The ones that got away

11 April 2012

Fay Weldon looks for all the world like a contented New Jersey housewife - the kind who eats too many Oreo cookies and cruises around town in a vast, four-wheel-drive people carrier. I am sitting in the cluttered kitchen of her Hampstead home trying to avoid admitting to her third husband, a former book-seller called Nick Fox, that, yes, it was me who gave her last novel such a stinking review, when she arrives.

Round and blonde and smiley, she is wearing a navy T-shirt, matching baggy trousers and a pair of white Nike trainers. Never in a million years would the casual observer surmise that this suburban pixie has 35 books to her name - or that, on Sunday night, she will be the subject of a glowing South Bank Show documentary.

But appearances are deceptive - as Fay knows very well. After all, before she decided to write her autobiography, who would have guessed that, in her youth, she flirted with prostitution (she was once given a pair of nylons by a creepy-sounding market stall-holder in exchange for sex) and worked, rather successfully, as it happens, as a hostess in a Soho clip joint? Not me, that's for sure.

"You are what you are, you did what you did," she says later, when I ask her why, at the age of 70, she finally chose to reveal these risque episodes to an agog public. "There's no point in hiding it. In that sense, I'm totally unrespectable. I only regret the men I didn't go to bed with."

The memoirs, entitled Auto Da Fay, tell the story of Weldon's haphazard childhood in New Zealand and postwar London, where she lived with her novelist mother and elder sister, Jane. But things start to get really interesting later on, after she leaves St Andrew's University.

Fay gets pregnant by the doorman of the Mandrake Club and decides to keep the baby. She has a son, Nicolas, but life, she discovers, is tough in a world where respectability is all - so when Ronald Bateman, headmaster and owner of a property in Acton, asks her to be his wife, she agrees. The marriage, however, is sexless - Ronald, 25 years her senior, is more interested in life at his Masonic lodge than in her. At this point, she starts "entertaining" strangers.

Bateman encourages this, even offering her to his friends. In fact, he longs to hear details of her naughty encounters. Finally, though, she can stand life in Acton no more - it is boredom rather than shame that sees to this - and she hops off once again, eventually landing herself a job in advertising.

Not long afterwards, at a party in Belsize Park, she meets Ron Weldon, the man who was to be the father of her other three sons and her husband for 30 years (this union was finally shattered by an astrological therapist who told Ron that he and his wife had incompatible star signs; Weldon died in 1994). Here, the book ends.

Ronald Bateman sounds an odd creature: sometimes kind, sometimes cruel (luckily, he is dead, too, so we can say what we like about him). "Yes, he was all these things," says Weldon, giving me one of her wide-eyed and innocent smiles. "He wasn't a bad man. He was just confused. He kept marrying unmarried mothers with sons." How much poetic licence did she use in describing life in Acton? Did she, I wonder, have her eye firmly on sales as she scribbled away?

"I left a lot out," she says, tartly. "And certain parts you put in the third person otherwise you feel rather horrified by them." But Weldon famously thinks you can have too much truth. Didn't she despise herself for spilling her guts?

"My publisher asked me to write it and I got on with it. Only afterwards was I cringing in a corner, waiting for the headlines to pass." Has Nicolas read it? "My children are not allowed to read anything I write. If they do, they're not allowed to talk about it. The extracts were very lurid. I told Nicolas not to read them. So, naturally, he went out and bought the paper. He didn't know it all already, but he thought it was very nice.

"The past is so hidden to people now. The 1950s are like Edwardian times, they feel so far away. It was very tough for women. People don't understand what life was like. Now, it's so easy to have a baby, you just lie there, or stand in an alley. You don't have to work, there are benefits. I'm just surprised that the teenage birthrate is as low as it is."

At this point, the door to the living room opens and in comes Nick (he is 15 years younger than Fay and a bit manic). To my horror, in his hand is a copy of the review I wrote for the New Statesman of his wife's most recent novel, The Bulgari Connection (so-called because it was sponsored by the Italian jeweller). He has an extremely protective look on his face.

"Now listen to this!" he says, voice booming indignantly. "You (he means me) worry that she (he means Fay) says that women menstruate at the full moon and that oral sex is good for the complexion." Oh dear. This is true. I can hardly deny it, given that it's there in black and white in front of him. "What else? Yes, you say 'distinctly feeble ... what this story lacks is SPARKLE!'"

OVER at the other side of the table, like a kindly goblin, Fay is giggling merrily. Perhaps the cheque she received from Bulgari was sufficiently big for her not to mind my petty criticisms. "She's very hard, isn't she?" she says to Nick. "She's very difficult. She probably didn't like it because it didn't have any sex in it. Look, you've embarrassed the poor girl now."

Fox leaves the room, his work done. I look at his wife. She is not at all flustered (unlike me). "It's all so subjective," she says. Later, she tells me that she loves being married, and that she did it again for a third time so as not to let Nick get away. "The good marriages are the irrational ones," she says. "The coming together of opposites. But the therapists disapprove of those. The ones they like are the dull ones, where people have shared interests and talk about their incomes. You're not meant to be consumed by jealousy or rage or hysteria. The expression of those emotions is forbidden. But we need more weeping and wailing and shrieking." She has a hunch that the rot set in emotion-wise after women started working in offices. "There, they just can't shriek at their fellow workers and beat them about the head."

It's hard not to enjoy her delicious habit of saying the very opposite of what you're expecting. In her day, she says, bulimia was a "skill not a disorder". Neither can she understand why modern girls make such a fuss about fitting in babies. "What do these women mean when they talk about their careers? It's all in their heads. On the whole, people have jobs, not careers."

When her 27-year-old son Tom was sent to a Dutch prison for three years for possession of drugs, "it did him a power of good". He learned to paint and is leading a normal life again, she explains. Most bizarrely, she thinks that women who reach 40 without having married or bred spent "too much time combing their hair and complaining about their period pains".

Luckily, breeding was never a problem for her and she now has five grandchildren. But for all that she pretends to have no ambition - "I didn't set out to do all this" - she has no intention of settling down into a quiet retirement just yet. She is already working on a new novel and volume two of the memoirs is bound to contain more bombshells. "When I turned 70, I thought it was time to behave with a certain gravitas," she says. "But that remains hard. I'd rather be 20. Who wouldn't?"

? Auto Da Fay is published by Flamingo, £17.

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