Mantrapped (28 page)

Mid-Seventies, and the city we knew seemed to be collapsing around us. We were not accustomed to foreigners, other than West Indians; suddenly the Middle East was with us, our institutions were being bought up, not to mention our race horses, and the West End bars were full of blondish girls for sale. The price of petrol went up to nearly fifty pence a gallon, and tights were available, even in Harrods, in only one choice of colour. The former much alarmed the men of Primrose Hill, and the latter the women. What, was even the privilege of the wealthy to be no more? Terrorists were active, bombs were going off in London, too close to home. They reached as near as next door, to No 1 Chalcot Crescent, where the Minister for Ireland, Lord Donaldson, now lived.

Lord Donaldson was a cheerful man, who got very drunk with my husband the day they moved in to their new home. They drank whisky together and ended up dancing on our dining table - refectory, old and solid - and letting down their trousers, to the horror of his wife, a serious academic and historian, and the delight of all our children. Our relationship with the Donaldsons thereafter was distant if polite. And Ron never drank whisky again, only wine.

The police asked for permission to run through our house and into the Donaldsons' back garden should there be reason to suspect an assassination attempt or a hostage-taking situation arose, and how could we refuse? There was a difficulty: the handle of our back door was missing. To get it open you had to use the end of a pair of scissors. The alarms next door would go off, our doorbell would ring, the police would rush in and pile up in our corridor like the Keystone Cops while I went to find the scissors. It was always a false alarm, mostly the cat, and if Lady Donaldson had vanished it was because she was round at the launderette, which she favoured above a washing machine. But it made you nervy.

Dan, sitting in a local cafe, overheard a plot to blow his lordship up. We told the police who told the Bomb Squad. It turned out to be a conversation between off-duty security guards outlining scenarios of possible attack, but it was disconcerting. Dan could scarcely leave home without untoward events occurring. First spoon-bending, now this. When he got in a car with Ron the sturdy Volvo engine would start to fizz and blow out sparks. Dan would have to get out before it would behave normally. Clocks and watches would stop if he went near them. He was seldom home on time: there had been a bomb scare or someone had jumped under a train. He played the trumpet like an angel: he went to Pimlico Comprehensive, a tough school with a good music department. He stopped off the bus to watch the Norwegian Christmas tree go up in Trafalgar Square, left his trumpet behind, and went back to retrieve it. He found the Square cleared and cordoned off and the bomb squad about to blow up his trumpet case. They were not amused to discover it was his. No one was amused. We were all too frightened.

I took Dan to a psychoanalyst, I remember - I must have been well into the grip of Freudian fervour - and asked him what to do. 'This child is event-prone,' he said. He was calm and wise and saintly. 'It is a recognisable condition. You are lucky. He could be accident-prone, and then you would be in real trouble. This kind of child attracts events in the same way some rare people attract lightning. They are catalysts for change: he will walk through clustering events without being touched himself. He will grow out of it, with puberty.'

And so Dan did, by and large. But I never grew out of my belief that anything you can think of actually happens somewhere. I wrote a passage in a novel,
The Hearts and Lives of Men
, in which a three-year-old survives an air crash, because she is sitting in the tail and it floats rather than falls. Soon after in real life a three-year-old survives just such a crash over Chicago. The writer invents, real life follows suit. The world is so crowded with people that if you can think of it, someone, somewhere, is doing it. Somewhere in India, or Malaysia, or China or Mexico, even now, two people have crossed souls like Peter and Trisha: it's just when it happens in Wilkins Parade that denial sets in.

Doralee is tired

Even now that she understood better what was going on, trying to sort out Peter and Trisha was a nightmare: it was like umpiring at tennis - one makes a mistake, the other one gets a point: that one moves, yet that one speaks: it exhausted her. She wanted to be able to cuddle up to Peter for comfort and warmth and reassurance, as she was used to, but there was no proper Peter around. She was on her own. And then the Trisha body would turn and stare at Doralee with a kind of yearning which reminded Doralee of Peter so that she almost wanted to hug her. But she despised the Trisha body. Trisha was too fleshy and too soft and not young enough: the idea of too close contact with her breasts, especially her naked, floppy breasts, was horrible. Yet she was beginning to think about it as a possibility. She had had lesbian leanings towards other women - she had inner stirrings towards Heaven Arkwright, if the truth be known, alongside the antagonism. Heaven had a kind of lean, muscly, dark-skinned smoothness that called out to something in Doralee, who felt pathetically white and soft by contrast, a little mewling creature battering fists against something more significant than herself, but about to be swept up and enclosed, which she half wanted, and half didn't want. It was incorporation that she was after. Yet Doralee, in the same room as Heaven, always felt unentitled in some way, perhaps by reason of having a church-going mother and a father who worked for an NGO; or perhaps it was just because she'd done something she knew was wrong, reading Heaven's e-mails and snaffling a job from under her nose. Well, now she was punished.

Doralee said she was going to lie down for a little, yet still hovered by the door, while the Peter body and the Trisha body played Scrabble, and took no notice of her, Doralee. They had left her behind, and now used her to look after them: they saw that as natural. They were a more perfect form than she, who was a mere heterosexual. Like snails they carried both male and female inside them.

She left the room and lay down on her and Peter's bed, and then found herself wondering what the Peter body might be like sexually when moved by Trisha's spirit. She, Doralee, was being offered the best of all worlds, surely. What was she doing, turning her back on experience? She was a journalist. It was her duty to find out. She slept.

Selling up and moving on

Come 1975 our front door too was sold, along with the other antiques. Ron wanted to live in the country: I could not see that it made any difference to me where I lived. One green field was much like another. I assumed he wanted me to come with him. In retrospect I am not so sure. The house was put on the market; a buyer came along, the deal was struck, and Ron put the contract under my nose and meekly I signed the papers. It was midwinter, and very cold. Now we had nowhere to live.

The house was sold to a banking family - in the fifteen years we had been there the Crescent had gone up in the world. How could it not? Central, airy, just down the road from the zoo and Queen Mary's rose garden, pretty Georgian houses - of course it had. A dream of a London house. Yet I'm sure I complained about it at the time - too small for our needs, too narrow, too tall, too many stairs - yet how sorry I was when it was gone. I pass it sometimes now, and never without a pang of nostalgia for the past, for the days when the future seemed to go on for ever.

I went back to Chalcot Crescent last year with a film crew - pad, pad, pad, they go, obsessively, in one's footsteps, recreating - but the magic was gone. Just another house. Plain, white-painted in the new style, no paintings, spruce and clean, too narrow, too tall and too many stairs. Could the walls have forgotten us so soon? Yet nothing is ever really over. Shut your eyes and stretch out your hand, and there it will still be: friends, laughter, the music of the Sixties,
Sergeant Pepper
heard for the first time, Joni Mitchell, veal roasted in lemon, endless bottles of wine, the warmth of the Pither stove, dinner parties, birthday parties, family Christmases, the voices of children, the crying of babies, new goldfish in the pond, the back door that wouldn't open -and all those emotions which surged from room to room, the gestures of love and affection, the wildness of sex, the anxiety of jealousy, the tears, the murmurings - and the sheer work of it all: the taps that in your time you've wiped behind, the surfaces cleaned, the washing baskets filled and emptied, the ironing you haven't done, the sheets folded, the stairs you've climbed, and climbed and climbed again, the domestic running to stand still, that intrepid almost religious female fight against chaos and entropy - it all goes on the same in some other parallel universe. Fifteen years must imprint themselves somewhere, somehow, upon eternity. You can't just shut the door on it and believe you've left it behind.

But of course there's a relief in it too. Too many years in the same place, and awkward events accumulate: there are public scenes you'd rather forget, neighbours who took offence, whispers behind hands, dreadful things the children did - now all left behind. All embarrassments conveniently solved by leaving familiar streets. It was always my mother's way of dealing with difficulties. Pack up and move on. And the house was indeed tall, and my legs were tired from carrying babies and shopping up the narrow stairs, and Ron didn't want the pitter pat of journalists' feet outside the door -
Upstairs Downstairs
had been screened and they were out in force - and he just wanted out of there. I signed, there was no argument and pretty little discussion.

Mid-sentence, mid-thought, it is true I tend to say anything, sign anything, just to make people go away and let me get on with the next piece of writing. I try not to but I do. And we had nowhere to live, and Ron showed no signs of actually looking for anywhere, though we bought
Self Sufficiency
, a book about living off the land, and I was busy writing.

Mantrapped! How can I explain to you, in these talkative days, so full of instruction from the wise to the foolish, the recommendations of experts and TV therapists and counsellors, and quizzes as to what makes a good marriage and what doesn't, and the insistence on talking things through, the attraction of the silent, troubled marriages of the day? Man proposed, and man disposed. Or perhaps it was just assumed that after so long, fifteen years, we would just read each other's minds. I fear I read only what I wanted to read.

The shop meanwhile had been sold over Ron's head. The new landlord, who lived above, wanted to charge a full fifty pounds a week rental, instead of the customary ten. Monstrous! And somehow my fault. The whole modern world, with its galloping inflation, its admiration of the trivial (me), its refusal to recognise the true artist (him) was my fault. Eve-like, I accepted blame. And he was quite right: I should not have taken so many taxis. I should have saved money, not spent it, and when the time came there would have been enough in the bank, in cash, for him to buy the shop outright. Everything had to be sold, everything, including the roof over our heads, in particular the roof over our heads, and all my fault. Thunder and lightning crashed around. But I was writing the last pages of
Remember Me
: yes, yes, I said. Anything. Whatever. The country. Yes.

In the novel, a ghost story, Madeleine the rejected first wife is killed in a car crash but can't die, because she has a child to look after. When, finally, her work done, she is at rest, the eyes consent to close. She is buried. '
Oh my sisters, whispers the memory of Madeleine to still troubled air,''
I wrote, '
and my brothers too, soon you will be dead. Is this the way you want to live? 'Which at least seemed to create some kind of consensus, for or against, because after that there was nothing but the wind to ruffle the grasses, and disturb the little pots of dried flowers on the more recent graves, and whatever trouble there was dispersed, and there was peace
.'

I was very child-centred in those days, I can see. But I'm glad that even then I gave a mention, although a little grudging, to the brothers. I came to the end of the book, and looked around. I had two children at home, one aged twelve, one aged five, a restless husband, a house to pack up and the new owners were patiently and politely knocking at the door. The contract was signed. There was nothing I could do other than what was under my nose. I packed.

But it was daunting, and a hard winter and the central-heating broke down. Ron was too busy in the shop to help. I noticed he was still buying stock - there was no sign of it closing down - I thought perhaps he could not stand the trauma of leaving. He had been in the house for longer than me, more than twenty years, and I lived in my head and he lived with the aesthetic of made objects: it was easier for me. How could mere things carry so much emotional weight? But they did. And so much of it. Every surface, wall and shelf was covered with treasures, bits and pieces, Georgian chamber pots, Victorian knick-knacks, French pottery brought home from holidays; the cupboards stuffed with raccoon coats -

Edwardian, prime pieces in good condition, only a little moult - rusty tin boxes of assorted buttons, ditto broken jet jewellery, photograph albums of other people's holidays, everyone long since dead. '
Oh my sisters and my brothers too, soon you will be dead. Is this the way you want to live
?'

Into crates and boxes went the mad yet wonderful collection of what to Ron represented both his own past and all civilisation, and I did not doubt for one minute but that everything must be looked after and properly packed; newspaper mostly, it being in the days before bubble wrap and foam. And I even gave the furniture one last coat of beeswax before it went to store - the Etruscan olive-wood table, the carving in elm of Edward VII (why? Why?), the carved-oak Jacobean blanket chest, the noble Welsh dresser, the staid Victorian chairs, the doubtful ancient-Egyptian frieze, the gracious bent-wood chairs, the late Victorian lace-covered cushions. And the battered first editions of Somerset Maugham and the complete works of H.G. Wells - and all the books that Ron had ever read or bought. I seldom bought books and still do not: I was too poor until my late twenties to afford them, and after that I had lost the habit. Books were things you wrote, or borrowed from libraries, or found in the post.