Fay Weldon - Novel 23

by Rhode Island Blues (v1. 1)

  William would reassure her, calm the panic: all she was feeling was the vestigial trace of what she had been through with Angel: the feeling that you should do something, though you didn’t know quite what, to stop disaster happening. A bad dream of secrets kept from you, the need to search for the little trap door which was the way out of the dark into sunlight once again. Except you knew there wasn’t any trap door: the dark was permanent. With time your eyes got used to it, but that was all. What went on in Dr Bronstein’s head was pretty much what went on in Angel’s: that is to say it wasn’t ‘normal’. Little areas of the brain which lit up in ‘normal’ people when certain things happened did not light up in Angel’s brain, or if Nurse Dawn was to be believed, in Dr Bronstein’s. Not any more. However you defined normal: and what happened or failed to happen was to a different degree, of course, in Angel. Angel’s disordered brain was housed in an active, flailing, young body, the lights lit up all over the place: Dr Bronstein’s in a body too old to be much threat to anyone. Even thinking about it brought the feeling of panicky helplessness swirling in again out of her past: she was swept out to sea by a current she wasn’t strong enough to fight, even had she known how, found anyone to tell her the secret. Love itself miscarried. Only perhaps you deceived yourself. Perhaps you’d had it aborted. The end of the world was your own doing.

  She called the Rosemount. Maria answered. She said that Mr Johnson had left already for the Casino. ‘Thank you,’ said Felicity and put the phone down.

  There had been two abortions. In the early days they were illegal, and no exceptions: they cost UK £200 or US $500 depending which side of the Atlantic you were, and the price seemed to stay the same for decades. Fathers, if they were decent, were expected to find the money for you. It was a cheaper option than marriage. If they weren’t decent, or you didn’t know why they were, or they’d given you a false name in the first place, you borrowed or stole or sold yourself before it began to show, before three months when they said the soul came in. And you could never be sure if you were really pregnant or not until ten weeks - anxiety wreaked havoc with the cycle - which gave you two weeks or less to find the money and the doctor.

  There were three results: you lived and were safe, you did yourself damage and died, you lived and were found out and went to prison: they cost £200 or $500 depending and what did you have in return? That your body was not invaded by an alien growth. It was enough. Sex with strangers could be admirable: babies by strangers hardly could be. A mean initial trick by God to link the two, before humans intervened and separated them, distancing sex from babies so you could have the pleasure without the consequence. Except as Sophia had once pointed out, that was an oxymoron; the pleasures of sex were survival-friendly: the less reluctant a woman was to have sex the more babies she would have: left to itself the sex-hungry gene must in time dominate. Now necessity meant the size of women’s families got smaller and smaller, babies turned into status symbols or were aborted as of right, we were going to end up in a world in which no-one liked sex any more. The process of enantiodromia, according to Exon: you go as far as the tramlines will let you, and then run back the other way. There’s nowhere else to go, if you’re a zealot. Rhode Island, the puritan state, ending up the Mafia playground: then back the pendulum swings again. The yearning for celibacy hadn’t yet got to Sophia in London, thank God. It would be nice if Sophia had babies, but Felicity doubted that she ever would. If you loved instinctively and without reason, as Sophia had loved her mother, and that love was brought to such an end, with what amounted to a vicious attack - what else was hanging yourself so your child would find you - you would lack the resolution to carry on the generations. The love of the child for the mother, the love of the mother for the child, being so unconnected with that other love, sexual passion, which you sought out with a partner, turning the strange into the unstrange.

  She wanted to be at Foxwoods. Yet William had gone without her. He hadn’t even told her he was going. She wanted to be sitting at a slot machine in a stupor, all thoughts safely locked in her unconscious, on hold, maturing, the drum spinning, fate rewarding you or failing to reward you. Telling you its plans, the pattern of your destiny. And no harm done. She loved William. Lucky in love, lucky at cards, lucky, lucky, lucky.

  She supposed so. Maria had answered the phone. William sometimes collected Maria’s child from school. Perhaps he was the child’s father? That had not occurred to her. He was surely of grandfather, even great-grandfather age. But strange things happened. In fact, she could see, she had let very little occur to her about William, considering how much they talked. Perhaps she was just determined to be lucky, the last forlorn hope of a desperate woman whose life had been a disappointment? How pathetic she must seem to the rest of the world.

  * * *

  Maria had called William ‘Mr Johnson’. She wouldn’t have called him that if they were on intimate terms. Or would she? Felicity thought she might very well cry. Why hadn’t William told her he was going to Foxwoods when he spoke to her earlier? Was gambling so solitary a vice? He’d confessed his addiction, demonstrated it, expected her acquiescence, and now he was just going to leave her at home? He didn’t want to share his life with her after all, only parts of it? Perhaps he’d changed his mind? Perhaps she had shown herself inadequate in some way? Perhaps he had expected her to hover behind him, constantly watching over his fortunes? Not to go off on her own, as she had, and gamble of her own accord. Not that playing the quarter slots was exactly gambling: you couldn’t make or lose a fortune. Perhaps she was too dull, too cautious for William Johnson, gambling man?

  She hadn’t felt so insecure since she realized that Buckley was bisexual, and that she was the least of his interests, and was kept at home as a cover he scarcely needed since everyone knew or felt so jealous since she’d realized he’d married her in order to have Angel in the house, the pale, beautiful elf-like child with the supple body, wild eyes and the red-gold, surprising, plentiful hair. His appreciation had been aesthetic rather than sexual, thank God - surely, since he preferred boys - but even so it had been enough to make her feel second best. Jealousy had nothing to do with sexual passion - she had been impervious to Buckley’s charms, and he to hers - but to do with wanting someone’s total attention. It was bad enough having girl children, all rivalry, all competition as they were, but you should at least be able to win for a time. But from the beginning Angel had been a creature of grace: all eyes turned to the child, not to the mother. She hadn’t been accustomed to it.

  Had she not gone to the funeral she would not have met William: she would be sitting in this room in mental and emotional comfort, bored out of her skull, but at least not subject to the panics and anxieties of being involved with a man.

  Had she not gone to the funeral, Dr Bronstein would not be in the West Wing, and she not be torn by ambivalence; knowing she should go and visit him and frightened to do so for fear of what she would see. Perhaps Nurse Dawn was right, perhaps she, Felicity, was too old to tell a damp leather seat from a dry one. The future did not bear thinking about, although it was everyone’s future. Perhaps falling in love with William - and they were right, it was an indignity and an absurdity - was compulsive, a strategy for postponing thoughts of death and the physical and mental decline that led up to it.

  Thus thoroughly mortified and depressed, Felicity sat, as everyone from time to time must sit, young or old, until she was disturbed by a commotion from outside the French windows. It was the sound of the arrival of Joy and Jack, turning up as William was wont to do, but today had not. Joy’s little white face appeared at the window, and the glitter of her jewels in a halo of misty pink velour. The thin fingers found the strength for tapping. The glass was no barrier to her voice.

  ‘Miss Felicity, Miss Felicity, let us in!’

  Jack, once burly, now thinning, good white teeth gleaming and smiling jovially in a square fleshy jaw, appeared beside his deceased wife’s sister. His neck had shrunk. To Felicity it
seemed his head sat squarely on his shoulders almost without any narrow bit in between.

  The world won’t leave you alone, it will always find you out, or your money, Felicity concluded. Dr Bronstein’s great-great- grandson and his partner had found him out, to make sure he was looked after for his own good. This morning no doubt they would be preening themselves for the compassion they had shown. They had journeyed a long way to make sure the old man was properly looked after: the fact that they now controlled his money would go down well with the bank: would give them security to raise a mortgage or start some fine new business, and provide them with the life which was theirs by right of youthfulness.

  Once she, Felicity, had been young and poor, had sung for her supper, and danced too, with or without clothes. There had been no-one to help her. There had been a house once, she remembered that. A rather fine house with a cook and a maid, and a mother and father, and all had vanished away. Things did. And a garden and a full moon and a summerhouse in winter, and after that she had made her own life. But the generations had been dealt a savage blow, and had struggled on to produce Sophia, and that would be the end of it, this particular experiment in nature’s passion for diversity, which caused human beings such pain. These girls with plentiful red hair, too bright and vulnerable for their own good.

  Luck, mostly, that she had not become diseased or dissolute, or taken to drink or drugs; that the lineaments of disappointment had not written themselves on her face. Her share of bad luck had piled up in the first twenty years. Apart from the next blow in the form of Angel, which had well and truly struck home, she had dodged most of the others, eaten more good meals than most, slept in softer beds than most for the last fifty years at least. And worn prettier clothes than most. That was something.

  ‘Miss Felicity, Miss Felicity, unlock the door! Are you deaf?’

  ‘Fat chance,’ thought Felicity, stirring herself to open the glass doors.

  ‘My, you were in a dream,’ said Joy. ‘No William today? Well, I suppose there wouldn’t be, since I’m using the Mercedes.’

  ‘Don’t be nasty, Joy,’ said Felicity, oddly pleased to see her friend. ‘William has his own transport now, but thank you for the use of it. Jack said it was okay. I had no idea it would upset you.’ ‘I’m not upset, Miss Felicity, just hopping mad. You went behind my back. You knew I wouldn’t approve. One look at that man and I knew he was after your money.’

  ‘Go a bit softly here, Joy,’ said Jack. ‘We have no proof of it.’ ‘Even if he was after my money,’ said Felicity, ‘I might not mind. I might think it was worth it.’

  But her heart wasn’t in it. She could hear her own voice, quavering for once, not ringing and defiant. He should have been home when she called.

  ‘Once he gets his hands on your fortune it wouldn’t be so pleasant,’ said Joy. ‘He’d beat you and abuse you, to help you on your way to the grave. You’d be glad to die. The papers are full of it.’ ‘Young women search out rich old men,’ said Jack, ‘and screw them to death, and there’s bugger all anyone can do about it. They make a business of it.’

  ‘Language!’ shrieked Joy.

  ‘You’re no different from your sister,’ said Jack.

  Joy fell silent, mutinous and sulky as a little girl.

  ‘Only louder,’ added Jack for good measure. Then he said to Felicity, ‘I’d better meet this William of yours. See what I make of him.’

  Felicity nearly said she didn’t know what to make of him either, other than that he’d let her down, gone to the Casino without her, and was secretive about his past, but desisted. If Joy heard about Foxwoods there would be no end to it. She sat them down and prepared coffee. She did not want to stir up room service for fear of stirring up Nurse Dawn as well.

  ‘So long as it’s decaff,’ said Joy.

  ‘I’m a real coffee man myself,’ said Jack.

  ‘That’s why you’re so bad-tempered,’ said Joy.

  ‘What is the matter with you two?’ asked Felicity. She had not heard them like this before. Neither was able to tell her.

  ‘Perhaps it’s the ghost of Francine,’ said Felicity, joking, but they didn’t think that was funny.

  ‘I loved Francine very much,’ said Jack.

  ‘I loathed her,’ said Joy, and they were both silent for a little. Some truth between them seemed to be emerging, the other side of irritation and resentment.

  Nurse Dawn tapped on the door and entered without waiting for an invitation. She was in her white uniform. She had changed her shoes to trainers but Felicity could see the outline of a black corset bra beneath the white fabric. The uniform had been washed and rewashed until, though brilliantly white, it was soft and flimsy. ‘Visitors again!’ she said. ‘I wish you’d ask them to come through the reception area and check in properly, not to use the French windows. I know Mr and Mrs Epstein of course, but it isn’t safe, Miss Felicity. There are so many rough types around. Well, it is Rhode Island, isn’t it?’

  ‘Connecticut’s much nicer,’ said Joy. ‘Much more classy. I always told you so.’

  ‘The used car market’s better in Rhode Island,’ said Jack.

  ‘That is exactly my point,’ said Joy.

  ‘If you can’t observe these simple precautions, Miss Felicity,’ said Nurse Dawn, ignoring the interruptions, ‘we might have to move you to an upstairs room, for the safety of the other guests. You could always play Rapunzel, of course, but I don’t think your prince will exactly be able to use your golden hair as a rope. This is such a dear room, with the view and all, it would be a real pity to have to move. Your granddaughter’s turning up from London tomorrow. Such a competent young woman. I’ll discuss the security problem with her, shall I? And Dr Grepalli will also be having a word with her about the painting.’

  ‘What painting,’ asked Felicity. ‘Do you mean the Utrillo?’

  ‘If it’s worth as much as they say,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘for such a little painting anyone could have done, it does leave all of us with yet another security problem.’

  Nurse Dawn took leaflets out of her pocket. She waved them around to make sure everyone saw. Then she left them on the little polished table by the door.

  ‘You might be interested in these, Miss Felicity. No Mr Johnson today? Stood you up? Well, that’s the way it goes in the world of the love-lorn. I remember it well. I think Dr Grepalli had a word with him. Today’s beau is tomorrow’s history.’

  She left, leaving Joy and Jack bemused. Jack examined the leaflets. They were issued by the American Gaming Association and offered free treatment for problem gamblers.

  'Warning!' they declared. 'Gambling in moderation entertains millions and generates jobs. America has taken gambling to its heart - a 35 billion-dollar industry with a great future. But for the few for whom gambling is pathological, it can get to be a problem. Like any other addiction compulsive gambling can lead to lying, stealing, going broke, neglect of employment, and even suicide. If you are one of the unlucky few or know anyone with a gambling problem, contact the AGA helpline. Treatment is free. We're here to help/

  And so forth.

  The phrase Win the Wages of Life appeared here and there, enclosed in a pink heart.

  ‘Why did that woman leave you these?’ asked Jack.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Felicity. It was a lie and one she shouldn’t have told. But she was weak, and undermined, as people are from time to time, by the accumulated misfortunes of the past, all the things that had gone wrong, all the disappointments and the hopes dashed, and for a moment lost faith. She did not want to hear Joy’s roar when she was told that William was a gambling man. It is in such moments of untruth that the seeds of social disaster can be sown.

  And suddenly at the French windows there William stood; silhouetted against the light, wearing his new suit and his lucky gambler’s hat, bright-eyed and smiling, in good form, his bright new red Saab parked in full view. One of life’s winners, not one of life’s losers, and Felicity’s faith was restored. Sh
e corrected herself.

  ‘William is a gambling man,’ she said. ‘And Nurse Dawn is a poisonous bitch. Do come in, William. Joy you already know, and this is Jack her husband.’

  ‘Deceased sister’s husband,’ both chorused.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Felicity, ‘I keep forgetting.’

  39

  Guy and Lorna did not make good travelling companions. They surprised me by deciding at the last minute to accompany me to Rhode Island. Guy got through to me in the editing suite on the Friday, and by claiming it was to do with Felicity and it was urgent actually got me to take the call. Not only did I lose focus but Harry slipped into my seat as I left it and took over at the console, which he had been dying to do. Men do so need to be in control. There was nothing wrong with Harry’s editorial skills of course, I did not doubt them, but the same kind of thing happens at the board as when a friend borrows your car. It never quite handles the same thereafter.

  But Harry mollified me by saying as he took my chair, ‘This seat is wonderfully warm, what bliss!’ For some reason this made me feel secure. So I wasn’t just someone he slept with and someone he worked with, in separate compartments. I was someone he slept and worked with. The roles overlapped and melded. Holly had been very quiet lately, and if only by virtue of sheer distance, over oceans and landmass, had begun to seem in my mind a little bleached out and pallid. Or perhaps Harry just kept her messages from me. The last news he’d given me was a couple of weeks back, when he’d remarked that her latest plan was to have artificial insemination by donor, using someone else’s egg, Harry’s sperm (she had some on hand frozen - really it was revolting) and a hired womb, but she had to get it all together, and he thought it was beyond her. She had been more preoccupied, Harry said, with the possibility of getting a big part in a sci-fi special effects production, a film where the dresses were sheets of changing colour and very little else, so she was having to get a body-double to do her difficult parts, namely her back, which the producers had decided was over-muscled.