Mantrapped. Fay Weldon

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ