Novelists can often be disappointingly unremarkable as people but occasionally one, like Fay Weldon, is a force of nature. She seemed to pack dozen larger than life women into one, in every sense. She used to say ‘that was after I became a fat girl’, and that she chose to write most about the sort of women whose side she was on – the large and plain ones. In fact, she was on the side of all women, and spoke better in her fiction to her own and my generations than all the militant loud-mouthed feminists. She married three times, enjoyed men and their company and hated men being publicly belittled and emasculated but she simply believed that it was women who needed sticking up and speaking up for and she did it better than most.
She was a versatile, prolific professional, a witty, sharp-edged stylist as novelist and short story writer, but she was equally skilled producing original work for the screen. She had no exaggerated sense of her own importance, put on no airs. She was a worker, she seized opportunities when they were offered to her, as writer in residence at the Savoy Hotel, for instance, and hired hand of the jeweller Bulgari, to write a novel in which their brand had to be mentioned no less than 12 times. She got plenty of flak for that, as well as a decent cheque, but when an interviewer told her that critics would accuse her of lowering her standards and selling out, she just said ‘Let them’.
I saw her little but we often spoke on the phone, when ‘just a couple of minutes’ turned into an hour of gossip, her wise advice, news. She was soft spoken but her personality burst through the receiver. We were speaking once when she suddenly said ‘I was confirmed in St Paul’s Cathedral yesterday. It was splendid but no one came with me so I felt a bit lonely.’ I was taken aback as Fay never seemed a lonely person – she had a big family, lots of friends and when she was alone she had her work. I said I wished she had let me know, as I would certainly have gone with her but she said she hadn’t told anyone for fear people would sneer. She had forgotten the ‘let them.’
The novelist William Trevor lived near to her in Somerset and they occasionally met on the London train. She had been sitting opposite him one day when she leaned forwards and said ‘Trevor, you mustn’t be alarmed, but I’m having a heart attack.’ She did look ill. What should he do? Pull the cord? Call for the guard? Then Fay took a tablet out of her bag and placed it under her tongue, and when her colour returned, said ‘I’m so sorry about that but please don’t worry. It sometimes happens.’
For a woman who had rarely dieted and never successfully and who had a number of rather serious health problems, she gave the lie to every doctor by living until she was 91. I divide people who telephone into those at the sound of whose voice the heart sinks and those who make it lift. Fay Weldon made it soar.
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