He was, even to me, an attractive man, broad-chinned, brighteyed, on the jowly side. I like men a little fleshy, Kubricky. In fact, Dr Grepalli reminded me of the abominable Krassner. Thinking back, it seemed strange to me now that I had not joined the latter in my bed. My last sexual relationship had been over six months previously, and that had been fleeting. My grandmother Felicity was obviously impressed by Dr Grepalli. Her wrinkled eyelids drooped over her still large, clear eyes. She actually fluttered her lashes, and moistened her lips with her tongue and sat with her hands clasped behind her neck. She had not read as many books on body language as I had, or heard so many directors expound on it, or she would have desisted. She was in her mid-eighties, for God’s sake, and forty years older than he.
To be seen from Dr Grepalli’s side window, at a little distance from the main villa, was a long, low building. Of this particular place we had not had a guided tour. As I looked an ambulance drew up and a couple of men went inside with a trolley, and a couple of nurses came out: the bleached, hard, noisy kind you tend to find in places other than the Golden Bowl. Dr Grepalli decided the sun was getting in our eyes and drew the net curtains between my eyeline and the building. I didn’t ask him what went on in there. But obviously some old people get Alzheimer’s: in the end some fall ill, some die. It can get depressing for others. There would be some form of segregation: there would have to be, to keep the fit in good cheer.
I fought back my doubts. All this was too good to be true.
Dr Grepalli and my gran3mother were having a conversation about the I Ching. Let the living and lively respond to the living and lively, while they can. Joy gaped open-mouthed. I don’t think she really understood what was going on, perhaps because she was wearing her hearing aid again and unaccustomed sound came to her undifferentiated.
‘But some of those people were chanting,’ she protested on the way home. ‘They were all out of their minds. And did you see the potatoes in the kitchen? All different shapes and sizes with dirt on them.’
‘Potatoes come from the ground, Joy,’ said Felicity. ‘They are not born in the supermarket. That’s what vegetables look like in real life. I loved that place. All such a hoot. Now all I have to do is wait and see and pray.’
‘Oh they want you all right,’ shouted Joy. ‘They want your money.’
But here was the limo come especially for me, here in my hand was the Concorde ticket, there was the thought of Kubricky- Krassner back home. There was the driver whose name was Charlie, and who looked like a mountain tribesman in The Three Feathers, dangerous and glittery-eyed, glancing with meaning at his watch. It would not do to cross him. ‘You go on back to London, Sophia,’ said Felicity. ‘There’s nothing more you can do here. I’m going to become a Golden Bowler. If I don’t do something I shall just fade away.’
‘I think you’re crazy,’ roared Joy. ‘And you’re selling this place far too cheap. I’m going to ask my deceased sister’s husband, Jack Epstein, He’s in car dealership in Boston.’
I thought I could safely leave them to it. I had done what I had been summoned to do: endorse Felicity’s decisions. She seemed well and positive. She could look after herself okay without me. I decided not to thwart the mountain tribesman but simply to go home. Joy was not best pleased, but didn’t set up too many difficulties, impressed as she was to discover I was the kind of person for whom limos were sent from New York. She had assumed, I suppose, that I was someone’s PA. Or the make-up girl.
Felicity finished asking advice of the I Ching while Joy helped me get my few things together. That is to say she banged and crashed about, and tripped over chairs and the edges of carpets and got in the way.
‘I’d have gone on looking after your grandmother if I could,’ she shouted. ‘But I’m too old for the responsibility.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘I’m family. It’s up to me.’
‘The only family I have left is Jack,’ she said. ‘That’s my deceased sister Francine’s husband.’ Jack and the sister Francine came into her conversation rather frequently, I noticed. Something beyond her betrayal of my grandmother was bothering her.
‘You young things and your careers!’ she said. ‘I’ll help her pack up the house, of course. Someone’s got to. A lot can go in storage, I daresay.’
‘I don’t know how sensible that is,’ I said. ‘When and where is everything ever going to come out of it? Better sell up and use the money.’
I felt brutal saying it, but it was true. The storage space of the Western world is full to overflowing with the belongings of deceased persons, which no-one quite knows what to do with, let alone who’s the legal owner. I cut a prize-winning documentary about this once. You Can't Take It with You.
‘I’ll get Jack to help her sell the antiques,’ said Joy. ‘There are so many villains around, just waiting to take advantage of old women alone.’
I said that the only thing she had of any real value was the Utrillo, and presumably Felicity would take that with her to the Golden Bowl. Joy asked what a Utrillo was and I explained it was a painting, and described it. Joy doubted that it was worth anything, being so dull, but had always quite liked the frame.
‘It’s not as if Felicity is going far,’ Joy consoled herself. ‘Only just over the state line to Rhode Island. It’s a much rougher place than here, of course, all has-beens and losers, artists and poets, yard sales and discount stores. Everyone rich and poor trying to pick up a bargain, and still they think well of themselves. They’ll have to wake up when the new Boston to Providence Interstate cuts through. Forget all those woods and falling-down grand houses, it’ll be just another commuting suburb. Property prices will soar: the Golden Bowl will sell up and what will Felicity do then?’
‘She’ll go to the barn,
And keep herself warm,
And hide her head under her wing.
Poor thing,’
I murmured, and then was sorry because she had no idea what I was talking about. How could she? When I was small my mother Angel would say the rhyme if I ever worried about the future, and really it was no consolation at all.
‘The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow.
And what will poor robin do then?
Poor thing.’
‘Things looked kind of permanent, at the Golden Bowl,’ I corrected myself. ‘And they seemed very responsible. They won’t just dump her.’
‘That’s what they want you to feel,’ said Joy. ‘But the marble is only veneer and that terrible white stone is so cheap they can hardly give it away. Why can’t she go somewhere more ordinary? Why does she have to be so special?’
‘The Ching was very positive about the Golden Bowl,’ said Felicity, when I came down with my bag, closing the book and rewrapping it in the piece of dark-red silk kept for the purpose. I felt such affectation to be annoying. ‘Though it seemed to see some kind of lawsuit in the future. Thus the kings of former times made firm the laws through the clearly defined penalties. What do you think that means?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said, briskly. ‘I do not see how throwing three coins in the air six times can affect anything.’
‘Darling,’ said Felicity, ‘it isn’t a question of affecting, but reflecting. It’s Jung’s theory of Synchronicity. But I know how you hate all this imaginative stuff.’
I said I’d rather not talk about it. My mother Angel had kept a copy of the I Ching on her kitchen shelf. She had no truck with silk wrappings or respect. The black-and-red book, with its white Chinese ideograms, was battered and marked by put-down coffee cups. ‘What’s the big deal,’ she would say, ‘it is only like consulting a favourite uncle, some wise old man who knows how the world works. You don’t have to take any notice of what he says.’ She would quote from Jung’s Foreword. ‘As to the thousands of questions, doubts, and criticisms that this singular book stirs up - I cannot answer these. The I Ching does not offer itself with proofs and results, it does not vaunt itself, nor is it
easy to approach. Like a part of nature, it waits to be discovered.’
One day when Angel had brought home bacon and sardines from the shop, rather than the milk we needed, because she’d thrown the coins before leaving the house and come up with something disparaging about pigs and fishes, I’d lost my cool and protested. ‘Why do you have to throw those stupid coins, why can’t you make up your own mind, then at least I could have some cereal! You are a terrible mother!’ She’d slapped my face. I kicked her ankles. She seldom resorted to violence. When she did I forgave her: she’d get us confused: it was hard for her to tell the difference between her and me. To rebuke me was to rebuke herself. The sudden violence meant, all the same, that the downward slide into unreason was beginning again, and I knew it, and dreaded the weeks to come. My violence, in retaliation, was childish, but that was okay inasmuch as I was a child; I must have been about ten. Her white skin bruised easily. The blue marks were apparent for days. I felt terrible. I think that was at a time before my father left me alone with her: he simply didn’t understand mental illness. He felt she was wilful and difficult and was doing everything she could to upset and destroy him, while doting on me. I tried to tell him she was crazy but he didn’t believe me. I expect believing it meant he would have to take responsibility for me, and he wasn’t the kind of man to do that. He was an artist of the old school. Children were the mother’s business. Anyway he left, sending money for a time. I was alone with her for six months before Felicity turned up to look after us. I’d found her phone number in my mother’s address book and called her. We’d run out of money and there was no food in the cupboard and my mother wasn’t doing anything about it. My grandmother stayed until my mother was hospitalized, and I was in a boarding school, and then went back to her rich old husband in Savannah, the one who left her the Utrillo. She couldn’t stand any of it. Well, it was hard to stand. Visit my mother in her hospital ward, in a spirit of love, and find her white-faced with wild glazed eyes, tied down, shrieking hate at you. They didn’t have the drugs then they do now, and made no effort to keep the children away. I told them at school I was visiting my mother in hospital, but I didn’t tell them what kind of hospital. In those days to have an insane relative was a shame and a disgrace and a terrible secret thing in a family. No sooner had Felicity flown out than my mother simply died. I like to think she knew what she was doing, that it was the only way out for all of us. She managed to suffocate herself in a straitjacket. ‘Throw the coins and throw the pattern of the times,’ Angel would say cheerfully, in the good times, and she’d quote Jung’s Foreword, which she knew by heart, relieving me of the duty of believing what she believed.
‘To one person the spirit of the I Ching appears as clear as day, to another, shadowy as twilight, to a third, dark as night. He who is not pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is against it does not have to find it true.'
As if that settled everything. I try to keep my mind on the good times, but you can see why I like to live in films rather than in reality, if it can possibly be done. I wondered what Krassner’s hang-up was. I thought I probably didn’t want to know, it was an impertinence to inquire. Art is art, forget what motivates it. What business of anyone else’s is why?
Felicity walked with me to the limo, her step still light, her head held high: age sat on her uncomfortably: it didn’t belong to her: I wanted to cry.
‘Thank you for coming all this way,’ she said. ‘I do appreciate it. It’s made things easier. That place is okay, isn’t it? Of course I’d rather live with family, but one doesn’t want to be a burden.’
‘That place is a hoot,’ I said. ‘I’d give it a go. If you don’t like it I’ll come over and we’ll try again.’
I sank into the squashy real-leather seat.
‘Of course you’re not my only family,’ said Felicity. ‘There was Alison. Though I daresay they changed her name.’
Charlie was looking at his watch. But I was truly startled. I kept the limo door open. We couldn’t leave until I shut it.
‘Alison?’
‘I had Alison before I had your mother,’ said my grandmother. ‘On my fifteenth birthday. That was in London, back in the thirties. I wasn’t married. That made me a bad girl. They made me keep the baby for six weeks, and breastfeed, then they took her away, put her out for adoption.’
‘How could they be so cruel?’ I stood there with the car door open, in the middle of Connecticut, and the past came up and slammed me. And it wasn’t even mine, it was hers.
‘In the name of goodness,’ she said. ‘Most cruelties are. It was in case we changed our mind, but how could we, we unmarried mothers? We had nowhere to live, nowhere to go.’
‘Who took the baby?’
‘I don’t know. They didn’t tell you. It wasn’t allowed. They said so you could put the past behind you and the baby could live without the stigma of its birth. They said it was for everyone’s good but really it was for our punishment. It was a long time ago. Don’t worry about it. She’d be in her late sixties now, if she made it to that.’
‘An aunt,’ I said, jubilant.
‘Always thinking about yourself,’ said Felicity, wryly, and there was nothing for it. I had to go. Other people took more than three hours to drive to New York, but Charlie the mountain man got to Kennedy in two and a half.
8
Alison! A long lost aunt! So long as she could be traced: so long as she had survived. But sixty something years was not so long a time in a Western society; the probability was that she would be still in this world. Chances were that she would have married, had children, grandchildren; that she could provide me with a host of cousins and little relatives, all only a half step away. As ready a family as one of the cake mixes in my grandmother’s refrigerator: just add water and stir: pop in the oven and there you are, evidence of the continuity of family affection. Go for the pleasure, the ready-made, not the pain and boredom of finding the bowl, the wooden spoon, beating the sugar into the butter until the wrist tired. Just hang around, and lo, a family turns up.
Leaning against Concorde’s flimsy hull on the way back to London (I had a window seat but there was nothing to see outside but navy-blue), sipping orange juice, I wondered from whence these domestic images came. When I was small, in the patches when she was sane, which grew fewer and fewer as the years went by, my mother Angel would bake cakes and I would help. Then I was truly happy: we both were. I would scrape the bowl of the creamy mixture: lick the wooden spoon. The taste of damp wood would come through with the vanilla essence.
So much of the time, at least when I was working, I rejoiced in my lack of family. I was not burdened as others were, by the guilt and obligations that seemed to go along with having parents, of whom one should be seeing more, or doing more for, desire and duty forever conflicting: the problems of children, ditto.
‘Just a grandmother in Connecticut’ seemed more than enough to me: far enough away, and of her own volition, to be out of the dreaded Christmas equation which afflicts so many these days: who goes where: which step-child to which step-house, which natural child to which parent, who is to take in the reproachful aged. ‘Oh, now she’s moved to Rhode Island,’ sounded as if she were not an invention, and static, but a living, moving in-touch person. And only a fraction nearer.
I had noticed, mind you, that if I were out of the editing suite for more than a couple of days I would begin to feel a little uneasy, a little unbolstered up, as it were, by my comparative aloneness in the world. Others had parents and aunts and children: their Easters and Passovers were well peopled: their Christmas lists were full of duty items, and duty, I had come to observe, can feel less onerous than freedom: the need to enjoy oneself can become oppressive. As my due to Christmas festivities I would visit my mother’s headstone at Golders Green crematorium, and consider the meaning of life and death for half an hour or so, until cold seeped through the soles of my boots. Not, I came to the conclusion fairly early on, that there were any conclusions
to come to. There was the pleasure one got in getting things right, and a disappointment that one day one could no longer do so, it would be too late. I hoped nobody noticed this lack of affect in me. I put on a brave face. And if someone were needed to work on Christmas Day, I would always volunteer.
Between jobs, the cracks showed. They were beginning to yawn wide enough to fall into. Colleagues were all very well: they adored you until the show ended, and then failed to recognize you in the street the following week; there were drinks and jokes in the pub with proper friends, and dancing and sexual overtures in the club, and films to go to, and plays, and theatre, and books. Girlfriends were fine until they got married or solidly partnered and drifted off into their folies a deux or, with-children, a trois or quatre, when you, little by little, turned into the baby-sitter, and a haze of domestic triviality drooped like a dull cloud over the old association, and the friendship faded away to Christmas card level: and others you thought were permanent in your life you quarrelled with or they quarrelled with you, over ridiculous things, over borrowed clothes or hurt pride or imagined insults, and that was always upsetting, and there was no sex by which to re-register and consolidate former affections. As if female friendship wasn’t made to endure, was a false conceit: as if sexual relationships plus children was all that really kept people together, and God knew even that didn’t seem to be enough. Some tried lesbian togetherness but I never really fancied it: it was either too possessive or too bent on variance for comfort, and you’d still find yourself jumping when the phone rang. Is it him, is it her, what’s the difference? Oddly, the young gay men now around town in such numbers seemed to make more reliable and lasting friends than anyone else: true, their partners changed more frequently and the splits were accompanied by the most dreadful tantrums, but their laughs and their lamentations mixed agreeably: they created more of a noisy family feel than the females managed.
Fay Weldon - Novel 23 Page 6