In the meantime, on the first day of December, Miss Felicity and Joy drove to Tommy’s funeral, driven by Charlie, who made an excellent, polite if melancholy and wild-eyed chauffeur. He wore a peaked cap, under which locks of black curly hair escaped. He owned a laptop. While sitting in the Mercedes waiting on his employers’ bidding he would consult it on obscure points of immigration law. The life of the battery was only three hours. Charlie let it be known that he preferred not to be kept waiting longer than this, or if he was, at least to have access to a power point. Tommy’s funeral, Felicity was able to reassure him, was unlikely to last more than half an hour.
The cemetery was forlorn: sea birds wheeled above, as if they mistook themselves for vultures. A few people clustered round an open grave, and stared openly as the Mercedes drew up a little distance away and the two expensive old ladies were handed out by Charlie. Otherwise all there was to look at was an open grave, a not very expensive coffin being lowered on ropes by impassive attendants, and a perfunctory parson.
Joy’s feet were cold. She wished she had worn her fur-lined boots with the high heels, but though they kept her feet warm they tended to make her totter. She did not want Charlie to see her tottering: she wanted to seem in command of herself and her body. Now that Jack was next door and Charlie in the guesthouse, the relaxed and slovenly days were over: she had a male audience. She wished she were not here by a graveside: it depressed her unutterably. She wished she were not Felicity’s friend, at the very least that she had been allowed to stay in the car. The elderly should keep away from funerals: it was not healthy to be reminded of mortality. Life was a long road uphill; you travelled in a vehicle driven by others; it was better to appreciate the scenery than to speculate about what was going to happen when you reached the top and looked down the other side.
One of Joy’s grandsons played computer games: she’d seen how you could topple down over the edge into a brilliant white nothingness: it had really scared her. These days she saw her own life like this, something almost virtual, perched on the edge of an abyss. Jack would stretch out his hand but nothing could stop her falling through the brilliance, and swimming round in the white waves below would be Francine, dragging her under in death as she had in life, laughing her victory. Joy realized she was sleeping, dreaming almost, standing there by an open grave. You could topple in, if you weren’t careful.
She paid attention. She counted. There were twelve mourners round the dismal hole in the ground, and some of those were probably from the church, brought in for the occasion. She wondered who had paid. Proper burials were expensive. The deceased had obviously been neither rich nor distinguished. Any normal person in Felicity’s position would simply have sent a wreath. Nurse Dawn had actually come down the steps pleading with Miss Felicity to stay, prattling about chills and depression and breaking ankles in the snow and the need to focus on life, not death. Felicity had been right about the Golden Bowl. They were certainly determined to look after you.
And what was Felicity to this Tommy, or Tommy to Felicity? A stepson, Felicity claimed, by a long-past marriage. How was one to say what people’s marital pasts really were? Everyone told lies, even Joy to herself, she’d been to a therapist: she knew all about that. Lovers became husbands in memory, husbands became lovers. After a certain age you were entitled to alter the facts to suit your comfort. And memory itself became patchy. You could remember the wedding venue, you could remember the canapes, you could remember what your new mother-in-law wore, and wishing she wouldn’t, but did you remember the face of the man who turned to you and gave you the ring? Not necessarily.
Joy had been married four times; she had certificates to prove it: one doctor, one lawyer, two insurance men in that order: if you left a husband you went up in the world: if they left you, you tended to have to take what was on offer. Men changed on the day you married them: though they always claimed it was you that did: that you didn’t bother any more. By which they meant you couldn’t be relied upon not to fall asleep in the middle of what they were saying, having heard it so many times before. She should never have left the doctor: at least the patients kept changing and had different symptoms and sometimes even died: but one law case is much like another, and what fascinates an insurance man is hard to keep awake for. This was the kind of thing you could discuss with Miss Felicity: Joy had been glad enough to see her go but now she was gone Joy missed her. No more popping next door: now it was a drive to the Golden Bowl, and just as well she had Charlie: Jack didn’t like her driving. Jack was beginning to behave like a husband, that is to say she was beginning to fall asleep while he was talking. He was in and out all the time: she didn’t even have the benefit of his bank balance let alone his company in bed. Francine had had all that. But at least Francine hadn’t lived to inherit. Well, everyone had their own experience. Felicity might be mean about passing on her own life experience but at least was interested in yours. Joy looked forward to the drive home in the back of the Mercedes. They could catch up with a thing or two.
She’d thought Felicity might have an ex-husband here today, which would explain her insistence on coming, but no. There was one rather good-looking elderly man, standing opposite them on the other side of the still open grave, with the coffin lying there uncovered while the preacher droned on and the wind howled and her feet froze, but he was not her type. Joy liked men more blond and bullish: grey-suited and thick-necked. Wealthy men got shinier and plumper as they got older: this one was too bony to be any kind of success, tall and lanky, more Felicity’s style than hers, but at only around seventy was well out of Felicity’s age range. His overcoat looked as if it was borrowed and his shoes were unpolished. Maybe Charlie would end up looking like this. Hook nose, alert eyes, one of those lucky heads of hair which didn’t just fall out as time passed, and turned proper white, not even grey. She’d never felt at ease with a man with plentiful hair. There was something unnatural about it: they were cheating. Men were meant to go bald. It was God’s punishment for their maleness. The man with the thick white hair was with a middle-aged woman in a cheap coat standing next to two dismal-looking teenage boys, presumably the deceased’s family. Even while Joy watched he said something to the woman and she rounded up the two boys and walked away, overcome with what looked more like temper than grief. Joy wondered what that was about.
In went the token clods of dirt. A thin and miserable hymn. Joy opened and closed her mouth dutifully: what was the point of exhausting her vocal cords: the wind blew away the sound in any case. And now what was this? What was going on? Felicity and White Hair were exchanging glances, in that peculiar way people sometimes did when they were young and very aware of each other, first looking away, not quite meeting the other’s eye, then catching it. It was absurd. She nudged Felicity to stop making a fool of herself but Felicity didn’t even notice. She’d gone bright pink. Or perhaps it was just the cold wind. Whoever blushed when they were over eighty? Whoever was looking, to see whether you blushed or not? As you grew older you became more and more invisible. The eyes of the world slipped by you. Shop assistants went on talking as if you didn’t exist. You vanished into a background of little old ladies. The only answer, Joy had found, was to wear bright colours or a good deal of gold jewellery. Then people took notice. If she’d worn her jewellery today, which she foolishly hadn’t out of respect for the deceased, who clearly wasn’t a candidate for a great deal of respect, why then the man with the white hair would have been trying to pick up Joy, not Felicity. Joy and he were much of an age, and Felicity was old, old, old. ‘Do you know that man?’ asked Joy.
‘No,’ said Felicity. ‘Not so loud, please.’
‘He’s wearing a wig,’ said Joy, hoping out of habit to nip any potential new unsuitable relationship in the bud. So much one had to do for one’s friends: so much she remembered of her youth. She might as well have saved her breath. During the singing of the hymn the man with the hair eased himself round the graveside and ended up standing next to Felici
ty. Felicity still had a pretty voice: at one dire time in her life - one of the few snippets she had disclosed to Joy - she had sung professionally. The voice was by now admittedly small, and a trifle quavery, but Felicity knew how to present it to advantage, trilling away under the stranger’s ear. The pick-up line was of course simple: they had a corpse in common.
‘A close relative?’ Joy heard him ask Felicity, in sympathetic tones. What was he after? Money? Felicity looked expensive; she always did, though her entire wardrobe could have been bought for a tenth of the cost of Joy’s teddy-bear brooch.
‘My stepson,’ said Felicity, and actually batted her eyes. They had aged well - large grey-green eyes with heavy lids which hadn’t fallen too badly: she might even at one time have had them lifted. Joy followed Felicity’s coy downward gaze: she seemed to be examining the stranger’s rather peculiar shoes; heavy, boatshaped, scuffed and battered things.
‘That’s a bit of a downer,’ said the man, taken aback. ‘I’m sorry. I’d no idea.’ He had a soft voice: Joy thought maybe he’d come down for the occasion from Boston. Joy herself tended to speak out of the side of her mouth: she’d started life in New Jersey and wasn’t ashamed of it.
‘But only a stepson.’ Felicity seemed to have decided on candour. ‘Not a blood relative. I hadn’t seen him for fifteen years, and I can’t say he loomed large in my life. I lent him some money and that was the last I saw of him. You know what people are like. No good turns goes unpunished.’
‘That’s for sure,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Nevertheless, you came to his funeral. You have a good heart.’
‘To stand about in the cold for half an hour,’ she said, ‘to honour what was good in someone, is no big deal. How else are we to encourage it?’
This sort of preachy stuff would be enough to put any sane man off, thought Joy. You had to admire the way Miss Felicity took risks. Joy’s mother had told her never try to be too clever with a man: never say anything they wouldn’t say themselves: nothing put them off quicker, and look how well she, Joy, had done for herself over the years. Felicity was prepared to risk all at a stroke. It looked as if she’d blown it, thank God. The conversation lapsed. Now they could get on back. Joy tugged the sleeve of Felicity’s ethnically embroidered cream-and-green coat to remind her that she, Joy, existed. That was another thing. Felicity wore such peculiar clothes: Joy’s mother thought a girl did best if she took care to look bright and healthy, and not too deep. Felicity always looked as if there was some secret going on, something held in reserve behind the gauzy scarves and the embroidery.
Joy could see she was wasting her time. Felicity and the man with the white hair were now looking into each other’s eyes, across the grave. The afternoon had become enchanted. It’s how Joy had met the lawyer, though already married to the doctor, eyes meeting across a crowded room. These things did happen. But Joy had been thirty then, when these things did hurtle at you out of the blue to hit you and change your life. But Felicity was over eighty, and this was no crowded room, it was a graveside, clumps of dirt fallen on to a cheap coffin and no-one had so much as thrown a flower. Two of Joy’s husbands had been cremated. The more elaborate and expensive the coffin the easier it was to avoid the thought of the body inside; what had once shared your bed turned to something that felt like marble, but wouldn’t last as well. After the coldness, corruption. Dead bodies had a kind of compacted solidity, as if they were more real than you were. None of it bore too much thinking about. This flirtation, for what else could you call it, might just be Felicity’s way of not thinking about it. Joy felt overcome by too much thought and overwhelmingly sleepy. She would go back to the car by herself. Charlie would put a blanket over her knees. He still frightened her but Jack swore he was okay so she supposed he was.
15
‘Do you have transport?’ asked Miss Felicity of William Johnson, for that was his name.
‘I don’t, as it happens,’ said William. ‘It vanished along with my stepdaughter some ten minutes back.’
‘Someone or other always behaves badly at a funeral,’ observed Miss Felicity. ‘Let me give you a lift to somewhere more convenient than this hillside.’
‘I would like to get in to Mystic,’ he said. ‘It’s where I temporarily reside. We don’t get many limos at our door.’
‘Life has its ups and downs,’ Miss Felicity said. They walked back towards the Mercedes. He offered her minimal explanations. That Tommy had been his stepdaughter Margaret’s partner, on and off for fifteen years, that Tommy drank too much and had never been a good provider. That he, William Johnson, had stepped in to help the family whenever he could.
‘She didn’t seem very grateful,’ said Felicity.
‘No good turn goes unpunished, the way you said.’ And he laughed again. She tried to match her footsteps to his. He slowed his to achieve the same. The sun came out and the snow sparkled. What had been dank and dismal obligingly changed its nature and became crisp and romantic. Joy’s impatient face stared at them from the car.
They were in no hurry to reach it.
‘But you came along to his funeral, all the same,’ she said, admiration in her voice.
‘I came along all the same,’ said the man. ‘And so did you.’ He said he wasn’t prepared to attribute all blame to Tommy: Tommy wasn’t all bad. He let it be known that his wife had died four years back.
‘How strange,’ said Felicity, and let it be known that she was widowed, and for the same length of time that he had been a widower. To the very month, as it turned out. Another bond. She had, she said, only just given up living alone, and moved into the Golden Bowl. It was okay.
‘It ought to be at that price,’ he said. He’d read their brochure. He couldn’t afford anything like that: he had given the marital home to Margaret and lived off various pensions. The best deal he’d found in the area was a place called the Rosemount: a dump but a pleasant dump.
He lit up a cigarette before he got in the car, and kept everyone waiting.
‘That’s the first in five months,’ he said. ‘Funerals are upsetting.’ He stubbed it out after two minutes and ground it into the snow. ‘Now you know the worst about me,’ he said.
‘It would have to get a lot worse than that,’ she said. ‘I haven’t led an easy life.’
Joy raised her pencilled eyebrows at the prospect of giving this addicted stranger a lift. That his name was William Johnson did nothing to reassure her. He was a confidence trickster. The name was too plain and plentiful among the population to be for real. Felicity and William both climbed into the back seat beside her. Rather than be squashed she was obliged to clamber out and clamber in again and sit in the front, next to Charlie. A gentleman would have suggested he was the one to do that. What was the point of driving round in a limo if you couldn’t keep undesirables out? That was the whole point of them. She hadn’t felt as raw and flustered as this since she’d been at high school, and her best friends had started dating and leaving her out in the cold. Did nothing in life ever get better? She could see she had replaced the one bad sister, Francine, with another, Felicity, and how could she discuss this with Felicity if Felicity paid her no attention at all? Her first husband had been trained in Freudian psychoanalysis: he would marvel at her insights. ‘A woman’s intuition,’ he would say, lovingly. ‘It certainly can’t be brain!’ He had been eighteen years older than she. She had left him for a Jungian. You entered into a certain world when you first married and tended to stay in it, if only because the men you met were so often your husband’s colleagues. She’d always envied Francine, who had married a car dealer and stayed married, though she thought Jack had affairs. Anything for a laugh. Just getting a smile out of Francine was a problem.
Joy heard Felicity tell the alleged William Johnson that she had first come to the States as a GI bride, married to Tommy’s father. The plantation home in Atlanta she had been told about, and shown photographs of, turned out to be a shack with hens, Rhode Island Reds, running around. When she
had charged her husband with deceiving her he had replied, ‘I wanted it to be true.’
Lies, thought Joy. This was the first she’d ever heard of such a story. ‘This must be an upsetting kind of day for you, then,’ said William. ‘Some things are better not remembered.’
‘I’ve known worse,’ Felicity said. A GI bride? Joy was shocked. One of the bad girls of Europe, fortune hunters, who’d pounced upon American servicemen overseas and robbed the girls back home of husbands? Could it be true? Joy had an uneasy feeling that it might be. Serve Felicity right if she fell in with a confidence trickster. They would be much of a muchness. Joy would do nothing to save her.
‘How old are you, William?’ she heard Felicity ask. So up front, how did she get away with it?
‘Seventy-two,’ he replied.
‘A mere chicken,’ she said, ‘compared to me. I’m eighty-one.’ More lies!
‘Women age better than men,’ he said. ‘I’d have thought you were younger than me. Anyone would.’
Joy raised eyes to heaven, and turned her head - with some difficulty: she was having trouble with arthritis in the neck - and said William had better give directions as to where exactly it was he wanted to go.
‘The Rosemount Retirement Home,’ he said. ‘Mystic. Not too far out of your way.’
Fay Weldon - Novel 23 Page 10