In Search of Mary (20 page)

The book I brought along for the train journey doesn’t help. Wollstonecraft’s fictional works are a downer at the best of times. In the novel
Mary
her protagonist witnesses the darkest effects of poverty on women and children, and as a result:

I will never forget Gloria. As the train pulls back into London, I stare out into the tunnel walls with a guilty feeling of relief, mixed with sadness. My reflection stares back. I look knackered. I feel like… well, like a crock of shit. Wollstone-craft thought and fought for women like Gloria and Sarah,
and for their children. But I’m just me, feeling pretty useless right now.

Labouring the point of uselessness to its outermost extremities, the next week I’m at a literary lunch. In West London. I stride into the gleaming white mansion, wearing what I believe to be my most literary-lunch-looking skirt. There’s Ottolenghi food, plenty of wine, and several rooms full of people having a splendid old literary time of it. How young they are. Young people are supposed to be occupied these days with mountainous debts and knife crime. Not round here though.

I’ve come seeking information. Having never been to California before, someone invited me here with the promise of some inside track on the Golden State. Apparently there are two people here who are intimate with the place, in all its radical, alternative glory. Acting like I do this all the time, gulp of wine and notebook at the ready, I sway into the beautiful crowd to find them.

Kala has a feline gaze through 1960s spectacles, and a zip all the way up the back of her skirt. She loves California and says I should
totally
get in touch with some performance artists she knows who do lesbian porn. Between mouthfuls of chargrilled vegetables, she delivers a condensed history of feminism.

“The Suffragettes and getting the vote obviously came first.” (“First apart from you,” I whisper loyally to Wollstonecraft inside my head.) “Then the Second Wave was in the Seventies: reproductive and labour rights, basically escaping from housewife hell via Women’s Lib. And in the Nineties you’ve
got the Third Wave, with sex positivism, racial inclusivity and queer theory.” At no point does a vegetable attach itself to her teeth or a blob of pastry fall from her fork. I take lots of notes.

Damian is in the corner of the room towering over a cluster of stylishly dishevelled people. He’s tall with a youthful, surprised-looking face, cuff-links and excellent shoes. Apparently he is a
salonnière
. Whatever this is, he definitely looks like one. A lot of people want to talk to him. I join the hoverers and wait my turn. When he hears I’m planning to go to California to meet 1970s Second Wave activists, he lights up. “You’re going to love it!” He fires off a mouth-watering account of the Grand Sur, San Francisco’s Mission District and hipster ice cream at the Bi-Rite Creamery.

In a moment of treachery I briefly imagine Wollstonecraft here among us in her rebellious baggy old clothes, with her heart on her sleeve and her chippy, volatile ways. Does California go far beyond her – will I leave her behind? I look around. What world of fabulousness have I entered?

Then Kala and Damian turn to me and politely ask what my book is about.

“Oh. Well, it’s – it’s kind of just a… bumbling around kind of… bumble.” They smile encouragingly at me, willing me to succeed.

“Bumbling is marvellous!” they say. Then, igniting each other’s enthusiasm: “Bumbling should definitely be encouraged as a literary form. Shouldn’t it! I mean, just think of Geoff Dyer.”

“Who’s he?” I ask. “Some kind of legendary bumblemeister?”

“You really must read him. Such a genius. He backs up all of his bumbling with so much insight – just pure, soaring intellect.”

I go and get another glass of wine.

Reading stories to my kids, I’ve always secretly editorialized and changed bits. You have to. The blonde girls should become chestnut-haired heroines, and so on. Then there’s the old trick of trying to miss out a few paragraphs here and there. This is definitely allowed if you’re really tired or it’s something intolerable like Enid Blyton or Thomas the Egg-Faced Twat. Eventually they will notice, though, and hold you to account.

But the Grimm tales have never let us down. I’m biased, having grown up among them. There’s a satisfying unity in the rhythms: always three sons and the third is the cleverest, or three daughters and the third is the bravest. The small and lowly shall outwit the big and powerful. There are always three attempts, or three companions, or three animals that transform the traveller’s fortunes. One evening, tangled up in some blankets on the sofa, we talk about this.

“Why is it always in threes?” the three girls ask.

“Maybe for suspense? If you won on the first go, it wouldn’t be so exciting.”

“But it’s not fair that the third is always best,” adds the second daughter.

“Mummy, you’re doing three trips and so there should be a happy ending.” says another.

“And what’s a happy ending?” I ask.

“Getting married! Having pudding! Killing the dragon! Custard!” they chime.

I start to wonder, and hastily wrap up that evening’s story so I can go and think about happy endings. No, not those ones, you perv. The thing is, I’m already happy. With a happy beginning and a happy middle. Happy endings aren’t the problem. If there is a dragon to slay, it must be some nuanced kind of beast. Perhaps the kind of feeling that British people describe by using a foreign word because we can’t handle it.
Ennui
.
Saudade
.
Weltschmertz
.
Joie de vivre
.

Or more specifically, in my case, a low-level rebellion against some of the realities of motherhood. The tiredness, the repetition, the inevitable laundry – all the pointless and invisible stuff. In a word: domesticity. The Dragon of Domesticity. Who, it turns out, is closely followed by his scaly friend the Dragon of the Crock. The one who says: “Shut your faces, all you women with childcare.” I’d happily turn a fire extinguisher on him.

Maybe not slay him, though. Something that has lingered on from Paris is the idea that freedom also means freedom for your enemy. Even fire-breathing enemies. How about me and the dragons exchange a brief Yorkshire nod: “Y’alright?” “Alright.” And then we carry on, and go our separate ways. As few battles as possible, and minimal slaying. Oh God – does this make me some kind of closet hippy?

Here ends my Vindication of the Rights of Dragons.

PART THREE

Chapter Thirteen

The Electric Calpol Acid Test

The very long flight is surprisingly OK. The emergency Calpol remains unused, even as the words of certain mummy blogs come echoing back: “Don’t ever travel on planes with babies under five.” OK, so he does keep running up the aisle, looking back with a huge smile and then bursting through the curtains into First Class, but who among us hasn’t dreamt of doing the same? No, he’s charming company. And only does a leaky poo right at the end.

We collect our unfeasibly shiny hire car, hoping it will soon acquire some dusty respectability and stop looking so rental. Accommodation-wise the gods of travel are already smiling on me: we’re staying with an old friend. Maria Clara was my flatmate back in our student days. She’s now married with two young sons and lives in a wooden-fronted Victorian house in the Mission District.

We haven’t seen each other since she’s had the babies. My mind does a hasty update, in which the entire data bank of a person on her wildest student nights out morphs into someone scolding a toddler in a car seat. As we catch up, I soon get dizzy with tiredness. Maria Clara and her husband Tim say their kids wake them regularly through the night and are worried
it’ll disturb me. I assure them what a pleasure it is to hear a baby that you don’t have to attend to. We go to bed early.

I wake up at six o’clock –
ping –
wide awake. Will is snoring quietly. It’s still quite dark. I look around the room, longing to be out on their large terrace looking at the sky. I might even get some reading done, if I tiptoe. So I ease myself out of bed onto the wooden floor, grope around for my jeans and T-shirt, slowly lift my bag and creep from the room. It’s lighter in the hallway, and I gently, so gently, pull the door shut behind me. I hold the handle tight and keep it twisted until the last second, fractionally pulling the door until a final gentle click shuts it. Phew. I creep down the hallway into the living room.

It’s silent. I tread on a musical plastic toy and scramble to the off button just as it bursts into tinny song. Silence again. I move timidly through the living room and let myself out onto the terrace. It looks down into neighbours’ gardens, and next door has a tree full of oranges. Oranges! YES – I’m properly in California. Large waxy flowers on trees, desert-looking plants. It’s a Sunday, and the sun isn’t up yet, but pink lights up the sky. I stretch triumphantly and bring out the book.

Here in the birthplace of the Summer of Love, the crucible of radical politics as we know it, my guiding star should be Wollstonecraft’s politics, not her private life. My state of infatuation has tempted me to keep looking for inner glances, rather than “the power of generalizing ideas”. So it’s time for a few edifying bites of the
Vindication
. At the time of writing, obviously women couldn’t vote, but neither could they
own property, enter a legal contract or have any say over their children. This is the case even for married women. For the unmarried ones – well, good luck.

On top of addressing these rampant miseries, Wollstonecraft often raises her focus to wider horizons, ones that remain sourly familiar today, like self-perception and body image. The answers, as always, are
education
and
independence
. Once again her target is idle posh women:

Ouch. When she proclaims “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners” she sure isn’t talking about sending thank-you letters. Just as women are ranked slightly above animals and below men, men find themselves above women but below “the bloated monster” – the King. All this must go, she insists:

It’s her plea for common humanity, an end to what Blake calls the “mind-forg’d manacles”. No one calls all this “human rights” back then, but it’s where she is heading. Sadly, though, as I read, I can hear that end-of-advert disclaimer popping into my mind: “Share prices can go down as well as up”. Human beings can go backwards as well as forwards. I’d hate Wollstonecraft to see what a lot of teenagers watch on their phones. Technology has evolved quicker than us tardy humans. How are young people meant to process easy access to extreme porn?

And while I’m at it, what about abortion rights? Perhaps the ultimate gain of the Seventies’ activists: safeguarding women’s control of their own bodies. But they’re under renewed attack here in the US, and all round the world. I have witnessed those campaigners outside abortion clinics in the UK. They are the stinking face of the dark ages, lurching anew from the ancient
mud to haunt us again. How lucky am I not to have negotiated that swamp to get an abortion? Why should today’s teenage girls have it so much harder than me?

Wollstonecraft never once admits the possibility of things going backwards. It’s not in her DNA. These are issues that she simply could not have anticipated. We’ve only just arrived in America, aka the future, and already I’m worried that she might not be able to handle it. I look around to shake off the gloom. The sun is now up. The birds have started singing, and from somewhere around there are clinking breakfast sounds. I’m starting to feel a bit peckish.