Mantrapped Read online

  Doralee was neat and small, and conventionally pretty, other than that she had wild frizzy pre-Raphaelite hair, which burst plentifully from her head as if all her bottled-up subversive energy was determined to get out. Usually such hair is red, but Doralee's was straw coloured. She had to colour in her eyebrows to seem to have any at all. She was notable for her shapely behind, once publicly compared by Peter's editor at the newspaper's Christmas party to that of Kylie Minogue. It had been touch and go whether Peter's female colleagues would enter a complaint against Peter's editor for sexual harassment in the workplace, but since Doralee was not actually an employee of the newspaper, merely an employee's partner, the matter had been dropped, to Peter's relief. He just wanted to get on with his work, which he liked: he didn't want to make a fuss. He was well informed and well-educated: his mother had got him to a good public school, though this was not something he thanked her for. He kept quiet about it: best in the new world to have risen from the ranks in the face of adversity, but it could not be helped. He would rise above the disadvantage.

  He went hand in hand with Doralee through a sensible and controllable life, and thought her bum was better than Kylie Minogue's and had not in the least minded the editor saying so, but kept quiet about that too.

  Doralee, who took her degree in pharmacology, had worked for a few years as a freelance journalist in the medical press, and then eighteen months ago had become a commissioning editor for Oracle - a monthly health and lifestyle glossy magazine. Life itself was now glossy, and even leisurely, in comparison to what had gone before. She and Peter liked nothing better than the thought of money piling up unspent in the bank, and pension funds accumulating, and the value of the apartment rising faster than interest rates. They glowed with the pleasure of it, but were prudent. They lived well but not extravagantly.

  In theory Doralee and Peter shared the housework equally, but in practice Doralee did more than he. (Research tells us this is often the case.) She cleaned the loos, changed the cat litter and plumped the cushions, long after Peter, the meal microwaved and cleared up after, had turned on the TV and given up for the day. But then she liked doing housework and he did not. Not only was her threshold of domestic competence higher than his but she seemed to have more surplus energy than he; she walked briskly here and there in high-heeled shoes about the house, stacking the dishwasher, cleaning behind the taps, and so on. From time to time Peter would stir himself to catch her round the waist and bear her down on bed or sofa, while she protested ritually that she had so much to do, that she had to get on, that she would miss her course or whatever. They were happy together and it was unjust that the finger of fate should point at them in the way it was to do.

  Fate announced its attentions, one might say, by spilling the vase of roses; such minor untoward events are often prece-

  • dents of worse to follow.

  Doralee and Peter's courtship had been conducted in the early Nineties, when fear of sexual disease and disaster was at its height. She had had only one lover before she met Peter, and no one else but him since. Peter had had four girlfriends, but two at a time twice, as it were, each secret from the other, he juggling dates and parties and beds, so he reckoned that only counted as two. He didn't behave like that now, and was ashamed of himself for having done so in the past. Doralee aimed, at least in theory, to have a baby before she was thirty-five, and was currently, if sporadically, doing what she could to conceive one. She found she liked sex without protection so much better than safe sex. It ceased to be a matter of mere sensation, as if there was something complicated and unlikely, loaded with vague possibilities, lurking behind the surface. It was, she'd told Peter, as if you'd entered the lottery of life and were waiting for the draw and had no idea what the prize could be.

  'You should put that in an article,' Peter had said, admiringly. That was when Doralee was still working at Health Professional Weekly, and thinking she would die of boredom. 'Call it: Enter the lottery of life!' So Doralee had done just that, and had forthwith sold the piece to Vogue. It had been very well received, striking a chord with readers and Oracle had asked her to join them. She had become their spokesperson for all things spiritual and mysterious, to do with fertility, Gaia, resonance, the inner life and so forth. Starting with the meantness of pregnancy: which she did feel, though it went against her training and the general drift of her thinking, now she wrote about the efficacy of prayer, the value of crystals in the search for inner truth, of the relationship between the state of the complexion and the state of the soul. Really there was no end to the things one could write about, and she now had the language of otherworldliness at her fingertips as they flew over the keyboard, without doubt or delay. It was thanks to Doralee that the word 'soul' was drifting back into public consciousness.

  After eighteen months trying, off and on, she was still not pregnant, but she did not let that bother her. She was optimistic enough to know that fate would look kindly upon her, eventually, and the later it happened, frankly, the better. God would bless them; they would have a beautiful baby girl. Female was the gender of choice in the Newer World. She would have every scan and test going to confirm that the baby was okay. She might resort to sperm-sorting to ensure the gender, but probably not. It was too calculating, and probably horribly messy and painful, though they never tell you these things.

  And if she never conceived, that too would be tolerable. She would be saved the total loss of control which having a baby seemed to entail - the inexorable growing of the alien thing inside, the change to the figure afterwards, a bum too skinny if she dieted and too heavy if she didn't, the general messiness of attitude and behaviour which mothers back from pregnancy leave seemed to develop - and always the awful fear that in the end she would turn into her own mother. After Ruby's twins were born Doralee had seen sick down both shoulders on the back of her mother's jumper. It was revolting, and she didn't even seem to have the will to put on a clean one. Both shoulders! No wonder her father had left, which he did when the twins were barely two months old.

  Peter knew well enough, rationally at any rate, that the world was not as entirely benign as Doralee's articles suggested. But they made good money and he was proud of her. His speciality on the research desk was warfare and weapons; he knew everything any journalist could be expected to know about depleted uranium and star-wars defence shields. He knew the map of the Middle East by heart. He had a side interest in epidemiology and the mathematics of catastrophe theory. He suspected that the only way to be saved was to be lucky. He had 20/20 vision but wore clear glass spectacles; partly because he felt they gave him gravitas and partly as an extra defence against the world. It was a point of neurosis in him and Doralee thought it was stupid. His father had apparently done exactly the same. Could such a personality defect be inherited? She feared it might be, though always when she wrote for Oracle she stressed that nurture won ever nature. It was magazine policy.

  Doralee wrote an article on how men had to be allowed their irrationalities, citing Peter's spectacles as an example, and contrasting their upbringings. Both Adrienne, Peter's mother, and Ruby, her own, had taken exception to what they saw as an intrusion into family privacy. 'But the truth is the truth!' Doralee had objected. Was one never to be free, reckoned grown-up, allowed to go uninspected? What was the matter with writing about one's own life in the papers? Everyone did it. Life was to be shared, not lived locked up in a little private box of one's own. That would suggest one was ashamed of something.

  What upset Ruby most was the part of the article which referred to the manner of Doralee's upbringing. Doralee had implied for all the world to see that it was chaotic. Doralee had been the eldest of six, and Ruby was proud that they had all turned out satisfactorily, especially the girls. It had not been achieved without effort.

  'You hold me up to ridicule, Doralee,' Ruby had phoned to say. 'You always had matching socks when you went to school, why do you deny it? I know Marylou was once sent home for having holes in
her school jumper - she would hold the hamster to her chest and she knew the little fucker chewed wool. Nothing would stop Glorianne from wearing those bloody earrings, and there was that fuss when Rex really did eat one of you girls' homework and no one believed her. I think it was Claudette's geography. But odd socks, no. You have humiliated me in public. Why do you do it, Doralee? Why do I always get the feeling from you that I'm not good enough as a mother?' That had hurt. You expected more support than that.

  'You should not have given us those ridiculous names,' said Doralee. 'As if we were trailer-park trash. You lost the right to be taken seriously.' 'They were very pretty names,' said Ruby. 'Surely a mother has a right to give her children names she likes? How sharper than a serpent's tooth, et cetera. God knows I did not bring you up to be snobby.'

  'I am a journalist. I have to earn a living. Do you begrudge me even that?' asked Doralee. 'You have no idea what it's like to be me, or how competitive it is out there. You have to sell yourself as well as your work. You've never even been out to work, you've lazed about at home all your life. And anyway it's true, you didn't have to have so many children. And you never did any housework if you could help it.' 'So not content with holding your family up to public ridicule,' said Ruby, 'you now wish your brothers and sisters out of existence.'

  It was quite a spat. Doralee knew well enough that earning a living was not the reason for this betrayal, for betrayal it was and she knew it. She did it because she wanted the world to know how she had suffered, from a partner who wore clear glass spectacles which had caused her friends to snigger, and from a mother who refused to keep a low profile, brought her family into ridicule, failed to keep a husband, and whose general sloppiness had all but ruined her daughter's life.

  Doralee then accused Ruby of being a churchgoer, prone to idle superstition and stuck in the past, and it had been quite a difficult row to patch up, and had left Doralee quite upset.

  Then Doralee had to put up with Adrienne calling from the office to say in the nicest possible way that Peter was not the kind to enjoy being made mock of in the press, and that she, Adrienne, had done the best she could to bring up her boys, but that if they inherited some of their deceased father's neuroses it was hardly her fault. She had been blamed because Peter's brother Maurice could not pass water in public, but his father had been just the same. Why was everything always the mother's fault? Now this. Doralee should remember that she was not married to Peter, and what was overlooked in a wife was not necessarily forgiven in a partner, and she should be careful.

  Doralee bit back the retort that since she wasn't married the least Adrienne could do was not behave like a mother-in-law - this was precisely why she and Peter hadn't married - and managed to cool Adrienne out. But later, chafing, Doralee suggested to Peter that his mother resented her for not being Jewish, and had always hoped that Doralee would fade out of the picture so Peter could marry a proper Jewish girl. Peter bristled and said that was an absurd accusation, almost a racist one. Doralee should certainly not put anything even vaguely like that in the next article she wrote. It was one thing for her to milk her own experiences, but she should leave him and his family out of it. Anyway, as he pointed out, Adrienne had not been in a synagogue since she was five.

  It was true, Peter said, that she'd probably argue for circumcision if the baby was a boy, to which Doralee said if it was a boy Adrienne could keep it, since she, Doralee, only wanted a girl. If it was a boy she would abort it anyway so who was worrying? It was the first row they ever had and so shook both of them they went to bed and vowed never to quarrel again. Both were amazed to find they were capable of harbouring such vile thoughts. Peter even had a word with the newspaper's therapist, who suggested he apologise, and Peter did, and went further and told Doralee that of course she could write about what she wanted: she was the creative one in the relationship and he did not want to stand in her way.

  Peter stepped on his glasses soon after that and never wore them again, and the families settled down to the fact that they would have to read about themselves in caricature from time to time - or their friends would. Neither Adrienne nor Ruby were great Oracle readers. And in the meantime the young people's bank balances got healthier and healthier.

  Doralee's mother hoped, of course, that Doralee and Peter would eventually get married. She was, like so many of her generation, waiting for a grandchild that was failing to materialise. Her four daughters were all too clever and accomplished for their own good, and she was fairly sure that the twins were gay. They were for ever going off to some university department where the professor did famous research on homosexuality and identical twins. They could have been part of some control group but she doubted it. Ruby quoted statistics to her daughter - as if Doralee and Peter did not know them off by heart - that the odds for married couples in infertility treatment were better than for 'partnered couples' but it was easy enough to quash Ruby by pointing out that marriage was what both sets of parents had done, and look where it had got them. Lots of children and suddenly no husband just when you had got used to one.

  Adrienne was ambivalent about the matter of grandchildren. They were ageing, if people knew about them, and their very existence suggested your life was more in the past than the future. She would have preferred Peter to have taken up with a Jewish girl. She herself had married out, and if asked on street corner polls whether she believed in God would answer briskly 'no'. All the same there was such a thing as tradition and ritual, and as she got older she could see their value. A Jewish wife would bring Peter back properly into the fold, and he would have proper connections within a supportive community. But he seemed happy enough with Doralee, who at least, as she herself did, knew the value of hard work. By and large, she had come round to thinking children by Doralee was the least-worse option.

  To recap: Doralee has a partner called Peter - Peterloo is her pet name for him: he wishes she wouldn't use it, but diminutives come easily to her; it is a matter of family custom on the mother's side. Peter's mother is called Adrienne. Her own mother is Ruby; the doorman at High View is George. She has five siblings, Marylou, Glorianne and Claudette, called after Country and Western hits, the twins Bobby and Robby, and a recently deceased dog back home at the Rectory named Rex. A high-rise apartment is no place for a dog, and Rex had with age become slothful, overweight and sometimes incontinent. He was better off at home with Ruby.

  We also know that Doralee has a good clean foam mattress she turns when it doesn't need turning, and feels older than she need because she wakes stiff in the morning. The fact is the mattress is too hard for someone as light as Doralee. Small, unpadded people need softer mattresses than large, padded people. Also Doralee sleeps an average of only six-and-a-half hours a night, which is far too short a time for proper rest and recuperation. Shortage of sleep makes her a little tense, and increases her partner's levels of anxiety, which are already high. She writes about this in her columns but does not really think the words she writes apply to her. They are for other people.

  Sex for Doralee and Peter is frequent at the moment, four or five times a week, once or twice a night, and though sexual activity promotes sound alpha-wave-rich sleep, quality does not necessarily make up for quantity. Peter and Doralee both wake to an alarm clock which is more shocking to the system than they imagine. Best to let morning light wake you - early in the summer, late in winter - but employment imposes an unnatural life rhythm on workers.

  Doralee is in her office by nine every morning, and thinks that's late; she tries to do better. It is a competitive world, and employers rule the roost; the employee who is seen to work longest and hardest gets promotion. Doralee gets to a Pilates class at seven thirty three times a week, and will fit in a work-out, a massage, a stint at the hairdresser and the beauty parlour, the better to arrive at work perfectly groomed. (Her mother never even got round to shaving her legs. What man is going to stand for that? And Doralee can remember all too vividly the time she saw her mother's under-arm h
air, black disgusting tufts.) Doralee is a size 10 aiming for a size 8 and has the longest legs of any of her sisters: all went into the professions and are high achievers. Bobby and Robby, identical twins, now go to Art College when they are not up at the university being tested, and are performance artists. They earn very little, but have the satisfaction of high principle, which seems to be an inheritable trait, coming down through the male line.

  Doralee's father Graham left Ruby on what to him were moral grounds, and what to her was an act of gross abandonment. She noisily refused to recycle their household waste, on the spurious grounds that recycling caused more pollution than landfill. This was at a time when he had, in response to the birth of the twins, just taken a new and better paid job as chief environmental officer to the council. 'Building a cleaner countryside' it said, on the new posters. 'Revive, restore, recycle!' Frankly, his wife embarrassed him. She had left home when she was seventeen, after changing her name from Kathleen to Ruby in the face of opposition from her parents, who were Seventh Day Adventists, and who disapproved of pop music. In vain for the girl to explain that country music was not pop music. She played her parents 'Ruby, Ruby,' which moved through her girlish unconscious like a siren call to faraway places and romantic emotions, in the hope that they would understand, because she loved them, but all they heard was 'Don't take your love to town.'

  Despairing of ever pleasing them she had come South and met Graham, and had misunderstood him as he misunderstood her. She had thought he would love her for ever, he had thought she was a sweet and biddable little thing. He had been mildly amused at the way she had changed her name to annoy her parents, and thought she could soon enough grow out of that sort of thing, and change her name back to - perhaps not Kathleen, but something graver and more open, like Catherine. But she never would and when it came to naming her own children the impulse to upset was clearly still there. He did not have the strength of will to restrain her. Doralee, Marylou, Claudette, Glorianne! It did not help the marriage. Graham came from an Anne, Sarah, Jane background, and his mother winced noticeably at the christenings, which were performed, naturally, by Graham's father. But his mother was well mannered and did not otherwise at any time betray her dismay at her son's choice of partner.