Fay Weldon - Novel 23

by Rhode Island Blues (v1. 1)

  Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said! Jerry Salzburger had described himself to Felicity as from an old Lutheran family settled in Georgia two hundred years back and so he might well have been. And he had described his home as like Scarlett’s Tara in Gone with the Wind, and she had believed him, and perhaps it had been, a couple of generations back. Oh America, my new-found land, the land of dreams, nylons, chewing gum and good cheer. Well, why wouldn’t he lie? Anton had lied. She was never to learn. He had married her to do her a favour, thinking he would never see her again.

  She set to work. She threw a bucket of water over Jerry, who woke up to demand food. She found eggs and made an omelette but he threw it at her. ‘Damn you to hell,’ she said, and washed and fed the little boy. She watered and fed the chickens and moved the ones who couldn’t stand up to a separate hen house, and cut feverfew and threw it in with them. Some died but some recovered. She shovelled chicken shit and mended the holes in the wire fence, to keep animal predators out. She didn’t know what they would be, just that they were bound to exist. She found Jerry’s shotgun and worked out how to use it. That would keep the human predators out. She was six months pregnant. It was hot and muggy. On the first night she made up a bed on the broken verandah and slept there. It had been a long journey.

  In the morning he apologized and said he’d never believed the child was his, he’d married her as a favour, he was married already but as it happened his wife had left him; gone without taking the little boy. Felicity could stay if she liked. There was nowhere else to go so she stayed. There was one tap to keep humans and hens watered. Little Tommy helped; he was a valiant child. They got on well together. She moved into Jerry’s bed. She had been happy enough there in the past, though she could see the taxi driver might be a better bet. Angel was born.

  Felicity wrote a letter to Mrs Donaldson asking her how to keep hens, because Jerry sure as hell didn’t know, he thought you just owned them and they laid eggs all by themselves. It hadn’t occurred to him that they needed to be looked after. No wonder he had taken to drink. Mrs Donaldson replied in detail, advising her to breed for neck lacing in the females, because that was where the future lay, but to beware of it in the males: that would lead to a flock with slate in their neck undercolour; the worst sin in a red breeder.

  The Salzburger family lived on nothing and the hens lived in splendour. The family ate fried eggs and baked eggs, scrambled eggs and poached eggs and the hens lived on scraps from the neighbours bulked up with scratch grains and though the shells were too thin the hens were content. They laid better if the cocks didn’t run with them. Emotionally deprived hens console themselves laying eggs; every one a sense of achievement. Soon there was enough money to put in a proper water supply in the hen houses, and after that to mend the roof, replace the stove, and buy nappies instead of laying the baby on moss. Moss, like the mosquito, is always plentiful in a hot, damp land. And to pay for cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women for Jerry, who never grew out of the habit, for all his Lutheran ancestry.

  Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said! If only Felicity could have settled, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t born to this, but to London bohemian life, no matter what the events in between. She had learned to be grateful but not as grateful as this. She got the Rhode Island blues and left one day, when Angel was five and Tommy was twelve, and who could blame her? At least she took the children with her: many don’t. She worked as a singer and dancer on an old-fashioned riverboat, with its burnished copper pistons, pumping up, pumping down, and the smell of hot oil everywhere. Up the Savannah every night, past the cotton warehouses, still in use, and back again, on the Old Glory's Moonlight Cruise. When there were private parties she’d dance topless, or so my mother told me, but Angel’s testimony is not to be relied upon: her brain was wired wrong.

  It was at one of these parties that Felicity met Buckley, remembered that she wasn’t legally married and set out to be his wife. Buckley had a good library and she wanted to give herself an education: she knew there wouldn’t be much else to do, once she was rich, except read.

  Buckley said he would take on the little girl, since she was so pretty, but not the boy, who did not appeal, so Tommy went back to Jerry, and grew up to be a wastrel and father William Johnson’s stepdaughter Margaret’s two boys out of wedlock.

  Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said! That can’t be laid at Felicity’s door: it was in the genes, like the slate undercolour of the neck feathers in a Rhode Island Red if you get the breeding wrong. And she did go to the funeral.

  Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said! Felicity shouldn’t have told Angel on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, that what Jerry was accustomed to saying in a drunken rage and then apologizing for the next day was true: that he wasn’t Angel’s father. Angel’s real father was a folk singer who played bad guitar and sang out of tune in a club in London’s Soho. The news so upset Angel that something in the brain wiring that had been holding out gave up and snapped and thereafter there was mayhem in her head, off and on. To some people a drunken chicken-shit father that you know is better than one you don’t know and is suddenly thrust upon you. And no-one can even remember his name, or isn’t telling.

  Oh, the Grand Panjandrum asks: Why did Felicity choose the eve of Angel’s eighteenth birthday to speak the truth? Answer comes there none, other than that Felicity’s sopping-up project was nowhere complete, and since there was still evil abounding to be passed on, that’s what happened. A life spent toiling on a chicken farm is a better preparation for goodness than singing and dancing topless as a riverboat entertainer, which can make you kind of careless. And not even on the mighty Mississippi, but on the lesser Savannah, the latter being to the former in style and glamour as Foxwoods is to Las Vegas. Only later did Felicity learn more restraint. She reproached herself for ever afterwards, but that does not excuse her, and she was still calling me from the States to say the time had come for her to speak the truth: she would not acknowledge that she spoke it more than enough. Mind you, I daresay Angel rising eighteen was a handful: how do you keep a girl modest and good when your own past is what it is, and word tends to get about beneath the damp and ghostly fronds of Spanish moss which festoon the trees hereabouts. In Rhode Island everything is clear cut: the dogwood is bright and clean and white in early spring: but there are always humming birds to remind you of the South: shiny green above, white chest, green sides and the male with a ruby red throat. I expect someone, somewhere is breeding them to make the females as pretty as the males, though it would require ingenuity. If you can think of it, someone some- where’s doing it, that’s my theory. More digressions.

  Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said! That my mother, as mad as a hatter but nobody knew it then, went off to London on her eighteenth birthday. She was sent to Europe on vacation with friends but shipped out mid-National Gallery and never came back, leaving Felicity and Buckley and Jerry distraught: a thin, wild-eyed, talented, beautiful thing with pre-Raphaelite hair and a good education, who knew a lot of poetry by heart, from Whitman to Byron, and had pretensions as a painter. She went in search of her father. This was in 1964. She just went round the corner from the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square into Soho, not far from where I now live, to a club called the Mandrake. 4Catch with child a mandrake root,’ Felicity had once rashly said to Angel, 4and that's where I caught you.' Angels don’t forget.

  The club was closed and up for sale, but there was an old caretaker there who remembered a man who could well have been her father. He played the guitar and sang folk songs: that was at the time when the V2s were falling in London, just before the end of the war, in the days when people drank whisky or beer, not wine. Artists and writers came to the club: they played chess. The showgirls from round about would come in to keep them company. No, he didn’t remember one called Felicity: he reckoned he would have. Mostly they were called Vera or Anne or Fluffy St George. But he seemed to remember the folk singer was knifed to death in some incident outside a pub. The night after V-E night, All
ied Victory in Europe night, 8 May, 1945. So much for my maternal grandfather.

  Oh, the Grand Panjandrum sings: English folk songs crossed to America back in the eighteenth century: their natural home seemed to be in the Appalachian Mountains, and there they stayed in a purer form than happened back home, where for the most part they simply died out. Except for songs like The Sweet Nightingale, which they’d make us sing at school, and everyone hated but me.

  My sweetheart come along.

  Don’t you hear the sweet song,

  The sweet notes of the nightingale flow.

  Pray sit your self down,

  By me on the ground -

  Oh yes, and we all know what happened next. Shut up singing, Grand Panjandrum, what did we know as children, what was to happen next in our life songs.

  Oh, the Grand Panjandrum calms down to say my grandmother came to London to rescue her daughter, but Angel refused to go home: she was determined to go to the Camberwell School of Art. She would be fine on her own.

  ‘Well,’ said Felicity, ‘I seem to remember I wanted to do ballet once,’ and let Angel stay in a strange city with no friends. How you deal with your children depends on your own life- experience, I suppose. Or perhaps she didn’t want Angel to find out about Buckley’s closet gayness: the world could still be shocked, and Buckley was increasingly rash: be that as it may Felicity set Angel up in a small apartment in Soho and flew back to Atlanta as quick as she could.

  Oh, the Grand Panjandrum is not surprised to note that Angel never turned up to art classes, nor did she phone home, and that the apartment soon filled up with winos and druggies she had asked back. The mentally ill frequently seek out the company of the dispossessed: they have a fellow feeling for them, an empathy. But victims are not necessarily nice people and soon Angel was locked out of her own place and sleeping on the floor of the art student who was to be my father. When I was one year old my crib was placed on the lid of the bath in the kitchen - this was how people lived in those days: if you wanted to own a bath the kitchen would be the only room in the house with plumbing, so the bath would have a wooden lid which doubled as a shelf. It was okay. When I was four my father Rufus had an exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in Cork Street. He had fifty paintings on display. He sold twenty-five. When the time came for the remaining ones to be taken down Angel piled them against the wall outside, doused them with methylated spirit, and set fire to them. The public had had their chance to buy these works of genius and turned them down: they would not be given another chance. They were pigs without taste. Rufus wept. The police did not press charges but she was made to see a psychiatrist. She became increasingly violent. She threw the cat across the room. Its yellow eyes proved it was the devil. But she never harmed me, or only the once when she thought I was someone else and tried to smother me. As I grew older I became her companion in setting the world to rights. Sometimes we’d throw things: sometimes we’d go to the cinema together and she’d sit quiet and good. I loved that. Sometimes I went to school, sometimes I didn’t. Felicity flew to and fro. It was as well that Buckley by now owned an airline. Whenever her mother came over Angel got worse. She wouldn’t accept money. If anyone gave it to her she burned it. She didn’t approve of it. Rufus came and went: he tried to stay but had to go, often at knifepoint. When the social workers turned up my mother was sweet as pie and always had reasons and excuses for bad behaviour. Sometimes they didn’t work and they’d take her away: I remember her walking away from me down a long echoing corridor, hand in hand with a nurse whose keys jangled at her belt. Doors slammed, with an extraordinary solid clunk. When she finally ended her life, when I was ten, which I think she did to save me from her, she was in a good phase, remission, they called it, but both Rufus and Felicity were away and I had to cut down her body.

  Oh, how sick I am of the Grand Panjandrum: he’s no use at all, someone tell him to shut up.

  36

  The day after her outing to Foxwoods, Felicity rose late. She breakfasted in her room on yogurt, orange juice and caffeinated coffee. Love makes some women fat with contentment: it makes others thin from an all-purpose eagerness. Felicity was of the second kind. She would have to have her skirts taken in, or better still, buy new. She wondered how William would be with shopping, and decided not very good, he would be impatient and like everything she tried on, not seeing that it mattered very much. Exon had been an attentive escort, carrying shopping and summoning attendants, but his taste led to the dull and out of politeness to him she would end up with clothes too boring to wear.

  After breakfast she spoke to William on the phone about this and other matters for at least half an hour. The more time two people spend together the more there is to say when they are apart. Trivia between intimates is as compelling as major world statements between strangers. Felicity had seen a rare green-throated indigo bunting outside her window: it had stayed where it was for at least five minutes, giving her time to find her bird book and identify it. She could swear that’s what it was. Good things were coming to her door. William had a blister from his new shoes, and the question was did one burst the skin and let the fluid out, or slap a plaster on it so the fluid dispersed? And so on.

  By the time Felicity wandered down to the Library to have a chat with Dr Bronstein and possibly Clara Craft, it was nearly midday.

  If she found Clara there she would have to listen yet once again to the details of the Hindenburg disaster, which ran through Clara’s mind like a film seen over and over, blocking out other thoughts. Just sometimes the footage seemed to leave her alone and then she would have a lot to say of interest. As it happened there was no Dr Bronstein seated among the leather armchairs: only Clara, whose skinny hand clutched Felicity’s arm, Ancient Mariner fashion. Dr Bronstein had been taken away, Clara whispered, against his will, in full view of his relatives, to the West Wing. Something must have been put in his drink: he had seemed confused. Not his usual self.

  ‘When was this?’ asked Felicity.

  ‘Just after the Reinforcement Session with Dr Grepalli,’ said Clara. ‘Yesterday afternoon. Everyone else had left the Library. I will never sing that half-full song again. Our cup is half-empty, I don’t care what he says. You should have been here, Miss Felicity. You could have stopped them doing it.’

  ‘I don’t see how,’ said Felicity.

  ‘People take notice of you,’ said Clara. ‘They don’t of me. You have a present. The rest of us only have pasts.’ Which at a less distressing time would have flattered Felicity greatly.

  ‘Fie didn’t want to go,’ said Clara. ‘Nurse Dawn manhandled him. She told him he had to go: he had no choice: they’d taken out some legal order. As for family, I don’t see what rights they could possibly have had, three generations down. But they don’t play it by the book, they do what suits them. Poor Dr Bronstein, his great-great grandson and his girlfriend, not even married, too young to know anything!’

  Miss Felicity had to manually loosen Clara’s grip on her arm. The rheumatically bent fingers seemed to have gone into spasm. They were hurting. Clara didn’t notice.

  ‘Mind you,’ said Clara, ‘I never know how old young people are any more: they might only have been in their mid-twenties. She was trying to be kind: she said it was for his own good: if you didn’t know the name of the President of the United States you weren’t capable of looking after your own affairs. And she was the one who wasn’t even a blood relation. They didn’t know I was listening. I was snuggling down in my chair.’

  * * *

  More likely, thought Felicity, Clara hadn’t been able to get out of it without help and Dr Bronstein had suddenly found himself in no position to give it. The chairs were low, deep and squashy and a perpetual challenge to the elderly.

  Nurse Dawn entered the Library, smiling sweetly. She carried in her arms, cradled like a child, three long-stemmed white lilies of the kind people used to give on the occasion of a death. Both Felicity and Clara were of an age to know that cut white lilies are
unlucky. Funeral flowers. Seeing Nurse Dawn and the lilies, Clara stopped talking and didn’t have the sense to switch the conversation, as Felicity would have done.

  ‘Something you don’t want me to hear, Miss Craft?’ inquired Nurse Dawn, consequently. ‘Some terrible event to equal the loss of the Hindenburg?’ She carefully laid down her lilies and went from chair to chair, testing their seats. She stopped at one, with disapproval.

  ‘Damp!’ she exclaimed. ‘Dr Bronstein’s favourite chair, of course. We can’t be surprised, though we can be revolted. Only one thing for it, replacement, and you know the expense of these real leather chairs. We kept Dr Bronstein out of the West Wing longer than was wise. Well, as they say back home no good deed goes unpunished. This kind of thing is not pleasant for the other guests.’ ‘They don’t say that back home,’ said Miss Felicity, ‘I say it, and I’m sure I’ve never set foot in your home state, Nurse Dawn. As for damp, that is not in the least damp.’ She had braved herself to test the soft, leathery surface, and found it dry enough.