Free Mantrapped by Fay Weldon Page A

wouldn't I. If I were a man I would no doubt reverse the genders.

 
    Life in the slow lane
     
     
    The day before Trisha's worldly goods went under the auctioneer's hammer, Doralee Thicket allowed a vase of water to spill onto the foam mattress she shared with her partner of long standing Peter Watson. This may not have been a good omen. It was six thirty in the morning, and high summer, but there was quite a wind, the unexpected kind that blows up sometimes in the early morning of a day in which thunder is expected, and gives you a glimpse of the intentions nature Was for a globally-warmed humanity.
    Doralee and Peter lived in High View, in Wilkins Close, just around the corner from the Wilkins Parade branch of the dry-cleaners Kleene Machine. Money has been spent on Wilkins Close - the council has beautified the street, putting in cobbles, fancy street lights and decorative railings, and will get round to the Parade and eventually to Wilkins Square, if the intransigency of the locals allows. But the area is, as they say, 'mixed' and the council may change their mind about the ability, and indeed the willingness, of sufficient of those living around to pay tax, and withdraw supportive funding at any moment, and then windows will start to get broken as the Goths and Vandals sweep in, and the barbarians take back what was so long theirs.
    But from the outside High View looks solid and grand enough. It has recently been converted from the factory it once was to luxury apartments, but keeps many of the original features, including its large windows, and interior corridors still in the original small red brick. There is a doorman, George, who lives on the premises. Doralee and Peter are lucky enough to have the penthouse flat - a mere five floors up, but still giving them a view to the west of the city and an expanse of sky, from which they can observe the brilliant sunsets of the last days of Empire. They do not see it like this, of course, though Doralee's father Graham sometimes gloomily mutters words to this effect. Rather they see themselves as living on the brink of a bright new world, in which all will be fair, and the nations of the earth glad and wise, and as one.
    When Doralee flung open the window to air the room, the edge of the curtain blew in and caught the vase - long red roses given to her by Peter when he came back from work the previous evening - and toppled it.
    The bed would have to be stripped and the mattress exposed to the air to dry: she would be late for her Pilates class. She felt vaguely vengeful: the vase would have to go down to Age Concern. There was no time in her life for the agents of misrule; for accidents or inefficiencies, or cheap vases with not sufficient weighting at the base. Everything has to go . She sponged the mattress down, first unbuttoning the cover and removing it, but a water stain would undoubtedly be left. Fortunately the roses, though perfect, long stemmed and without thorns, seemed to have very little to do with nature and had not clouded or coloured the water at all. She asked Peter to drop the cover down to Kleene Machine round the corner in Wilkins Parade, together with her once worn black dress with the thin satin straps, on which some idiot had dropped champagne, and a couple of Peter's shirts.
    Kleene Machine offered a next-day delivery service. Doralee suspected she paid over the odds for it, but completed work could be left downstairs with George the doorman, and that was convenient. If he wasn't at his desk in the lobby, as sometimes happened, you just opened his cupboard yourself and took the clothes from the rack. The other tenants - there were eight flats in the building, a new conversion of what had been originally a children's home, then a sweet factory, then a makeshift warehouse, and was now a much-sought-after apartment block - had so far shown themselves respectable and honest. Someone had once taken her Armani white blouse with the frilled cuffs but she