Fay Weldon - Novel 23

by Rhode Island Blues (v1. 1)

  ‘You mean, she looks like Schwarzenegger,’ I said.

  ‘She’s more like Demi Moore,’ he said. Which put me in my place.

  Perhaps involving a lover in the genetic make-up of a projected child was a normal Hollywood way of keeping a man? Who was to say? Would it work? Who was to say that either? It was on the cutting edge of the new genetic technology coming out of LA. Invented people as well as invented narrative. Holly was an increasingly unreal person but then films were unreal and Harry was a film person too. He effected reality: he made a really good stab at it: if this bouncing endomorph with the companionable testosterone-ridden flesh was in truth just a cartoon character, the big-time director out of Hollywood on the loose, you could have fooled me. I know there have been big advances lately in animation technology, but he was still amazingly detailed: his shoulders might be fantasy broad and unreasonably square, but one of his front teeth was whiter than the other, and his face was mobile way beyond the expectation of the ordinary viewer. Holly might be someone in one of the new special effects films coming out of Hollywood, but I told myself the longer Harry stayed out of that city the more actual, the less virtual, he became. And as for me, my obsession with films had lately been faltering. Offer me a choice between going to the cinema and going out to Twickenham for a dreary lunch with Guy and Lorna and oddly enough I’d choose the latter. And now I was abandoning Harry’s company and flying off to see my grandmother when she wasn’t even sick. Just in love and contemplating marriage.

  What Guy had to say on the phone was that he and Lorna had decided on impulse that the time was ripe to meet their grandmother Felicity. They’d be hard-put to find their way to her without me, so could they come with? I murmured objections to do with passports and bookings. You can’t decide on the Friday that you want to travel distances on the Saturday, not if you’re an ordinary person. I travel easily and without fuss, and like to put a difference between myself and those less well travelled, who ought to find journeys difficult. Crossing the globe is not like stepping on and off a bus, whatever people might say. The ankles swell, and paranoia with it, strange viruses circulate with the air, the body’s time clock is shot to pieces: the shortterm memory goes. You learn to ignore these things, just as you learn to ignore what goes into the water of the municipal swimming pool, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t there, that shit doesn’t happen.

  Guy was having none of it. He said surely I could put the studio’s travel agent on to the problem of availability: I had often spoken of what marvels they could work. I had to agree that indeed they could. And yes, both brother and sister had their passports in working order. They holidayed in Barcelona in Spain every year: they’d told me this. So they had, though why I had forgotten. There was some good historical reason for it: as there is to most people’s holiday habits. Perhaps Lorna once had a pen pal in Spain? I feel bad about forgetting. I called the travel agent, and they manoeuvred two extra seats in Club Class at economy prices. But we all had to go to New York not Boston. I of course was the one still travelling economy. That’s the way it goes.

  Would that it had. Lorna and Guy, in a flurry of self-sacrificing good nature, insisted on negotiating with the steward, once the flight had departed, to ease the two little Japanese newly-weds out of the seats next to me and into Club Class. Thus my cousins could sit next to me. This was remarkable behaviour and a better measure of their ignorance as travellers, I thought, than of their concern for me. They lifted the seat divisions and their solid bulk squashed up and pressed me in against the window. Guy was next to me and I thought he was unduly pleased to be so close, flank touching flank, but I overlooked it. He was family. Just sometimes I remembered his grandfather Anton and poor Felicity, whose pre-Raphaelite red-gold hair I shared, and what Lucy had told me of what happened next, and I shrank away. But all that was generations back and evil, like wealth, got swallowed up or dissipated with the generations. Forget it.

  I had booked a suite in the Wyndham Hotel in West 68th Street so we could rest overnight before going on up to Rhode Island. I had called ahead to the Golden Bowl to tell them I would be arriving the next day, and mentioning the two extra grandchildren I’d bring with me. I left a message on Joy’s answerphone to see if by any chance Charlie could come and pick us up in New York. I would not totally spring this new family upon Felicity, while yet not giving her too much time to react unfavourably to the notion of their existence. It would be a fait accompli, yet I could argue it was expected. Guy and Lorna, as I had, would have travelled a long way to see their elderly relative. She could hardly refuse them. And, I told myself, Felicity was of an accepting rather than a rejecting nature; she was never churlish. I was sure the meeting would go well.

  But as I say, not a good flight. I should have expected it, I told myself. I cast the coins before we set out, and threw hexagram number three and not a changing line anywhere, the fates set fast and unswerving. Difficulty at the Beginning works supreme success. Described as Chun, in the I Ching. K’an, the abysmal, above: water, Chen; the arousing, below.

  Thus the superior man

  Brings order out of confusion.

  In other words it was going to be all right in the end but fairly dreadful on the way. So it proved. Once the cousins were settled in - and it took a good half-hour into the journey before they were - Lorna kept pressing the button for attention and when the steward came asked any old thing: how the seat recliner worked - she could just as well have asked me, but it seemed she liked to get people to work for their living - or require him to adjust the airflow when she could just have reached up and done it herself or could have asked Guy to. And then she wanted to be brought water and when told she could get it for herself she was piqued. When Lorna finally subsided - I kindly put her behaviour down to nerves - it was Guy’s turn to get going. He complained that his headphones didn’t work - how his body had pressed into mine as he squirmed and searched for a plug point! - and demanded they be replaced. He complained loudly about the quality of the music. And then there was the matter of the missing free copy of the flight magazine, and how Lorna’s food tray wasn’t secure and could easily tip and spill boiling coffee on her, and so forth and so on. My cousins then contemplated asking the Japanese couple to return, so they could go forward, where they’d discovered the air was better: but I persuaded them otherwise. The turmoil would have been dreadful. One way or another I was unnerved. I couldn’t pretend they weren’t with me, because they so clearly were: they chafed and irritated loudly all the flight through.

  Nine at the beginning, according to the I Ching, means: Hesitation and hindrance.

  It furthers one to remain persevering,

  It furthers one to appoint helpers.

  Seasoned travellers know the only thing to do is not react to events, not to notice shortcomings, not to make objections: it is a waste of time and emotion. You go with the flow, pass out of full consciousness when you set foot into an airport and only go back into it when you step out of the other, the far side of immigration and customs. This was not Guy and Lorna’s way. So circumspect and well-behaved at home, they were a far more obstreperous pair out of it. Perhaps Alison’s maternal influence lay like a damp cloud over the house. Perhaps she was more like her Aunt Lois than she appeared: perhaps she too had been a tyrannical mother. Oddly enough, although I squirmed with embarrassment, I liked Lorna and Guy rather better for this outbreak of antisocial behaviour.

  It is not a good idea to go on living in the childhood home: people should move out as soon as they can, and rejoice when the ancestral pile or suburban semi - both seem to rouse the same passions - my train set, the walnut tree, the blue remembered hills: gone, all gone - is sold up. Too many of my friends go into mourning when it happens. It’s easy for me to say this, of course, never having had a proper childhood home, and so never having had one to move out of. I had just ended up living near where my mother had been conceived, round the corner from Mearde Street, Soho, which is little more than an alley l
inking Wardour with Dean Street, in the heart of London’s film land. But I daresay that’s just a coincidence, not the nearest I could get to home.

  40

  The day before we set out for New York I’d asked Wendy from Aardvark to see if she could come up with anything about my maternal grandfather, the folk singer.

  ‘Tell me more about him,’ she’d said.

  ‘A man too inept to stop my grandmother from going to America, too inept to stop her naming another man as the father of his own child.’ Could have been anyone, said Wendy’s look. ‘And too inept not to get himself killed in a street brawl the night after V-E night,’ I added. ‘Allied Victory in Europe night. The war in Asia with the Japanese was still going on.’

  ‘That last is something to go on,’ she said. ‘At least there might be press reports.’

  I said I would try to get more details out of Felicity when I saw her. I’d only ever had Angel’s version of what went on anyway, and she was hardly a reliable witness. If Felicity was at last happy in love she might be more forthcoming about her life and times. She had never really been happy with Exon; she had been dutiful and well-behaved and half herself. Presumably that was the penalty you paid for being in a tranquil and suitable marriage. Heaven keep me from it.

  My own ineptness had to come from somewhere, why not my so far nameless grandfather? Why was I content to be a film editor and not a director? Why be me when I could be Astra Barnes? Perhaps I needed to go to assertiveness classes? True, I was a very good film editor and she was a very bad film director, but I might be setting my sights too low. If I’d set my mind to it and done enough body building I could even have been a film star like the over-muscled Holly. I had the looks and better hair and certainly wouldn’t need a body double for my back - but this was of course nonsense. I was a perfectly ordinary if good-looking woman: whereas Holly had the kind of personality and looks which made others excuse the sins of folly, perfidy and self-absorption. Stars, unlike the rest of us, are encouraged by the media to talk about themselves, ceaselessly, and can hardly be blamed if they begin to find themselves interesting. They fall for it themselves, forgetting that others are merely making money out of them. My main problem has always been that I am not a fool, and have very little capacity for self-deception. I would make a hopeless film star.

  I was quite unlike my father, who would believe anything if it flattered him. Rufus believed that he was a great artist and that the mantle of the muse had descended upon him, and all he had to do was put paint on canvas and he would be hailed as a great painter. My mother Angel had believed it too, and to both of them, wrongly, that had seemed the part of her that wasn’t mad. Rufus was all innocent inspiration; he had left the Camberwell School of Art after a couple of terms, quarrelling with his tutors and asking what need did Van Gogh ever have of tuition. He married a derelict American girl he met wandering the streets - my mother, that is to say - to confirm his bohemianism and further distance himself from his own Canadian parents. Europe was the home of art: centre of sensitivities denied to the rest of the world: London in the sixties the place to be; awash as it was with LSD, death to the brain cells.

  I have two paintings of his on my walls; he favoured Fauve, swirls of heated orange and red. Harry quite likes them. After my father died, of lung cancer, my grandmother had the rest packed up into crates and put into storage. What else was to be done with these works of semi-art, semi-decoration? There were not enough friends with wall-space enough to hang them all - only the rich have wall-space, and my father’s friends smoked too much marihuana ever to get going in the world and achieve such luxury. His parents had first disowned him - Europe, drugs, permissiveness, art - and then died, one of those couples so close that if one goes, the other goes too. The children of lovers are orphans, as Tolstoy remarked. What a stick nature created for human beings with which to beat their own back, sharpened both ends. Too much love or too little of it, and all the world’s to pieces.

  Perhaps when after my father’s first exhibition my mother made the bonfire of canvases in the street, she realized the eventual problem of disposal. Her rage with the gallery seemed irrational even for her: they had actually given Rufus an exhibition, which was more than anyone else had done, and made not a bad job in selling the paintings and might even have managed to establish him as a major artist, but after the bonfire they didn’t have the nerve for it. They expected gratitude, not police, fire brigade and a madwoman. Word got round, of course, and suddenly no-one was eager to give Rufus so much as a show, in case his wife did it again, or something worse. She was famous all over town: beautiful but insane and dangerous with it.

  Thereafter Rufus, with reason enough, blamed Angel for every rejection he ever had, for all the shakings of heads and the not for me, I’m sorry that was all he got from galleries everywhere - and since for the not-quite-good-enough painter the world is all rejection the marriage didn’t have much chance, forget Angel’s evident and increasing fits of insanity, the shaving of my head, the living in cardboard boxes and so on. My father found a nice plain normal girl in the end, a secretary called Angela who gave him bed and heart space on and off and kept him sane. I don’t know what became of her. She took me in sometimes, in emergencies: she made rice pudding in the oven, and sprinkled it with nutmeg. She was nice enough, as was her rice pudding, but we all knew she didn’t count. She wasn’t a major player.

  After my mother’s death I lived with Rufus, on and off, but he was not a focused father: he spent most of his time in his studio, afraid to look at me in case I took after my mother and went mad. I was never afraid of this myself, oddly enough. I was the sanest one of all: I didn’t paint or smoke dope or drink: I got on with my life, passed exams and went to the cinema. When my father died, which took him only two months from diagnosis to death, it was a relief to me, the end of a complication: now there was only me, with Felicity far away. Rufus had loved my mother and now he was with her. That must sound strange but the other side of her insanity, of her hatred, of her urge to destroy and self-destruct, lurked this most gentle and lovable person. I am too brisk to be like her in this respect, too rejecting of sentiment: I suppose I have had to learn to be. These days, though, since she won’t come to me, I cross the ocean to visit Felicity, to put my toe in the water of complication. I am getting braver.

  Difficulty at the Beginning. The I Ching again. Six (that’s two heads and a tail) in the second place means:

  Difficulties pile up,

  Horse and wagon part.

  He is not a robber;

  He wants to woo when the time comes.

  The maiden is chaste.

  She does not pledge herself.

  Ten years, then she pledges herself.

  But Felicity could not afford ten years before she pledged herself. The normal rules which apply to the rest of us - such as reading the I Ching when you’re in love to see how things are going to turn out - do not apply at the extreme ends of life, in youth or age. But at least the I Ching seemed to have a good opinion of Mr Johnson. He is not a robber.

  Difficulties pile up! I hadn’t reckoned on company. I like to be alone on flights, I like the way life ceases to be, even as one’s desire to keep it going is at its strongest. Had Angel flown above the clouds more she might not have killed herself: she would have been too practised in the fear of death.

  41

  As it happened, Felicity had earlier that day cast the coins to get her own reading from the I Ching. She threw Difficulty in the Beginning. This was no more than a coincidence. Do the I Ching five or six times a day and the odds against hitting on a particular one out of those available - there are sixty-four different combinations possible if you cast three coins six times - are not astronomical. It takes only sixteen people in the same room at a party for the odds of there being two people there with the same birthday to be greater than not. Felicity was glad to hear that William Johnson was no robber, for she too interpreted the oracle literally. The I Ching itself elab
orates on the theme.

  When in time of difficulty a hindrance is encountered from a source unrelated to us, we must be careful not to take upon ourselves any obligations entailed by such help, otherwise our freedom of decision is impaired, if we bide our time, things will quieten down again. And we shall attain what we have hoped for.

  Since the days when she wondered whether Exon was going to propose marriage or not, Felicity had scarcely opened the book, until the determination to sell Passmore and strike out into the world had been made. There had been so few decisions to reach in the quietness of widowhood. At any rate once the funeral had been arranged, and all that business, and then the shock of being alone accepted, together with the understanding that because of her age life was likely to remain like this. It wasn’t too bad. You got to quite like being able to do your own thing and go your own way without comment, in your own time. Nothing much happened to widows of mature years.

  Winters came and went, and summers too, and sometimes Sophia came to stay and more often she didn’t.

  Joy next door’s deafness increased, and her determination not to wear an ear machine with it. Joy’s sister Francine had died and Joy had been in extra noisy tumult for a time, torn between grief and relief.

  Joy’s driving licence had nearly been revoked: she had driven into someone else in a parking lot and driven away once too often, without so much as leaving a telephone number, but had escaped with a fine. That was almost an excitement.