Mantrapped by Fay Weldon Page A

Company in disguise, for everyone to see. It appeared every week in a Sunday newspaper, under a former name, Fay Bateman, beneath a picture of myself. Fay Bateman says . In my column I advised the public how to cook with cans. ' 'just dunk a whole chicken in a can of condensed chicken soup and bung it in the oven ,' I'd write, ' Delicious !' And in my mother's footsteps, ' Just a little short-cooked cabbage and some butter - what could be better? Serve with a ham souffle: just add eggs to your can of soup and it's done !'
    At home Ron, a gourmet cook, would spend hours on a cassoulet, or a bouillabaisse, or a boeuf en daube , using the garlic and mushrooms which had only recently become available in the shops, and tossing a chicory salad. How he despised my timid habit of peeling mushrooms: what harm did a little dirt do anyone? Our kitchen surfaces were littered with pans and the floor with discarded oyster shells, and I would clean up, and write my no-fuss cookery columns. The pans were copper and never properly tinned. I worried about metal poisoning but was laughed out of court.
    All his life Ron fought a bourgeois heritage in which food was meant to be white, pale and bland, and like sex was not to be enjoyed, lest the pleasures of the flesh overwhelm the spirit and lead to dissolution and disgrace.
    The tendency to cook fish in parsley sauce, from which Ron's mother, and indeed mine, suffered, the idea that even white pepper was suspect lest it overheat the blood, was to be soon rooted out of society (along with the class system) and the artists, that is to say Ron and company, were to lead the foodie onslaught. And I, one of the wives, was engaging in such careless culinary treachery. ' Cooking with cans - this way the future lies. Just open a can and go out to work !'
    Be that as it may, all that cooking and guilt aside, I had hoped for Louis' approval, but the novel I gave him seemed only to make him angry. 'But this is not a proper novel,' he said, waving The Fat Woman's Joke around, 'and what a monstrous jacket!' Indeed, the book had a jacket so terrible - two great rows of chomping shiny white teeth against a staring red background - that I destroyed every one I came across. I would root them out in bookstores and slip the jackets off and trash them every one. I had neglected to do so on this occasion, feeling an urge to present Louis with the truth, warts and all.
    These jackets, if in perfect condition, are now in great demand, I am happy to report, I having so rashly destroyed so many of the first edition. The book has never been out of print. I have its current jacket in front of me now; bright pink with a line drawing of a not very fat woman on the front. Once she was all luscious folds of fat. Nothing these days can be extreme. The passage of the years has turned the book from a revolutionary document, first blast in the feminist fusillade, to all but chick lit. The novel now seems to be about a woman with eating problems (a syndrome much spoken of now but un-invented at the time of writing) brought on by a surfeit of domesticity: pleasant enough but not in the least incendiary.
    To me these early novels are historical documents, though the publishers say they remain relevant enough. But I suspect they say that because these young persons, not having lived through a pre-feminist world themselves, have no idea of its full horrors.
    'If it isn't a novel what is it?' I asked Louis. It is my normal policy to agree wholeheartedly with my detractors, thereby deflating them, but for once I felt defiant. 'My publishers thought that was what it was,' I told Louis. 'It's what they call it in the shops. A novel. People are reading it, and turning the pages. Many even like it.' But I can remember my shock; the terrible feeling that Louis Simpson was right.
    I was an impostor, an upstart. I had no business dabbling in serious matters.
    'Novels have inner form,' he said, practically stamping his foot. 'They have shape,