Mantrapped

by Fay Weldon

  'It's Doralee,' says Doralee to her Dad. 'Not Dora. I hate having my name shortened, as I must have told you a hundred times. But I don't want to talk about that, I'm worried about Peterloo. He went out earlier this evening leaving his keys and his mobile behind and he hasn't come back. He doesn't think about me. Supposing I wanted to go out and I had to wait in for him? He's very selfish.'

  'You married him, not me,' says Graham. He has switched over to the speaker phone. Now Eve can hear what he is saying. He feels safer with witnesses.

  'Daddy, we're not married. Try to remember.'

  'I'm sorry. Are you worried because he's gone missing or because he's selfish?'

  'Because he went out to get the cleaning and he hasn't come back and it's not like him.' 'But your mother said it was a safe area.' 'You and Eve are so, so yesterday,' said Doralee. 'Safe, not safe, it's just human.'

  'Have you called the police?' asked Graham. 'Of course not,' said Doralee. 'They never come.' 'I should call them,' said Graham. 'I know they tend to arrest the victim these days, not the criminal, but you could give it a go.'

  'You are so cynical, Daddy,' complained his daughter. 'They do their best. But you get through to someone in a call-centre who wants to know your mother's maiden name, and I can never remember it.' 'O'Neill,' said Graham.

  'Fancy you remembering that,' says Doralee. 'But it's just in case. It's a nice evening. Peter's probably just gone for a walk.'

  'What, down there where you live?'

  'It's a mixed area,' said Doralee. 'Very vibrant. We love it. But it's understandable that I'm worried. You walked out on us, after all, without notice: all that was left of you were your keys. It might happen to me.'

  'It was a long time ago. You're very much your mother's daughter,' said Graham, and to his astonishment his daughter began to cry and said she loved her Peterloo very much. 'Peterloo,' sang Eve, from the back of the room, Abba-like, 'Peterloo, you are my Peterloo? Graham hushed her as best he could. But she'd taken all her clothes off and was dancing around naked. When presented with bad karma this was her normal response. She had nice perky little breasts, unlike Ruby's hefty ones, and danced gracefully and slowly, without too much energy, waving this way and that like a poplar. He was very happy with her. She was uncompetitive and had nothing of Ruby's over-active do-gooderiness about her, allowing him to get on with saving the world.

  'Doralee,' said Graham, 'I am sure your partner is all right.

  He's probably just gone to the pub.'

  'He hates pubs.'

  'Oh, I rather thought he was pub kind of person. Full of information and useful facts.'

  'You just don't get him, do you, Daddy. Peter is a private kind of a guy, very reliable, and kind and good.'

  'Then he's probably busy doing someone a good turn: taken them to casualty, left his cell phone behind and now can't find an unvandalised telephone box to be in touch. Stop panicking. He may even be trying to get through to you as we speak.' That was over-hopeful.

  'We have a call-waiting feature on this phone,' said Doralee.

  'But thank you, Daddy, for being there for me.' She even sounded as if she meant it. 'I know I'm over-reacting. It's like, all that past bad stuff in my life.'

  All that had stuff

  Doralee's father Graham, although only just into his sixties, still has something about him of that earlier generation of manipulative men, into which I have put Ron and the other artists and poets of that tricky post-war generation. See them clear in Osborne's Jimmy Porter, the one with the gift for invective in Look Back in Anger, that seminal drama of the Fifties. When an earning wife was a rare thing, and the husband a meal ticket for life, male resentment against women was rife.

  Graham's speciality was a kind of war game of the emotions: the blame game. He left Ruby because she was too active, too busy, too noisy, too beset by crying babies. He craved peace and felt entitled to it. He blamed her for what she was, not for what she did, which is a great cruelty because there is nothing that the accused can do about it.

  Ruby, mantrapped, has never fully recovered from the shock of his leaving. She clips curbs when she drives, and forgets things, how many sausage rolls she has ordered for the Church Tea and so forth. It does not stop her driving or organising as she always did. She's just not so good at it. She grits her teeth and achieves her aims, just about, and tries to concentrate but trauma leaves its marks through life, the left-over life which is all the mantrapped and abandoned woman has.

  In the days of female powerlessness the male blame game -endearments today, rejection the next - was more frequently played than it is today. It was played out between my husband Ron and me over a period of thirty years. He won hands down. I was an amateur.

  Ted Hughes played the same game, as did so many mid-century men of the arts. The poet drove poor Sylvia to suicide (male poet: you have dared to rival me; 1 will choose another over you, that'll lam yer!) and Assia Wevill (male poet: you have brought down dark cosmic powers to damage me: you have killed my true wife by your presence in my life: I cannot live with you).

  Sylvia was a friend and neighbour in Primrose Hill, so was Assia, her successor in the Hughes' marital bed in Devon. In the eyes of those dinosaur men, woman was the great destroyer; she was Delilah, snipping his hair while he, trusting, slept. His male strength was sapped by the weakness she exploited, as was his capacity for tenderness and love. Ron, for example, artist, musician, man of parts, both loved me (at any rate for a time) and was persecuted by me. With men of his generation - mid-century men one could call them - these things went together. They were reared on George Bernard Shaw (marriage - woman's meal ticket for life); Strindberg (women drive you insane); Henry Miller (mock them while you shag them); Melanie Klein (good breast, bad breast, and just your luck to have got the bad); on 'men have art and women have babies' - and a host of films and books in which woman was the destroyer, the siren, the wanton, the sexual devourer. Every woman, they thought, would turn into their mother given half a chance, and try to tell them what to do. They would do what they could to turn you into her, and once they had succeeded, would be off, to find someone as little like her as possible. Graham's still at it; albeit a shadow of the giants of the past. 'I wish you weren't so noisy, pet,' was all Ruby can remember Graham saying by way of warning, the day before he left. Of course he was going to marry Eve: there was Ruby standing at his mother's sink, using her pots and pans to make the jam from the strawberry bed his mother made. Yet it was he who bought the house. If Eve wants to stay married to him, she had better not make jam, even as he begs her to.

  Meanwhile women hung around, the surplus gender, hoping to be chosen, suffering humiliation if they were rejected or abandoned, as a good proportion was going to be, statistically. Today's woman, busying herself demonising the male gender, finds it hard to understand the mewling mindset of yesterday's woman.

  Ruby's daughter has vowed never to be mantrapped like her mother. No marriage for Doralee, but of course she is a mantrap in herself, as is Trisha. Good Lord, Trisha trapped a whole male being in passing, soul, body, memories and all. Doralee's an amateur.

  Peter is as indoctrinated as his forefathers, of course he is, just in a different direction. Forget the printed page, forget Shaw and Strindberg, Peter and his generation have been reared on a fictional diet of film and TV, in which women are strong, victims are nice, colonialists are bad and the colonised good, fathers are your best buddy and empathy rules. Who cares, wins. The Sermon on the Mount has sunk into male consciousness. Anima triumphs over animus. Blessed are the weak for they shall inherit the earth. A likely tale. But at least dinosaur man is dying out, starved of nourishment in the new age.

  And more waiting

  Another hour passed. Nothing on TV. Doralee thought she might ring up Heather but no one wants to report their boyfriend is missing. It seems careless, and misfortune is bad for business and prestige. Unwise. She won't use or even think the word 'partner' to Heather: Heather is in a partnership
too, not a marriage, but the fact of her pregnancy makes Doralee's relationship seem kind of second class, to do with the free expression of consumerism rather than commitment - so she reverts to boyfriend. She called Ruby. Ruby was making strawberry jam in her big farmhouse kitchen in aid of Cancer Research. A local soft-fruit grower had donated his surplus stock, rejected by the supermarkets a week previously as too ripe for the shelves. Irradiation and chilling had failed to control the fruit's overweening tendency to mature. Now Ruby was in a race against time and waste and the kitchen was sticky with sugar, soft fruit and pectin.

  'Some people are kind and considerate,' said Ruby. 'They make up for the ones that aren't.'

  'Like Daddy,' said Doralee. 'What is that funny noise?' 'Me sucking my fingers, I expect,' said Ruby. 'I expect it was cheaper for the farmer to give you his left overs than destroy them under EC regs.,' said Doralee. 'Now don't be cynical, darling,' said Ruby, 'it doesn't suit you. What's the matter?'

  Doralee wept a little and said that Peter was missing. No, she hadn't called the hospitals. She hated hospitals. It wasn't even as if you could ever get through, you just hung on the end of the line listening to some stupid music until you didn't care who was alive and who was dead. Ruby offered to do it for her but Doralee took offence, and said her mother was wishing bad karma on her partner. Of course nothing bad had happened to Peterloo. He was not the kind of person bad things happened to.

  Ruby said she had to get back to the jam. She'd left the pan on the Aga and now the sweet sludge was bubbling over onto the stove and burning and caramelising on the hot plate and the smell was dreadful and the stickiness appalling. You were meant to sterilise the jamjars but she thought she'd bypass that stage. She'd rinse them out with the stuff you used for baby's bottles. She had some somewhere. Ruby heard the click as her daughter hung up.

  'You care about bloody cancer research more than me,' said Doralee, to the empty air. 'I don't suppose you'll even keep a jar back for us.' Well, she was upset. And for some reason she felt entitled to be horrible to her parents, while being pleasant enough to others, so long as the latter hadn't given her any particular cause for grievance. But in the daughter's eyes her mother was guilty until proved innocent, not otherwise.

  Doralee took two of Peter's sleeping pills and went to bed. Everything would seem better in the morning. The pills were of a new generation which meant you were perfectly alert if roused, just got a good night's sleep. She had written an article about the benefits of sound sleep and had done some research into the matter. All the same it was some minutes before she fell asleep. The futon with its strip of foam rubber was uncomfortable. Her head lay uneasily upon its pillow. The curse of the missing mattress-cover, perhaps. She missed Peter. She missed his lean hairy legs besides hers.

  It occurred to her that she loved him and that it was more than just a matter of mutual friendship, companionship, shared interests, with sex tagged on. It could become painful, difficult and dangerous, if you were not to pursue self-interest with fixed determination, but allowed yourself to be distracted by random emotion. Perhaps, all unknowing, she had driven Peter away as her mother had driven her father. Her father had just walked out the door one day when asked to relight the Aga for the autumn season. Ruby had been astonished: summer was over: to announce autumn by the Aga ceremony was the man's job. Of course she knew how to light the stove: it was just not her job. Perhaps Peter had similar feelings about couscous but had never voiced them?

  Could you do things to others you were not aware of? Be some source of danger to them, sap their strength, steal their being, turn them into something they were not, just by close proximity?

  Was she, in fact, bad for Peter? Her sister Claudette said she was; said Peter had changed since he had been with her, become passive, a kind of mini-Doralee. But Claudette was jealous, everyone knew, had always fancied Peter. Doralee slept.

  On the villainy of women

  As well for the future of the nation that Mr Kovac, new citizen, packs a gun. Someone has to look out for women. True, he's a drug-dealer, and true, in his time he has killed a man or two - but in his own country, not ours, and when young and impetuous and only as custom dictated, in defence of family honour. You could almost believe that all of us, men and women both, left to themselves, and given permission by society, are murderous. Mrs Kovac has had three abortions in her day, Doralee has had one, and Trisha two. Ruby has had none, but simply goes ahead and allows as many little things as come along to live their lifespan out. (She is much criticised for this - six children! No wonder the husband left.) Graham makes up for them all by saving lives, distributing grain to starving peoples. By virtue of cutting a corner or two in the past, in far-off, brigand-held lands, and increasing his own profit in ways that are not strictly legal, Graham has managed to salt quite a bit away, which is how Ruby and the children have been able to stay at home in the Rectory, and Eve to dance around the kitchen ethereal and naked for his entertainment. It is all paradox, as Eve observes.

  Mr Kovac is a danger only to his enemies. Smile at him and he'll smile at you. No illegal he. He is happy in the city and loves driving and is proud of his van. He delivers drugs and dry-cleaning around the neighbourhood, and collects money owed on behalf of people of many nationalities. He is a pleasant fellow, without apparent guile, and is trusted. His native tongue is Albanian but he has a smattering of Italian, Iranian, even Afghan. He comes home early if he can and helps his wife with the shutters. His compassion extends however, only to the outer limits of self-interest, and Doralee, foolish girl, has placed herself outside it. Doralee has been trained and encouraged to look a long way afield, beyond her circle of acquaintance, to the rights and wrongs of other countries, other races, to such a degree that she's bad at noticing what goes on next door, or indeed inside herself. She goes on anti-war demos with alacrity -blame lies with other nations, just as in her personal life it lies with other individuals - and feels entitled as a consumer to require Mrs Kovac to keep the shop open late, no matter how tired that hard-working woman is. She can kill her unborn child and forget about it within the month, give or take a few nightmares, while still seeing life as innately precious. She has been well trained by her teachers in her rights and in the art of high self-esteem: she sees herself as honest, kind and good.

  Yet only last week Doralee sent an e-mail in Heaven Arkwright's name, sneaking into her office at lunchtime to say no but thanks to a request for Heaven to write up a newly-discovered rainforest herb, which when applied to the skin plumped it up and removed wrinkles. That meant the request would then come Doralee's way. Doralee tells herself that natural justice is on her side, this is a grey area: Heaven deals with complexion issues, true, but the herb is also claimed to promote sound natural sleep. She has done nothing criminal, just read an e-mail not meant for her, replied, and then deleted. Doralee is a relativist, though no one ever told her what the word meant, and she believes the moral universe falls into place around her according to her own advantage.

  She, the murderess, killer of her unborn baby, is unaccustomed to seeing herself as morally flawed. Mr Kovac has a better sense of original sin. Yet how scrupulous Doralee will be, should she eventually give birth, a better mother than I, three decades back, could ever be. Doralee will bond with her new baby (she will have no choice; the midwife will thrust the infant head to Doralee's reluctant nipple; the mouth will grab and suck and that will be that). And thus bonded, sentenced to a lifetime's anxiety, she will breast-feed for six months as instructed, until the poor little thing is weak and mewly with hunger, and see herself as irresponsible if she shoves a piece of solid food into its mouth, to watch the tiny teeth, already grown, at last find something satisfactory to bite upon.

  But us lot, us mothers of the Sixties and Seventies - how good we were at doing what came naturally. We shoved the bottles in the babies' mouths and put up with the guilt which followed. We knew no fear. We saw ourselves as doing the best we could with the material with which we
were supplied, and left the rest to chance. We were protected from anxiety by our own ignorance. Three months pregnant with Nicolas, I caught German measles. These days that would be an instant recommendation for termination, there being a possibility of blindness or deafness in the child, but what did I know about that? Upper left arm, we all had a smallpox inoculation scar but that was as far as preventative medicine went. That a baby could be born less than perfect did not occur to us. Nicolas grew up to be a musician and has 20/20 vision. Neglecting to foster our offspring's moral, physical, psychological or intellectual development, we left them alone to grow, and by and large they did.

  I watch my grandchildren and pity their parents, as the little ones are woken out of peaceful slumber to develop their hand-eye coordination, their spatial skills, their empathy with others. These infants must work from the moment of birth; they are taught theories of projection at their mother's knee, learn to empathise with their enemy - darling, if John hits you it's because you hit him first, and poor John, his mother isn't very nice, is she - must be conscious of their thoughts and feelings from the start, and scarcely a one is theirs alone but has not been fed to them by the kind and well-intentioned. My ambitions for my children were that they should sleep and give me time to write. Mine slept because they were so bored, no doubt, but sleep they did. I loved them and sang them lullabies and pop songs. They could all chant Doris Day's Que Sera, Sera, and I tried not to pass on to them the habit of anxiety. And so through rain, hail, love, disappointment, psychoanalysis, notoriety, disgrace, divorce and pregnancies, rehearsals, lost socks, cooking, laundry and plastic bags, I somehow kept the writing coming. Faster, faster, more, more.