My usual answer to the unease about whither and whence, alone, was simply to begin another job. Directors waited for my services. I was as busy as I needed to be. Get back to the cutting room and the dissection of fantasy, and the possibility of an award, an Oscar even, if not this year, then next, and the comfort of one’s prestige in the film business, the working end of it at any rate, if not the Oscar Versace summit, and I’d be just fine again. But I could see I could do with an aunt. One sprung ready-made into my life, without the complications of a shared past. Alison!
If there was an aunt maybe there would be an uncle to go with her? But maybe not. The men in my family tended to fade out of sight in the bright glare of the female personalities with which they were confronted. Mind you, there was fresh blood in there somewhere: this Alison would have had a father. Who fathered an illegitimate baby back in the nineteen-thirties and then scarpered? Not anyone nice. But I assumed Felicity wanted me to go in search of her long-lost daughter, otherwise she wouldn’t have mentioned her. Would she?
* * *
The elderly woman in the Hermes scarf and sensible shoes in the seat next to me called the steward. He arrived, obsequious, resentful and rubbing damp palms together. It is as difficult for Concorde to provide a more luxurious service than First Class on a regular flight as it is for First Class Regular to do much better than Club Class subsonic. There must be an end to the distinction between one grade of smoked salmon and the rest, the taste and texture of one rare globule of caviar and the next. The battle to justify the extra thousands spent by customers cannot be left to speed and convenience alone. There must be luxury enough to shame the opposition. Catering feels it too must do its best, but imagination fails. The staff just has to learn to bow yet lower, and it hurts, and it shows.
‘Last time I was on this blasted machine,’ said my neighbour, ‘there were shreds of real orange in the juice. I’ll swear this is condensed.’
The steward went forward and came back with the cardboard container to reassure her. ‘Nothing but the best of freshly squeezed real oranges,’ claimed the box. She refused to be reassured.
‘I have no proof the juice came out of that particular box,’ she said. The steward offered to provide witnesses. She declined the offer. The cast, as she called them, would only stick together and lie. ‘Why didn’t you just squeeze fresh oranges?’ she demanded. He said there was a space problem on Concorde. She said oranges, properly packed, wouldn’t necessarily take up more room than boxes. He said they would: oranges were round and boxes were square. So they wrangled on. The human race, even on Concorde, is in search of an occupation. The Mach meter showed 2.2. More than twice the speed of sound. The metal against which my arm rested became uncomfortably hot. I thought maybe the whole machine would melt. I expressed my worry to the steward. He felt the wall of the plane, and studying his once handsome face, grown soft from the habit of an unfelt politeness, and petulant from the obligation to justify, justify, justify, I thought I saw alarm writ there. As one does.
‘Oh it does that sometimes,’ he said. ‘If we overheat the pilot will cut back.’ Even as we spoke the Mach meter fell rapidly to 1.5 and the metal cooled almost instantaneously.
There you see,’ he said, triumphantly. The woman beside me snorted and fell asleep. I slept too and dreamed of Aunt Alison, who looked like one of the motherly types you see on packets of cake mixes. She folded me in her arms and said, ‘There, there.’ That was all but when I woke up there were tears on my cheeks.
9
The film had been unlocked, that was what had happened, why I had been sent for. A rare event. Young Olivia’s female live-in lover Georgia, slighted by Olivia’s claim that she was no lesbian but the mere victim of child-abuse at the hands of a female teacher, had made an unsuccessful bid to end her life, first e-mailing the news desks with her suicide note: she had been stomach-pumped in time. Georgia’s parents had not helped, joining in the media fray, accusing Olivia, our film’s gentle heroine, of seduction of their daughter, who had been all set to marry a parson. The PR panic was sufficient to infect the studio back in Hollywood. They flew over to sort things out, which only happened in real emergencies. Had they been able, they would have cut off my head and had my brain pickled and turned into some sort of memory bank unit, always accessible, but they couldn’t do that, so they had to pay the price of a Concorde ticket and have my body as well as my brain in the editing suite. They breathed down my neck and shuddered when Harry smoked, which he did more than usual for their benefit. ‘The Studio’ consisted of a sharp young man and a sharper young woman with big hair and a narrow tiny face. She had LA hips, which are wider than those you see skittering about in New York. Californians are built bigger, spreading into available space. Texas is not so far away, in perceptual reality.
The decision finally reached was that I was to recut the love scenes between Leo and Olivia to show an absence of passion rather than a surfeit, as both young people struggled to define their gender identity. This was no great problem for me, since it reflected the actuality of what went on between them on camera. The end was to be changed, which fortunately there was sufficient random footage around to do: a conventional happy ending became one rather less conventional but more convincing. Olivia went off into the sunset with her best friend: Leo with his. The suggestion that the same-sex friends were shortly to be lovers I was able gently and delicately to imply. The film could now be described as brave and edgy, pushing back the frontiers of contemporary experience, it no longer had to be a heart-warming story of young love. It would not please the overseas Islamic markets, but would do fine in the non-Catholic West. ‘The Studio’ were thrilled by their own decision, seeing it as, I quote, ‘seminal to a new generation of gender cinema’. We went into a London pub (their idea) to celebrate and they drank gassy water and managed to score some coke - the supply side in LA had recently run into some trouble, apparently - and got the last flight home.
Nearly everyone was happy about this new turn of events, except by all accounts Krassner, who bit my neck as I did what I was paid to do, and handsomely paid at that. Krassner’s artistic integrity was acknowledged to be under threat, though I had the feeling he would be laughing like the rest of us if he didn’t have a reputation to preserve. The writer was not particularly happy, either, but then writers never are, and Clive our producer, whose film was now going to come in way over budget, was white and exhausted, and in a state of shock, but this is what producers are paid to be.
‘Please do not bite my neck,’ I said to Krassner. But I had come to almost like the slightly sweaty, anxious, obsessive smell of his breath as he craned alongside me towards the screen, and it mingled with mine. Stray strands of black hair interwove with my red tendrils, which by sheer bulk and energy won any encounter. If I tossed my hair out of my eyes, as I did from time to time, a few strands of his would leave his scalp and end up in mine. There seemed an intimacy between us, the greater because we had failed to spend the night together. Matters were still all promise, no disappointment. My bed had held a companionable waft of Krassner as I snatched a couple of hours’ sleep before getting to the cutting room, and to my surprise I hadn’t minded one bit. He’d left a note saying he had wormed the cat: a homey touch, though he had not shaken out the duvet. But then, neither had I before he got under it.
‘I’m not biting,’ he said, now. ‘I’m neurotically gnawing.’ It was true, his teeth - all his, and perfectly capped or veneered or implanted or whatever they did with the teeth of the older man nowadays - slipped gently over the surface of my skin, his full lips following. You don’t get anywhere in film by claiming sexual harassment: that’s for people about to get out of the business anyway. You can get a handsome award but you never work again. For some it’s worth it. Not me. And I liked him gnawing me.
We were three hours into editing when Krassner got a personal phone call from LA. His turn to disentangle his hair from mine, leaving a few more of his strands behind. He took the
call. ‘Why hello, darling,’ he said. ‘Yuh, the rumours are correct, we’re up shit creek again. I’m stuck here. Why don’t you fly over to me instead of me going over to you?’
I stopped listening: how stupid I had nearly been: I cut off all reaction. Any shoulder in a storm, that was all my shoulder was to Krassner. Someone nudged me and said that’s Holly Fern on the line - I’d heard of her, who hadn’t: she being the new talent on the block, singing and dancing, according to her people, just like a reborn Ginger Rogers - I thought that was pretty stupid because whoever these days had heard of Ginger Rogers - and with a degree in philosophy which publicity also foolishly did to death. It was from a crap college. ‘Against stupidity,’ my mother Angel once said to me, ‘the Gods themselves strive in vain.’
Nobody had hair as good as mine, but hair isn’t everything, and just because I got up ordinarily with mine in the morning, didn’t mean others couldn’t get the same effect out of a hair salon, if they were prepared to spend half a day achieving it. I wiped Krassner out of my mind, moved my shoulder out of his line. Back at the console he dug me in the ribs and said, ‘Whatzamatter with you?’ but I didn’t deign to reply. It doesn’t do to aim too high, the fall’s too hurtful.
10
That night I called Felicity. I tried to get her to tell me more about Aunt Alison but she wouldn’t.
‘I shouldn’t have brought it up,’ she said. ‘What’s the point?’ She quoted from Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters.
‘We have had enough of action, and of motion, we,
Roll'd to starboard, Roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.'
No, she hadn’t heard yet from the Golden Bowl but if they wouldn’t have her she would sell up anyway and go round the corner to the nearest residential house. Joy’s brother-in-law Jack had turned up and made an offer on the house and she had had to disappoint Vanessa.
‘How much?’ I asked.
‘$750,000,’ she said.
‘But that’s lower!’ I was shocked.
‘It’s all he can afford, I won’t have to pay agent fees and I don’t want to disappoint Joy.’
‘How do you know he can’t afford it?’ I asked. ‘Because Joy said so?’
‘I don’t know what you’ve got against Joy. She’s a better friend than you ever were a granddaughter. Just because she’s a bad driver doesn’t mean she’s a bad person.’
‘No,’ I said bitterly, ‘she just prefers animals to people. Big deal. Is Joy’s sister moving in too?’
‘She died a year ago: Joy hated her, loved him.’ I asked if this meant there was romance in the air and Felicity told me not to be absurd. Joy hated sex but liked to have a man about the place to shout at.
Felicity was not moved by my anxiety that the house was sold, and the Golden Bowl had not yet confirmed her apartment. She said one room was much like another when you got older: one steak as hard on your teeth as the next. The I Ching had given her Biting Through, Chen Chi. She must bite resolutely through obstacles: then she would be rewarded with supreme success. I could tell these were mere delaying tactics: she would talk about anything at all except my lost aunt. I cut her short and asked her directly who the father of her first baby was. I pointed out that these days there is no family decision which can be made without consultation: if you gave away a family member you were giving away relatives for future generations, too, and you had to be answerable to them.
To which she replied tartly that I was a fine one to talk, since I was slipping out from under and having no children at all.
I said no, that’s why I wouldn’t be answerable to anyone, lucky old me. But she had, and so she was. You had to know your genetic background if only to keep the Insurance Companies happy.
She said don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs: she lived in Norwich, Connecticut. There were only two things to bear in mind. Death Only Insurance Policies meant they bet you you’d live longer than you thought you would, and annuities meant you bet them you’d outlive what they predicted. And they had whole departments working on it and you didn’t, and they normally won.
I said, though diverted, don’t change the subject, and repeated the question. ‘Who was the father of your adopted child?’
‘That is simply not the kind of thing you ask in proper circles,’ said Felicity, hoity toity, ‘and it is not your bloodline so what has it got to do with you anyway?’
‘I hope he stayed long enough to take off his boots,’ I said, ‘and give his name.’ Felicity, provoked as I had hoped, spoke haughtily. ‘He was not unknown to me, but it is not something I am prepared to talk about. I gave birth on my fifteenth birthday. Honestly, Sophia, would you want to remember such a thing? I know fifteen is nothing these days, but back in the thirties, certainly in the circles in which I moved, it was really something. I gave birth in a Catholic Home for unwed mothers and bad girls didn’t get given chloroform, which was the only anaesthetic available in childbirth at the time. That was to help teach us the wisdom of not doing it again.’
‘It didn’t work. Later on you had Angel.’
‘I took care to be married, and by that time there was gas-and-air. You really must not pry. So far as I am concerned my life began when I married a chicken farmer from Savannah. Anything that happened before that I have sensibly wiped out of my memory. It is all nothing to do with me.’
I wondered how she would get on at the Golden Bowl, where the old wisdom of not thinking about unpleasant things was hardly encouraged. But Felicity could always invent a life story for herself, and go with that, if she so preferred. Or did the spirit of invention, as with the emotions, as with the body, get tired with age? There was a quaver in her voice: a frisson of self-pity I had never heard before. The telephone conversation ended unsatisfactorily, with me anxious for her welfare and her ordering me to not stir up the past. But I had what I wanted. Two further clues. Her fifteenth birthday and a Catholic Home for unwed mothers.
The Tomorrow Forever team, I know, employed the services of a detective agency. The next day I put them on to the job of finding Alison. They offered to lose the cost in the general film expenses, but I said no, this was private work, I would foot the bill. There was now some talk of changing the title to Forever Tomorrow. I couldn’t see that it made much difference. Felicity’s birthday was 6 October. A Libran, fair and square and in the middle of the sign, better at being a mistress than a wife, not that I held any truck with astrology. There can’t have been a great number of babies born to fifteen-year-olds in London on 6 October 1930, in a Catholic Home for unwed mothers, and presumably some records of adoptions would have been kept. And with any luck the right ones would have survived the blitz, and I had always seen myself as a lucky person, though I knew enough from working on a film called Fire over England that great chunks of the national archive went up in flames in 1941.
If I couldn’t have Krassner I wanted a family. I wanted to be bolstered up, I wanted to be enclosed, I wanted someone to be around if I were ill, I wanted someone to look at my calendar and notice that the cat was due for his second worm pill. You could write yourself notices and pin them on a board as much as you liked, but how did you make yourself look at them? You had to have a back-up system.
11
‘What do Golden Bowlers do?
They live life to the full’
By the end of November Felicity was settled into the Atlantic Suite of the Golden Bowl Complex. Her house had been sold to Joy’s brother-in-law Jack, at a knockdown price. At the last moment he had had second thoughts about purchasing and she had brought the price down a further $50,000. It scarcely mattered. She had $5,000,000 in the bank: the interest on which was sufficient to pay all costs at the Golden Bowl, though if she lived to ninety-six or more, and rates continued to rise exponentially by ten per cent a year, she would have to begin to dip into capital. She could afford to buy a small gift here, give a little to charity t
here, though she had never been the kind to dress up and go to functions and give publicly. Too vulgar for Miss Felicity: too much gold and diamond jewellery on necklines cut too low to flatter old skin.
Felicity’s lawyer Bert Heller, Exon’s old friend, was satisfied that he had done his best by the old lady, as she had once alarmingly overheard him referring to her. Her will was in order and left everything to her granddaughter Sophia in England. Joy was pleased her friend was near enough to visit but that instead of having the responsibility of an elderly widow living alone next door, prone to falls and strokes, she now had the comfort of a brother-in-law as a neighbour, one who would look after, rather than need to be looked after. The move had suited everyone.
All Felicity had to do now, in fact, in the judgement of the outside world, was settle down, not make trouble, and live the rest of her days in peace.
And why not? The Atlantic Suite was composed of three large rooms, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom embossed with plated gold fittings and more than enough closet space: the view was pleasant: the rooms spacious. The world came to her through CNN, if she cared to take an interest in it, though few at the Golden Bowl did. Most preferred to look inwards and wait their turn to get a word in at group therapy. The decor and furnishings were pleasing and she had never been sentimental about her belongings: most had gone to auction. Sometimes Miss Felicity would remember a dress she had particularly liked and wonder what became of it: or a charming plate she’d owned, or a scrapbook she’d once compiled. Did people steal things, had she lost them, had she given them away? Why try to remember? It hardly mattered. She had a photograph of her granddaughter in a silver frame on her bedside table, but that was to keep Nurse Dawn quiet. Nurse Dawn, helping her unpack, had found it and stood it there when first Felicity arrived, and Felicity did not feel inclined to take on Nurse Dawn at the moment: she would wait until something more significant was at stake. To have family photographs on the bedside table suggested that life - by which she supposed she meant sex - was in the past.
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