‘As we get older,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘our tactile senses get less acute. We smell and don’t know it, repeat ourselves and don’t realize it. And when we lose our judgement we have to be looked after by others for our own good. Sometimes we even smudge our lipstick and can’t see it even in a magnifying mirror.’
She leaned forward and touched the edge of Felicity’s lips with the edge of a tissue she took out of her pocket. It smelt of disinfectant. Felicity drew back in disdain. ‘Which is what seems to have happened this morning, Miss Felicity,’ Nurse Dawn continued, unabashed. ‘We don’t want to look like hen dressed as chicken. As we grow older we should use less make-up. At least then we keep our dignity.’ And she shook a plump finger at Miss Clara, whose face was slashed across as ever with a line of scarlet lipstick, drawn regardless of the shape of the lips.
‘If only Dr Bronstein had known where Kosovo was, Dr Grepalli might have been persuaded to let him stay,’ went on Nurse Dawn. ‘Pique might have led the good doctor to forget the name of the President, as I was at pains to point out to the family, but it is not a good sign when once intelligent old men forget geography that’s been all over the papers and CNN. We tend to forget what we want to forget. Place names, unconnected as they are with emotion, are usually the last to go in the descent into senility. Not many people know that. But I hope you had a good outing yesterday, Miss Felicity.’
‘I did,’ said Felicity. ‘I shall organize outings to Foxwoods from the Golden Bowl. There are special rates for those wise in years.’ ‘Wise in years,’ jeered Nurse Dawn, sticking the lilies into a vase amid existing foliage, as if they were javelins. The tough stems pierced with ease through obstacles of leaf and stalk. ‘If only women didn’t get sillier as they got older. And what euphemisms these places use.’
‘That’s a big word,’ said Felicity.
‘In my days at the Post,’ said Clara, who had taken all this time to get her courage back, ‘we were never allowed to use a long word if a short one would do.’
‘So you have observed a hundred times, Miss Craft,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘I hope you know what year we’re in.. Dr Bronstein got that wrong too.’
‘I do indeed,’ said Clara, sensing danger, forgetting to be languid. ‘And it’s far beyond any I ever thought or hoped to see. When I was twenty I hoped to die by thirty, when I was sixty I found that quite astonishing, now I am ninety I wish I had died yesterday but haven’t got the courage to do it.’
Nurse Dawn was now pushing her active fingers through the greenery in the great vases, which stood in the formal fireplace where no fire ever blazed, searching out withered leaves and faded flowers. She wore her bold white uniform today, with brass buttons on the shoulders, voluminous pockets, and little tarty red high heels which she had forgotten to change.
‘You wouldn’t want our visiting psychiatrist to think you were depressed,’ said Nurse Dawn to Clara. ‘In his book that’s one of the worst geriatric disorders. We like everyone to be happy, our cups half-full not half-empty. I don’t think too many of our guests will even notice Dr Bronstein’s absence. So shall we not draw too much attention to his departure? I thought I caught a glimpse of you yesterday, Miss Craft, hiding in your chair, legs drawn up like a naughty little girl, trying not to be noticed.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ said Clara. Her courage had been short-lived. Nurse Dawn smiled with her mouth and not her eyes, and left, taking with her a little bag which she kept in her uniform pocket, into which she stuffed the derelict leaves and flowers she had stripped from their stalks.
‘Is visiting at some special time over in the West Wing?’ Miss Felicity asked Clara.
‘You wouldn’t want to visit over there,’ said Clara. ‘It would be too distressing. Goodness knows who we would see, who we’ve forgotten. Did you know I was one of those people on the ground when the Hindenburg caught fire as it landed?’
37
Later that afternoon the Mercedes, Joy and Jack within it, arrived at the Golden Bowl. Charlie, as Joy bitterly observed, knew the way well. They were to visit Dr Grepalli. Valerie Boheimer’s report had gone ahead of them. Joy wore a diamond and gold choker which lay not on the skin but on the polo-necked collar of her pink velour running suit. ‘Just because a girl needs to be grand,’ she said to Jack, ‘doesn’t mean she can’t be comfortable.’ Jack protested he didn’t see the need to be grand, but Joy said it was important that Dr Grepalli took what they had to say seriously. Felicity’s future welfare depended upon it.
Joy had lately taken to wearing her diamonds nearly every day. Francine had kept hers in the safe for years, claiming it was far too risky to wear expensive jewellery in public. If you wore a ring some drug-crazed villain might cut off your finger to get hold of it, if you wore a bracelet they might take off your whole arm. Francine had heard of it happening. Precious rings, beads and bracelets - her neck was too short for chokers, fortunately, Jack always thought, considering her fears - stayed in their velvet- lined boxes gathering dust under lock and key, until one day, a year before her death, her cancer still undiagnosed, she had without warning removed her valuables from the safe and sold the lot, giving the proceeds to, of all things, a dogs’ home. She had not even liked dogs. Jack had been upset. They had, after all, been gifts from him, bought with the sweat of his brow: he had had a hard life: becoming a wealthy man takes drive, long hours, and concentration. All he had done to deserve this treatment, so far as he could see, was to try to persuade Francine to wear at least something - even if only diamond earrings - to the sixty-fifth birthday party her sister Joy had so kindly organized for her.
Joy had hoped that perhaps Jack would dress up a little for the visit to Dr Grepalli, but she was disappointed. Jack, now a member of the Country Club, would be playing golf later in the day: he declared he would wear only what was suitable for that. His days of dressing to please others were over. His pants were elasticized, his sweaters familiar and baggy.
When Dr Grepalli rose to his feet, a handsome, broad-shouldered, benign figure, he could be seen to be wearing a well-cut grey suit, with white shirt but no tie - a mixture of formality and casualness designed to put others at ease. None of Joy’s husbands had ever achieved sartorial success, and she felt it. She herself preferred ease, a bit of show, a bright colour and a nice fabric, and couldn’t help it, but had always hoped for more from the men she married. In vain.
‘Mr and Mrs Epstein,’ said Dr Grepalli. ‘Welcome!’
Joy and Jack both started to explain together that they were not man and wife but man and deceased wife’s sister, but both gave up. Jack because Joy drowned him out and Joy because she lost interest in denying it. She might as well be Mrs Epstein, the way they had begun to bicker. Francine’s title, once too high an aspiration for Joy, no longer was. Thank God sex did not enter into it, the way it did with Felicity. She, Joy, had never liked sex much and increasing age spared her the necessity of pretending she did. In any case it was young men who required you to enjoy sex: as they got older they became almost relieved when you didn’t show too much interest. Yes, to be Mrs Epstein would be all advantage, no disadvantage. It is better to be a wife than a widow. It would be an entirely suitable match.
Dr Grepalli did not pursue the matter of the couple’s marital status. He was flicking through the Abbey Inquiries report. He looked up at them with calm brown eyes. Joy felt a certain frisson; not sexual, certainly not, had she not decided she was beyond all that; but a kind of emotional spasm which lay just the other side of spiritual into the worldly. Merely a matter of possibilities, a suggestion of shared intimacy. But no doubt he looked like that at all the ladies.
‘I appreciate your concern for your friend,’ he said, ‘and I know my executive assistant Nurse Dawn shares it. But old people are not paper parcels. They have free will, they have feelings, they have a right to love just like anyone else. They may even have a right under the Constitution not to be followed by private detectives but I’m not sure about that.’
There you are you see, Joy,’ said Jack. ‘I told you so. You shouldn’t have done it.’
‘I had to do it,’ shouted Joy. ‘Felicity’s my best friend. She’s in her second childhood. What about her fortune?’
‘She is entitled to dispose of it as she wants,’ said Dr Grepalli. ‘And as fortunes go it is not so very great. Many of our guests leave their money to philanthropic institutions, not to their families, and just as well for this nation that they do. Men tend to be showier with their wealth and dispose of it in their lifetime. Women tend to wait until they’re dead-‘
‘-Or want to make a point,’ interjected Jack, bitterly, thinking of his many gifts to Francine, love tokens all, gone to support stray dogs. Was this how she had thought of him? Or perhaps she just felt bad about her failure to love all God’s creatures equally and wished to compensate.
‘So I don’t think you have a problem there,’ the Doctor went on. ‘Those who earn money are more free with it than those who receive it through the medium of others, which tends to be the case with most of our lady guests. Their husbands made the money: they stayed home.’
‘But supposing she marries,’ said Joy.
‘Ah then,’ said Dr Grepalli. ‘We may have a problem. Any will and testament she may have already made becomes invalid. Until and unless she makes another one all property would automatically go to the new husband.’
‘She has to be stopped,’ yelled Joy. ‘He’s a con artist and a cheat, a younger man chasing an older woman for her money and that report proves it. You have to call the police.’
‘Quieten down a bit, Joy,’ said Jack. ‘No need to get excited. Calling the cops may be way down the road here.’
Francine could be like this, Jack recalled, obsessive, when she got some notion into her head, though she was quiet about it and brooded rather than shouted. She’d always believed he was having an affair with Joy. Of course he hadn’t been, in the true sense of the word. He was no saint, but he would never foul his own nest. It’ll happen, Francine had even whispered to him once. It will happen one day. Men have no taste. The memory depressed him.
‘It’s not me being excited, it’s you just letting things go,’ Joy rounded on him. Francine would just have given him a look. As a consolation you never had the feeling that Joy was keeping things back, the better to pounce. She was looking a little strange today. The diamond choker over the shell suit, or whatever they called it, was all wrong. But at least she didn’t keep the stuff in the safe. At least one day he wouldn’t have to open it and find his gifts missing, sold, the past they symbolized evaporated, gone as if it had never happened. It was after that that he did begin to see Joy, he had to admit it, and thirty-five years too late, began to think he might have married the wrong sister. But too late now.
Dr Grepalli turned back to the report.
‘Four traffic violations in a lifetime,’ he said, ‘doesn’t seem too much to me.’
‘It depends,’ said Joy, having asked him to speak louder and repeat himself three times, ‘what those violations are. DUI or DWI. Driving under the influence or driving while intoxicated.’
‘Joy knows what the difference is,’ said Jack. ‘She had an incident once, and her alcohol levels were dead on point one five. First thing I did when I moved into the area was make her get a chauffeur. Not a side-view mirror left in the neighbourhood and the dents in the old Volvo had to be seen to be believed. Lucky she had me to trade it in for her.’
‘Those dents,’ said Joy, ‘were animals running into my car at night.’ ‘Sometimes one’s night vision isn’t what it should be, as we approach the golden years,’ said Dr Grepalli, absently. Old dears tended to bicker on. It should be seen as a demonstration of custom and affection rather than antagonism. Grown children, listening to their parents, often made the mistake of believing they were unhappy, when what they were doing was keeping little ripples of response flowing from one to the other. ‘At least he doesn’t have a criminal record.’
‘He goes under many names,’ said Joy. ‘Anyone called William Johnson is making it up. The commonest name in all America.’ ‘Dr Grepalli may not follow your logic, Joy,’ said Jack. ‘If it’s common a whole lot of people will have it.’
‘And just look at those age gaps,’ Joy shouted. ‘That’s not love, that’s calculation. He marries old women and then murders them for their money.’
But Dr Grepalli’s eye had fallen on something in the report that worried him.
‘Is that an actual Utrillo she brought with her?’ he asked. ‘I’d assumed it was a reproduction.’
‘What, that old painting she fusses about? It could be for real. He did own an airline. But you never know what to believe.’
‘If so, it has very serious implications,’ said Dr Grepalli, ‘in so far as our insurance is concerned. The thing should be in her bank: if there’s a theft we could be sued. Miss Felicity has no business keeping it on our walls.’ Dr Grepalli was upset beyond mere reason. Homer Grepalli, his father, had collected paintings. He had the best collection of schizophrenic art in the country on his walls, which had distressed Helen, Joseph’s mother, very much. She complained she felt crowded in by such a bleak and tormented vision: nothing on these canvases was bright and cheerful: everything was twisted and inhuman, in black, grey, or if you were lucky, ochre, and at very best a smear of purple. Why did anyone collect lunatic art? Helen was convinced Homer spent good money on these paintings on purpose to annoy her, but as Homer had pointed out to Joseph, his mother was of a paranoiac turn of mind: indeed, she had once been one of Homer’s patients.
Little Joseph had from an early age practised the art of thinking the best of everyone and everything. His father was not malicious. His mother was not insane. The artists represented on the wall did not paint like this all the time, only when they were in a psychotic state. In between episodes their minds would unfold, the tormented shapes curve and stretch into something healthy and whole: he would often look at the clawed arthritic hands of his Golden Bowlers, as they sang the half-full song, and wish for them that time would play backwards, so he could watch their hands unfold and be open, free and graceful once again. His telephone beeped a little tune: a Beatles number. Dr Grepalli excused himself and took the call.
‘That was Miss Felicity’s granddaughter, the English girl,’ Dr Grepalli said. ‘She too seems to be anxious about her grandmother’s welfare. She’s flown over with two other grandchildren and will be driving up from New York tomorrow.’
‘But I thought Sophia was her only living relative,’ said Joy. ‘Miss Felicity is just not capable of speaking the simple truth.’
‘It’s amazing how family comes out of the woodwork,’ said Dr Grepalli, ‘when it’s a matter of inheritance. Thank you for coming to see me, Mr and Mrs Epstein. I know none of us wants to get into any kind of zero sum game here. Nevertheless I will have a little talk with Miss Felicity, about this and that.’
38
After her disagreeable conversation with Nurse Dawn, Felicity, upset and panicky, called William at the Rosemount. She wanted his assurance that she was not to blame, that sooner or later Dr Bronstein would have ended up in the West Wing, and a little sooner made no difference. She wanted to be told that Nurse Dawn was not vindictive and dangerous, just stupid, tactless and a little nasty and doing her job as she saw it. That it was not her fate to be cast back into the convent again and again. That the Golden Bowl was not some kind of prison, where the mind kept the body in chains and the body did what it wanted, not what you wanted. No, rather it was that as you got older the sense that the spirit was incarcerated in the body became more intense: the temptation was to project it outwards. It was not the Golden Bowl which kept you in one place against your will, it was your body, now reluctant to run, jump and skip.
True enough that had she gone along with Dr Bronstein for his interview with the psychiatrist she could have pointed out that if powerful negative emotions were sufficient to block off recall of the President’
s name, why then the same thing would apply to Kosovo. It was not just a place on the map which anyone familiar with current events should know, but a terrible place of massacre and chaos in the heart. She could have explained that it was not an ageing brain which made you forgetful - it was the battering upon the doors of knowledge by the hammer of experience. If you suddenly sold your diamonds and gave the proceeds to a dogs’ home it wasn’t because you’d gone batty but because you’d come to the legitimate conclusion that dogs, creatures you despised, were worth more than people. The less able you were to act the more to the point your actions became, perforce. The old who spat out food showed what they thought of food, just as babies did, without inhibition. It didn’t use up much energy.
Of all these things and more Felicity wanted to speak to William. So few people in a lifetime who understood what you were talking about. All those men in the Old Glory days, and earlier in London, who’d come and gone with hardly a word of talk. No exchange of ideas, just sometimes information. They say the weather's getting better tomorrow or Chamberlain's back from Munich with a peace deal or I like your dress. How about getting it off. She’d always thought herself that her mind made a more interesting offer than her body: and theirs too, of course, to her. More than the temporary loan of that piece of rampant flesh they seemed prepared to offer. If the body was used too much, and the whole person denied, the brain and the spirit would atrophy along with the sensibilities, which was why you could mostly tell a prostitute. It was the way the face muscles set when the attempt to ward off disgust had gone on for too long, the process of toughening up been too protracted. It was when you succeeded you were in trouble, when the spirit retreated, leaving the lineaments of all things tawdry behind. Not that she had ever been quite a prostitute, just a good-time girl who when offered payment would not refuse. She would have paid for sex, if she could afford it, if she hadn’t been paid for it first.
Fay Weldon - Novel 23 Page 25