Fay Weldon - Novel 23

by Rhode Island Blues (v1. 1)

  The last lucid thing Angel had said to me when they declared her to be a danger to herself and others, and had jabbed her full of medication, and I was sitting next to her in the ambulance on the way to the psychiatric unit (from which she was to escape) was that it was all Felicity’s fault. Felicity had destroyed her, and would destroy me too.

  ‘Your grandmother is evil,’ she said. I accepted then that Angel was indeed raving. Felicity was no worse or better than anyone else: she was better than the teachers at the various schools I’d gone to and not gone to: morally better than my father who’d walked out rather than have to do the dirty work of having his wife put away, and simply abandoned me, his child, to cope. She was less use to me than studying, or my passion for cinema, and certainly less use to me than my friends. I’d always had friends and mothers of friends who’d take me in, when times were bad. Children meet with great kindness. In fact Felicity did her best, I knew, within the boundaries of her own nature. But then everyone does. And a mother’s last words are difficult to forget, if only traditionally. You know how it is.

  Nor did I want Felicity, thirty years later, to be raising these painful matters at five in the morning. I would rather be lying beside Krassner, making the most of such time as I had with him: me, the person without past, without family, the one who just sometimes walked out of the editing suite and engaged in the real world.

  I switched the conversation before I got angry and upset. I gave Felicity the information I was saving like the icing on the lemon drizzle cake my mother would buy in the early days, when we had a nice apartment like other people and my father was selling a painting or two and could pay the rent.

  ‘I think I’ve found your Alison,’ I said to Felicity. ‘Your long-lost daughter.’ For once it was quiet outside the window. Those of excessive habits had finally gone home to rest and recuperate. The tourists had not yet woken. Only the binmen still clattered along the edges of Berwick Street market, a few blocks away, clearing the detritus of fruit and vegetable. Krassner snored gently on the bed. It was the third successive night he had spent there. The insides of my thighs were agreeably sore. He was due to fly home on Friday. This was early Wednesday morning. When he was gone I would be able to get my clothes to the cleaners and have my hair trimmed and streaked, and do all the other small necessary things you don’t seem to do when there’s a man around because they seem so domestic and boring and not what the film stars do.

  There was a long silence from Felicity’s end. The lemon icing I so looked forward to was sometimes too tart and sour, I remembered that. When the silence was broken it was a slap sharp enough to dash the cake from my hand altogether.

  ‘I didn’t ask you to find her,’ said Felicity. ‘I just told you she existed. I should have known better than to mention it. I’m sorry I did.’

  ‘I’m finding her for me as much as you,’ I said feebly.

  Therapy babble,’ said Felicity. ‘For me! For me! What makes you so important in the scheme of things? What have you to do with this, something that happened to me seventy years ago and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget?’

  ‘But what harm can it do? Another family member-’

  You never knew what you’d get with another person, was Felicity’s view, family member or not, and she let me know it. They’d come smiling over your threshold and stay to burn the place down. I was too young to know anything. As you grew older the soup of life - I beg your pardon? - got thicker and mushier and bits sank to the bottom and you’d better leave them there, not drag them up to the surface.

  ‘Well, Gran,’ I said, trying to keep it light, keep my voice from trembling, trying to remember the sheer unreasonableness of Angel’s hostility, ‘no wonder you like to live out of packets. One- minute minestrone with added vitamins. Just heat and serve and nothing in the murk.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Miss Felicity demanded. ‘Don’t change the subject. I can only hope you haven’t set anything in motion you can’t control.’ I just felt tired and weak and in need of affection. I wanted my mother.

  * * *

  The door between Krassner and me had swung open. He stirred in his sleep. That was all going to go wrong too. I must be prepared for it. I was just a convenient bed, so he didn’t have to take taxis to get to his meetings. I pushed the door shut with my feet. I have nice feet. Krassner admired them too; he’d gently pull the toes apart to admire the pink perfection between them, which, he claimed, when shadowed matched my hair. Men and women together can be so ridiculous: but it’s such a wonderful vacation from real life, all this mutual grooming between lovers, or quasilovers, as we were. Just practising, or remembering, or passing time, holidaying with the wrong person, trying to forget the right one. Except I had never yet met the right person so what was I going on about? It was all right by me.

  ‘You are two bloodlines and one generation distant from this person,’ Felicity was saying. ‘It is nothing to do with you. You are like all your generation: you know nothing and understood nothing. See a problem, sort it out! Most problems are unsolvable.’

  I tried not to snivel, thus scolded. The attack was so unexpected. We had parted so amiably, and so recently, as if we were proper family, apart but supportive. But the old distresses still pushed their way up to the surface, excoriating. I was seven years old again, my parents rowing over my existence, my father angry, my mother at best dysfunctional (though the word hadn’t been invented so it was a rather rarer condition than now), at worst raving. I was playing patience with sticky cards laid out on the carpet, willing the hand to solve itself and not end in stultification. It hits you when you are around this age that the pattern your life is making at this particular time will recur, ’til the end of your life, you being the person you are. It will take minimally different forms but essentially be the same. Pocket money will give way to earnings, parents to spouses, but nothing’s really going to change, except the patterns of the carpet, and that’s if you’re lucky. What was Krassner but a game of patience played with sticky cards that wouldn’t resolve itself? I was not beautiful enough, or rich enough, or interesting enough: mostly I was not brave enough, I didn’t have the courage, the toughness, not to care what others think of me. Those who care least, win. That’s why Holly does so well out of life.

  * * *

  ‘Now I suppose I’ve gone and upset you,’ came Felicity’s voice, softer now, and then, blessedly: ‘Oh, go on then do what you like.’ I heard muffled voices at the other end: remonstrations: and then my grandmother’s voice again, to me.

  ‘Sorry about that. It was Nurse Dawn, telling me not to have late-night telephone conversations. You remember Nurse Dawn?’ ‘Of course I do. And what business is it of hers?’

  ‘She says talking to relatives is like eating cheese before going to bed; it leads to bad dreams.’

  ‘Doesn’t that depend on the conversation?’

  ‘That’s what I told her.’

  ‘This one was a bad dream to begin with. How did she know you were on the phone?’

  ‘There isn’t a direct outside line. It goes through the operator. She must have told. I don’t think this is a complex for the elderly at all. I think it’s a CIA training ground for surveillance techniques and psychological warfare. I’d better go now.’

  I quite liked being described by Felicity as a relative. It made me feel warmed and safe, and not so unlike other people after all. But I also quite liked the thought of this grandmother of mine feeling obliged to do what Nurse Dawn told her. Perhaps at the Golden Bowl I would find allies; people who would understand what it was like to have Angel for a mother and Felicity for a grandmother. Then I felt disloyal, and weak for wanting to belong, and sorry for Felicity, because her life was drawing to an end, and there was nothing she could do about it, not even a rewind button to press, no way of cutting the footage together differently: the picture was locked. No way now of editing out the boring bits. These had to be lived through in real time, with a body that was i
nexorably running down, and not all the efforts of the Golden Bowl could help her.

  I would certainly not have a baby by Krassner, or anyone, ever. The smaller the family the better. One minute you resented them, or they were making you cry, the next you were feeling responsible for them, missing them.

  All I could hear over the phone now was the wheeling of the stars, the singing of celestial spheres. She was gone. I listened a little on the open line to the chirrupings of the cosmos, before putting down the receiver. A group of tarts clip-clopped on brazen heels down the street below, back no doubt from some Arabian orgy in one of the big Park Lane hotels, calling one another a cheerful good night. People always manage to find areas of pleasure in their lives, whatever others may think of them. They get together and have a good time. It’s that or death.

  I slipped back into bed beside Krassner whose organ extended ramrod-like at the touch of my body against his, though he still did not wake. I did not interpret this as either love or lust: he was just a man of easy sexuality with quick, automatic and healthy responses. I felt shredded, raw, and cold of spirit, flesh and heart, and made no attempt to take advantage of so easy a prey. I was to be back in the editing suite sooner than I had thought, cutting a film called Hope Against Hope, a legal thriller, with a female director, Astra Barnes. When Krassner went back to Holly at least I would have something to do. I took the usual comfort from this. It wasn’t good enough.

  13

  On 1 December, in the face of opposition from Nurse Dawn and even Dr Grepalli, who came tapping at her door to warn her against so doing, Felicity went to a funeral. The body of a man had been discovered in a beach hotel in Mystic and Felicity’s name was in his address book, as living at 1006 Divine Road. Joy’s brother-in-law had happily given the police her new address. The death was by natural causes: drunk, the man had choked on his own vomit. His name was Tommy Salzburger. Fie had been in the neighbourhood for only two days. The police had come up to the Golden Bowl to interview Felicity: fortunately they had telephoned first and Nurse Dawn had ensured they came not in a police car and not in uniform, so they could pass for insurance brokers or lawyers: the kind of professionals who do visit Golden Bowlers on occasion. To be on the safe side Nurse Dawn also persuaded them to park their car outside Felicity’s French windows, to the side of the building, so their presence did not become a matter of curiosity for the other guests.

  Tommy Salzburger was Felicity’s stepson by her first marriage to Sergeant Jerry Salzburger of the United States Air Force, one time of Atlanta, long deceased. Miss Felicity freely admitted it. She had no idea why Tommy was in the neighbourhood, she had not seen him for fifteen years or so, but if his turning up in Mystic was anything to do with her, which she pointed out could be purely coincidental (maybe like her latest husband he was interested in naval history; appearances could deceive), he was probably after money. She had lent him sums in the past, never returned. He was a gambler and a drinker.

  The police had called her the next day to say Tommy Salzburger had a girlfriend with two of his children living in the locality: he had turned up there but she had turned him away from her door: no doubt he died while attempting to drown his sorrows. Felicity surprised them by asking where the funeral was, and shocked Nurse Dawn by saying she was going.

  ‘You will be upset,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘You will catch cold and bring back germs into the building. It isn’t fair to the other guests. No-one will expect you to go. Old people, like children, are excused from funerals.’

  ‘But I want to go,’ said Felicity. And when Joy called up asked if she’d come along to keep her company, and rather to her surprise Joy shouted that she would, since now she had a chauffeur, whose services she shared with Jack.

  14

  ‘We don’t have to actually get out of the car when we get there, do we?’ Joy pleaded.

  A flesh-and-blood child was one thing but a vagrant stepchild from an unfortunate and short-lived marriage who wasn’t even a blood relation hardly merited catching cold. Better to watch from the Mercedes window. She never liked burials, as this one was to be, the turning over of graveyard dirt. There had been plagues in the area, albeit long ago, and mass burials, everyone knew, and heaven knew what still lingered. There were bound to be germs about. Cremation was more hygienic.

  ‘You’re old enough to be excused,’ Joy shouted into Felicity’s shrinking ear. ‘You could have got out of it, I don’t see why you didn’t.’

  ‘He was a very nice little boy,’ said Felicity, ‘though he grew up to be a nuisance to everyone. I go to his burial in memory of the child he used to be, not the man he became. And if I don’t go, who will?’

  ‘We get the funerals we deserve,’ cried Joy, to the world. Joy felt better able to assert herself now that she had Jack living next door. She felt protected. Jack was a sociable person; gusts of male energy swept through her house whenever he visited, which was every day. He did the sort of things men did. He had the Volvo taken to the garage and the dents got rid of. He had the low stone walls rebuilt. Somehow the drapes begun to hang less limply: the cushions seemed to plump themselves. There was a purpose to the place. When Jack said, as he often did, that she, Joy, reminded him of her deceased sister Francine, she did not sulk or feel hurt: she accepted the comparison gracefully, even as a compliment. With Jack in the house she had at last what was hers by rights. There was no special reason for thinking this, other than everything her sister Francine had ever had, Joy, being the older sister, felt was hers by rights.

  If you just hung round long enough and kept cheerful things seemed to turn out okay. Francine had come along three years after Joy was born, and Francine had died three years before Joy, so Joy already had six years’ more life than Francine, albeit a little deaf and a little short-sighted. That alone was a kind of victory: there might be more to come. Could you marry your deceased sister’s husband? It was the kind of thing Felicity might well know: Joy had called Felicity at the Golden Bowl to find out, but instead of being able to discuss the matter had been roped in to accompany her friend to the funeral of some derelict she personally had never met and nobody seemed to like.

  In honour of the funeral and her friend’s presumed grief, Joy was dressed in suitable black, her hair was less blonde than usual, and her mascara kept to a minimum. She wore a bright yellow fluffy teddy-bear brooch to keep everyone’s spirits up; its eyes were real diamonds balanced on emerald spikes, which spun when the wearer moved. Jack had bought them for her from a friend who imported jewellery. The shop price would have been in the region of $5,000 but Harry had acquired them for $500. He was like that.

  Miss Felicity was still displeased with Sophia, and anxious for her too. To suddenly start searching for distant relatives was the kind of impetuous thing Angel would do, though real mental illness would surely have surfaced in her granddaughter by now. To worry about it, she assured herself, was a symptom of the free- floating anxiety a doctor had once told her she suffered from: lighting like a fly here or there without real cause or purpose. All you could do was wait for it to go away, which assuredly it would. In the meantime she could only hope that Sophia’s search would lead nowhere, and that no news from her was good news.

  * * *

  The graveyard where Tommy was to be buried was next to a small clapboard church outside Mystic, prettily sited in a snowy landscape. Just a light sprinkling of the stuff: just enough to make everything seem fresh and clean, and cover up the layer of rotting autumnal leaves which at this time of year got everywhere, staining the landscape with the dankness of decay. The chauffeur turned out to be Charlie, the very same Charlie from New York who had collected Sophia for her Concorde flight, and whose looks had so alarmed Joy. He had left his card on the hall table, at Passmore, from whence it had inadvertently fallen to the floor. Jack, moving in, had come across the card and read in this event a sign from God. Joy was talking of employing a chauffeur and handyman as well as a housekeeper: let it be Charlie. She could well aff
ord it: when Joy protested that she could not Jack said he’d made such a good deal on the house, thanks to her, he would be happy to pay something towards the cost of a chauffeur; he would only occasionally want to borrow him. (Of such sensible arrangements are future difficulties made.) Charlie had been summoned and interviewed: he was from the former Yugoslavia: he had arrived three years back as part of a refugee settlement programme. He was taken on in trust and hope.

  He was to live in the guesthouse above Joy’s garage block. Of course, his family could join him. Anything else would be inhumane. Everyone must do their bit to make the world a better place. Of course, Joy was to sign forms without reading them: of course the guesthouse would fill up with wives, children, sisters, sisters-in-law, young girls with soulful looks and permanent tears in their eyes, old ladies in headscarves. Two of the tearful girls would turn out to be pregnant: no-one liked to inquire too closely about the father, or fathers. Of course, thanks to Charlie’s cleverness on the Internet and his familiarity with immigration law, relatives once scattered all over the world were to fly in to Boston and find themselves united in the Connecticut woods. A wife, a dark-eyed, bouncing, energetic, always pregnant young woman, was to replace Joy’s mean-minded housekeeper. In time the family would clear some of the woodland which bordered on Joy’s land, the ownership of which had never quite been established, and start to grow their own food. They were even eventually to keep a cow, which required massive amounts of feed to keep it nourished, since grazing in these wooded parts was not good, and for which Joy would in her kindness pay. But since the diamond eyes alone of Joy’s new teddy-bear brooch, the gift from Jack that showed just how precious she was to him, would keep many a cow in comfort, what was the big deal? Charity begins at home. None of this was quite what Jack or Joy had intended, but in the end it is impossible for the softhearted to keep the teeming, seething rest of the world out, nor should they try too hard. Care for animals today, care for people tomorrow. It escalates.