Mantrapped (18 page)

'Graham,' says Eve, coolly, hand ineptly over the mouthpiece, 'It's Dora. One of your daughters.' And she hands the phone to her husband.

'Dora!' says Graham, trying to sound pleased. He has behaved as well as he can to his many children but it is not good enough. He left their mother and only the twins, the boys, the youngest, the males, will ever forgive him. He had hoped that as they reached maturity the girls would opt to rename themselves, as their mother had in her time. But no. As Eve puts it, 'It is more important for them to spite you, I'm sorry to say, than to live good and useful lives.'

'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.