Making the Cat Laugh (2 page)

Now I realize that what I want is a book. So much do I want to give birth to a book that I experience ‘false alarms’ – when
I think I am ‘with book’, but am not really. Once a month I phone up my agent and say, ‘It’s happening!’ And she says, ‘How marvellous!’ And then I have to ring again a week later and say, ‘Bad news,’ and she says, ‘Never mind, conception is a mysterious thing.’ I suddenly realize that a book would be a comfort in my old age, and I try to ignore the argument that there are already too many books in the world competing for the available shelf-space. Mine, of course, will be a poor fatherless mite, but I shall love it all the more for that.

Perhaps the image of the paths and crossroads is just the wrong one. Perhaps I did always know where I wanted to go, but just walked backwards with my eyes closed, pretending there was no act of will involved. Because I do recall from early youth that while other children pleaded with their mums for miniature bridal outfits and little dolls that went wee-wees, I was campaigning for a brick-built Wendy House in the garden where I could lock the door and sit at an enormous typewriter. My only imaginary friends were phantom insurance collectors, a person from Porlock and the printer’s boy.

My idea of a Wendy House was a rather grandiose one, I suppose. It involved guttering and utilities and a mantelpiece where I could put the rent money, not to mention trouble with the drains. I remember when a little friend told me she had acquired a Wendy House, and I was wild with envy. But when I went to see it, it was just a canvas job with painted-on windows. Fancy telling a gullible kid that this was a Wendy House. Sometimes I wonder what happened when she eventually uncovered the deception. Probably she married somebody with a big house and had lots of kids in double-quick time, to establish a sense of security. In which case, I wish her all good luck on her chosen path.

The prevailing notion of the lone woman traveller seems to have been fixed about a century ago, and entails such heart-stopping intrepidity and pluck that there is not much in our banal modern lives to touch it. I mean, compared with the achievement of striding across the Andes armed only with a pocket bible and a big stick, the modern-day purchase of an air ticket to Los Angeles is going to look rather paltry, isn’t it? And compared with Amelia Earhart flying solo across the Atlantic in a rattling crate with nothing but a soup Thermos and a star-map, the modern woman’s stout-hearted endurance of an eleven-hour scheduled flight (complete with movies and drinks) is emphatically nothing to write home about.

Intrepidity is relative, however. To me, the acme of being brave is catching a bus in central London after 9pm, or enduring a whole instalment of
Just a Minute
on Radio 4. So it was only natural that when I booked my single ticket to LA before Christmas I was so transported by my own pluckiness that for a moment I thought I smelled quinine and hartshorn in the air. Sod Amelia Earhart’s soup, I thought; this feels
great.
How brave and adventurous I am, to travel alone! I nearly phoned up Maria Aitken to suggest she make a documentary.

This was the first thing I learnt about solitary travel, by the way: that the habit of tiresome (and bogus) self-congratulation starts at the ticket desk and never wears off. ‘Hey, I made it!’ you say proudly, as you step off the plane, having done nothing more heroic during the flight than stumble to the loo a couple of times. ‘Wow, I collected my luggage from the carousel! I found my hotel! I had some M&Ms from the minibar! I turned on the TV and it worked!’ This exclamatory tone is a bit relentless, I’m afraid. ‘I hired a car! I looked someone up in the telephone directory! I ate a bagel in Santa Barbara!’ And so on.

Travelling
à deux
does not encompass this splendid sense of perpetual infantile achievement; I don’t know why. Travelling
à deux,
in fact, is generally a much more sober and grownup affair, with precision map-reading not only its greatest measure of success but also (alas) its highest goal.

‘Nicely map-read, dear,’ says the driver, calmly applying the handbrake.

‘Well, thanks very much. It got a bit tricky around Nuneaton, but I think I kept my head.’

‘We didn’t get lost at all, did we?’

‘No, we didn’t.’

The advantages to travelling alone are many, as I discovered. For one thing, you can listen to old Beach Boys hits on the car radio without your passenger huffily twiddling with FM to find something else. Secondly, you can take art galleries at your own pace (at a brisk roller-skating speed, if preferred) without feeling guilty. Thirdly, you can browse in shops without first devising an hour’s alternative entertainment for your companion (who will otherwise stand next to the door looking helpless, like a tethered puppy). And fourthly, you can choose a route for your journey without your companion suddenly spotting a scenic wiggly detour just a few miles short of your destination.

The main disadvantage – as I also discovered – is that when travelling on fast roads at night it is impossible to drive and navigate at the same time. Something to do with the number of hands, I think. Consequently, on a simple trip across town to Pasadena, you can get so deeply lost on the freeway system that you think the night will swallow you up (just like poor old Amelia Earhart) and that your cats at home will die of broken hearts waiting for your return. Such terrors are feeble, no doubt, compared with those of the stout Victorian lady wandering lost in the deserts of Arabia, describing huge ragged circles in the shifting sands. But I can assure you that the cry ‘I don’t want to go to Glendale!’ represents the nearest I have ever got to a nervous breakdown.

Perhaps map-reading really
is
what holidays are about – strenuously mastering streetplans, so that one can always find the route back to the bus station. I admit that maps obsess me; as a founder member of Cartomaniacs Anonymous, I resent and refute the theory that women are genetically incapable of reading maps (although I rather like the notion of dangling a copy of the
London A–Z
over a pregnant woman, to determine the gender of the unborn child. If the foetus shrugs and turns its back, murmuring ‘Ach, I’m sure you’ll find it,’ it is probably a boy.)

So no wonder my night of terror in Los Angeles made such an impression on me: every time I braked abruptly at the sight of yet another freeway approach, all my maps slid off the passenger seat on to the floor. Moreover, when I reached inside the glove compartment for hartshorn, there was never any there.
Alone and Disoriented Without a Smelling Bottle in Glendale.
Perhaps I should make the call to Maria Aitken, after all.

An old chum, newly spliced, recently invited me to dinner in his new marital home. Ordinarily I would have said yes automatically, but this time I heard myself imposing conditions.

‘Is it a nice house?’ I asked.

‘Yes, very nice.’

‘And you and your new wife are really happy there?’

‘Yes, we are.’

‘With a nice well-organized kitchen, and a big fireplace, and a patio for barbecues, and a little room suitable for Baby?’

‘Yeah, sort of.’

‘Well, in that case the answer’s no.’

There was an awkward pause.

‘Did you say no?’

‘That’s right,’ I said briskly. ‘Not in a million years. Let’s
meet at Leicester Square for a pizza or something instead. Then we can eat and talk just the same, but afterwards I can come home feeling quite all right and not mysteriously depressed because your home life is so lovely. All right?’

If he was surprised by this outburst, so was I. I had no idea I felt so strongly. All I knew was that sometimes, after a delightful evening spent with perfect hosts in a full, groaning family house, a single person spends the next few days dumb with misery, hating everybody, and bursting into unexpected tears during heart-warming re-runs of
Flipper.
I confessed my ‘Not in a million years’ speech to a friend, who said she understood, and who mentioned that at least I had been assertive without being aggressive. Which made me bloody annoyed. ‘What’s the point of that?’ I yelled. Damn. Next time, I shall shout ‘Sod your fancy house with its bloody patio and its baby room, you make me sick, you people.’ Because there are times when a sub-text simply won’t do.

The alternative strategies to an outright No Thanks – though possibly better etiquette in the strict sense – are too wearisome to contemplate. For example, you can accept the invitation, and then half an hour before arrival phone up with a fabricated story about a last-minute mercy-dash (‘I’m so sorry, but if I don’t deliver this jar of rollmop herrings to the Foreign Office in the next hour, we could find ourselves at war with Finland!’). But is this less rude than explaining your true feelings? I think not. Worst of all, surely, is to agree to come, turn up punctually, make perfect-guest ‘Ooh lovely’ noises at the wallpaper, and then sever your wrist quietly in their nice big kitchen while pretending to help with the puddings.

Don’t get me wrong. Things get better for single people every day. Oh yes. How cheerful to reflect, for example, that Sainsburys now sells ‘Single Bananas’ in a special bag. But we are not the norm, despite our bananas. We are seen as something akin to the rogue animals in wildlife films, the ones
that are tolerated by the herd but don’t fit in, and are photographed sulking hundreds of yards off, snuffling in long white grass. When lone dolphins turn up in British harbours (clearly enjoying a walloping good time eating fresh salmon and frolicking with the boats), the British public invariably feels sorry for them, and worries about finding them a suitable mate. It is the same benevolent but mistaken instinct that makes married people invite you to their new house.

What nobody appreciates, of course, is that the poor old dolphin fields invitations all day, through his ultrasonic mind-waves. ‘Come to dinner, we haven’t seen you in ages,’ he hears from a happy nuclear dolphin family five miles out to sea. ‘Bugger,’ thinks the dolphin, wishing he had remembered to switch on his answering machine. How can he say he moved five miles (and risked having to swim with New Age poets in wet-suits) just to escape all this? Treading water for a minute, he programs his super-brain to run through the available strategies, and instantly feels doubly depressed. Pizzas in Leicester Square is not a viable option for a dolphin; and the rollmop herrings routine cuts no ice whatever in a marine context.

He is caught all ways actually, because he can’t be assertive
or
aggressive, since neither is in his nature. And he
always
finds
Flipper
depressing. What a bind. So in the end, he agrees to visit, swims miles, has a marvellous time, adores the kids, applauds the bold choice of murky green throughout, gets home late, and flops out exhausted with a smile on his face. And then, for about a week later, he mopes miserably in the water, and everyone says it must be because he misses the company of other dolphins.

Perhaps it is a phase you go through, this ugly envy stuff. I hope so, certainly. I know one woman who is perfectly all right most of the time, but who bursts into tears every time she gets a wedding invitation, so that we have to rush out and have a pizza at Leicester Square, where we talk bravely about single
bananas. Edna Ferber said that single life, like drowning, is a delightful sensation once you cease to struggle – but is this comforting, or isn’t it? The analogy isn’t bad, certainly: your whole life unfolds before your eyes, and you entertain strange dreamy consoling thoughts such as ‘I shall never have to wash my hair again, anyway.’ Meanwhile, however, you can’t help wishing that those nice married people on the bank would stop chucking you lifebelts, so that you can just get on with it.

I went to see
Batman
Returns last week. A man-friend had dropped the offhand remark that the Michelle Pfeiffer character had reminded him of me, so naturally I couldn’t wait to find out what he meant. After all, Michelle Pfeiffer and I are seldom mentioned in the same breath; and on the evidence of the publicity shots of Catwoman – the sexy patent leather catsuit, the high heels, whip, and hood with little black ears – I have to admit I was chuffed and flattered.