Fay Weldon - Novel 23

by Rhode Island Blues (v1. 1)

  Abundance has success.

  Be not sad.

  Be like the sun at midday, by way of quite pertinent observations, such as

  The perseverance of a solitary man furthers.

  And what was William Johnson but a solitary man? Unless of course the oracle was suggesting he would be well advised to stay solitary? Surely not.

  She was going too far too fast, of course she was. Whenever had she done anything different? Meet someone in the least possible, and her mind was off at once, nest-building in her mind in the face of all likelihood, casting coins like a silly girl, trying to predict her own future; cheating, even, until the coins threw up what she wanted to hear. Were all women as idiotic? She thought maybe she was not unusual in her own generation: born helpless, obliged to live off men, having no way of earning for themselves, their minds darted for ever into hope and a vague kind of mysticism. She didn’t suppose Sophia thought in the same way: Sophia was the centre of her universe, she could afford to be. Sophia would be the one to do the picking and choosing, the men the ones to dream. Sad in its way: out of so much plenty struggled such a little shrivelled, shivering root of female trust, so much disinclination to engage in the future.

  As for lust, it was not the prerogative of the young: as you got older desire presented itself in a different form, that was all: as a restless sense of dissatisfaction, which out of sheer habit you had the feeling only physical sex would cure. It was generated in the head, not the loins, the latter these days admittedly a little dried up, and liable to chafing rather than the general luscious overflowing which had characterized their prime. Felicity had lived on her own at Passmore after Exon’s death with only the briefest sexual fling, and that with a man who’d come to buy some antique furniture, whom she was pretty sure was simply trying to get a good price from her - she was not gullible. But she did miss being in love: the mantra of I love you, I love you, running beneath the surface of everything said or thought, being so much preferable to the Golden Bowlers’ fail-back position, we live life to the full. How could they possibly do such a thing? No amount of selfhypnosis would make it true. Stuck as they were in those ridiculously deep armchairs, so difficult to get out of. The state of love - though she was not sure of this - didn’t demand physical fulfilment: men were past it after a couple of active decades anyway - after which they took to litigation or melancholy. What she’d been missing, she decided, was the consciousness of some secret level of the self where things more important than the rational mind would ever know took place, to do with the wheeling galaxies and the purposes of the life force, reduced to the whisper out of the soul, the foolish, pleading, murmuring, subtext to everyday female life: I love you, I love you.

  She found she was singing of all things an Elvis Presley song. She couldn’t remember the words. Dum ’de-dum, dum ’de-dum, de de de de dum. That was the secret of it. Always there from the start, just not yet come along. No wonder generations refused to believe in his death, saw Elvis walking the earth everywhere, fat hopeless ruin of a man that he was. He’d put his finger on the truth. There was someone for everyone in the end, who had been there since the beginning. Mid-eighties was pushing it: she could be mad, this could be senility, the beginning of the end: she didn’t care. She’d had a minor stroke, she was self-deluded, what did it matter? This elation was enough. Invulgar parlance, Mr Right had come along; and she was at one with every girl who’d ever hoped against hope he ever would.

  When Felicity had the Rosemount’s telephone number, she called through to Jack, Joy’s brother-in-law. She asked him if she could borrow the limo on occasion. She would pay him for its use, of course. She’d gathered from Joy that Charlie was left unemployed quite a lot of the time. Such an arrangement might suit everyone. Jack agreed, as Felicity had known he would. He’d cheated her out of $200,000 at least over the house deal. Felicity had allowed it to happen. She knew how useful it was to have other people in your moral debt. You had to be careful, of course: some people who’d wronged you bad-mouthed you for the rest of their lives, but mostly, if you were on their conscience, they would make amends when they could.

  William called her the next day, as the second hand moved to midday. She was watching the clock. She invited him to tea. He said he’d be delighted. She said she’d organized Charlie to collect him from and return him to the Rosemount. He said wasn’t she taking rather a lot for granted. She said no, she just didn’t have time for the waiting game. She was twelve years older than he was. He said she was twelve times richer than he was: she had the upper hand here. She said no; it just about balanced out. He said he’d stayed awake most of the night wondering if he had the nerve to call her. She said if he hadn’t she’d have waited three days and then called him. Then both fell silent.

  ‘It’s easy on the telephone, isn’t it,’ she said, eventually. ‘We just got three weeks’ worth of games out of the way. It’s in the flesh the trouble starts.’

  ‘We could keep it to the telephone,’ he said. ‘If you’d rather. It might be kinder on both of us.’

  ‘Hold your nose and jump,’ she said. ‘It’s always been my motto.’ He said he’d be round that afternoon.

  ‘Try not to let anyone see you,’ she said. ‘They’re bound to make trouble.’

  ‘We’re free agents,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ she said. ‘I’m older than you are. I know more about the world than you.’

  19

  This is the account Wendy gave me of her visit to Alison Dowson, nee Moore, adopted Wallace, at the address Aardvark Detectives had decided was in all likelihood hers. It was a good address, Wendy reported, on Eel Pie Island, a couple of miles short of where the Thames has decided to stop being tidal and runs clear and bright and wide towards the sea, unless a particularly high tide fights the prevailing current back. Pleasant turn-of-the-century houses stand prudently back from the riverbanks, all the same: well-cared-for lawns slope down towards the water, though this being November a general mossy sogginess abounded. (I had the feeling Wendy cared for nothing either watery or rural.) Boats were cocooned or else, neglected and with moorings grown slack, bumped up against the jetties and boathouses with the wake of every passing pleasure steamer. These, being mostly floating bars, cared nothing for season or view, let alone the spirit of Edwardian England so evident in these pleasant gardens; the sense of happy childhoods and plentiful cousins, of cheerful adventures without the help of drugs, and high teas with scones and cream and jam, before anyone feared fat and sugar.

  Houses here were much sought after: rock singers and stars of stage and screen bought properties to re-create a sense of tranquillity for their children, the illusion of privacy and timelessness that the river brings. Sweet Thames run softly while I end my song. Wendy, awed, would have given me a rundown of comparative property prices in the area but I stopped her. Alison’s house, numberless but registered at the Post Office as Happiness, would have changed hands for around a million pounds sterling if only because it was shabby and very little had been done to it in the last fifty years. Typical of the homes of a million comfortably-off elderly women, said Wendy, just before they decide they’re too old to cope alone and go to live with family or into a nursing home, and someone buys them up cheap and does them over.

  The porched front door was opened to her by a woman in her late thirties: the intellectual type, said Wendy: that is to say she had a thin pale face and large short-sighted eyes, into which unkempt hair would fall, and a chin which wanted to meet her flat chest, that being the best position for poring over books, and had that general air of abstraction which comes from living too much in the head and not enough in the world. I suffer from the syndrome a little myself: though it is not my own thoughts which keep me out of the world, just the inventions of others invading my head. I like to think that at least between gigs I can hold up a kempt head with the best; wave manicured nails and this season’s shoes at the right places, and pass for any party girl. Not that Krassner
seemed to notice either way. Maybe he was never in the real world at all. In his mind I was just an extra standing there on set until needed.

  Be that as it may, here I was in pursuit of family, and here seemed to be a putative, well, what? Cousin? An aunt’s daughter would be a full cousin; a half-aunt’s daughter could only be a second cousin. Not close enough to be able to look for family likenesses, or to demand a Christmas dinner of right, but at least something. Alison had had children and here was one of them. How eagerly I listened to Wendy’s account.

  The young woman was not unfriendly, but cautious, when Wendy explained her errand. She identified herself as Alison’s daughter Lorna, said she had an elder brother, Guy, and acknowledged that there was some hazy mystery in her mother’s background.

  The Aardvark agency had got it right. A mossy and mouldy wooden sign on the porch, Wendy was pleased to note, had Happiness burnt into it as if by a red-hot poker. Her mother Mrs Alison Dowson, said Miss Dowson, had recently moved to a nursing home. Wendy, looking over Lorna’s shoulder, saw a pleasant, shabby hall, a lot of books and papers, and beyond that a long room with large windows looking over the lawn and down to the river. She had the impression there were no children around. Lorna did not ask Wendy in. She made her stand on the step. She would consult with her brother Guy, she said, before deciding whether or not to pursue the matter. Lorna said she would call Wendy, and took her card, but did not give her own telephone number. Not that that would bother the Aardvark agency, to whom the e-mail, fax, phone numbers, credit card expiry dates, holiday details, overdraft facilities were an open book. You name it, they could find it out.

  As Wendy was leaving Lorna said, ‘I thought under the 1974 Children’s Act children were allowed to get in touch with parents. I didn’t think parents could approach children,’ to which Wendy replied, quick as a flash, that the law didn’t specify anything about grandchildren. She had the feeling, all the same, that Lorna would go at once and look the matter up in a reference book. That she did not have a trusting nature.

  Given the names Lorna and Guy Dowson, Wendy was able to make short work of the siblings’ personal histories. Guy was forty- six, divorced, not so far as anyone knew gay, and a lecturer in international law at the London School of Economics. Lorna was thirty-eight, unmarried and a professor of crystallography at Imperial College, where both her parents had once been students. There was no history of lesbian relationships: just a long presumably dispassionate relationship with a fellow academic - no sudden leaps in her John Lewis account in the lingerie department: these things usually betrayed themselves financially, one way or another - which had come to an end a year ago. (This latter was deduced from a sudden drop in Lorna’s minicab bills.) She had sold her own apartment in West Hampstead and moved back into her childhood home to live with and look after her mother. That had been three years back. What she had done with the proceeds of the sale would require further costly investigation - bank records are the most expensive to crack. I told Wendy not to bother. It hardly mattered. What did matter was the reason Alison had moved to a nursing home two months ago, on finally becoming incontinent. She was an Alzheimer’s victim. Medical and social security reports spoke well of Lorna: she had been efficient and competent in the care of her aged mother, but having injured her back could no longer cope with nursing her.

  ‘Her back seemed perfectly okay to me,’ said Wendy, ‘but so what? This case is not about insurance fraud.’

  The written Aardvark agency report went into more detail: it told me that Mark Dowson had been Alison’s one and only husband, and father of the two children Guy and Lorna. Mark, a palaeontologist, had worked in the back rooms of the Natural History Museum in London for most of his life: he had died of lung cancer at fifty-three. Not then a non-smoking environment, I suggested to Wendy - but she, a smoker herself, said that people who worked with old bones and the dust of past ages had a lower life expectancy than average. It was not necessarily anything to do with smoking, or with curses for that matter. Those involved with the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb had all died young - but it was the dust that did it, not the curse. Both Guy and Lorna had done well academically, though neither could be described as outgoing or fun-loving. I had by this time seen something of Lorna, and could say so with some confidence.

  Guy had moved in with his sister soon after his mother had gone into her nursing home. Lorna had apparently lived a blameless life but there had been some difficulty with Guy’s credit ratings, and he had a couple of drink-driving offences to his name. These, mind you, had been around the time of his divorce, and Wendy was disinclined to read too much into it. The wife, Edna, had ended up with the child (good news: a second cousin for me!), the house, alimony, and the new lover installed. Edna was now making trouble about access (bad news: the second cousin no sooner found than snatched away!). The divorced couple had been back to argue in front of the courts five times within the year. There might well be money difficulties, Wendy said: lawyers would be taking most of Mark’s money: Lorna wouldn’t be making much as an academic, these days among the poorest in our society. Alison’s care would have to be paid for: if the State was providing it would insist on her house being sold to meet a proportion of the cost. There might of course be trust funds somewhere, but they hadn’t showed up. Wendy offered to run further bank and credit checks but I felt I had more than enough to digest as it was and said no.

  The Dowsons seemed a respectable, aspiring, even rather dull family within the changing framework offered by the times: if this were a film, everyone would live happily ever after. Guy would meet spmeone new and now Lorna was to all intents and purposes without a mother she could spread her wings and fly. Though as Wendy described her, I was not quite sure that such was her temperament. One must not read oneself into other people. But maybe I had just come across the Dowsons at a low point in their lives. I, the cousin ex machina, would be the one to descend from the heavens to make all things well.

  Lorna called Wendy who called me, and said that Guy had agreed to meet me for lunch. We were to go to Rules in Maiden Lane, halfway between the LSE, where he worked, and Soho, where I did, but rather nearer his end, I thought. It was his choice of restaurant, all rib of beef and Yorkshire pudding and treacle tart and a dress code. Comfort food. I was excited, and yet terrified: it was as if for once I was directing a film, not just editing it. And strange to meet someone about whose life you knew a lot, while they knew nothing about you: it gave one agreeable if unreasonable power.

  I had a little trouble at the door gaining admittance: I had walked from Soho and so worn my sneakers. This did not conform to the dress code. I threatened to solve the problem by taking them off and going in with stockinged soles, so they quickly relented. Guy was already waiting there at the table. He rose to his feet politely. I had no sense of family from meeting, but why would I? The bloodline was running thin: we shared only a sixth of our DNA. Guy was broad-set, almost pudgy, with a born-old look, but with bright, quick, knowing eyes. He was already balding and had a long jaw, which gave him a mournful look, but might only have been the weight of the jaw dragging down the corners of the mouth. I reminded myself I was trying to gain a family, not a prospective lover. One was not meant to find family attractive. It was inappropriate. I found myself trying to please him, nevertheless. I did not get the feeling that he liked me very much: he ordered the roast beef and I ordered a Caesar salad without the croutons which he seemed to think peculiar of me and apologized to the waiter. I said I hoped he did not find me trendy and hysterical, and he smiled politely and said no of course not, but not very convincingly. When I talked about my job he looked puzzled, and couldn’t really work out what I did or why I would want to do it. I almost liked that. It was refreshing to meet someone outside the business. One’s life narrows down with the years: there is so much to say and so little time to say it in - one sticks to the patois of the profession, which can put others off. He had not heard of Harry Krassner, whose name I brought into
the conversation. (I can’t help doing this, I notice.) He, Guy, told me he had no real interest in meeting Felicity - Rhode Island was a long way away: she was very old and living in a home: his own mother was more than enough to cope with. His work seldom took him to the States; he lectured in Europe. He could understand that his mother Alison might well have liked to meet her real mother, but Felicity had left it rather late. His mother was now past wanting to do anything except be comfortable in her bed. I tried not to show, in the draining of my espresso - he had filter - that I thought he was a real wet blanket. When the bill came he suggested I pay it, since my interests were served by the meeting, not his. Startled, I paid. He said politely he had enjoyed the meeting, and it was pleasant to meet a cousin once removed, which put me in my place. Humiliated and hating him, I left him at the door of the restaurant.

  I called Wendy and told her the meeting was something of a washout, and Wendy said she was sorry after all that, but it was pretty much par for the course. People were not very adventurous after the age of thirty: they did not want anything new to happen. It took them all their energy to deal with what was in front of their noses. I was an exception. I prepared myself to cope with disappointment. But then the next day Alison’s other child, Lorna, called me in the cutting room and said I must come over to tea sometime. She was busy with students at the moment but as soon as a window opened she’d be in touch. I was unreasonably blissful. I danced round my apartment naked that evening and Krassner, back in town, asked what on earth had got into me? Delighted though he was to see me like this, who usually crawled into bed with him too exhausted to undress at all.