Penelope Mortimer reborn

Penelope Mortimer, 1971. (Photo by Michael Ward/Getty Images)
 

By LAURA FREEMAN

���It���ll be alright���, says Mrs Armitage in Penelope Mortimer���s novel The Pumpkin Eater. ���I promise you. You���ll like it when it���s born, you always do, perhaps it���ll be a boy, you haven���t got anything like enough boys . . . One more won���t make any difference, I promise you it won���t.���

Mrs Armitage, pregnant for the umpteenth time, is pleading with her husband Jake to be happy about her news. It is never quite clear how many children she has accumulated from her four marriages. They are variously a ���brood���, an ���army���, a ���bodyguard���, and a ���bloody houseful���. Her father fears she���ll come ���trailing home with half a dozen more in five years' time���. Mrs Armitage wants desperately, obsessively to have another; Jake does not.

The novel was first published in 1962 and is reissued this month as a Penguin Modern Classic. A radio adaptation will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 next month, with Helen McCrory as Mrs Armitage. So what will it mean to people discovering it now? Is it a period piece or a fiction of enduring relevance?

Either way, Mortimer certainly tells an unsettling story. (The TLS, at the time, thought it ���claustrophobic��� and ���quite the best of Mrs Mortimer���s excellent novels���.) Mrs Armitage is coerced into having a termination by a husband who has tired of playing at domesticity. ���What joy do you think I get out of this god-awful boring family life of yours?��� he asks. ���Where do I come in?��� 

Mrs Armitage, who has no first name in the book, only her husband���s surname, is sent to a nursing home for the termination and to be sterilized. Mr Armitage, meanwhile, knocks up his mistress.

It ought to be a bleak book, a tale of marital misery, but Mortimer does not let Mrs Armitage get away with moping. She interrogates her character���s particular malaise with wry scepticism. She is mistress, too, of the small detail. Jake���s mistress writes to him in mauve script on mauve paper (presumably, a slightly different shade of mauve), telling us everything we need to know about her.

Fittingly for a novel about pregnancy, The Pumpkin Eater had a long gestation. On March 27, 1956, Mortimer, thirty-seven years old, married to the writer and barrister John Mortimer, and mother to six children by four fathers, wrote in her diary: ���Perhaps soon I shall begin to write another book . . .  I sit in the chair and smoke and think, I can���t sit here much longer; and go on sitting. I drive to John Barnes [a department store] and walk around the bales of material, even sometimes feeling it, touching it; thinking, I know quite well I don���t want to, shan���t buy any . . . Some day I shall write about this���.

In The Pumpkin Eater, John Barnes becomes Harrods ��� a fortuitous change, with the book���s long-term popularity in mind, since one department store is long gone, but the other continues to thrive. There Mrs Armitage has a breakdown in the Linen department and has to be taken to recover in a small, private room next to Lingerie. Bed linen and lingerie: the departments are significant in a novel about early passions deadened by the responsibilities of childcare.

The novel is dedicated ���To John��� which has led to speculation about how much was autobiographical. Mortimer began writing in November 1961 and finished in the spring of 1962. During that time, she agreed to an abortion and sterilization after becoming pregnant for the eighth time (her seventh pregnancy had ended in miscarriage). Shortly after the termination, she found out that her husband���s mistress was pregnant.

To my mind, the themes of the book are as pressing today ��� in a Britain of smaller families, gender (im)balance at work, and stay-at-home dads ��� as they were then. How few we have been able to satisfactorily resolve. How many children can a couple afford? How many is too many to give each enough care and attention? Can a parent love a step-child as unconditionally as their own child? Does a man have any say in a woman���s choice to have an abortion? What if he is her husband? Tellingly, the praise of Edna O���Brien quoted on the cover of the new Penguin edition ��� ���almost every woman I can think of will want to read this book��� ��� you can also find on the back cover of Penguin editions of old.

Only this week a debate has run in the newspapers, after comments made by the comedian Jenny Eclair, about whether having a nanny makes you a less able and attentive mother. Mrs Armitage regrets that affluence brings nursemaids and nannies who take your children away and tuck them into bed for you.

Perhaps the most enduring question is: for women, can children and home be ���enough���? Or must a woman maintain financial independence and her own career? Mrs Armitage suffers an anxiety about dust, and is bored by the limited, repetitive conversation of small children. Mortimer does a fine impression of the chatter of children home from school:

���I got a green star . . . I got top in Friday Paper . . . Two of the goldfish died and a cat . . . Did you see any lions? . . . I got a green star for spelling and I got . . . Well, I got top in Friday Paper . . . What were the elephants like, did you see any lions? . . . We went to the circus, we went to the pictures three times . . . That���s where I fell down . . . Did you see any camels, then? . . . and I got a green star for sums . . . .���

And so the domestic round goes on. Mortimer hasn���t any solutions to offer, but her questions remain compelling. Of which of today���s novelists might people say the same thing, for addressing the same issues, in fifty years��� time?