. . . had a wife but couldn't keep her
Helen Osborne
ABOUT TIME TOO by Penelope Mortimer Weidenfeld, .£16.99, pp. 219 his second volume of autobiography opens in 1940 when the first Mrs Mortimer is Mrs Charles Dimont and the mother of one daughter. But its purpose begins three daughters on in 1947 when John Mortimer, a young barrister five years her junior, rides into her life and swoops up mother and girls like some swashbuckling au pair. Until then, herself the child of a clergyman who lost his faith, she had been a groupie to the sons of clergy; three of them had fathered her four daughters. The Mortimers marry, they have another daughter. There was, she writes, no money but, in the way of financially coy middle- classes, enough to send the elder girls to boarding school, for help in the home, cars, summer cottages; there is always someone to provide in a crisis and, increasingly, holi- days abroad to cool the marital tempera- ture. She is writing novels. He is writing novels. Neither seems to have the time or gift for friendship, and one senses an edgy competitiveness even in their early days and a mutual boredom within the restric- tions of the clamorous domestic set-up. It kept him from the juvenile worldly pleasures he had missed; it kept her from the typewriter she clanked around with her like a comforter to villas in the South of France, Italy, Spain. A son was born. Mor- timer told her they must now enjoy their luck and promised a great adventure. He was already having affairs. Things did not improve. How could they? 'Neither of us could understand the other's language when we were being serious.'
I first saw Penelope Mortimer under the hair-dryer at Evanksy's (very Sixties). By then she had written The Pumpkin Eater and was held in awe by men and women alike. She was very striking, both physically and by reputation and, of the two, 'I was the better known writer'. A little later I got to know them both. There were parties with shepherd's pie from a restaurant in the Fulham Road called The Hungry Horse. Penelope seemed aloof from the warm white wine babble, but then there were usually one or two of John's girls in attendance and they were not nearly as frumpy as she would have it in this account. The blood was already on the wallpaper, and it wasn't very Sanderson. Later still, when she was a half-hearted film critic on the Observer, we worked together. There were confidences but no intimacy. 'I had come to have a paranoid distrust of other women,' she explains.
By that time, too, she was on a course of drugs and men, misery and ECT which would lead her almost to madness. Yet her memory, even before this, is feathery: 'I don't remember . . . 'I have an impres- sion . . . 'I have no idea who was looking after the children. . . 'I try to recall these friends but few of them have names, let alone faces.' It's a device which leaves one muttering, 'Well, go back and try.' The brutal medical treatment was to blur her vision, but there never was much world out there. What was going on outside those windows she broods behind? At one rare point, she suggests they present themselves at the Ban the Bomb rally in Trafalgar Square. Mortimer advises, 'One cannot afford it,' and she is uncertain what he means. Oh, but I think one is.
About Time Too scotches any protesta- tions that her novels are not autobiographi- cal: All my women protagonists were victims of their insensitive husbands; none of them did any work; they had children, but didn't get much enjoyment out of them; they had obscure, meaningful problems, but never about the gas bill or school fees . . . God knows who they were, but I knew them well.
Once written, these novels seemed to bring her scant satisfaction or celebration, much in the way of the children, who sprang not from fecund passion but from an impatience with contraception, and who are little more than stoic footnotes in this recollection. Of course, she must have been mightily wounded by the glancing, avuncular treat- ment she received from Mortimer in his cuddly memoir, Clinging to the Wreckage but, reading between the lines here (as she exhorts us to do), when it came to ruthless- ness and cruelty, you suspect she gave as good as she got. When the playwright David Mercer came to ask Mortimer for his wife's hand in marriage, he replied 'Be my guest.' Behind the surface lassitude of this volume there is a similar contemptuous chill at the heart of things.
You may have heard that About Time Too is 'beautifully written.' Well, no, it isn't. It is obsessively written, which means that even when Mrs Mortimer is telling the truth — her truth, her grief, madness — it is hard to perceive under the blanket of self-absorption.
He [her father, the Revd Fletcher] told me that marriage was the coffin of love, that I must never suffer from false modesty and that life was like a gas fire.
That's a pretty bleak inheritance, not much under-pinning there. No wonder this is the glummest book of the year.
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