Fay Weldon - Novel 23

by Rhode Island Blues (v1. 1)

  32

  Valerie Boheimer of Abbey Inquiries, Private Investigators, Hartford, equivalent of London’s Aardvark Detectives, reported back to Joy at the end of the week. Joy had had to fork out $1,000 in advance, and further sums would be payable until the investigation of William Johnson was complete.

  ‘What I do for my friends!’ shrieked Joy to Jack. ‘Do you think that English girl will pay?’

  ‘Depends what this Valerie finds out,’ said Jack. He was feeling more cheerful, and becoming accustomed to the noise Joy made. She had been remarkably good about Charlie: hadn’t sacked him for running around behind her back, using her gas without a by-your-leave and inciting Felicity to madness and keeping it secret. Joy balked at making ten living creatures homeless, which would have happened had she let Charlie go: the ten including various women, four wideeyed children, and what was more important, two dogs and one cat which had just had kittens. If the humans went Joy would have felt obliged to take in the animals. Francine would have fired Charlie on the spot and had the animals put down. No messing.

  Yet Francine, Joy’s deceased sister, Jack’s deceased wife, still seemed to live among them, to trot to and fro between Windspit and Passmore as they did. If you listened you could almost hear her soft footsteps in the early morning mists. Francine had never liked animals; she had an asthmatic reaction to cats and an aversion to dog hairs on her clothes. She had been as quiet as her sister was noisy, padding cat-like about the house - maybe it was that she wanted no feline competition. It was not Joy’s fault that Francine had developed cancer. Joy didn’t believe the nonsense about it being the disease of unspoken grief: of faulty genes more like it, which Joy hoped to God she didn’t share.

  Jack had the builders in to Passmore, as Francine would have wanted. Francine liked everything to be state-of-the-art and spotless, and Jack, after forty years of top-of-the-range car dealership - Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar, Saab - could afford it. Indeed, he felt obliged to provide it, even though Francine was underground and not actually living in the house, or only in spirit. Joy, who had always been obliged to live more modestly than her sister, could never understand why Francine, who specialized in moral disapproval, and wouldn’t let a man smoke or drink spirits or swear in the house, had ended up with wealthier husbands than she, Joy, had ever managed to acquire. There was a certain breed of moneymaking men around, it seemed, who needed their wives to look daggers and keep them on the straight and narrow. They didn’t want fun. In the same way, she noticed, very good-looking men often had the plainest, dullest wives. But the very beautiful women often had fat and ugly husbands, so she supposed it kept the balance right. Except those man were usually wealthy, and the wives not. Perhaps the female capacity for moral disapproval served as an equivalent currency.

  Be that as it may, Felicity, who had married Exon to be disapproved of, so far as Joy could see, had spent too much time looking in mirrors and buying clothes to have looked after Passmore properly, and now Jack was left to put up with the consequences. Felicity had simply not noticed that paint had chipped, that bathroom sealant had gone mouldy, that there were squirrels and worse under the roof, and rot under the floorboards. Or perhaps she had indeed noticed, and that was why she had been so anxious to so suddenly sell up and move into the Golden Bowl: nothing to do with falls and burns, just a disinclination to face facts, spend money, and put up with the annoyances of builders. All that would be left to the purchaser, and Felicity had taken no pains to point out to the buyer - even though that buyer was Jack, Joy’s own brother-in-law - just how much would be needed to get the property back into good repair. Joy resented this on Jack’s behalf. He had paid over the odds.

  Felicity had kept the place crowded, English-style: ornaments on all surfaces, and no place mats, so French polish had been scratched to bits and no-one cared. The walls had been crowded with drawings and paintings, but when it came to packing up, Felicity had just thrown up her hands and sold the lot at a knockdown price. Charlie had organized a field sale for the small things and it was amazing how much you could get for rubbish, even reckoning that Charlie probably returned only fifty per cent of the cash he took. Selling Felicity up had proved a lot of hard work for everyone, and throughout the process Felicity had been at her most lordly, declaring herself bored with material possessions, happy to move into the hotel-like, bland, unadorned nothingness of the Golden Bowl, taking only a few personal belongings and the Utrillo with her. She had given Joy the first choice of her wardrobe, which Joy had declined - not her style - and after that had let Charlie and his family take their pick. The two little girls, Beck and Georgina, though their mouths were grubby, were seldom seen out without pieces of expensive fabric pinned here and there, peasant-style by way of Bergdorf Goodman.

  Charlie’s daughters would be a handful when they grew up: already they eyed even Jack as if he were natural game: the little boys, whether their cousins or their brothers, Joy was disinclined to find out, were tough, handsome and surly. Charlie had the matter of nationality in hand. Immigration officials turned up from time to time to ask questions but seemed satisfied with what Charlie had to say and went away.

  Jack was beginning to feel more at home. Dramas and events did that, gave you memories, rooted you in a place. Having the builders in added tension. If living with Francine was like floating on a smooth sea, albeit one calmed by an oil spill - he did not know why the image came to mind - living with Joy was all choppy water, but at least things happened.

  * * *

  Valerie, the private investigator hired by Joy was blonde, brisk, tough and professionally indignant. She was not as young as she would like to be but neglected to flirt with Jack, as most of his older female employees had done in the past, however minimally. Jack felt his age and asked Joy anxiously if his neck was becoming shorter and Joy said, yes, it was. His head was sinking into rolls of flesh above his shoulders. That’s what happened when you retired and stopped questing, sniffing out money, and relaxed. It had happened to all her husbands, she assured him. Golf did not help.

  Valerie reported that the subject William Johnson had four traffic violations, one in 1958, one in 1974, two in 1994, but no criminal record. He had spent some time in Europe. He had cashed in various insurance policies over the previous ten years to the tune of $900,000. Currently he owed a total of $82,000 on eight credit cards. He had $208 in his current account. He had been born in Providence in 1927.

  ‘Twelve years younger than she is!’ said Joy, making rapid calculations. ‘What do they call them? Toy boys?’

  Valerie was really quite attractive, thought Jack. When Francine died it had opened the door again to legitimate adventures of a romantic kind, but here he was again, hemmed in this time by Joy. Women crowded you: they didn’t want you to get away. He’d believed that age in a man didn’t matter, only in women, but they’d got it wrong. Women these days looked through him and beyond him. But he was only sixty-nine.

  Valerie continued. The subject came from a once wealthy textile family, originally from Massachusetts, who had come north to Rhode Island in the 1860s, been burned out in Narragansett in the great fire of 1900, lost all its money in the crash of 1929, and been finally blown out, uninsured, by the great storm of 1937. Subject’s father had been an unsuccessful sculptor and painter. The mother was Italian-American, a Catholic, from Providence. There had been a twin brother, who had been killed in a car crash along with his mother, on Ocean Drive, just before World War II. There were no records of school attendance, but William had gone to college in Boston and studied English literature at Queen’s, New York, and qualified as a teacher. He had married three times. ‘Unstable, I told you so,’ said Joy. Jack murmured that Joy herself had been married four times, and so come to that had Felicity, but Joy said it was different for women, which baffled Jack. Valerie was anxious to get on.

  Valerie’s report went on to detail William Johnson’s marriages. The first at twenty: Emily, twelve years his senior, who had seen him through
college, and died of cancer eight years later. The second when he was thirty-six, to eighteen-year-old Sue-Anne, killed in a car crash when she was twenty-five.

  ‘What a chapter of accidents,’ said Joy, meaningfully. Jack pointed out that Joy had outlived all her husbands, and Joy snorted.

  The subject William Johnson had been fifty-one when he married Meryl Mason, aged forty-one, a publisher’s editor from New York, who had come to the marriage as mother of a daughter, Margaret. The Agency could find no record of a divorce, though this did not necessarily mean there had not been one. Valerie would be happy to find out, but it would mean upgrading the basic packet of enquiry, and would cost a further $500. The trouble with these common names was that a great deal of cross-checking was required. Give the Investigation Industry an unusual name and they could trim their costs accordingly, but Johnson! Joy said she had heard more than enough and the fee was outrageous as it was. Valerie said she needed to get home to change. She was going to a big charity do in Hartford with her husband. He was its president and they couldn’t be late.

  ‘Just look at those age gaps,’ shrieked Joy, after Jack, apologizing, had shown Valerie out. ‘That’s not love, that’s calculation. This man murdered his wives for their money. Felicity has got tangled up with a serial killer.’

  ‘I too am a widower,’ said Jack, patiently. ‘I did not murder my wife. And please not so loud. We don’t want passers-by to hear. It might get back to poor Mr Johnson.’

  Joy sulked at that, said Jack was a man and naturally on the man’s side: she had a headache and was going up to bed. Jack could sleep in the guest room if he wanted.

  These days Jack would do this once or twice a week, the short cut through from Passmore to Windspit being barred by a stock- fence put up by Charlie to keep his two goats and the cow from getting out, and Jack having to use the long way round via Divine Road to get home. Sometimes at night it just seemed too far to go. Joy told Jack that she spoke perfectly quietly, it was other people who whispered. It was a long way from the road, and who was there to hear anyway?

  ‘Charlie and his family,’ said Jack. ‘They might not be above blackmail.’

  That didn’t please Joy either. She liked to be the only one to think badly of the family in the guesthouse. The younger of the two women now in residence - both of whom claimed to be Charlie’s wife, but maybe that was just a difficulty with the language - was now engaged to clean Joy’s house, for which she was paid a considerable sum, and scrubbed the paint so hard it began to look scratched. Joy discovered that Esma, for that was her name, Me Joy you Esma, was using a saucepan scourer for the paint, silicone polish on the antiques, and glass cleaner on the floors. Esma had to be excused, Charlie told Joy, accustomed as she was to those rusty tins of scouring-powder - one powder cleans all - that in dimmer parts of the world, where there was no consumer choice, were all anyone had by way of cleaning agents.

  Joy felt bad mentioning it. Esma spent unconscionable hours ironing, and weeping into Jack’s shirts, which Joy had agreed to launder for him at Windspit. The kind of pick-up-and-deliver valet service Francine had been accustomed to seemed to be extravagant in a retired man who didn’t even have an office to go to.

  If Joy murmured about not having the control on the iron set to very hot, since so doing crinkled up silks and left scorch marks on the tablecloths, Esma would weep and talk about massacres and mass graves, which Joy couldn’t bear. Otherwise Esma was picking up American habits very fast: she had arrived in the country bundled up inside layers of clothing: now she wore dresses with full skirts and tight belts, and you could see the shape of her body.

  Joy thought maybe the two girls were Esma’s, and the two boys belonged to the other wife, Amira, but could not be sure, again because of difficulties with the language. The two girls, around twelve, giggled and hid and peeked if you caught sight of them, but the boys, both about ten, Joy thought, swaggered about and had once got hold of the shotgun she kept in the garage, and fired at innocent songbirds, and brought their dead bodies into her kitchen for her to admire, just as a cat would. Francine would really have hated that. You could almost hear her ghost protesting. Charlie, summoned, had disarmed and shouted at the boys, but Joy dismissed that as just for show. She was not stupid. But for some reason unclear to herself she did not like Jack criticizing this unfortunate family. Jack was still a newcomer, living in what still felt like Felicity’s house. Granted he had been instrumental in employing Charlie in the first place, Windspit was her (Joy’s) property, her (Joy’s) guest apartment, her (Joy’s) limo. Jack should remember that. If Charlie’s lapse was anyone’s fault, it was Felicity’s. Felicity took advantage of her (Joy’s) goodness, ordering Joy’s chauffeur around as if Charlie were her own.

  Felicity went too far. If now Felicity had got herself into trouble, she had only herself to blame. What made Felicity think she was so special that at her age she could be loved for herself and herself alone, not for her income? Pride comes before a fall, and the fall would bruise and hurt her but had to happen. Felicity didn’t of course deserve to die, and it was Joy’s duty to warn her that William Johnson was at best a bigamist and at worst a serial wife killer.

  Joy called the Golden Bowl to let them know she would be coming soon to visit Miss Felicity, and asked Esma to drop a copy of the Agency report in the post to the Director, Dr Grepalli. Esma said she would do it as soon as she had milked the cow and put the goats in the goat shed over at Passmore - once Felicity’s garden studio - so the document did not get off that night. In the world of the stock keeper, bits of paper take second place.

  33

  My grandmother called me at midnight.

  ‘So how’s love?’ I asked.

  ‘Just fine,’ she said. ‘My dear, the irrationality! I’d forgotten. The sky brightens, the future beckons, you start again! William turns out to be a gambling man, I’m afraid to say, but I can put up with it.’

  ‘You mean gambling Las Vegas-style?’ I asked. ‘Atlantic City? Crime, vice and pole dancers?’

  ‘Foxwoods-style,’ she replied. ‘Reservation money, not Mafia. The Mashantucket Tribal Nation. Frankly, all rather on the muted side: you can hear the backwoods calling. But I was never one for the high life. Casinos are fantastic, Sophia. You hand them money and they hand it back with interest.’

  ‘Sounds just like investing,’ I said. ‘Though I must warn you it’s rumoured not to be as safe.’

  ‘One can only go by one’s own experience,’ she said. ‘I went in with $50 and came out with $150. I am naturally lucky, or so William tells me.’

  ‘Beginner’s luck,’ I said.

  ‘That is an irrational concept, Sophia. Why should a beginner be more lucky than anyone else? No, it’s me. Since William and I got together he’s been on a lucky roll.’

  I envisaged an elderly man sitting at the slots, feeding in a quarter at the time. The pair of them, side by side, holding hands between rolls, as much interested in each other as what went on behind the windows. Why shouldn’t they? Just two of many grey heads lined up on stools beneath bright lights, safety in numbers. You couldn’t get into too much trouble, a quarter at a time. Cherries, red sevens, triple bars, whatever, whizzing away on command, the little orgasmic shudder when they stop, for good or bad. A sex substitute, according to a docudrama I once cut, though I wasn’t quite convinced. Not all pleasures have to relate back to sex. But at eighty-odd you do what you can. You get fruit machines on rail stations all over Britain but the pleasure’s furtive and solitary, the payout’s disgraceful and the train pulls in to rescue you. ‘In fact he’s been able to afford a new car, a top-of-the-range Saab,’ said Felicity. ‘I don’t have to borrow Joy’s Mercedes any more.’

  This didn’t sound so good. If they were playing the slots, it was certainly not the quarter machines.

  ‘He plays mostly craps,’ she said, reassuringly. ‘You get the best odds. Blackjack’s most fun, but you can get overexcited. William’s no fool. And he knows when to
stop.’

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I said, and no more. This woman was in love, and who wanted to rub her nose in reality? I hadn’t heard so much nonsense since my friend Evie fell in love with a drug dealer and told everyone he was going to go straight because of her. The odd thing was that he did.

  Felicity sounded intolerably cheerful. Personally I’d had a hard day in the cutting room, and a row with Harry. He had been no help at all: he’d been too absorbed with himself to so much as remember there was an outside world, and I said so. He’d sat and stared into space or flicked through magazines and let me get on with it. I felt, since his presence was being paid for by the studio, he might just sometimes give the job in hand a little attention, if only for form’s sake. He said that was absurd: I was an independent female perfectly capable of making my own decisions.

  I said I’d been doing that all my life and was tired of it.

  He said I was pre-menstrual and I thought I would kill him. There was no sharp weapon around, though, so I solved my problem by simply editing out a whole thirty seconds of Astra Barnes’s filmic meanderings instead of wrestling it into shape.

  ‘I bet you don’t tell Holly she’s pre-menstrual,’ I observed casually when it was done without so much as a comment from him and he was sitting still reading the paper and smoking. It was a tiny room, but what did he care?

  ‘She doesn’t have periods,’ he said. ‘She’s too slim.’

  He was behaving monstrously. He was a monster I had inadvertently let into my life. What was I doing with this alien being? I had to get rid of him somehow.

  ‘In the US we know how to keep our bodies under control,’ he added. ‘We don’t guzzle Danishes.’

  The PA had brought in Danishes and coffee at lunchtime, without being asked. I’d eaten one. He’d eaten two, both the apricot, which I preferred. I made do with apple.