Читать книгу Mantrapped - Fay Weldon - Страница 11

Trisha had been playing Polly Peachum at the Lyric Theatre the day she won three million pounds in the lottery. The notices for the show had been good. This had been her big break after years of small parts, temping and bar-maiding. If she had known then what she knew now—the things she would not have done when it came to winning the lottery! She would have remembered to tick the no-publicity box. She would not have consented to a public ceremony when she went to collect her cheque. She would not have replied, when a journalist thrust a microphone in front of her and asked what she was going to do with the rest of her life, ‘Spend, spend, spend.’ And then added, almost as an afterthought, ‘and fuck, fuck, fuck.’ She had thought it was only radio but there were TV cameras there too. The clips were excerpted into the opening credits of a successful girlie TV show, and ran for a month before anyone told her, turning her into a kind of mini-celebrity until the public got bored. She sued and won another £50,000. To them that hath, etc. It also ruined her chances of being taken seriously ever again in the acting profession. When the show transferred to the West End she was not asked to go with it.

Other things Trisha should not have done: she should not have had a baby by a humble stunt man. She should have chosen a bank manager. She had gone for looks, not income, thinking she had more than enough of the latter. But of course she had not. Once pregnant, she should not have married the father. As it happened Rollo had his own stroke of good fortune and soon became the face of a range of men’s toiletries. Now that he could pick and choose amongst women, he thought he could do better than Trisha. Within six weeks of their marriage being written up in Hello and three days after discovering Trisha was eight weeks pregnant, he left her for a Page 3 girl with a degree in economics, famous for having once allegedly slapped Elizabeth Hurley’s face. He divorced Trisha, married her successor the day Spencer was born, and disappeared from her life.

Trisha was brave publicly, and cried privately, and gave birth to Spencer with only her mother in attendance. People came to visit her to drink free drink and eat free food and use her pool but she thought they did not care about the real her. Men would use and abuse her and demand presents. She thought women might be kinder than men and took up with Thomasina Deverill, and gave money away to lesbian causes. Thomasina was a success at the Edinburgh Fringe with a one-woman cabaret show about the awfulness of men, and when she came back had taken against little Spencer, mostly on the grounds that he was male. Thomasina wanted Trisha to have Spencer adopted and have a female test-tube baby by a gay friend instead. Trisha refused, Thomasina left.

A year later, when Spencer was four, Rollo turned up again. He had been converted to born-again Christianity, and wanted to claim custody of his child and bring him up in decent surroundings, by which he meant free from lesbian taint. In vain for Trisha to say that had been just a passing phase. By then Trisha also had a well-documented drink and drugs problem, and though that too was over—drugs now made her dizzy and alcohol made her sick—the court found against her, and Rollo—with his wife the economist now in government—was given care and control of Spencer. And Trisha, though she should have been upset, found that she was not. Spencer was a hyperactive child who yet had a weight problem, and she knew she failed him.

Trisha tried to be angry with Rollo. Her friends thought she should be, and she tried, but when she looked inside she found a rageless hollow. She lost quite a few friends this way. Why didn’t she fight the bastard? What sort of unnatural mother was she? (This from friends who would no more dream of getting pregnant than they would look after their old mothers.) The fact was she was a man’s woman even though the man had left her. She was just instinctively on her enemy’s side.

And Rollo was so very convincing and charming in court, and such a good actor, that she was quite persuaded by him along with everyone else of her own unfitness to rear a child, and clapped when the judgement against her was given. She had to be stopped by her own lawyer. His name was, fetchingly enough, Hardy Acre, but there are more than enough names already for you to focus on.

To wit: Trisha and her six-year-old son Spencer, her husband Rollo, and her lover Thomasina. No doubt there have been more and other transient relationships: Trisha is, after all, a thespian, and thespians have a kind of life fluency, a need to be all things to all people; they are prone to sudden mood swings, fits of irresponsibility and changing fortunes. They are the playthings of writers, and whom the writers love they destroy. In the parallel real life there is Fay, the Dane, two Rons, my mother Margaret, my aunt and uncle Mary and Michael, my father Frank and his ghost, Graeme MacDonald, Elizabeth Smart, George Barker and Rosie. All were prone to self-destruction, without need of writers.

Trisha was reared in the confident days before herpes, AIDS, and fear of secondary smoking swept the Western world; the days when we could drift through our lives, taking what came along on trust. We assumed that politicians were wise, that food was safe, that pension companies paid up and scientists knew what they were doing. But there can be no more drifting: today’s world punishes those who do not take care to look after their future. It is increasingly difficult to know how this is to be done.

Trisha has certainly not looked lively enough. She has met her come-uppance, and the credit has run out. The day the cashpoint refused to give her any more money she put the house on the market. It stayed stubbornly unsold for a year. What she thought was a desirable residence to too many others apparently looked like a supermarket, all false gables and unseasoned wood. The swimming pool grew an unusual sort of mould, which turned the water murky grey within hours of filling. Her creditors moved in and forced a sale. The house filled up with little men with weasel faces who claimed to be bankruptcy advisers.

It was found that in some mysterious way the deeds had Rollo’s name upon them, and not a mention of her own. She had a recollection of promising one evening to look after Rollo for life and he must have taken her seriously and she have signed a document in a fit of drunken sentiment. That was when he had sprained his ankle in a fake car crash and was depressed, thinking he would never be an effective stuntman again, and then became the official face of the sensitive man about town, and had only to worry about his looks, not his survival.

Drinking made Trisha effusive and emotional, given to absurd gestures, giving things away to friends: ‘Take this, and this, darling, and this, because you need it. Take this holiday, this camera, this house. By all means borrow my Valentino suit, it suits you better than me.’

Trisha spends many days in front of the judges of the family court: the house is to be Rollo’s, they decide, though she can keep the contents. It seems fair enough. Rollo has little Spencer to bring up. What with one thing and another the £3 million has simply dissolved away and now Trisha has to live like other people, worse than other people. The papers have lost interest in her. She must interpret herself now from her face in the mirror, not the one in the newspapers, from the words on her lips, not the ones in the headlines. She is an ex-celebrity, and what can be worse?

Also to blame in my opinion are Trisha’s lawyer Hardy Acre—she has told him so often not to pursue her interests through the courts he has come to believe her. There is also Trisha’s accountant Vera Thicket, who, while holding a few hundred thousands of Trisha’s money in her client’s account, ran off to Chile with a conman and all the money. Easy come, easy go: Trisha of course blames no one but herself. Trisha chose both her accountant and her lawyer because their names appealed to her. Some would say in that case she deserves what she gets, but your author is very fond of Trisha.

Trisha is valiant, defiant, and uncomplaining. Drink may make her forgetful and silly but she is never nasty-drunk. Your writer does not have a drink problem, in case you’re wondering. She is far too sober most of the time for her own good. Nor does she smoke, not because she has given up like so many through nobility and strength of purpose, but because she never got the habit in the first place.