Fay Weldon - Novel 23

by Rhode Island Blues (v1. 1)

  I had a feeling that maybe bed didn’t count in Holly’s scheme of things: what counted was how you stretched and roamed in your silk wrap first thing in the morning, and sat sipping your orange juice in your vast kitchen which overlooked the ocean, with Harry Krassner, hairy-legged and white dressing gowned, facing you, saying the kind of things film stars say to their director-lovers, binding them closer and closer, delivering charm, demanding guilt, while the paparazzi duck and dart beneath the windowsills. But the call wasn’t from Hollywood: it was from farther north and to the west, where the winter days are short and cold and people still fall in love, not into relationships.

  ‘I think it was a friend of your grandmother’s,’ said Harry. ‘It was hard to tell, she shouted so loud. I kept saying I wasn’t you, but she didn’t believe me.’

  ‘That would be Joy,’ I said. ‘I hope everything’s okay.’

  ‘I could tell from the pitch of her voice that it wasn’t,’ said Harry. ‘I said you’d call back.’

  I reached across him for the phone, disturbing his tranquillity. ‘God,’ he said. ‘You really worry about your family.’ Men never like it if you pay too much instant attention to anyone other than them. ‘For someone who has so little of it, it’s truly wondrous.’

  I got through to Joy. I begged her to put in her hearing aid and once she had the vibrations of her voice became differentiated and it was possible to tell what she was saying. She had been on to the Golden Bowl and warned them that a fortune hunter was after Felicity. She had hired a private investigator to check him out: I was going to get the bill: after all I was family, she was only a friend. I said perhaps she should have waited until I came over, and could judge the situation for myself. Joy thought otherwise, said I was selfish and ungrateful and took after my mother, and put the phone down. So much for transatlantic calls. I re-entwined myself with Harry but he was asleep; real life drama did not impinge on him; presumably it wasn’t focused, drifted along, needed editing. Outside the wind banged and crashed. I lay awake and listened to the radio, which told me what I already knew, that force seven winds were sweeping London.

  The phone went again: I leaned across Harry and still he did not stir, though my elbow went into his hairy chest. This time it was Jack, apologizing for Joy.

  ‘She’s upset for your grandmother,’ he said, ‘I guess you’ve got to excuse her. She isn’t as young as once she was.’

  ‘Are you over in Joy’s house?’ I asked. I like to envisage where people are when they speak, that’s all, but the question seemed to make him defensive.

  ‘I just came over for a game of cards,’ he said. There was the sound of a struggle as Joy took charge of the telephone.

  ‘Jack says I was hard on you,’ she said. ‘It’s just such a worry. I shouldn’t have to go through this kind of thing at my age.’

  I agreed, no, she shouldn’t. I am the great placator; the picker-up of unconsidered pieces: the scavenger of the good deeds of the universe, the fitter-together of snippets to make as narrative. I like to create a cheerful viewing, a good read. I should have said, ‘If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen,’ but I didn’t. I should have said, ‘Call off your dogs,’ but I didn’t.

  And while I was busy reassuring myself, Guy and Lorna, I could see in retrospect, sat up late and wondered how they could get their hands on the Utrillo, sooner rather than later, for the fees Alison was paying to the Glentyre Nursing Home were excessive, and Happiness would have to be sold to pay for them, and they had remembered how much they loved the house, and what happy childhoods they had enjoyed, and wanted to live on the banks of the sweet Thames for ever and ever, to the end of their lives, which is much the same thing, in Happiness.

  So Lois must have felt, waiting for Sylvia to die, so she could marry Arthur and move in, and oust Felicity who was not her own blood, or joined to her by semen as a husband is, making the pair more one flesh than otherwise. Lois worked by atavistic instinct, to plant her own family in this good soil, to look after her own, and not the stranger’s. The cuckoo in the nest, easing out the contender’s genes. No, that was just some film starring Joan Crawford or was it Bette Davis? Or had Felicity not been an innocent victim at all: perhaps she’d set out to seduce Anton to pay Lois out? Perhaps Arthur had seduced an innocent Lois? All we knew of Lois, really, was what her child, who was not a reliable witness, had said: and how two of her grandchildren had turned out. Could one work backwards? No, because others could choose to conclude that because I was taking Harry from poor lost and bewildered Holly, in all probability Felicity was a bad lot too. Far-fetched to see Felicity not as victim but as perpetrator.

  But it was there in my head, the archetypal scene, waiting to be born: Fatal Attraction or The Mistress’s Revenge. Of course we do not do this kind of thing these days, not in sophisticated circles: I was able to contemplate Holly’s existence easily enough: I was not moved to murderous rage. I hoped the same could be said of her, in relation to me.

  Harry stirred and put his arms around me, and beseeched me to stop thinking: he could feel it through my skin. I did too much of it.

  ‘Do you have a grandmother?’ I asked him, refraining from entering into a debate as to whether he ever felt Holly thinking through hers. He laughed and said he barely had a mother. He’d left her long ago in Sacramento. Americans don’t seem to have elderly relatives in the way we do. It’s as if they spring fully fledged into the world, and the old keep going playing golf and singing in choirs until one day they just drop down dead or retire gracefully into places like the Golden Bowl, where visitors are discouraged. The weak die young from drink, drugs and rock’n’roll: those who survive are strong, fit and wealthy. I know it can’t really be so: I daresay the old creep and shuffle in the States as anywhere: all I know of the nation, like most Europeans, is from out the window of cabs in Boston, New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles and the odd dash up to Seattle: wherever films open or are edited and occasionally I get sent. And my little scraps of family visiting into Connecticut, and the land of the Rhode Island Reds, the best laying hens in all the world. And the whole history of film, of course, and Harry in my bed; focusing all America, my new-found land, my love. See what I mean? As bad as turned to ice: the leap to cliche, to what e’er was felt, and ne’er so well expressed. E’er being ever, and ne’er being never, those Victorians being so punctilious about rhyme. What’s on the late-night film, what old black-and-white love story? Turn the sound softly. Krassner sleeps again. Outside the wind drops. A stillness descends. Everything stops in the face of love, freezes, for just one second before entropy wins again. I sense it. To hold back time itself, to halt the inexorable descent into the darkness of death mid-flight, what power is this? It’s not as if new life were going to come out of this union.

  31

  Felicity was waiting at the French windows of the Atlantic Suite for her day’s mystery outing by ten on Monday morning. She had dressed leisurely and carefully, in the full pleasure of expectation, addressing every spot and blemish. So she remembered similar outings in her youth, when her skin had been firmer and the line of her jaw cleaner. She did not care. Only one woman in the whole world could look in the mirror and be told ‘You are the fairest of them all’, so what did degrees of failure matter? And if that was what the mirror did ever tell you, everyone hated you: you became wicked witch to Snow White. And besides, it didn’t last: good looks were all anxiety and disappointment: she had given up worrying years ago. She caught a flicker of Dr Rosebloom in the mirror today: she thought he approved.

  She would miss a lecture on How the Past Feeds the Present by a Gloria Fensterwick PhD and Monday’s Light Lunch, which would be ham quiche, arugala and boiled potatoes. She had recently ordered a book called Salad, the Silent Killer from a publisher whose list specialized in healthy living and thinking, and left it prominently in the dining room, to have it slammed back in her room by Nurse Dawn. The lecture and the lunch would be no great loss.

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nbsp; A spectacular red Saab coupe, driven by William, swept past the French windows and round the corner to the formal Atrium entrance of the Golden Bowl, and parked in the appropriate place.

  The days of secrecy were over. William Johnson stepped out, dapper for once in a blue and white striped shirt, red and yellow tie, navy suit, and ordinary well-polished loafers, which might or might not have been Gucci.

  Felicity, dressed more seriously than usual, without the usual swathing of scarves, in taupe and stone and other neutral colours, did not wait to be summoned but left her room and went to the front desk where William was waiting for her. Nurse Dawn appeared as if by magic, to protest that Felicity had not cancelled lunch in proper time, and she could not countenance a trip out in such weather. Mr Johnson was irresponsible in suggesting such a thing.

  ‘Good heavens,’ said Felicity, ‘it’s a perfectly fine day. Mr Johnson and I are going out on a date, and I don’t suppose we’ll even notice the weather.’

  Nurse Dawn said that was a pity: she’d hoped Miss Felicity would be there this morning to help Dr Bronstein stay in the land of the sane.

  ‘What can you mean?’ asked Felicity, alarmed, stopped in her tracks as she swept out on William’s arm.

  ‘Poor Dr Bronstein,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘is getting quite confused. What we used to call senile in the old days, before we knew so much. He so enjoys his chats with you: they keep his mind alert. His appointment’s after lunch; I don’t want him to let himself down.’

  ‘What appointment?’

  ‘With the psychiatrist. His family think it’s time he was declared fiscally incompetent and moved on to the West Wing for fuller nursing care. And Dr Grepalli agrees he’s beginning to quite disturb the other guests with his ramblings. We can’t have that. Poor Dr Bronstein. You know the kind of questions they ask, to see if you know where you are and who you are. What year is it, who’s the President, where’s Kosovo, that sort of thing.’

  Felicity leaned against one of the Roman pillars. She seemed to feel suddenly weak. William held her arm in support.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘I hope I haven’t upset you. Pm sure Dr Bronstein will do just fine. It’s just we’d all really miss him if he had to move on to the West Wing, especially you, Miss Felicity. You two are such friends. Don’t worry about it: I’ll speak up for him: my recommendation counts for a lot.’

  ‘Once you pay the Danegeld,’ said Felicity, enigmatically, recovering, ‘you never get rid of the Dane. I will keep to my plans, but thank you for mentioning it,’ and she smiled at William and they went out.

  ‘You have a nice time now,’ Nurse Dawn called after them.

  ‘I didn’t know you could look so smart,’ said Felicity.

  ‘I had a good week last week,’ said William, looking for some wood to touch.

  ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ said Felicity, ‘those clothes are all new.’

  ‘I went into Hartford,’ said William, ‘I couldn’t let you down.’ ‘And the car?’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘I love it.’

  ‘All for you,’ he said. ‘All because of you.’

  William took Route 95 North to Exit 92, then Route 2 West: they travelled through roads where sometimes the woods crowded in to the very edges of the tarmac, sometimes kept aloof so you could see the shapes of the hills: the eye became accustomed to muted browns and greens. It was a bright day: the world seemed young and cheerful. It felt natural for Felicity to be sitting there beside him: as if she had been doing it all her life. There was a rightness about it. He drove fast and competently, like a man twenty years younger, at the height of his power to impress the world, eager to be getting where he was going. Men always drove more slowly coming home. She buried anxiety about Dr Bronstein: Nurse Dawn was being both absurd and malicious. Even if the good Doctor too was due for a psychiatric examination that afternoon, which was not necessarily the case, it wasn’t likely that a conversation over lunch would make much difference to the Doctor’s mental state. He talked and she listened; it was not exactly sparkling dialogue. She could of course have checked that he knew the year and the President’s name, and they could have looked up Kosovo together - she dismissed the thought. This was her day and Nurse Dawn was not to be allowed to spoil it. Felicity didn’t take up the matter with William. He was not going to be impressed with her concern for another man: Dr Bronstein relegated to the West Wing would suit William well enough, and even, for all she knew, Dr Bronstein himself. Just because she, Felicity, feared the West Wing, and the chancy kindness of nursing staff as over the years you were stupefied by tranquillizers, rendered paranoiac by painkillers, confined to your bed and became a source of profound irritation and trouble to others, did not mean the rest on the world shared her fears. Some might quite look forward to the rest, the absence of decision, the notion of too late now. Some cared what others thought of them scarcely at all: worried only about what they thought of others. In the West Wing Dr Bronstein could talk on to himself, without the bother of having a face opposite, sitting watching. She knew she was trying to convince herself. She should have done her duty by friendship and stayed. But when did a woman ever put a friend before a lover?

  It was not too late. She would ask William to turn back. She opened her mouth to say so, and closed it again. So much you could do for others, no more. This was her day: hers and William’s.

  The Saab turned a bend in the road. There, gaudy, impossible and sudden, towering over the woods, stood an emerald-green Disney Castle, all spires, glass, turrets and towers.

  ‘Foxwoods Casino,’ said William, happily. ‘My secret. Property of the Mashantucket Pequod Tribal Indians. This is reservation land. All profits free of tax, in due compensation for the injuries of the past.’

  ‘This place can hardly be secret,’ said Felicity, ‘to anyone who comes along this road.’

  ‘It is only a dream,’ said William, ‘which keeps coming true. It is happiness snatched away and rendered back to you. It is wealth beyond your wildest dreams yet always in them and beyond them. It is excitement and compulsion and infinite choice. It is the battle against the self. It is Eros in the face of Thanatos. It draws you back and back and yet it never happened. Outside you, this is my life. Last week I played the purple tables. Minimum bet $500; I chose orange chips only. That’s $1,000 a throw. I cleared $50,000 and left before it was gone again. I had to, to get back to you.

  That’s your influence, Felicity. My luck has turned. I’m on a roll. Can’t you sniff it in the air?’

  He smiled as he drove, for her but no longer to her. There was a gleam in his eye, an alertness; she could feel the magnet pull as well. Others had the same idea. The road filled up: they were part of a pilgrimage. She felt jealous. She wanted to be his only preoccupation. This was no fly in the ointment: this was a great writhing caterpillar with staring eyes on stalks. She had not bargained for this.

  ‘What a perfectly frightful building,’ she said, as English as she could be. ‘How quite extraordinary. Whoever gave them permission for that!’ She felt she spoke with Nurse Dawn’s tongue but couldn’t help it.

  ‘They don’t need permission,’ William said. ‘It’s their land, not Uncle Sam’s. You get used to it, you get even to like it. I come here most days, mornings only since I met you, and two or three evenings a week.’

  ‘Gambling,’ she said. ‘A gambling man. That’s why you have nothing left, why you live in the Rosemount. It’s an addiction.’ ‘Good car, good shoes, good tie,’ he said. ‘They can’t take this away from me.’

  ‘No, but you can lose them again,’ she said sharply. He looked sad, misunderstood. She put her hand on his knee: and he cheered up suspiciously quickly. He had been too sure of her. Perhaps she could cure him? She’d thought that once of someone - who was it had had the drink problem? - and of course been wrong. Those were in the Twelve Step days, but whoever got beyond six? Hello, I am a reformed gambler, drug addict, alcoholic, loveaholic. How can I help you?<
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  William Johnson, gambling man, the opposite of contrite. Take his money from his bank, put it on a horse, or its casino equivalent, weep and grovel for a bit and then go back for more. Except he did not seem the grovelling type. She wanted to overlook it, tell herself it didn’t matter, a man of seventy-two was allowed his entertainment, but what would Exon say? His stiff, kind face would have turned stiffer still in disapproval: even Buckley, back in Savannah, who played poker on mahogany tables in the houses of friends, would never have frequented a casino. ‘That’s why your family left,’ she said. ‘That’s why you’re all alone. They couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘Margaret’s a po-faced bitch,’ he said. ‘She wanted the house. She got it.’ He showed her a savagery he had not so far brought to her attention, but did today, almost carelessly. He was handing her reasons to break the relationship off, sink back into the safeness of the Golden Bowl, to spar with Nurse Dawn till the West Wing called. Anything was better than that, even the attentions of a gambling man, when he had time off from his obsession to think of you.

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’ he asked. ‘Turn back? Is it too much for you? Too vulgar to endure?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said.

  ‘Praise the Lord,’ he said, and put his foot on the accelerator in his eagerness. She could see that if he had delivered her back home again, he would simply have set out again for these shimmering topless towers of Ilium. Take me, take all of me.

  The towers and turrets differentiated themselves as they approached: some turquoise, some silver; the magic diminished, the place looked more like a gigantic shopping mall than Mickey Mouse’s fantasy of heaven. Still incomparably vulgar, hopelessly at war with nature, but kind of local all the same. The Pequod Indians changing their tune, subduing the natural world for a change, false God as it had turned out to be, for them. A toothless, hopeless God, when faced by an enemy with a flair for logistics. Commune with nature all you liked, meld and mystify, worship and magnify, placate and please, in the end it betrayed you. Nature had sided with the white man, trampling and crushing through undergrowth though he might, slaughtering animals, burning the prairie: nature admired him. Talk loud, act tough, win. The survival of the cunning, not the valiant. That’s what nature respects.