The Ted Dreams: Fay Weldon

“My life seems full of husbands who suggest I ‘see someone’, when all that happens is I see something others don’t.”

Fay Weldon’s novella, The Ted Dreams begins with an unforgettable sentence: “It was the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring… except a clot of blood, creeping up from Ted’s leg to his brain, to kill him as he slept…”

Phyllis was married, rather miserably, to art gallery owner Ted for twenty years when he died, unexpectedly, in bed one night. When Fay Weldon’s wonderfully funny book, The Ted Dreams opens, Phyllis is remarried to Robbie, an American neuro-pharma-scientist after an indecent interval of just ten months of widowhood. Phyllis was warned by her grief therapist not to “embark on a relationship,” but arguing that “a good man is hard to find” and that “they don’t just hang about on trees like ripe fruit waiting to be plucked,” Phyllis plunges ahead into matrimony once again. Phyllis is now happily married to Robbie, getting plenty of sex, and marriage to Ted with its many problems is buried in the past. Of course, it’s just possible that Phyllis’s bovine contentment could be explained by the pills she’s given by Robbie to fix those “hormonal issues.”And since Robbie has a top-secret job at Portal Inc. where he works on psychotropic drugs, he’s in a perfect position to provide her with all the experimental mood-altering drugs needed to keep her happy and content.

Phyllis remembers that Ted used to complain about her moods: ” ‘I know it’s your hormones’ was all Ted would say, thus maddening me the more. ‘ I just sit it out.’ ”  But Robbie takes his work home. “One little pink pill night and morning,” and Phyllis is  “generally benign and tranquil.”

But since this is a Fay Weldon novel, fans know that domestic bliss is a mere façade, and behind Phyllis and Robbie’s seeming domestic bliss lie some ugly dark truths. The first crack in Phyllis’s happiness is a result of all the Ted dreams she has. In Phyllis’s dreams,  Ted “grown no older, just a bit sadder and recently more resentful” appears to be stuck in a dark wood, and in the latest dream she sees him brushing off mud from a shoe. What a nasty shock, then, when Phyllis wakes up and discovers a lump of mud next to the bed. Can it be that Ted still exists somewhere in another dimension? Is there ‘life’ after death? Why is Robbie so fascinated by Phyllis’s dreams of Ted? Is Ted trying to break through to the other side, and if so what are the implications for Phyllis and Robbie?

As Fay Weldon’s wickedly funny plot unfolds, Phyllis begins to ask questions about her marriage to Robbie, and she talks to the poisonous Cynara who may or may not have had an affair with her business partner Ted and who was, according to Robbie, “just a bed buddy.” Can it be just coincidence that the marvelously bitchy Cynara had sex with both Ted and Robbie? The ‘visits’ from Ted turn out to be the most recent events in Phyllis’s life that defy rational scientific explanation. She’s given to visitations from ‘beyond,’ episodes of telepathy, and is known to be a ‘sensitive’ with telekinetic powers.

With ever growing paranoia, Phyllis begins to question the fabric of her entire existence: what exactly was her neighbour’s involvement in her husband’s death, is Phyllis the subject of a sinister experiment, and is Robbie’s sperm laced with psychotropic drugs designed to narcotize? With alarming speed Phyllis’s ‘perfect’ new married life begins to unravel, but then after we meet her creepy identical twin daughters (who could have stepped out of The Shining,) Martha and Maude, we realize how weird her life really is:

their bickerings often end (and they do bicker) just because one of them is using the other’s lines and they get confused.

Fay Weldon is in top form here with The Ted Dreams, and she proves she is as relevant as ever with this tale of spying and psychotropic drugs.  I loved this book for its subversive humour and for its tongue in cheek look at conspiracy theories, life extension and the ‘Great Beyond.’

That’s right, I felt like saying: when in doubt, fucking blame the woman.