Fay Weldon - Novel 23

by Rhode Island Blues (v1. 1)

  ‘Is something the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘I was remembering things it’s better to forget,’ she said.

  ‘We all have those,’ he said. Her hand, in return for his on her breast, strayed delicately down to his penis. It lay confidently, and as if about to swell into life, but not quite yet.

  ‘I can see I’ll have to tell you the truth,’ he apologized. ‘Or it’s never going to work. Mostly with women it thrives on lies. Not this time.’ She liked being called a woman, even though it suggested a past rich in sexual event. They were both too old, surely, to resent what went before. Anything pursued with energy seemed in retrospect to be enviable and desirable.

  ‘Tomorrow we’re going out with Charlie,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’ He wouldn’t say what. It was a surprise. It might turn her off him for ever, but it might not. But she had to know. Someone else would tell her if he didn’t. Whatever it was he didn’t seem to be taking it altogether seriously. He leaned over her, his old eyes looking into her yet older ones, into a mirror which threw back only pleasant sights, livened by the unexpected.

  What, what? He wouldn’t say. She drummed impatiently with her heels upon the bed but got a sharp pain in her thigh so had to stop. What was there to know about people that would put you off them but wasn’t immediately apparent? She knew where he lived. Perhaps there was another woman? But she didn’t think so. Something so fundamental he would have told her, or she would have sensed. She didn’t of course know what he did when he wasn’t with her, and he had all the morning to do it in, and evenings too. She had assumed that like her, being retired, he did nothing: that is to say he pottered about, while the few things there were to do expanded to take up the time available to do them in, and the effort of doing them became more and more oppressive. If he did something, whatever it was didn’t make him any money: so much was apparent. ‘Confessionals!’ she said. ‘I suppose you want mine.’

  She’d let it out little by little, or at any rate what she chose to remember. The girl she’d once been was no longer her, in any case. She’d shed too many skins, grown too many new nerve endings since she began. She didn’t feel she was cheating. She’d begun with the marriage to Jerry, Tommy’s father, the man who’d neglected to tell her about his wife, but had at least got her across the Atlantic, a new life, and a US passport for herself and her unborn daughter Angel.

  * * *

  She’d spoken of her time in Savannah thereafter, when the marriage had collapsed. An entertainer, was how she’d put it. Singer, dancer and occasional good-time girl on the finest riverboat ever, fin-de-siecle style. The slow, shiny water beneath the hull, timeless, the smell of hot oil, the private cabins, red plush and gold fitments: whatever changed through the decades? Well, some things did. She’d had the best of it, she thought: not much fun now the whisky had turned into sparkling water and even cabins dedicated to vice were non-smoking. But then it was cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women and she was one of the women. They drive you crazy, they drive you insane. No-one minds a woman with a past so long as that past was wild for wildness’ sake, and not for money. If now she became vague on certain points, who cared any more? Mostly as women got older what they regretted was what they’d never done, not what they did. She told William Johnson, fairly and squarely, of the circumstances in which she’d married one of her patrons, clients, customers, call them what you like, who adored her English accent. He wanted his domestic affairs taken care of. He had an airline to build. For a year he’d taken her to his grand house with the portraits of his forebears on the walls, outside that fringed, damp and mossy town, Savannah, and to his four-poster bed, and just have her lie there while he listened to her speak. He proposed to her one day as they walked in the town, a hot sun slanting down between pale cooling fringes of Spanish moss. How she had been too tired to say no. Yes is easy, no takes energy: and it was so hot. How she’d married him in romantic white, to whispers behind elegant fingers, male and female, how she’d hosted his expensive parties, and run his elegant house, and helped him buy paintings - she had always had an eye for art - Edward Hoppers and Mary Cassatts. How the marriage had not been consummated. How for a while she had been glad of that, pleased to have her body to herself for a while. But then she began to chafe and feel trapped and full of complaints. You think you can sell yourself and you can for a while, a day or a night or a week is nothing, but years? Comfort and security are less important the more you have of them. He was gay, of course, nothing unusual in this closet city of gay, pallid, beautiful men, whispering and conspiring as did their wives - but she’d more or less known that from the beginning. At least he’d tried, as did so many of his generation. If the expression of homosexual love, if doing what the desires of your body dictated, was a criminal act, of course you would try to be heterosexual, and marry, and if that failed, secretly seek out the company of others like you, and in the end relish the secrecy: it would be what turned you on. How could she resent it? Five years on she asked him for a divorce and he sighed and gave her one.

  ‘Five years without sex?’ asked William, horrified.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, but did not elaborate other than to say: ‘I never stole other women’s husbands, or not if I could help it. Most grand Savannah marriages were shams, anyway. At parties you’d see the men gathering together, whispering, smiling, making assignations, while the women made bright Southern conversation, all charm and trills, and honey this and honey that, but to no purpose whatsoever.’

  In the end she’d left. You wait and wait for something to happen, but in the end you have to stir yourself to make it happen, or nothing ever does.

  ‘I guess that’s where the Utrillo came from,’ said William. ‘Part of a divorce deal.’ Sometimes she thought he was overly interested in the Utrillo, but she could see it would bother people not accustomed to it, just sitting on the wall, using up $2,000,000 or so to no apparent purpose. She’d told them at the Golden Bowl it was a print. They didn’t have the knowledge or interest to look at it closely, or know what they were looking for if they did.

  But what activity of William Johnson’s was it of which she might not approve?

  Something that couldn’t be talked about but had to be seen? Perhaps he helped out at a funeral parlour? Laid out corpses? She could think of nothing else. She might ask Dr Bronstein over supper if he had any ideas, only it would mean shouting, and was too elaborate a matter to be imparted briefly. And Nurse Dawn would turn up before she was halfway through. Nurse Dawn need not worry: Felicity’s relationship with Dr Brontstein was circumscribed by his deafness. He spoke and Felicity listened, perforce. This seemed to suit him well enough. He could have switched on what he called his ear machine, but never did, even though it was one of the more expensive kind and probably worked. His deafness had become a metaphor for an ongoing state of affairs - all his life he had used women as witness to the life, not a true participant in that life - and was the sort of aural fix - in the same way as TV ads have visual fixes - which happened when you got old and began to lose your marbles, and used your incapacity to finally get your way without argument. If a man could not hear you, you could hardly demand that he listened to what you had to say. She wondered what kind of life Mrs Bronstein had lived, what troubles she had had to put up with, and if she, Felicity, could ever end up lying naked next to the good Doctor, and decided, no, that was impossible. It was a particular man she wanted: this man, William Johnson, and whatever he did she could not imagine that it would cloud their relationship. ‘You’re drifting off,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking of another man, I can tell.’ She laughed and said she was beyond that, she was thinking about what she would wear tomorrow.

  There came a tapping on the door. It was Nurse Dawn, an hour early with her sweet, stern call.

  ‘Miss Felicity, Miss Felicity!’ Felicity was agitated when anyone called her that. You could never quite trust the motives of the one who used it. It sounded good in the mouths of friend
s, derisory in the mouths of enemies. Today Nurse Dawn sounded smarmy and hoping to please. When Sophia called her Miss Felicity it was at least with a certain irony, albeit with that faint air of disdain with which the young treated the old: affectionate but distancing. When Joy did it, it was to keep her in her place, to mock her Southern past and suggest that she was unduly pernickety and had to be humoured, but it was done mostly with affection. When Dr Grepalli used it, it was an attempt to infantilize her. Nurse Dawn’s Miss Felicity suggested plot, and outrage, and machinations to beware of. If Nurse Dawn had her way Felicity would be sent off to the West Wing as an incompetent. William lay quiet under the bedclothes. They were like schoolchildren, discovered.

  ‘What is it, Nurse Dawn? I’m resting.’ How easily lies came, after a lifetime’s practice. How convincing they sounded.

  ‘Could I come in? The workmen report a leak in the roof. I need to take a look.’

  ‘It will have to wait, Nurse Dawn,’ said Felicity, but Nurse Dawn had used her passkey and was already in the room. Felicity drew the sheets to her chin, but William’s clothes were folded over the back of the chair and his shoes were on the carpet.

  ‘Whose shoes are those?’ asked Nurse Dawn. ‘They can only fit a man’s foot.’

  William flung back the bedclothes and sat up. Nurse Dawn gave a little shriek but did not flee.

  ‘Miss Moore is free, white and over twenty-one,’ he said, ‘and that’s not a racist remark.’

  ‘Be so good as to cover yourself up,’ said Nurse Dawn sourly. ‘You haven’t checked in as a guest of Miss Moore, you are trespassing on institution property for the purpose of harassing one of our residents and I must ask you to leave. We can talk about this later when we’re calmer.’ Her strong face, usually pallidly opaque, as if the effort of self-righteousness both drained it and toughened it, was flushed and hot.

  ‘I am perfectly calm,’ said Felicity, whose colour had changed not at all. ‘And this is dreadfully vulgar. I am not a child to be told what I can and cannot do.’

  ‘There is not so much difference,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘Once you’re in your second childhood you have to be looked after for your own good.’

  ‘If you’d just go,’ said William, ‘I could get dressed.’ Felicity quite admired his physique: the hairs on his chest were white and wiry, and the ribs showed through pale, thin skin, but his shoulders were broad and still well muscled. She could see she might be biased in his favour, from the distaste with which Nurse Dawn regarded him. ‘I am a trained nurse,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘and used to old men in the nude. I doubt you could show me much that could shock me.’

  But she left the room, all the same. William dressed. They heard Charlie’s limo arrive outside.

  ‘That’s a really poisonous woman,’ said William.

  ‘She didn’t seem to like you much,’ agreed Felicity.

  ‘We’ll have to get married,’ said William. ‘If we’re going to go on meeting. Otherwise there’ll be endless trouble. What do you say?’

  Miss Felicity, who had no years to waste, let alone days, opened her mouth to say yes, of course, but he put his finger on her lips, and told her to think about it and say nothing until the next evening, by which time she might want to change her mind. ‘You have so much to offer and I have so little,’ he said, and she was inordinately flattered, but then a memory came to her out of nowhere, of the particular wheedling note in a particular voice. Please, please, darling, let me. You promised. Whoever said that? Yes, out in the garden under the moon in the snow. The soft brown warmth of her coat, Lois’s coat. Anton so shaggy and heavy in his raccoon, once he had abandoned talking.

  27

  Nurse Dawn went straight to Dr Grepalli.

  ‘She had a man in her bed.’

  ‘I often have a woman in mine,5 he said. ‘But not this afternoon.’ ‘That’s because I had a very distressing phone call from her friend,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘She is very concerned. Our Miss Felicity is being taken advantage of by a known criminal, a con man and a gambler. This can be very dangerous for the Golden Bowl’s reputation.’

  It was true enough: one of the unspoken promises to the relatives of those interred in the Golden Bowl was that old men would be saved from the machinations of pretty young nurses who were after their fortunes, and old women likewise from gigolos. Those who, indecently enamoured, marry late in life, tend to remake their wills so that the money ends up outside the family that has cared for them so long, and sacrificed so much time and energy on their behalf. It is the revenge of the grateful. As William Johnson once remarked to Felicity, attributing the words to that other, eighteenth-century, Johnson, the learned doctor and great wit. ‘No good deed but goes unpunished.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Dr Grepalli. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. So Miss Felicity is still an attractive woman, in spite of her age, or indeed because of it. I suppose the relationship couldn’t be genuine?’ ‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Nurse Dawn, and gave up, at least for the time being. Dr Grepalli was not going to take her seriously. In her experience, the relationship between men and women was seldom genuine. It was, for the most part, a form of trade. Your body for my money: you fill my bed, I’ll take you to the party: you make the will, I’ll cook for you, clean for you, go to your funeral: I’ll act like your father, if you’ll be a better mother, whatever. Very little was freely, genuinely offered at the best of times.

  Some men, she knew, were genuinely attracted to old women, just as some were genuinely attracted to children, but both were equal perversity, other than that there was less time available for those abused in their later years to suffer as a result. Strange how you could sleep with men and be so intimate with them and still know so little about them: how you tended to believe that their interest in you was the outer limits of their desire. The wives and lovers of paedophiles and rapists often have no idea what goes on behind their backs.

  It wouldn’t do, Nurse Dawn warned herself, to think that old people’s homes were like children’s homes, and too often attracted as staff those whose interest in the inmates was unhealthy, being either sadistic or erotic, or both. But if something gave pleasure, did the motives of those who gave it matter? If a bomb falls on you, does it make any difference whether it was dispatched in the genuine interests of world peace or of terrorism? She, Nurse Dawn, placed her stiletto heel in the small of Dr Grepalli’s back in the interests of promotion, and an easy life, not because she was genuinely thrilled by so doing, but who was to say that the happiness of the greatest number was not thereby better served? His smile within the Golden Bowl kept everyone cheerful, and out of the West Wing, whatever it was that made Dr Grepalli’s eyes glitter and the corners of his mouth stretch. But what was the point of talking about these things? Dr Grepalli dismissed her fears because he didn’t want trouble: if he didn’t look the problem would go away. Nurse Dawn knew that it would not. There was trouble ahead.

  ‘I’m losing my touch,’ was all she said, dropping the subject. ‘I made a mistake accepting the woman, and have to accept it. I should have taken the Pulitzer Prize winner, even if she did smoke.

  The fact is, even leaving aside the lover, Felicity Moore has trouble growing old gracefully. She has too many visitors: she brings in the outside world.’

  ‘We’re not a closed community,’ said Dr Grepalli, gently reproachful. He was locking the door. Nurse Dawn took off her jacket and then her blouse.

  ‘She stirs up the other guests. Now Dr Bronstein has someone to listen to him he gets overexcited and that makes him incontinent. I don’t want the leather chairs in the Library soaked. It might be time to get him into the West Wing. Old Clara Craft has taken to eavesdropping. She hides behind columns and acts like a madwoman.’

  ‘Wasn’t she a journalist?’ asked Dr Grepalli. ‘The outer and visible form of an inward and spiritual state, more apparent as the inhibitions are loosened with age.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said Nurse Dawn, now in suspender belt, black stockings and
scarlet high heels. ‘All I’m saying is that if Felicity Moore could be persuaded to leave the Golden Bowl it would be to everyone’s advantage.’

  ‘Except to our overall statistics,’ said Dr Grepalli, ‘and it would upset the Board. They would see it as a failure. Look at it like this. You and 1 have our pleasures; the old so seldom do. Why grudge them to others? Be generous with them as you are with me.’

  He lay naked on the sofa: she bent her head over him and he stroked her soft, dull hair. She took away his power, for which he was grateful. Responsibility weighed heavily upon him. She felt her power over him, and that released her, if only temporarily, from the nagging sense of her lack of it.

  That evening Miss Felicity called her granddaughter Sophia in London’s Soho. ‘It’s two in the morning, Gran,’ complained Sophia. ‘I wish you’d work it out.’

  ‘It’s the only time you’re ever home. How are you ever going to get married if you have no time for love?’

  ‘There’s always sex beneath the editing desk,’ said Sophia, who was working for Harry Krassner again. Clive had been brought in as executive producer on Hope Against Hope, which was still giving trouble. Astra Barnes was suing the studio: to satisfy the lawyers a known director had to be brought in to redo the work already satisfactorily accomplished by Sophia. Clive had brought Harry over from LA, and he was now in Sophia’s bed again.

  ‘It’s fate,’ Harry Krassner had said.

  ‘No it’s not,’ said Sophia. ‘It’s Clive. It’s in case I start suing as well. He thinks you’ll keep me busy.’