kind of family pressure, but it hasn't. Another person g
rowing and growing inside her and then bursting out of her? It is an appalling idea, yet how calmly others take it, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. But it isn't, it's primitive and bizarre. Just because it happens in nature doesn't make it right. She is not an animal. It will damage her body and lower her income. She doubts that they can do key-hole caesareans: if she is pregnant she will be left with a scar. It is not pain that frightens her, pain is in the head and leaves no marks, but knives cut flesh. Ruby had a caesarean with the twins, and her wrinkled, stretched, scarred, fat and muscle-less stomach is still a horror. Doralee thinks she will have to go to the bathroom and make herself throw up. But her throat and stomach seem to have gone into a state of stasis. Tickle as much as you like and nothing happens. She coughs and retches but no product is delivered. She weeps.
Tomorrow she must go to Heather's baby shower after work and pretend to envy her. Though already Heather, at seven months, has grown sleepy and vague and vast, and there is nothing whatsoever to envy her for. Heather is indecently proud of the way the baby's movements can be seen under her dress; Doralee thinks the foetus would be better sedated but has too much sense to say so. You are meant to admire insensate growth, for some reason. The blind searching movements remind her of what Peter's penis does sometimes in his sleep at night when he turns towards her and embraces her.
She will wear the black dress with the thin shoulder straps - it rolls up into almost nothing and can be just shaken out and slipped on in a second: she hates the way her colleagues try to party themselves up in the toilets by just putting on a necklace, slapping on more mascara over old and hoping for the best. If Peter manages to get the dress back from the bitch at the dry-cleaners. There seem to be more and more people like that around - rude, unhelpful and officious, with no idea of service, let alone making a profit. The rules of the game more important than the game. Perhaps there was an article in that?