Krassner had seemed surprised when I said but what about the genes? Doesn’t Holly want her own child? What is the point of a baby who is someone else’s? Krassner said we Europeans were hung up on heredity. In the US rearing was what counted – babies burst bright and beautiful into the world: it was up to whoever adopted them to keep them that way. Holly would have checked the birth parents out for health, looks and sanity. I persisted that I didn’t see how you could really love someone else’s baby as your own. Krassner said of course you could and it was irrelevant anyway since I’d decided to have none. Perhaps in the US love isn’t so passionate and painful a thing as it is in Europe: Krassner flew off easily enough, with an absent-minded peck goodbye, already in his head halfway to Hollywood.
I was to be out of the cutting room for the three holiday weeks over Christmas and the New Year. I had proceeded apace with Hope Against Hope and left great swathes of it on the floor. Three hours’ meandering mishmash was now a sleek piece of work premiering in February. I had reason to believe that Astra Barnes, whose tedious director’s cut had been understandably ruled out of order on commercial grounds, was badmouthing me all over London but that was to be expected. My association with Krassner, now more or less public knowledge, did nothing to damage my professional reputation. On the contrary. If he did not contribute to our living expenses while he was with me no doubt he bore this in mind: that every day he spent with me put up my earning potential. These are the rewards of fame.
Now Krassner was gone, leaving me with my jealousy, an emotion entirely new to me, and all I had to take my mind off the worm gnawing at my vitals were my finer feelings, my friends, and my acquisition of new family. For once work had failed me. The Aardvark agency closed on 21 December and didn’t reopen until 8 January. I felt abandoned. Wendy was like a tight-laced know-it- all mother, bustling about, the kind you will grow up to leave behind, such are your superior sensitivities and their lack of them. It doesn’t mean you don’t miss them when they go away and leave you.
I called Felicity at the Golden Bowl. The operator told me it was afternoon rest time and she should not be disturbed. I decided it was probably for the best. Supposing she really hated it there and wanted me to come and rescue her? I sent her a Christmas card instead. I would wait until I had her family sorted out and then surprise her thoroughly: I would visit her properly with names and addresses and telephone numbers and photographs and life would be so rich.
22
For three weeks Felicity faced William Johnson across the table. They debriefed one another: her politics, his (which in him amounted to nothing specific, just a state of perpetual indignation): her musical taste, his (they differed on Wagner, but that tended to be a normal gender divide, or at least they so persuaded themselves): how in her youth she’d fled England for the new world of America, to reinvent herself; America, the promised land. Fie in his thirties going back to England, hoping to uninvent himself in Shakespeare’s land, and failing: meeting there the woman who was to be his wife, Meryl, bringing her back. Fle’d wanted children, she hadn’t. She’d had a daughter already, by an earlier marriage, yes, the one at the funeral, Margaret, the one who had Tommy’s boys. He looked forward to the Judgement Day, to the great debriefing, in which all things would be made clear: whether or not he had been unkind to Meryl, unfair to Margaret, who killed Kennedy, what happened to the Marie Celeste, and so forth.
‘Do you mean a literal Judgement Day?’ she asked, alarmed, alerted. All this, and he might turn out to be a Born-again Christian.
‘Wishful thinking,’ he said. ‘It would be great to think someone, somewhere was in charge. The great gambler, the great dice roller in the sky.’
The metaphor was unusual but she thought no more of it. Every day brought new confidence, greater expectation: layer after layer of agreement or at least acceptance; getting closer, feeling safer, she giving an account of her life starting from the present and working backwards, since her life had got better as she got older: he, for whom it had been the other way around, starting at the beginning and working forwards, this for both of them being safest. Both, it seemed to her, putting off the day when they would have to face the problem of being no longer young. Bad enough at twenty to work out how to proceed from physical distance to physical intimacy: how to move from the chair to the sofa, from the sofa to the bed: fifty, sixty years on and the problem was back again. About some things she still remained silent. It would not surprise her if he did too. He was no fool, like her old enough to know that some information had better come after sex and not before or there might be no sex at all. Conversation between them grew difficult: they’d fall into silences. She became restless, almost irritable.
Charlie would tap on the window to remind them when time was up. She would be the one to hear it, not William. She realized that he was quite deaf: perhaps his silences were to do with that, nothing more significant. He just hadn’t heard what she’d said. The secrecy she had insisted on began to seem silly. It was ridiculous that Charlie had to be back before Joy woke from her afternoon nap: that William had to be gone before Nurse Dawn put in her appearance, bustling everyone up for their next assault on the day. She put it to William that he could stay longer if he wanted. But William said he needed to be back at the Rosemount because he minded Maria’s baby while she went off to collect her older children from school. Maria? Just one of the domestic helpers at the Rosemount.
‘She’s thirty-one, I’m seventy-two,’ he said. ‘All I’m good for is baby-sitting.’ And Felicity hadn’t even asked. He could read her mind by now. She didn’t like it.
‘But what did you do all day before I came along?’ she asked. ‘You are a mystery to me.’
‘This and that,’ he replied. ‘What did you do?’
‘The same,’ she said. ‘But it suits women to be like that, it doesn’t suit men.’
He looked at her seriously for a moment or two as if debating with himself and then said, ‘Why do I always sit opposite you. Couldn’t I sit next to you, on the sofa?’
He didn’t wait for her answer but pushed the sofa round so the table was in front of them and now they could lean into each other when they talked. She felt a charge of electricity when she touched him, as if she’d laid her finger on the metal of a bell push, first one in to the office in the morning. If the carpets were nylon and the wall paint acrylic, the charge could throw you back across the corridor if you were unlucky. She’d worked in such an office once. She’d complained and lost her job; or perhaps it had been because the boss wanted to sleep with her and for once she wouldn’t. The electric charge was quickly gone, anyway, some waiting energy finally released. Maybe he felt it too. If so, he didn’t show it. Still nothing was said. She could be wrong about it: he could be teasing her, manipulating cruelly. She could be making a fool of herself. Maybe all this was in her head? Eighty-three! But now they leaned into one another, came nearer to one another’s imperfections and still, it seemed, he did not shrink. His hands, like hers, were wrinkled and liver-spotted. Though she thought the new creams she had been using had rather diminished the discolouring on hers. That encouraged her. She held them up boldly for his inspection. She took a risk.
‘Such old hands,’ she said. ‘Can you bear the reality of them? Or do we just go on talking for ever?’
‘It may be all you’ll allow,’ he said. ‘How am I meant to know?’
‘We could just lie together on the bed,’ she said. ‘I’m so old that sitting up straight for so long quite tires me out. We have to think about these things.’
He didn’t reply at once. I’ve blown it, she thought. All my life I’ve blown it. Gone too fast. Had too much faith. Now I’ll have to die knowing I never got it right, that how you begin you are doomed to go on.
He stood up abruptly. ‘You don’t know how anxious I am,’ he said. ‘I’m an old man. I’ll only disappoint you. I think I’d better go now.’
Go then, she would have said in her youth, hurt and angry
, sexually rejected. Go and I never want to see you again. But now was now and when it came to it William was younger than she was: what did he know what was good for him?
‘Oh sit down and shut up,’ she said. ‘You’re such a chicken compared to me.’
‘My wife left me because I was too old and inadequate.’
‘Confession time,’ said Felicity. ‘And anyway I don’t believe you. It’s too easy.’
He stood at the French windows. It was touch and go. Then he sat down on the bed. ‘Charlie isn’t here yet with the car,’ he said. ‘I’m in no position to walk out. So if your back is tired we’d better just lie on the bed together.’
He stretched out on the bed. She lay down beside him. He was five inches taller than she was. Female hip fitted neatly into male waist: she’d known it would.
‘Did you love your wife?’ she asked. It was easier to ask this not looking at him.
‘Meryl? I was married to her for nearly twenty years. You become like one person: it isn’t necessarily the person you were born to be.’ Not quite a straight reply.
‘After twenty years most women would stay. They wouldn’t up and divorce you for nothing. What had you done?’
‘Nothing I did. Perhaps what I was. Maybe she was like me, maybe she felt she wasn’t the person she was born to be either. Perhaps she wanted to find out who she was before it was too late. People get desperate.’
‘But you didn’t want the marriage to end.’
‘Of course not.’
That hurt her. She’d forgotten how such stupid things could hurt, a man loving his wife.
‘I had grown into her, for good or bad,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have the heart for divorce lawyers. She did. She’d joined a women’s group. They egged her on, I guess. What she didn’t take I gave to her, and after she died Margaret had it. Now I live at the Rosemount. I read a lot. I watch the sea and the sky changing, and think about living somewhere else, doing something with my life. It’s okay: if you take it day by day. So the world thinks I’m a loser, so what do I care? But I never thought this was how it would end. An old man at the ocean’s edge.’
‘And I’m the old woman of the woods,’ she said, but she was shaken.
* * *
Joy would think he was a madman. In Joy’s world you looked after yourself, and William Johnson had spectacularly failed to do so. Joy did not understand the gestures which made living with the self bearable. A lame duck, Joy would say. A sponger. Why are you lying here on a bed with this loser? Felicity wanted to cry: she wanted to be home again in England, where failure was a more honourable state. ‘Except now I’ve met you life doesn’t seem to have ended,’ he said. ‘I can see there just might be a rebirth.’
For once in my life. No-one can take this away from me. Why has it had to take so long? Doubts fled as quickly and suddenly as they had come. There they were, lying on a bed, flesh touching, albeit the other side of fabric. The denim of his jeans, the silk of her skirt: her legs still long and shapely, the skin no longer taut, blotchy; a blue network of veins beneath the ankles. How much did it matter? What had love ever been about? The spirit or the flesh?
‘I haven’t told you everything about me,’ she said, on impulse. ‘Only the things I wanted you to know.’
‘I guessed as much,’ he said. ‘Speak to me.’
But Charlie was tapping at the window.
‘Saved by the bell,’ she said. And she stayed lying on the bed, bold as brass, not minding that Charlie was there to see, watching William Johnson gather his coat and leave, saying he would be back tomorrow. It was true, it was all true: she was eighty-three and felt the exhilaration of true love once again and no-one could take this away from her.
Miss Felicity consented to go to the evening’s Reconciliation Class, and was charming to Nurse Dawn.
‘What do Golden Bowlers do?
We live life to the full/
she chanted with the best of them.
Did you have to tell people the truth? She could see the wisdom of it when you were twenty. Secrets were likely to emerge when least convenient and upset the applecart. Social disgrace, madness in the family, illegitimate babies, a spell as a whore - whatever it was, was best faced up to at the beginning. But at this end of life the past was so far away, and seemed to have so little relevance to the present. Past states, past sins, drifted into forgetfulness. Better perhaps to let the past be. She’d told Sophia on the satellite link that she was old enough now to speak the truth. Brave words, and ones that might have been true even a couple of months ago but were not true now. Acquaintance with William Johnson had sent her spinning back into insecurity as to what she should or shouldn’t say for the best, like an adolescent. But she was grown up now and if she still wasn’t equipped to make judgements about the world, when would she ever be? Except when had she ever thought differently? At fifteen, an assignation, stepping into a snowy garden while the full moon looked down. I know what Vm doing. Some fifteen years later, stepping across the gang-plank at Southampton which would lead her to the new land - the seductive upwards tilt of the heavy damp dark wood, ridged to stop you slipping; the smell of salt sea and engine oil, the noise of engines and seagulls. 1 know what I’m doing.
‘Is our cup half-empty or our cup half-full?’ inquired Dr Grepalli. ‘Half-full!’ returned the happy chorus. Only Dr Bronstein and Clara Craft seemed unwilling to join in the general enthusiasm. It occurred to Felicity that Dr Grepalli was setting his sights too low. Her own cup was pretty much full to overflowing.
23
It was remarkable how friends thinned out over Christmas: gays retreated either singly to the maternal bosom to discuss gender relations, or to the paternal one to torment it: or in pairs the better to dissect the subtleties of the reaction they had had to endure over the season: the significance of the offering of the single bed (rejection) or the double one (acceptance). Single women went home to their county families to hole themselves up and protest the fullness of their city lives; lone mothers might ask you round to Christmas dinner, but what with the childcare absent, the ritual thawing of the turkey serving only to mark the thinness of the living, and the desperate smoking of joints behind the children’s backs an embarrassment, made me disinclined to accept invitations from this source. Two-income professional childless couples offered the best and most lavish entertainment, with their minimalist Christmas trees and their elaborate, fashion-conscious meals, but the drug of choice, cocaine, made everyone jumpy and even evil: I would limp home to my lair exhausted.
I thought I would have to spend Christmas Day on my own: disappointingly, Guy and Lorna didn’t seem anxious to extend an invitation. Though since my first encounter with them they had become quite friendly and I had been to visit them on several occasions, their hospitality was never lavish.
‘We don’t really keep Christmas,’ said Lorna. ‘Such a hypocritical time: commerce lurking under the guise of religion.’
Well, everyone knows that: they just choose to ignore it, or better still, make a meal of it and enjoy it. I hoped Lorna would relent: the house on Eel Pie Island seemed so perfect for Christmas. I would put up the decorations, streamers and so on, if they were too self-conscious to do so. I wasn’t afraid of stepladders, as Lorna might be. I would even pay for all the baubles, if the thought of what they cost was Guy’s problem. Did they have no feeling at all for tradition? Had this house not been their childhood home? But even as children, I could see, such were their natures they might not have entered much into the Christmas spirit. Lorna would have found fault with any toy she was given: Guy would have worried himself sick in case her gifts were more expensive than his. Both seemed to have been born with a wicked waste of money on their lips. Yet I did not feel Alison had been like that: the house was too pretty, the lamp-fittings needlessly expensive, the dish cloths proper Irish linen. And the name on the lintel was Happiness, though her children had let creepers grow over it, and woodlice scuttled around in the damp, flaky wood of the b
oard.
I was, it was beginning to be evident, rather disappointed in my new cousins. I looked for lightness in the dullness. Perhaps Guy and Lorna, brother and sister, were having an affair? But the fact that I had edited a documentary film on sibling incest, Family Bond, which suggested that among the intellectual classes such deviancy was common, did not make it true. There was nothing Byronic about Guy: though something of Dorothy Wordsworth about Lorna.
At first Lorna showed no more interest in Felicity’s existence than did Guy. She actively disliked films; her enthusiasms were reserved for the crystalline structures with which she worked, the subject on which she lectured. Crystals are no doubt beautiful and extraordinary, but at the other end of the spectrum from the flashing, changing life of celluloid, and to the non-scientist, once you have applied an adjective or two, a difficult subject for conversation. When they discovered that Felicity owned a Utrillo, brother and sister became rather more interested in their new relative. I suppose, when you come to think about it, she's our actual grandmother. I think both had associated widowhood and living in a retirement home with poverty. That she owned a major piece of art intrigued them, though Lorna’s eyes glazed when I began to tell them the story of how Felicity had acquired it. Long ago and far away, and how things come to be as they are, held no interest for them.
Both brother and sister had reddish hair and the same long, broad, rather grim jaws, though Lorna’s drooped to meet her chin and Guy’s tilted aggressively upwards. Lorna’s hair was the exact same orangey shade as Angel’s and mine, but straight and thin, not crinkly and thick. Glints in what remained of Guy’s hair suggested the same shade. Clearly the overweening colour gene had come through from Felicity, but those corresponding to texture and plenty had been diffused over a couple of generations. Photographs of their father the palaeontologist showed the same jaw, but set in a pleasanter expression than either of theirs. He looked, in fact, a rather nice quiet studious person of integrity. A photograph of Alison as a young woman showed her with straight dark hair, mine and Angel’s pale skin, Felicity’s widely spaced, rather hooded eyes, and a lively expression.
Fay Weldon - Novel 23 Page 14