Fay Weldon - Novel 23

by Rhode Island Blues (v1. 1)

  ‘Scones and jam and sandwiches and family snaps!’ I cried. ‘Family at last!’

  Fie was puzzled and intrigued. I have the feeling that Americans use their large country to advantage, simply to get away from family, paying it lip service at Thanksgiving. They do not like to cluster together as we do, our little family units our defence against the world. They are braver and tougher than we are. His parents had started out in Buffalo: his father now lived in Texas, his mother in Sacramento: both had remarried, and started their lives over. Fie reminded them both of what both would rather forget, their time together. His father said how like his mother he was. His mother said how like his father he was. Both claimed to be proud of him and both wanted money from him. At night, lying next to me, he would sometimes sigh heavily in his sleep, and I would feel my heart almost break for him, but there is no healing the world’s grief, of which he had no more than his share. I really cannot understand why we are born with such a capacity for it. But there is always cinema, to take us out of ourselves.

  20

  Felicity and William met almost daily over a period of six weeks without attracting the attention of Nurse Dawn. Between two o’clock and five o’clock in the afternoon, activities at the Golden Bowl ceased: guests were expected to retire to their suites to rest and meditate. Videos were provided: a supply of black-and-white movies out of Hollywood second to none, as the brochure put it, plus a whole range of self-help extravaganzas: Breathe Your Way to Tranquillity, The Art of Happy Memory, Meet Yourself As You Really Are and so on. Most Golden Bowlers, having seen the old movies the first time round, and exhausted emotionally by the daily effort of self-improvement and self-revelation, simply slept. Nurse Dawn slipped upstairs to be with Dr Grepalli, and the other staff relaxed in her absence. The place dreamed.

  In the West Wing, the long, low building which Sophia had noticed from Dr Grepalli’s office, morning or afternoon made little difference. Life-support systems hummed and buzzed; heart and blood- pressure monitors called for constant help. Benign old eyes gazed dreamily ceilingwards, all passion spent, drifting in the good dreams that today’s hypnotic drugs induce. It was here in the West Wing that those Golden Bowlers who were finally lost to senility or incontinence were cared for. This was where, from time to time, priests came to administer last rites - mostly to keep the staff happy (many in the caring professions are of Irish or Catholic extraction): the departing guests themselves beyond worrying about the afterlife, or the punishment or rewards ahead. This was where the undertakers called with their discreet vans, to transfer the husks of the once living out the back gates. Golden Bowlers knew well enough when the back gates were opened: staff talked, and the gates creaked mightily, in spite of any amount of oiling. Dr Rosebloom had been one of the few to succumb in the main house: it happened sometimes, but rarely. Nurse Dawn had an eye for an impending sudden death: the sharp pain in the big toe, which, though considered innocent enough by the one who complained about it, could be the precursor of an infarction; sometimes a sudden pallor, an abstraction, as the soul, almost as if told in advance, prepared to quit the body. Then a sedative in the three-times-daily vitamin drink, and a discreet transfer to the West Wing, and a return to the main house in a couple of days if happily the crisis passed. However, Dr Rosebloom had just sneakily and suddenly deceased, almost, Nurse Dawn felt, to spite her: a wrong note: how the discordance jarred. Nurse Dawn played the Golden Bowl as if she were a piano player and the organization was her instrument; she hated fumbles and jumbles. At the moment, she felt in her fingertips, all was running along well, smoothly, almost merrily, with no false notes, Pianola style. She could go up to Dr Grepalli’s suite and relax, or at any rate help him to, with corsets and stiletto heels and a neat little horse whip, without concern.

  The arrangement between Felicity and Jack was that Charlie would drop William off at the Atlantic Suite at two-thirty every weekday and pick him up at four. Joy took a nap every afternoon: there seemed no reason to agitate her by letting her know how Charlie was occupied. If he were not around she would assume that Jack next door had some use for him.

  Seeing a Mercedes and driver, the security man at the gates of the Golden Bowl opened them without question to let the vehicle through. Charlie, instead of driving up to the big front door, which everyone refrained from calling the Golden Gates, drew up outside the French windows of the Atlantic Suite and there dropped William off, before casually driving away. Charlie knew where his bread and butter lay, and how to be discreet. Even in his native land such a budding relationship would have aroused comment and disapproval. Only in the United States, he thought, would the old have health and energy enough thus to complicate their lives. It gave him a sense of future. He might even give up smoking the better to fit in.

  Felicity, on the first visit, obliged to unhinge her vision - a whole day in the making - of William Johnson from the reality, was relieved to see coming towards her a lean well-set-up man wearing jeans and an open-necked shirt. He did not hobble, or dribble, or shuffle, things she might have chosen to forget. From a distance he could even have been in his forties. Close to, yes, the grey-green eyes were rheumy, the mouth thinned, all that. What did it matter? So he was seventy-two, she was eighty-something. That was the way the world went, these days. What was age, for a woman? Mostly the absence of oestrogen. She had taken one little yellow tablet a day from the age of forty-seven: she had not even known when the menopause started, if indeed it had ever come. She had looked in the mirror twenty minutes back and for once had been satisfied with what she saw. It was a magic mirror, she decided: it threw back your soul to you, and not your looks. Mirror mirror on the wall who deserves love most of all? Me, me, me. Just one last time. Please.

  For the first two weeks the couple sat opposite each other across the table, studying one another, not touching.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Why have you ended up in the Rosemount? Don’t you have a pension, insurance, entitlements, like other people?’ He was vague. He was looking for the right place. He had for many years been a teacher of English literature in a school in the Bronx, head of a department in the days when to be a teacher was a noble thing, suggested a life of dedication to the common cause, bringing a dream to the nation’s children. It wasn’t like that now, of course. Teachers were nobodies. They had no status. He’d been offered promotion many a time, could have been principal, joined the School Board, that kind of thing, but he loved actual teaching too much. His task, his vocation, his skill. And there’d been problems with taxes after his ex-wife’s death. A lot had been paid out that shouldn’t have been. Then lawyers had taken more than he had got back. Besides, he liked the Rosemount.

  * * *

  ‘I like company,’ he said. ‘Living alone has its compensations. I’ve tried it. But spend days without hearing a human voice and when you finally do you can’t understand what it’s saying.’

  Sometimes she felt he was not telling her the whole truth. He was not necessarily lying, just missing something out. She was not sure she wanted to know what it was. You trusted or you didn’t. She trusted.

  ‘And after families, I suppose strangers could be a relief,’ she said, and he agreed, but he was not forthcoming about his family. She asked what life was like at the Rosemount.

  ‘They try to give you happy pills,’ he said. ‘So long as you never swallow them you’re okay.’

  ‘It was never happiness one wanted,’ said Felicity.

  ‘If you hurt,’ agreed William, ‘you know you’re alive.’

  That was on the first meeting, which set the pattern for the ones to come. They talked, but didn’t touch. Maybe that was all he wanted, just someone to talk to? Maybe there was no sexual component in his interest in her. She was a woman in her eighties. It didn’t feel like it, emotionally: apparently you learned nothing when it came to affairs of the heart. You started afresh in folly every time. Look in the mirror, and you always saw something different; sometimes you saw the spirit of
yourself, perfectly fresh and youthful: sometimes you saw corrupted flesh. Once or twice again lately she’d even caught a glimpse of something shadowy, a flicker of a reproachful Dr Rosebloom: get as old as this, he was saying, and male or female, what’s the difference? She didn’t want to risk humiliation by insisting on the distinction. She’d met younger men in her time who, just as girls will do with older men, took pleasure in inferring a sexual interest only to draw back in shock-horror when brought to the test. But what are you doing! You're old enough to be my mother! I thought we were just friends! That started at forty. Foolish she might be, but not as foolish as to risk this particular hurt. Though the quality of William’s candid stare, the steady grey-green eyes regarding hers, reassured her. He wasn’t the kind to play games. Yet they had a glint, an urgency she’d seen in soldiers, excited by the adventure of killing. She wanted part of it.

  ‘It’s good to have someone to talk to,’ he said, on the third visit. ‘You could talk to people at the Rosemount,’ she said. ‘Why come all the way out here to do it?’

  ‘At Rosemount talk is for the exchange of information, not ideas,’ he said. She could see she did rather better at the Golden Bowl, where the other guests were hand-picked for intelligence and lifetime achievements, mostly in the sciences, if only because Nurse Dawn was convinced that those with active minds outlived those without. With the exception of Dr Bronstein, whose ideas, though so interesting the first time you heard them, seemed to be on a loop, and were beginning to be repeated, the great majority of Golden Bowlers were not chatterers. If they had great thoughts, they kept them to themselves. Scientists were never ones to share their homework answers, at the best of times. Sometimes she missed Joy, and the easy, noisy flow of nonsense and self-regard, which kept the demons out.

  ‘Then why don’t you apply to come here?’

  ‘Let them eat cake,’ he said, and laughed.

  On the fourth visit he confided more, by way of explanation. A late and painful divorce had put paid to his savings. He had given his house, not far from here, on the edge of the Great Swamp, to his stepdaughter. That had been in the days of his comparative prosperity: now she would not let him back in. He felt King Learish about it all, he said, lightly.

  ‘Why did she take against you? What did you do?’ he asked. ‘Existed,’ he said, briefly, ‘as the person I was.’

  Felicity wanted to make things up to him. She wanted to be kinder than his wife, better than his stepdaughter. But what would he accept from her? She had no idea. Just because she had an erotic impulse to him did not mean he felt the same about her - perhaps he came every day simply because Charlie turned up and cost him nothing, and there was vodka and pretzels at the end of the journey. And because he could talk about himself, somewhere comfortable, away from the washing hanging on the line and the littered front yard. Perhaps he saw her as a mother.

  She’d never had a son: for once she was glad, she would be in no danger of treating him like one, since she had no idea how to go about it.

  Nothing changed; whenever had falling in love not been like this? Except now there were no girlfriends to brush up against, to give you a view of what was going to happen next, help you with the confusion between what seemed to be happening and what was really going on: He loves me, he loves me not. The only person who might understand was Sophia in London. But Sophia was impetuous: if Felicity said anything she might take it into her head to come over and inspect William. The idea made Felicity uneasy: maybe Sophia would drive William away, or William might fall for her - that was absurd, she could not possibly be jealous of her own granddaughter - still it was not safe. She hardly thought she could confide in Joy, who would shriek and tell her that William was a confidence trickster after her money. Which of course, and here was another thing, and one she really didn’t want to think about, he could be. What he said about himself didn’t quite add up.

  ‘Is that a Utrillo?’ he asked, on the eighth day.

  ‘Only a copy,’ she said. He got up and studied it. Houses, a bit of tree, a street, a sky. Realer than real. She loved it.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that. It’s a very good painting. White period, too.’

  ‘If it were real,’ she said, ‘I’d get a couple of million for it.’ She had told him the truth and yet not the truth. It was a Utrillo all right, with papers of provenance to prove it, part of her settlement from old Buckley, in Savannah, her rescuer and persecutor. Old Buckley, she called him, out of habit. When he died, she realized, he had been twenty years younger than she was now.

  Every day William Johnson came, and every day they talked, and while they talked she had no doubts. Except she didn’t touch him and the table kept the space between them, the no-man’s land between desire and fear of consequences.

  Every time he left he said, ‘Shall I come again tomorrow?’ and every time she said, ‘Of course.’ And he’d look over his shoulder with such an expression of marvel and pleasure it was impossible to doubt his interest. Only when Nurse Dawn came bustling in for her five-fifteen look-in as she called it, checking up that Felicity was alive and well, and hoping she’d come along to the Library for an Affirmation Session before supper, or whatever the day of the week provided, did Felicity feel old and useless again, and slightly dotty, since that was how Nurse Dawn saw her.

  She sent off by post for cosmetics and face creams and even pretty underwear. Not that she thought the former would do any good, or the latter be seen. It was part of the habit of youth, of what you did when you fell in love. She had married men on grounds of common sense: this one was kind and prosperous and would look after her: that one because he could take her into high society; the next as a safe haven, and though God knows that was dull, she had not complained. She kept her side of the bargain. She did not exploit them. She did not offer love, but affection and services. It was a trade-off and they knew it, and were prepared to settle for it, to have at their command her charming smile, her slender body, the diversion of her conversation and the creature comforts she offered, if not her total attention. As for love, in Miss Felicity’s comprehension that was a wildness reserved for outside marriage: something which would obviously collapse if you attempted to confine it within the boundaries of domestic responsibilities. Within marriage, love turned into habit: yet without permanence it faded away. But while it lasted, how magic was the exhilaration, the exultation, the sense of being properly alive. Just one more time, and this time let me get it right. True love. Could it be that if you just hung round for long enough, your faith intact, it happened? When you least expected it, there it was at last.

  21

  More riches! Aardvark Detectives had discovered another relative: a half-sister for Felicity herself, younger than she by seven years. Mrs Lucy Forgrass, nee Moore, still alive and in full possession of her faculties, and living in some style in Highgate in North London: by some style Wendy meant that the Forgrass home was a large beautifully maintained house in the £l-£1,500,000 bracket and there was a heated outdoor swimming pool at the end of the garden, in a country which rarely indulged in such luxuries, and why should it, its skies being mostly grey. Now as well as cousins I had a half great-aunt. But she could wait. I had not yet met Lorna, I had not yet visited Alison. I had told Miss Felicity nothing yet of my successes. I did not want to risk her censure again.

  ‘Go slowly with all of this,’ said Wendy. I found it difficult. Real life is so slow, film with all the longueurs left in, the move from chair to door, the folding of linen, the waiting for the taxi. ‘Cut, cut, cut,’ one longs to cry. ‘Go slowly!’ forsooth. But I did.

  The Aardvark agency had consulted documents held at Somerset House and now knew the history of Felicity’s birth family. The child had been born Felicity Moore, on 6 October, 1915. Her father, Arthur Moore, was described as a novelist and journalist: her mother Sylvia, as a concert pianist. Sylvia, poor thing, had died of influenza in 1921, in one of the great epidemics that swept Europe after the Great War and too
k a greater death toll than that conflict itself. Felicity would have been six at the time. Her father had married again within the year - to a Lois Wasserman, from Vienna. There had been one child of this union, Lucy, born in 1922. She would have been eight when Alison was born. Arthur had died in 1925, when Lucy was three, leaving Felicity orphaned and in the care of her stepmother. In his will Arthur left everything to Lois and Lucy: Felicity was ignored, for reasons unknown. And yes, Lucy was still alive, thrice widowed, and living in Highgate.

  Thrice widowed! I had once worked on a horror film, a rip-off of Basic Instinct, about a serial marriage killer who successively used an ice axe on her husbands. I should never have taken on such a film, and never did again. Too much blood and gore and dismemberment viewed over and over and over, is upsetting. Some editors get hardened to it, I never have.

  I still did not doubt the wisdom of stirring up the past. I had found an aunt in Alison, albeit one with Alzheimer’s, a half great-aunt in Lucy with a swimming pool in Highgate, some cousins in Guy and Lorna, and a cousin once removed in Guy’s question-of- custody little boy. My Christmas list would soon be full: I could join the rest of the world in wrapping up parcels and complaining about it over the festive season. It was enough for me.

  Krassner had gone home to Holly, not for Christmas - she was Jewish, but then so was he, through his mother - but because she wanted to adopt a child, and required him to sign a form declaring something called ‘dedicated fatherhood’. This he had to do in person: fax or e-mail would not suffice. Adoption is the mother- hood-of-choice in Hollywood: pregnancy can interfere with a film career, or spoil a perfect body. Suppose the chance of a lifetime turned up at a day’s notice and you were just going into labour! An adopted baby may arrive suddenly but will do so ready-formed and can be left with the staff almost at once.