Mantrapped (15 page)

When I arrived, as the third, Karen was living with her mother Barbara and visiting her father at weekends. Cynthia's clothes still hung in the cupboards when I moved in, her plates still stacked the kitchen shelves, her tubes of paint - her cerulean blue, her titanium white - still stood in jars of dried-up turpentine upon the shelf, and Karen mourned her going. Now I had ruthlessly taken Cynthia's place, moved into her very bed and founded a dynasty around it.

I was accustomed to being liked - disapproved of perhaps for the messiness of my ways, both practical and emotional, disconcerting in my inability to conform to the mores of the times - but liked. Forty years on Karen and I get on just fine, indeed with much mutual affection, but it was a long hard road. It took me decades to learn the secret of living peacefully with stepchildren - you must treat them as if they were royalty, and only speak when spoken to. Smile amiably, and try not to catch their eye or draw attention to yourself, and all will be well or at least better.

Cynthia Pell, my predecessor in Ron's affections, was a painter who now enjoys a posthumous reputation. She was a beautiful, full-bodied, full-lipped girl with dark hair and red cheeks, who had gone completely out of her mind. She was a friend of Sheila Fell, Lowry's protegee, another painter of astonishing talent and beauty whose work is much valued. Pell and Fell, Fell and Pell. Pell painted women in distress, Fell painted landscapes. Both women enjoyed to the full the gifts and pleasures of self-destruction. Cynthia took to the knife and Sheila to the bottle. If I diminish them for the sake of a neat phrase I am sorry, but I know no other way of containing them and their troubles in my head. They were both appallingly self-indulgent and destructive but the times gave them no choice. It was as if, in the Fifties, when their work was mostly done, the talent and impulse to paint and the problem of being female formed some kind of corrosive mixture which scoured their insides out and left them raw and bleeding with rage and misery.

Fell, Pell and Plath. Sylvia Plath was the poetic equivalent, vociferous in her distress. I see all these self-destroyers of the Former Age as sacrificial martyrs to the New Feminism. The artists lead the way. This life is
impossible
. Cynthia's scratchy, tormented drawings and haunted paintings are so powerful I can scarcely look at them without wanting to throw open the windows and let the sunlight in. Sheila's landscapes, very different, have a swirling intensity, a lustiness about them, but also an anxiety, as if every brush stroke was won with difficulty, and earth and rock were for ever on the verge of flying apart from one another. Evelyn Williams, their contemporary, was another beautiful girl, whose work is now highly sought after, and is hung in the Metropolitan and the Tate. She was not self-destructive, on the contrary; she worked patiently through the decades, with very little acknowledgement until recently, when it has come flooding in. But she had to wait until her seventies to receive it. And her work too is so imbued with tragedy that it can only really be viewed dispassionately from the walls of a great gallery. Get too near and you feel you will never smile again. Yet sometimes when Evie does something cheerful - a child's face or a rising sun - the sense of pleasure left behind is so intense it lingers long after you have left the gallery.

But Cynthia! After leaving the house she shared with Ron, Cynthia lived in a mental hospital for fifteen years, restrained for her own and others' safety, before destroying herself, horribly and graphically, cutting her own throat. I wrote a story about her once, called
In a Dustbin, Darkly
. She lived for a time in real life, and in the story, in a dustbin down an alleyway at the end of the street, while I chirrupped gaily about the house, and pretended she did not exist. Ron seldom referred to her. I think he simply did not know what to do about her, either, or how to think of her. This is the problem with the truly mad - their terms of reference and yours do not coincide.

If I am to speak for Ron, Cynthia was perhaps the central tragedy in his life, the person and major life-event around which all other things circled. I was only the bit part player in Ron and Cynthia's life, not Cynthia's in mine. I was deluded in thinking otherwise. The clothes of mine I hung in her wardrobe as I elbowed her out of my life, pushing her waisted jacket with the fur collar (did not Trisha wear something like that?) to the back, could not have brought good karma.

Cynthia turned up in the house once and threw Dan, then a baby, across the room. She snatched him out of his crib and threw. I was shocked and alarmed, but she had at least thrown him onto the sofa. She did not wish him real harm. All the same it seemed some terrible visitation: Mrs Rochester from the attic had erupted into my life. There was a terrible and convincing simplicity with which she accused me of being an insensitive woman and an unfit wife. 'You have stopped Ron painting,' she cried aloud. 'What has he done! Marrying a woman like you! An office worker!' She threw a few shoes about and left.

Ron said she would not come again, nor did she. Did he visit her? Sleep with her? I don't know. It became evident to me that 'being a painter' carried far more weight with Ron and his friends than 'being a writer' ever did for me. Writing was something you did, not something you were. The true artist, in the eyes of those talented young people who came out of the Slade, St Martins, Camberwell, in the Forties and Fifties, was bound to be like Van Gogh, mad, bad and tormented. Whereas writing, I would maintain, smiling blandly the while, was if anything restorative; it had a gentle tonic effect. I wrote a story under that name, too,
A Gentle Tonic Effect
, about a young woman who worked for a nuclear power plant, and whose job it was to maintain that radiation was not harmful at all, but gently beneficial.

The more I suspected myself that what I wrote might be explosive, the more I maintained its harmlessness. I think I was quite wilfully disingenuous. I was known in the beginning to his friends as Ron's port and lemon girl: the amiable barmaid type, the provider of money, the washer of dishes. I did not like to disappoint.

Poor Cynthia, in retrospect! It had been her home, her bed, her cupboards to clean and her stepdaughter, not mine, to care for.

But what real attention did I give her? None. I would drink my morning coffee, made sinfully and wastefully strong -now I was out from under my mother's eye I had a taste for excess - from the little brown coffee cups Cynthia's mother had made as her wedding gift to that happy couple. The Pells were wealthy; Cynthia's mother was artistic and able to afford a kiln. I relished the sense of victory. In the Fifties women were in competition: we had little sense of sisterhood.

So I moved the clothes from her closet, and was glad when Ron took down the painting rack in which both their paintings sat, gathering dust. Friends said - though they seldom mentioned her in my presence - that she painted better than he did. He painted on the backs of her canvases for a while and then gave up altogether.

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?'