‘Or make you happy,’ said Harry Krassner. ‘You English are so cynical. You have no soul.’
‘I expect Holly has more,’ said Sophia, irked. ‘Why don’t you go back to her.’ Then she went to the hairdresser and had six inches of hair cut off, to punish herself for the remark. She could see she was getting possessive. She made a scene at the salon, too, seeing her beautiful hair on the ground, bursting into tears and snarling at the stylist and saying he’d taken off too much. It was completely out of character. And then having to apologize. After all that Harry Krassner didn’t even notice that she’d had it cut.
‘I thought I’d better tell you,’ said Felicity, ‘I’m in love.’
‘Is it reciprocated?’ asked Sophia cautiously, trying to get the measure of the statement.
‘I think so,’ said Felicity. ‘He’s asked me to marry him.’
There was an expensive silence from Sophia’s end. Then: ‘I can come over at the end of the week,’ she said. She would miss five precious days of Krassner in her bed, but it would have to be done. She would not alter her behaviour, abandon her family duty, for any mere man. That way madness lay. She could do it for a film, but not for herself.
28
‘Just think!’ I said to Guy and Lorna, who had asked me over to Happiness for Sunday lunch, ‘our grandmother has received a proposal of marriage.’
They looked at me cautiously. Guy was slicing a rather pulpy half-leg of GM lamb, so lean as to be singularly dry, while Lorna doled out a few potatoes boiled with their skins on, and some spinach which stayed in the shape of the package, having been slightly under-microwaved, so it was still crisply frozen in the middle. I could have been eating linguini in Dean Street at Zilli’s with Harry and Clive, but this afternoon we were going to visit Alison. I had decided to act with Harry as if I was not particularly anxious for his company. I have never before in all my life played games with men - which just might be, as Felicity once pointed out, the reason I did not have one to call my own. But I seemed to have begun to learn how, prompted by Harry’s upfrontedness: he was so little a gamesman when it came to matters of the heart, it behoved me to be a gameswoman. Holly would call from the States and I would hand the mobile over with a smile and say, ‘It’s Holly,’ and not, ‘that bitch again’.
The adoption had fallen through. The mother turned out to have sold her baby to four different parents at $200,000 or more a throw, and though prepared to actually hand it over to Holly and Harry (such integrity) for an additional $100,000, they had decided that the baby might inherit the genes of dishonesty. I did not even murmur to Harry that ‘dishonesty’ was socially defined, and you would have to know a great deal more before disqualifying a baby on those particular grounds. You could as well claim the baby would inherit the genes of sensible self-interest and a sense of humour. I even had a sudden desire to fly over to LA at once, and take the baby for myself, but that was absurd. I did not want a baby. I wondered to what an extent competition between women, in the old days, had led them into repeated pregnancies. But no, it was probably just the absence of contraception; in the face of male sexual drive once you were married pregnancy would just happen. Krassner quite wore me out. He could not fall asleep, he said, in the absence of sex. He was half-joking. He was in fact a considerate and emotional lover, who wanted me to say such simple things as, ‘I love you,’ which I found difficult. Like most Americans, he talked a lot during lovemaking. The English tend to be silent, in a world minus language and so the more intense.
Holly would not have sex with Harry while she was filming - it made her puffy around the eyes in the morning - so I took care never to appear reluctant, no matter how tired I was. And though by day my body cried out to be close to him, and I believe he felt the same need to lean into me as I did to him, here I was at Guy’s and Lorna’s and not at Zilli’s, parting with knife and fork bits of gristle and a strange glutinous fibre which the lamb had grown in place of fat, not olive oil, glistening agilely around my fork. Lorna did not even know their house was called Happiness, she said she might once have known but was at pains to forget, though Guy acknowledged that as a child he had been sufficiently inquisitive to pull aside the creepers and find out. Both were more interested in the inside of books than in the real world. They ate to sustain life, and asked me over out of vestigial politeness, rather than enthusiasm.
The matter of Felicity’s proposal did stir a certain interest. ‘Someone after her money, I suppose,’ said Lorna. ‘The same thing happened to poor Mother. That’s really why we had to have her put away.’
Put away sounded rather unfortunate. Even Guy noticed.
‘She’s not exactly put away, Lorna,’ said Guy. ‘You couldn’t go on nursing her. Your back was bad. She is very happy where she is, well looked after and safe.’
‘She’d start wandering,’ said Lorna. ‘Dangerous so near the river. It got very bad last summer. She’d begun to give money away. I took away her chequebook, but she was very cunning. She’d go round to the bank and get another. He coerced it out of her, of course.’
‘He’, on close questioning, turned out to be a semi-naked, glistening young thug working in the boatyard, casual labour, rough trade: Alison had asked him home, the police had been called; rough trade had a police record. And Alison was not yet seventy: think what could happen when a woman was eighty-five. ‘Eighty-three,’ I said. For some reason the two years seemed to make a difference. And Alison was sixty-eight, not yet seventy. Were older women not to be allowed their excursions into unreason? I supposed, when money was involved, not. They must be locked up, before they gave it all away.
Lorna and Guy ate glumly on. I longed for the noise and good cheer of Zilli’s. There was a singularly pretty waitress there: long legs and an intelligent face. Perhaps Harry, bereft of my company, and spiteful, would offer her a part in his next film. Not that spite seemed in his nature. He might I suppose do it in the spirit of sheer exuberance. If I wasn’t under his nose he would forget about me. He lived in the present, not the past, or the future. Holly summonsed him, he went; but to make her go away. Easier to do as she said, so long as work permitted, than work out what she meant to him. How could I hope to disturb such a solid relationship?
I told Lorna and Guy that I was flying over to Rhode Island to see Felicity, to find out more about her romance, and they could see the necessity, though obviously thinking it a wicked waste of money and Guy wrote down the number of a bucket shop where I could find the cheapest flight available.
‘You’ll have to nip it in the bud,’ Guy said. ‘Or some con artist will end up with the Utrillo on his wall, not you.’ They were coming round to the idea that their grandmother was quite well off.
I said my walls were singularly unsuited to a Utrillo, which was the last of my concerns, and this seemed to shock them. There was apple pie for dessert, which Lorna had made herself. Lots of thick heavy pastry and a thin sliver of apple squeezed between, but never mind. I was touched that she’d tried. I said Lorna and Guy could have the Utrillo, if and when Felicity died, it was only fair: it would look right on their walls, which were the right shape for framed paintings.
I regretted having said it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Guy went out to make coffee and Lorna took out the dessert plates and I could hear them murmuring in the kitchen. I saw a kind of gleam in their eyes when they came back which I hadn’t seen before, and I remembered that Lois’s blood ran in their veins, as well as Anton’s. Perhaps Felicity had known what she was doing when she gave Alison away, and with the baby, that baby’s progeny. But too late now.
29
The Glentyre Nursing Home was much as these places are in this country. The same satellite TV goes unwatched: chairs, though they may begin informally grouped, end up with their backs to the wall, where the occupants insist that they be. Even a slight touch of paranoia is enough to make you want to keep an eye on what the others in the room are doing. Safer not to have your back to anyone. The same smel
l seeped into the very fabric of the walls, of urine and disinfectant and old-fashioned face powder. The same staff: a few cheerful and kind, most sullen and underpaid. The same sense of waiting, of bemusement that life has come to this. Communal (that is to say, lowest common denominator) taste when it comes to the colour of walls and drapes. The food provides nothing that anyone is likely to object to, a consideration which more than anything leaves the flavour of sadness in the mouth. What we value all our life, what fires us and sparks us, the sense of our individuality, dampened down, crushed, deprived of oxygen. No outrage allowed.
The three of us trooped in to see Alison, who was bed-bound: they had not warned me of that. She sat against pillows in a small single room. She stared into space. She looked wilfully old, as if she were pretending. She had my hair, but it was white and crinkly: it spread in a witch’s fuzz around her face. She had Felicity’s eyes and Anton’s heavy jaw, around which old flesh drooped, and when she turned those still beautiful eyes towards us they were sulky and dull. I know one should not say it of those who are past improvement, but I did not like her. Pulses of noise came and went: the roar of young male voices rising and falling in unison: the sports stadium was all but next door: Sunday afternoon’s fixture at Twickenham was under way: but what was it to her? ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘Did Lorna send you? She never comes herself.’
‘I’m here, Mummy,’ said Lorna.
‘Lorna had me drugged and locked up in here,’ Alison confided in me. ‘I was all right until they started giving me pills. Now my legs don’t work.’
‘Your legs don’t work because you had a stroke, Mummy,’ said Lorna.
‘Guy was always in love with me,’ Alison told me. ‘Even when his father was alive. But then he had me walled up in this prison.’ ‘Now why would I do a thing like that, Mummy?’ asked Guy. Sunday lunch, however meagre, had given him a well-fed bursting look, or it might just be that his blood pressure was already mounting, and we’d been only two minutes in the room. ‘I was running off with a nice young man and my son couldn’t stand it,’ explained Alison. ‘He thought I might change my will. He didn’t know I’d changed it already.’
‘I don’t think there’s any point in we two staying,’ said Guy. ‘We thought you ought to see for yourself. We’ll go and wait in the car while you try and get through to Mother.’
Getting through to Mother was clearly a phrase frequently used: it had a familial, helpless kind of feel about it.
‘That got rid of them,’ said Alison, once they’d gone. ‘They come here sometimes and pretend to be my family but they’re not. I was adopted, so they’re no blood relatives of mine.’ I sat on a wicker chair and once I was settled she directed me to another, from which I first had to remove a rubber hot water bottle and a variety of woollen garments. No sooner was I sitting down when she asked me for some water. Then she told me not to sit in the chair I had just cleared because it was where she kept her hot water bottle. I could see she would have been the sort of mother who never gave her children a moment’s peace. The minute they’d sat down she’d think of something for them to get up and do, and if they were busy and on their feet she’d suggest they sat down: their ceaseless activities were making her feel tired. I understood Guy’s and Lorna’s liking for what I saw as dullness but which they saw as peace and quiet. To the end of their days, they would appreciate just moving from one side of a room to another without being told what to do: and if it was the room where they had spent so much of their childhood, so much the better.
She asked me if I were the cleaning girl and I said no, I was her half-niece, and that I was glad she had brought up the subject of adoption because I had news of her real mother. She peered at me suspiciously and pushed her hair back from her head with a hand that was uncannily like Felicity’s. She felt around for her purse and pushed it under her pillow, pointedly.
They send people in to steal from me,’ she complained. They even stole me once, when I was a baby.’
I tried to explain that she was given away, perforce, by her birth mother, not stolen by her adoptive parents, but she would have none of it. She had been dropped in Woolworths and not handed in. Anyone honest would have spoken to the Manager about it. I could not make up my mind whether she was teasing me or not. I could see the resemblance to Felicity and liked her rather more. Alison took a plastic beaker out of her locker, into which was wodged a rather nasty lump of tissue paper. She removed the paper and showed me a collection of blue and green capsules, pink flat pills and large white tablets.
T saved these,’ she said. They’re trying to poison me. The sooner I’m dead the more money they inherit.’
‘Who’re they?’ I asked, though I knew the answer.
‘Guy and Lorna. They don’t even come and visit me.’
They were in this room just a minute ago.’
‘No. Guy and Lorna are little children. They take after their father. A very dull man.’ This last was said with a Felicity-ish sigh. ‘I should never have been born, you know. It was a great mistake. But I always liked the river. It should have been called Mother Thames, not Father Thames. Old Mother Thames keeps rolling along, down to the mighty sea.’
She sang this last in a high-pitched, quavery voice. A member of staff came in with a cup of tea.
‘Singing again, dear,’ she said. ‘That’s nice.’
When she’d gone Alison poured her cup of tea into a pot plant with a shaky hand. It was a miniature palm, much overwatered. Not a single leaf but was tipped with brown.
‘Your real mother,’ I began again, ‘is alive and well and living in Rhode Island.’
Alison looked at me as if trying to decipher what I was saying. I think she managed because she seemed to give the matter some thought and then said quite sharply: ‘That’s all very well, but finders keepers. Tell that to them in Woolworths. If you want to keep your purse don’t drop it. Good layers, though, Rhode Island Reds.’ She closed her eyes and the interview was over, and with it my hope of enriching my grandmother’s life. What a lot of money I had spent and to how little purpose. I joined Guy and Lorna in the car. Lorna tried not to look too reproachfully at her watch. They liked to be in and out of the Glentyre Nursing Home like a shot, and who could blame them?
‘Now we’ll be caught up in the rugby crowd,’ she complained. We were, too, but after the Glentyre the thronging of thoughtless young male flesh, the sound of drunken revelry, the very air fetid with testosterone, was a relief. When I finally got back home the waitress from Zilli’s was not there in my place, of course she was not. Harry was, waiting.
30
Once we were in bed again - and under the duvets, not on top of them - Krassner said: ‘I had a call from home, while you were out.’
It was a cold night, and a great wind got up and found branches and leaves to fling against our window even here in the very heart of London; and the street signs swung around and creaked atrociously; and the sound of breaking glass had more to do with the weather than the recreational violence so common in these parts as the nation prepares itself for its Monday morning best- foot-forward, but Harry and I were snug and warm. I remember lying in my narrow bed as a child and wondering what the future held: would I ever lie next to a man as of right: would I have a wide bed forever rumpled, or with children crawling around it and over me: would there be maids to bring orange juice and toast, and a silver tray for the post? Knowing even then that things turned out never as good as you hoped, never as bad as you feared.
Perhaps the bed would be forever narrow, and clean, and quiet, as Angel’s was? She was such a still, cool sleeper: as if all her energy was taken up by her mind, roaming and plotting and scheming even while her body slept. I was all over the place, tossing and turning and murmuring in my dreams: she’d complain of it. ‘Like your father,’ she’d say, which to the child of the single parent is condemnation, less for the girl than the boy, but there all the same. I have broad plain hands, not like Felicity’s or Lucy’s, not li
ke Angel’s, like my father’s, Angel said, and I vaguely remembered. And what crimes had they not, in my mother’s mind at least, committed? I will tell you more about my father presently.
Right now here I am happy with Harry in my bed, my leg pushed between his, his arm over my shoulder. Nevertheless ice gripped my heart again, when he said he’d had a call from home. It is terrible to be a woman in love, if only because such images come to mind. Ice gripping the heart! I suppose you could do it in special effects but it would look pretty silly. I remembered Kay, Gerda’s childhood sweetheart in the Hans Christian Andersen story. Just a sliver of ice in the heart from the Snow Queen and he wandered the world as her servant, forgetting Gerda back home. Harry was the real Kay, Holly was the Snow Queen, and I was Gerda. Such a plain, dull name, and such a silly good girl. She got him back in the end, though.
I thought the phone call could only be Holly summoning Harry back. She would want to go into therapy with him, to recover from the shock of losing the baby (it would seem to her like the most drastic miscarriage, no doubt), something, anything, to have him by her side and not have to come after him herself, swell her ankles at 30,000 feet. What would she think of me, if she knew about me? She wouldn’t mind much, I didn’t imagine. I was only the hired help, one of the production team. Not one of the principals, the ones who counted. I wasn’t seen with Harry Krassner in publicity photos outside smart nightclubs, or entwined by someone’s pool or in the gossip columns, any of those things that so upset the great and famous: I didn’t think she’d much mind Harry’s habit of sleeping entwined with me, to the detriment of my back (it always ached in the mornings) or the calm domesticity of how we got along. Him putting up shelves: me sweeping outside my front door with dustpan and brush, singing: doing, as Harry put it, my Doris Day impersonation. Not Holly’s style. Terrible to think of one ending up as the girl next door.
Fay Weldon - Novel 23 Page 19