not necessarily want to do what is in their best interests. I was properly chastened.
Twenty years later, on holiday with the children in the Gambia, visiting a Muslim household where there were four wives and four cooking pots over four separate fires, one in each corner of the same cooking hut, all cooking rice in a room temperature well over 100 degrees, I suggested to the husband that they could surely take turns to cook the rice, and do it over one fire in one big pot. He said, ‘But each wife competes to please the husband.’ I daresay those women felt the same way as the women of Acton. It is all just a matter of degree.
We were oddly happy, Jane and I, living together with the children for those few months, and it was good of the headmaster to give her shelter—Jane and Guido never had the money to pay for any fixed abode: he loved her but was not a good provider. There was no doubt however but that we were crowded, even by 1957 standards. Guido made it a condition of his joining Jane that we shelved the living room (we would pay) so that he had room for his books. I at that stage owned one book: Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God, of which I had bought a first edition for two-and-six, stolen from the housekeeping money, a book I kept under the bed. I still have it—the only possession left from my young womanhood I did manage to keep.
Fed up with my chaste first marriage as I was, I had taken to sleeping on the sofa in the living room, where I was racked by a bronchitic cough (‘Cough it up, girl, cough it up, what ails you?’), but now with Jane’s arrival I had to return to the marital bedroom and get up to cough in the loo. I wrote a television play in that loo, I remember (those were pencil and paper days, not computer), about a prostitute, in which I explained to an uninterested and easily shocked world how easy it was for a girl to come to such a pass. It was returned from the BBC with a note saying they could not contemplate dramas on such a subject, ‘no matter how well written’. I treasured that phrase but wrote no more: I did not want to ‘be’ a writer; I just wanted to earn enough money so I could live other than by the kindness of men. Men were frequently kind, but they could also be very odd.
It was shortly after this that I determined to run away from home. I was not five but twenty-five, or more, but you would not have thought it. I would leave my sister to fill my place. She could look after my husband, cook his boiled beef and carrots, iron his shirts. I felt my father egging me on. Had he not just sent Ina to trace Jane and me to Acton, and declare herself horrified in his name? ‘If your father could see you now, he’d turn in his grave?’ And she didn’t know the half of it. I was moved to take action. I resolved to leave secretly in the middle of the night, telling no one, not even my sister. In retrospect there was no need at all for secrecy, but women who feel they are behaving badly often fear the violence of men. Mr Bateman had shown absolutely no signs of violent behaviour heretofore. And later he was to sound genuinely confused, rather than angry, at my leaving him thus. ‘But why didn’t you tell me you were unhappy. I would have helped you leave.’
Be all that as it may, I tucked my child under my arm and ran away in the middle of the night, stealing four pounds from his wallet, and took grateful refuge in Laura and Stephen’s snazzy flat in South Kensington. If your mother fails you, and your father is dead enough to turn in his grave, you have no option but to look after yourself.
There were, of course, other reasons for my feeling justified in leaving home. As so much that happens in this life is, it was a matter of convergent dynamics, rather than a simple answer as required in murder cases. ‘But why did you do this?’ ‘Because, your honour, because…’ The because is never single-stranded, it is a whole tassel of factors: you have to extract the brightly-coloured one and offer that as explanation. My becauses in this case included it seeming wrong to me to live with one man while being in love with another—the Dane, that is to say, the sailor ad-man. My father sending a messenger from the grave. My husband’s averring that after we were dead we would live together in the hereafter, just him and me, in a little cottage on a mossy bank by a river. Forever. ‘ I saw it in a vision, darling.’ You could play grandmother’s footsteps with fate as much as you liked, but when the music stops and you are playing pass the parcel you must on no account be caught with the wrong man. Or they might be with you for eternity. That too was a very bright thread in what I would refer to as the knotted tassel of reasoning that leads to action.
Young women are beyond belief. I wish I could report less superstitious nonsense on my part but I can’t—not and still speak the truth of my experience.
The stairs which led up from the dry-cleaners to Trisha’s new living quarters were very narrow. It is unlucky to pass another person on the stairs, for fear that in brushing up against them your souls will be exchanged, and you will reach the top of the stairs, or the bottom, a different person. That day Trisha Perle crossed on the stairs with a stranger to her, Peter Watson, whom you have yet to meet. Both, at the time, were in a bad, ungenial mood.
Well-behaved, handsome, de-natured Peter Watson, thirty-six, lived as it so happened with Doralee Thicket, journalist. They had been together for six years. ‘This is Peter Watson, you know, Doralee’s feller?’ Not that Doralee was particularly famous, or rich, or in any way unusual, just that somehow she seemed more vivid than he. Once upon a time women were indignant to be introduced as someone’s wife, daughter or sister, as if they had no identity of their own—these days the insult is more likely to be offered to men. Women are so vivid and mettlesome these days, so vigorous in their being, even when like Trisha down on their luck, I am surprised they do not subsume the whole male race.
If I describe Peter Watson as de-natured, as one describes a piece of much-laundered fabric, it is because one has the sense that once there was more stuffing to him. Yet he has a handsome enough, thinking, empathic, executive face, is over six foot and goes to the gym religiously, as does Doralee. He does not look unlike Russell Crowe but wears glasses. He seems to have a promising future before him and one feels life has gone comfortably enough so far, but that perhaps his mother, or someone, has made him anxious and a little jumpy in childhood, and over anxious to please. But you would be glad enough if he had the window seat in the aircraft, the one given to an able-bodied man so he can open the door in case of an emergency and a chute landing. The barber uses a number two clipper on his hair, so it is short-cropped in the modern style, and his clothes are smart and clean. His hands, unlike Trisha’s, are not nicotine stained.
Peter Watson works for a daily newspaper: indeed he is deputy head of its research department, and sees himself as being ‘in the loop’. He goes to senior editorial meetings. It is not as exciting as being in features or on the news desk, but the whole place so pounds with energy the job is more than good enough for him for the time being. He is the one who knows the facts behind the facts, and the detail behind the sweeping statements newspapers love to make: he is consulted on international affairs, the mood in the Congo, the state of the Albanian Air Force, whither Europe, and why Gibraltar. If he does not know he will find out. He is relied upon and trusted, and the Editor does not shout at him.
Peter’s partner Doralee is pretty and smart, and more ambitious than he. You could accuse both of smugness, but that would be unkind. They have both had parents who loved them, and no reason to believe the world won’t go in the way they have experienced it to date: they love the nanny state and feel that nanny is perfectly well suited to looking after them, and that so long as they behave like everyone else all will be well. They talk out any emotional problems that might arise, and look after their health. They drink bottled water, and choose flat not fizzy: bubbles seeming to the young couple to be somehow chemical, trivial and false. Tap water was to be avoided: it had been recycled through other people’s bodies too many times for comfort, and was full of their hormones.
It is true that Doralee sometimes swigged a glass of tap water in secret, in desperation, having read that over-chlorinated water contributes to