novelist’s actual life and the alternative reality as presented by that novelist. That the times have finally and sadly come to this, that a novel simply no longer feels meaty enough without the input of the writer’s life and sorrows. All my writing life I have argued that fiction and autobiography are separate. ‘Good Lord,’ I have been in the habit of saying at literary festivals and in interviews, where writers are so frequently these days required to bare their souls, ‘if any of what I wrote was true I would be in prison or dead.’ Now I can see that I ought to have been in prison or dead, if I were to get my just desserts, that is to say if to lust in your heart is as sinful as the act itself, as St Matthew reports. All these monstrous acts I have written, all the murders, crimes I have conceived, are as good as done. I who was accustomed to saying earnestly to my audience, ‘If you want to write a novel you must lose your good opinion of yourself’, should repent. It is a terrible thing to say. I have been urging others to be as bad as their characters. Late-Victorian novelists felt obliged to present noble characters capable of good deeds, Soviet writers would only be published if they provided worthy role-models for their readers, the Chinese to find excitement in the fulfilling of the factory quota. Our writers fostered discontent and rebellion. Those women who read my novels in the Seventies and come up to me at literary gatherings still and say, ‘But your novels changed our lives. It was you who gave me the courage to leave my husband, ’in fact bear witness against me. But what I wrote was all true, true, true. I never slept with my father, as Praxis does in the novel of that name, written in 1977, but I daresay that if like her I met him in a bar and he picked me up, and I didn’t know who he was, I would not hesitate. Like would surely call to like. Think it and it’s done.
It has not been the habit of writers to show their hand too clearly. Flaubert writes about his own father when in Madame Bovary he describes the good Doctor Bovary’s disastrous attempt to cure a club foot by breaking all the bones in it and stretching it until the foot gets gangrene and all but drops off. Flaubert couldn’t bear to keep the incident out, though it meant Dr Bovary had to behave out of character for a whole chapter. ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi,’ Flaubert famously says, giving the game away. I daresay Chaucer had an affair with the Wife of Bath, gat teeth and all. But Chaucer’s not going to declare that, either.
Just as the world of screen and airwaves blends and melds into real life, so too, today, must the creations of the printed page. There are elements of me in Trisha, and parts of Rollo and Peter in every man I have ever known. Mind you, men of the Newer Age have to be learned: they are not the ones I grew up with. Men of the Former Age tended to be without emotional conscience, like George Barker, or Ted Hughes or my husband of many years Ron, but at least they produced art.
If Rollo, the ex-stuntman now born-again Christian and conscientious father, or Peter, the bottled drinking water (still, please) newspaper man were to write a poem, you’d know in advance it would be fairly terrible – mealy-mouthed, sentimental and commonplace. When it comes to the reformation of the world, Rollo believes in the efficacy of the new overarching social-worker-Jesus, Peter in the Power of Purchasing. Both are victims of the Pelagian Heresy: that we are all nice people at heart, really, so it’s only others who come along and muck things up. George Barker and the Dane, of an earlier generation, knew only too well about Original Sin: they revelled in it, and were loved the more because of it.
Charlotte Brontë, dealing with men of the Former Age, did not attempt Mr Rochester from the inside out: she observed him from the outside in, and very erotic the result is. That was when men and women were differently reared. Far easier these days to write about men from the inside out. Now they are just more people, it is rather disappointing. So they were like us all the time.
Mind you, some things don’t change. Good behaviour never gets a woman anywhere: bad behaviour gets a man everywhere. I say this from long experience of husbands, lovers, sons, both of the Former and the Newer Ages. But then I would, wouldn’t I. If I were a man I would no doubt reverse the genders.
The day before Trisha’s worldly goods went under the auctioneer’s hammer, Doralee Thicket allowed a vase of water to spill onto the foam mattress she shared with her partner of long standing Peter Watson. This may not have been a good omen. It was six thirty in the morning, and high summer, but there was quite a wind, the unexpected kind that blows up sometimes in the early morning of a day in which thunder is expected, and gives you a glimpse of the intentions nature has for a globally-warmed humanity.
Doralee and Peter lived in High View, in Wilkins Close, just around the corner from the Wilkins Parade branch of the dry-cleaners Kleene Machine. Money has been spent on Wilkins Close – the council has beautified the street, putting in cobbles, fancy street lights and decorative railings, and will get round to the Parade and eventually to Wilkins Square, if the intransigency of the locals allows. But the area is, as they say, ‘mixed’ and the council may change their mind about the ability, and indeed the willingness, of sufficient of those living around to pay tax, and withdraw supportive funding at any moment, and then windows will start to get broken as the Goths and Vandals sweep in, and the barbarians take back what was so long theirs.
But from the outside High View looks solid and grand enough. It has recently been converted from the factory it once was to luxury apartments, but keeps many of the original features, including its large windows, and interior corridors still in the original small red brick. There is a doorman, George, who lives on the premises. Doralee and Peter are lucky enough to have the penthouse flat – a mere five floors up, but still giving them a view to the west of the city and an expanse of sky, from which they can observe the brilliant sunsets of the last days of Empire. They do not see it like this, of course, though Doralee’s father Graham sometimes gloomily mutters words to this effect. Rather they see themselves as living on the brink of a bright new world, in which all will be fair, and the nations of the earth glad and wise, and as one.
When Doralee flung open the window to air the room, the edge of the curtain blew in and caught the vase – long red roses given to her by Peter when he came back from work the previous evening – and toppled it.
The bed would have to be stripped and the mattress exposed to the air to dry: she would be late for her Pilates class. She felt vaguely vengeful: the vase would have to go down to Age Concern. There was no time in her life for the agents of misrule; for accidents or inefficiencies, or cheap vases with not sufficient weighting at the base. Everything has to go. She sponged the mattress down, first unbuttoning the cover and removing it, but a water stain would undoubtedly be left. Fortunately the roses, though perfect, long stemmed and without thorns, seemed to have very little to do with nature and had not clouded or coloured the water at all. She asked Peter to drop the cover down to Kleene Machine round the corner in Wilkins Parade, together with her once worn black dress with the thin satin straps, on which some idiot had dropped champagne, and a couple of Peter’s shirts.
Kleene Machine offered a next-day delivery service. Doralee suspected she paid over the odds for it, but completed work could be left downstairs with George the doorman, and that was convenient. If he wasn’t at his desk in the lobby, as sometimes happened, you just opened his cupboard yourself and took the clothes from the rack. The other tenants – there were eight flats in the building, a new conversion of what had been originally a children’s home, then a sweet factory, then a makeshift warehouse, and was now a much-sought-after apartment block – had so far shown themselves respectable and honest. Someone had once taken her Armani white blouse with the frilled cuffs
