Mantrapped (29 page)

And then the artwork. Cynthia's upsetting paintings, down from the racks in a cloud of dust: and then Ron's - rather gloomy, heavy colours; later, when he started painting again and was more miserable, the paintings were to became inordinately cheerful and distinctive - bright colours, fauvist, full of appreciation and generosity of spirit - I notice the same thing in myself; if I am miserable I get really funny: it is the search for balance in all things, no doubt - but then untouched for years (all my fault), finished and unfinished, all the stiff unusable brushes stuck to the bottom of jamjars, the glass now multicoloured, from which the turpentine had evaporated. A couple of Sheila Fell landscapes, the two sandstone Gaudier-Brzeska sculptures I had bought for two hundred pounds from a passing scholar, who told me he had rescued them from Violet Hunt's garden in Camden Hill. Ron kept them as doorstops; only after his death did I feel able to rescue them, set them on marble pedestals and admire them. A massive collection of Ron's 78s - mostly early jazz - and yet more accumulated aspidistra plants. And
objets trouvés
, pale bits of tortured wood, and mastheads, and copper pans from every century, Victorian lace-trimmed underwear: nothing could be discarded or thrown away. I tugged at string and labelled everything. I bound boxes round and round with sticky tape. I remembered every lesson ever taught me by my mother, who so believed in packing up and moving on, and had thrown so much of my childhood overboard, when we left New Zealand for Britain in 1946. '7
can't go on lugging this stuff round the world for ever.''

I gave Trisha an easy time, when it came to packing up her lottery-winner's house. I chose an easy way out for her and let her put everything into auction except what was required for her immediate needs.

Making good

Mrs Kovac had had to close the shop for a day, and put off some of her best customers. She'd had to throw out skein after skein of paint-splashed embroidery thread, which was these days hard to come by. That hurt. Her records were gone, her lists of customers: also the names and addresses of former contacts in the people import business. She was not in that business any longer: it had got too dangerous and she had gone straight, but you never knew when you might need to recall favours. She had not wanted to involve the police. Mr Kovac was legally in the country but a man in his position was easy enough to frame. There were informers everywhere you looked, and he had friends who were very sensitive and might get nervous if a police car was seen outside the premises. You sometimes had to pay a heavy price for having a man in your bed.

The repair man for the ironing machine had promised to turn up but hadn't. That meant finishing would have to be farmed out, at extra cost. She was tempted to ask Mr Kovac to hurry him up with a hammer over the kneecaps but stayed quiet. This was no time to be stirring up trouble, however aggravated you were. She should certainly not have cut up the black dress and sent it back just because a customer had been rude. There were laws against that kind of thing now and her business-college tutor would have been horrified.

The damage done to the shop had been more than you would have expected from a little thing like Trisha, no matter how angry or drunk. The yuppie she'd sent up the back stairs to collect his repairs might have had something to do with it. She wouldn't be surprised. He was cheating on his wife or partner - that was clear. They'd left a bottle of vodka behind them and the nasty bits of card and debris dope-smokers used for anyone to find. It might not have been dope, of course, there were all kind of unpleasant new drugs out there which you could smoke. Mr Kovac only dealt in the old-fashioned kind which had known results, or so she hoped. These sudden outbreaks of uncontained and irrational violence worried everyone. If Mr Kovac dealt at all, of course. There were other reasons than drugs, these days, for having pockets full of cash. She had stopped bringing girls into the country because the field had become professionalised, and there was no room left for the amateur.

She, Mrs Kovac, had put her past behind her, was a good citizen, paid taxes, did her accounts, had a grant from the Small Business Office, and was doing her best to make it in the new society. Anti-social elements made it difficult, but when did they ever not? The shop needed redecorating anyway.

She called up the Chinese person who'd been after the flat before Trisha Perle had turned up with her grumpy ways, false promises and crude stitching. She'd never seen worse buttonholes. The white races had no idea any more of fine work. They left it all to imported labour. She was gone, leave it at that and put it down to experience. The new girl's name was Anneping Lin. That was pretty. She sounded a nice person. Perhaps they could be friends.

First thing she'd thought, when she saw the damage, was that Mr Kovac would not make too much of a fuss. Men so often did. Mr Kovac had called by around lunchtime, to find the shop closed, the glazier's van taking up his parking space, his wife still working on the damage, he unable to deliver because even after the muddled tickets had been sorted, little bits of glass still had to be vacuumed out of shoulder pads and belts. He had indeed overreacted. He had thrown her teapot through the glass window. The window would have to be replaced yet again, but at least the glass had already been measured up. And he kissed her in apology, which was nice.

Mrs Kovac thought it was wise to suggest the perpetrators had been a couple of tripping youths she had seen hanging round when they closed up the night before. She also let slip that the new tenant had been thrown out for sloppy workmanship and for being on the game. She didn't want Mr Kovac turning up at High View and making trouble. She had a lot of good customers there, and she was more interested in profit than vengeance. She doubted that the same could be said for her husband.

Trying to get out of the city

The cities were falling - only in the country, next to nature, would anyone be safe. Rural fervour swept the land, and our family was not immune to it. We, or at any rate the self-aware middle classes, would live on food from the fields, nettle soup and dried herrings, and be the better for it. We would live next to nature and clasp trees and be restored in spirit and mind. Self-sufficiency was all the rage and John Seymour was its high priest. Hetta Empson went to visit him on the banks of a muddy river and came home to report that she had never been so hungry in all her life. Quarter of a kipper for dinner, she complained, albeit served with ceremony. John did nothing, she complained, while his wives toiled, up to their elbows in mud.

Time was running out. The new owner, a famous banking name, was waiting to move into Chalcot Crescent. Ron thought perhaps we should buy a country rectory to live in - the Church Commissioners were selling them off cheap. We went to see one or two but he did not think they were suitable, on unspecified grounds. I could see his heart was not in it. Perhaps all he wanted was to get away from his analyst, Mrs Warburg, and could see no other way of doing it other than sell the house over his own head, as it were; he said as much, once. Now terror had struck his heart as it had mine - nettles in winter are tough and stringy, Dutch elm disease had swept the Southern counties: the fields, without their tall green hedging, did not look so pretty now. The threat of rationing had gone, the increased price of petrol had not brought the world to an end, the bomb scares were fewer than they had been. Business in the shop was good: perhaps a negative transference to Mrs Warburg had switched to positive, who was to say?

I rang Mrs Warburg once, only once in all those years, and complained and said, 'How can I ever have a conversation with my husband, he only ever talks to you. All things intimate belong to you; I want him to stop.' And she thought a little, and then she said, 'My dear, you will be sorry when he stops,' and it was true, I was.

Homeless! I put down the opening page of
Little Sisters - 'We are all within spitting distance of millionaires. Spit away, if that's what you feel like
…' and bought us, in haste, and from friends, and without consultation with Ron, because there seemed nothing there to consult with, a small new square modern concrete house, an in-fill between two big houses round the corner in Belsize Park. It was there, and it was somewhere to go, with our suitcases and our minimum of belongings. It had two rooms up and two rooms down and two bathrooms, and was neat and small and trendy, and confirmed Ron's view of me that I had no aesthetic judgement and given a choice would choose a kidney-shaped dressing table over a Queen Anne cabinet any day. 'It will be a
pied-a-terre,''
I said boldly, 'because if we are going to live in the country we still both have business in London.' But even I could see he was bound to hate it. It was brand new and had no history. It smelt of the seaside, there being a fan above the cooker which belched out ozone to freshen the air, but was quickly to be taken off the market as a danger to health.

Some twenty years later, after Ron died, it fell to me to pack up Orchardleigh, the Somerset farmhouse we eventually moved to in the August of 1976. Another two decades of accumulation to sort. I found some of the Chalcot Crescent boxes in the barns, still unpacked. I thought everything was done: I stretched up and opened a hatch in the ceiling of the bathroom lobby and a large wicker basket from the holiday camping days - tent, metal tent poles, camp beds, folding chairs, waterproof sheets - disintegrated and tumbled down on top of me in a cloud of reddish powder. Rust and moth had got in to corrupt; and time, the great destroyer, sneered at me. I was cast off the stepladder into a heap on the lino floor and beaten about the head with falling objects.
Take that, and that! Let this teach you to value the past! It is over, gone
… Something had got into that house. It lurked on a corner of the stairs, hulking, evil, foul and menacing. I dreamt the taps ran blood. Professional cleaners came: they make all the difference. Whatever it was left its haunt on the stairs and I could go up and down in peace.

These days I have less patience with things. I take them round to the charity shop on the slightest excuse. I try not to accumulate objects and speak harshly about the evils of the consuming society. If I had to pack up all my worldly goods I don't say they'd fit into the back of a car but a couple of vans would do it. I like to be ready to run. It feels safer like that. My archive, the proper sum of me, is contained in the shock-proof, bomb-proof, temperature-controlled vaults of an American university.

When I visit my children I notice they serve dinner off plates that were once mine, on which I served the lemon veal joints from the Elizabeth David
French Provincial Cooking
recipe, and the glass bowls for the chocolate mousse. We sit upon sofas that once I bought, sleep on mattresses familiar under the weight of flesh and bone, and were not the row of copper saucepans hanging on the wall once a source of anxiety? (Ron found them in a skip back in 1961, and they were never properly tinned.) The pottery vase in which the pot plants sit was once my salad bowl - I remember the very shop where I bought it, in the main street of Cahors, the year Tom was bitten by a viper.

The final decree of my divorce from Ron in May 1994 came through the day he died, and it was unclear whether I was divorced or widowed. It still is not. I remarried a week later: the date had already been set. As I say, you see what's under your nose and go ahead and do it, if you can. Then everyone settles quicker.

Trisha had an easy time of it, indeed: I did not make rotting wicker baskets full of rusty metal poles fall upon her head and shroud her in slimy waterproof sheeting: I am writing a comic strip, not a horror tale. A story about swapping souls, not moving house. Mantrapped.

Doralee adjusts

People can be good at adjusting to new situations, especially when they are young. On the Monday Doralee was living a happy and successful life, by Wednesday it has fallen to pieces. By Thursday it is true she is in quite a state, and it is getting worse not better as the implications of her present plight become obvious. She finds herself out of love with her partner, whose body is inhabited by an older woman she does not admire. When either Trisha, who is really Peter, or Peter, who is really Trisha, attempts to so much as touch her, she tends to pulls away. She is confused.

She must face her responsibilities. She must give up thoughts of running away to Australia. She might well get her book
SoulSwitch
published, and it may even cause quite a stir but it is unlikely to make her a fortune. No one is going to believe something so profoundly unbelievable. She will still need her job. Rescue needs to come soon, before the new personalities harden into their bodies and turn into just more people, but people without much hope of earning a livelihood. Will she, Doralee, be expected to support all three of them? The Trisha body is of course qualified to do the Peter job, but who will employ her? She has Peter's intellect and store of memories, which includes everything there is to know on weapons of mass destruction and so forth, but no certificates to her name, and no qualifications other than an unfinished course in embroidery and patchy employment on the stage: lottery winning is not a recognisable craft. The Trisha body could settle down to winning pub quizzes, but there's no money in that. Peter might just about manage a job as a male model but he's already in his early thirties, well over the hill.

And where is rescue going to come from, Doralee asks herself. It is she who has squeezed the orange juice and run round for the croissants. She left them to make the coffee and instead of grinding it and using the percolator they have spooned instant powder into their mugs. Peter in the new Trisha body seems to like to just sit and accept what happens next. He does not think of the medium and the hypnotist, Doralee must do that. Not that she has many hopes of them.