Fay Weldon - Novel 23

by Rhode Island Blues (v1. 1)

  ‘I’m a bit upset today,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d let me down, gone off without me, and it triggered off all kinds of rubbish. Stuff so long ago I’m the only one alive to remember it.’

  ‘You’ll tell me when the time’s ripe,’ he said. ‘It’s talk of marriage does it. It’s stirred up things for me as well. I thought I’d take you to the ancestral house in the woods, on the way to Foxwoods.’ ‘If it’s in the woods,’ she said, ‘I’d better change my shoes.’

  ‘But those are so pretty,’ he said. ‘The little boots with the laces. You were wearing them to the funeral. That was what I first saw of you. I was looking down at the grave, and my eye was caught by these little shoes. Not in the least sensible. In the face of death, I thought, someone’s very much still in life. And I let my eyes travel upwards and there you were.’

  ‘Double bows?’ she asked, ‘like today?’ But how could he possibly remember a thing like that. Her father had said And to be doubly sure, you can do a double bow, not a single one. Be doubly sure. What had her father ever been doubly sure of? He had married a monster, from a family of monsters: a sister who knew how to trap a man and please a man, in unladylike ways in a ladylike time, when sex was in the dark and for procreation, and mouths never used except by whores: a brother who thought it was funny to seduce and debauch a child, first teach her the ways of whores, then make her pregnant and leave her to her fate. Her mother might look down from the heavens and grieve, but she doubted her father was by his wife’s side. If you took another wife, that was that. He would have to peer up from Hell, along with Lois.

  Which of her many partners, her many lovers, her nearest and dearest, would she find herself next to, met up again with after death, the way the spiritualists said? Were they all expected to get on? If you had more than one spouse, who qualified in the afterdeath stakes? If she went with Exon she’d be looking down, but it did not seem her natural place. If she went with William she’d be looking up. Hell was where the profligates, the sinners and the gamblers went. The fornicators and the loose-tongued. Him and her: that felt more like it. But perhaps they’d team her up with Sophia: she had earned Sophia, in return for Angel. Men came and went, family stayed.

  On the way out with William, wearing flat shoes without laces, she asked, ‘Why are you suddenly so interested in the Utrillo? Nurse Dawn was talking about it too. What’s so remarkable about it?’

  ‘Its value,’ he said. ‘It just isn’t sensible having something worth three million dollars hanging there on a downstairs wall with no security. Word gets round about these things. You’re on your own here. I worry for you.’

  ‘As much as that?’ she marvelled. ‘I had no idea. Good for Buckley. At least he knew how to buy a painting. There’s no problem. I have a call button by the bed. It’s part of the Golden Bowl deal. And who round here can tell an original Utrillo from a print?

  Except now possibly a retired art dealer in Narragansett Pier, who might well put the news about.’

  She was back on form, here in the present, and it was good, and ongoing, and she loved him and would marry him. But she wouldn’t tell him quite yet.

  It wasn’t until she was in bed that night that Felicity wondered how Nurse Dawn could possibly know the painting on the wall was an original. She’d told Joy once but Joy hadn’t taken it in. Why did she always have the feeling that there were people around who were plotting against her? Age or truth, which bore in upon her more?

  If you showed yourself to be paranoiac, like Dr Bronstein, you ended up in the West Wing. Just because you think there’s a conspiracy against you, doesn’t mean there isn’t.

  44

  William took her not to Foxwoods, but to a house called Passchendale in the woods up by Hopkington, towards the Connecticut- Rhode Island State Line. They left Route 195 at Exit 3 and thereafter, sometimes uphill, sometimes down, followed a network of roads, tracks and lanes, deeper and deeper into woodland, narrowing with every corner they turned, every mile they travelled, until green rhododendrons, like the laurel thickets already showing new furled deep green buds for spring, brushed fingers up against the Saab windows, and then as suddenly gave way to more open hill and dale landscapes.

  ‘I have to admit there’s a shorter way,’ he said. ‘This is the scenic route. Too early for the blossom but at least you get the views. And we had to come here sooner or later. After Foxwoods, this is the other place that explains me.’

  ‘Passchendale! What a peculiar name for a house,’ she said, as lightly as she could. ‘A battle in the First World War? A memorial to slaughter? Or perhaps it’s just particularly muddy? In which case I’m glad I changed my shoes.’

  He smiled at her. ‘You’ve even heard of Passchendaele,’ he said. ‘You must be the only person left in all America who has and I’m the lucky guy who found you.’

  ‘You’re marrying me for my age,’ she said. ‘I was right to suspect it.’

  There was hardly anyone about: they passed one group of walkers and one pack of crazy cyclists, and a single vehicle packed with screaming young people, far too early for the season’s parties, William said, and that was all. Where the road ran for once a little straighter and wider, skirting the Green Falls pond, a deer sprang over a low stone wall to stand in front of the vehicle, stared at them briefly with brown eyes, and leapt away again into the woods. ‘I always think that’s lucky,’ he said. ‘See a deer and the dice roll right.’

  ‘If it doesn’t kill you first,’ she said. She had cricked her neck as he slammed on the brakes. Who was it once told her their car had to be written off after a deer leapt straight over a hedge and landed on the bonnet? She couldn’t remember. There was so much trivia she didn’t remember: was heaven a place where you remembered everything, she wondered, or nothing? ‘The thing about a deer is that it doesn’t look before it leaps.’

  ‘That’s why they’re lucky,’ he said. She hoped they would get wherever it was soon: her knees were stiffening, she wanted to stretch them. William showed so few signs of decrepitude. She was older than he was: perhaps she ought to take the fact seriously. But really she could not. She put her hand on his knee as they drove. She’d had the nails manicured by the beauty therapist who came weekly to the Golden Bowl. Once so white, soft and delicate, now claws - but elegant claws. She had liked her hands through all their stages. She glowed in her own self-approval, and his, and forgot her knees.

  The other side of pine and birch, ginkos and hickory, holly and young dogwood, where the forest held a rich undergrowth of huckleberry and pepperbush, the final narrowest track of all opened up into a grassed clearing, stone-walled, where stood a large tall shingle house, the wood panels stripped of colour where they were exposed, but holding the bleached remnants of green paint where each was protected by its fellow, so it seemed fashioned in a translucent, layered patchwork. Creepers crept over old windows. The place was beautiful but had seen better days. It even seemed to lean a little.

  ‘If that house had knees,’ said Felicity, ‘they’d be very stiff.’

  ‘It would need new ones,’ said William. ‘And I can’t afford them. Ozymandius, king of kings, with hip and knee replacements. This summerhouse is all that’s left of the family home: three centuries on and this is where the Johnsons from Massachusetts ended up. The poorer branch, that is. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.’

  ‘Shelley,5 she said.

  ‘You know everything,5 he said. ‘It’s such a comfort.5 But he knew the names of all the trees, and could identify every one, and there was something erotic in that. Between them they brought together the interests and obsessions of two lifetimes, and she was older than he was, but still he knew more.

  They circumnavigated the house. It was empty but only recently so. The birds had not yet finished the nuts in the feeder, which hung from the lower branches of the chestnut tree in the patch of level hillside to the back of the house, which looked over wooded valley and pond, and you could almost swear to the ocean itself. A
brown thrasher, reddish brown above, brown streaks on white below, stood on the wooden edge on the feeder and sang a little until realizing it was overlooked, when it flew off. Its place was taken almost immediately by a mocking bird, a pattern of shiny greys, which set up the same song, completing the interrupted cadence, before flying off as well, leaving the feeder swinging. It seemed like an omen to Felicity, and a good one. A rebirth, a new chance, the finishing of what had begun. Hexagram Sixty Four in the I Ching. She could all but see the page before her.

  Before completion. Success.

  But if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing,

  Gets his tail in the water,

  There is nothing that would further.

  In other words, take care. You were not there yet. Things moved towards fruition but could still go wrong. Felicity had not yet told William about her weakness for the I Ching. She had the feeling he might object. It might seem to him to be her weakness, as gambling was his. The point where each could look at the other and decide I have been deluded. This man, this woman, is not for me. You could argue and argue that the I Ching came more out of Confucianism than superstition, that Carl Gustav Jung himself had written the Foreword and given it respectability, but it might be too like fortune-telling, altogether too vulgar, for William’s peace of mind. And paradoxically, his own sense of the force called Luck being so strong, being almost religious in its intensity, the I Ching could seem too close a neighbour to his own beliefs for comfort. The most serious quarrels are between dogmas that are nearly identical, but not quite. He threw the dice, she threw the coins. It might be wiser not to mention it. Forsake the I Ching and go to church and thank God for her good fortune, and pray that he gave up gambling.

  ‘This seems more than grand enough for a summerhouse,’ she said, cautiously. ‘If this is the poorer branch, what happened to the richer?’

  They too had fallen on hard times, it seemed; peeled off at the turn of the century when the textile trade collapsed and gone to New York to be bankers, come back to build their great summer houses outside Providence, then lost everything in the great collapse of 1929. The houses themselves had been swept away by the hurricane of 1937. Only William’s cousin Henry, who’d gone off to California in the forties to work on the new computer technology, could be said to be doing well and he had got to ninety without becoming Bill Gates.

  ‘I guess the family just ran out of steam,’ William said.

  He had a key. They went inside. Nothing had been changed since the fifties. She recognized the crockery, the pans, the furniture of the mid-century. A wooden wireless stood on legs in a mahogany cabinet. A mass of small, high rooms, corridors with violet walls and faded rugs, half-stairs to unforeseen landings, everywhere paintings, on the walls or stacked up against them. Wood carvings: bronze castings; elegant, earthy, dark polished shapes, life-size, vaguely human, limbs and torsos folding in on one another. At the back of the house a vast studio with a good north light, two storeys high, once no doubt warm and dry, now cold and damp with a whiff of decay which she knew would soon spread to the rest of the house, if nobody did something soon. Everything tidy and organized: brushes still in turps which someone had replenished, a not quite finished painting on the easel as if the artist had stopped mid-stroke. A muted greenish grey landscape, in fitting with the quietness of everything around.

  ‘My father’s studio,’ said William. ‘He died seven years ago. My childhood home.’

  = A layer of dust covered everything; small nibbling creatures had made the place their own: spiders were happy here. ‘When I can afford it,’ he said, ‘I get someone in to clean it up.’

  Felicity remembered Rufus, Angel’s husband: and the messy chaotic colours of his studio: the intensity and folly of his life. Artists were obsessional in different ways: but she’d never known one who in their bid for an elusive immortality wasn’t parasitical on the vitality of their children. Artists taught the morality of aesthetics, not the politics of survival. William rolled dice: Sophia cut film. Neither were ever quite engaged in what went on around them; neither could quite fit into the energetic mainstream of life. At least the landlords had appeared after Rufus’s death to claim their unpaid rent and take back the apartment and solved the problem of what to do with the paintings by burning as many as they could find, finishing the work Angel had begun. But what was to be done with these? Too good to throw away, hopeless in the art market: these days you can’t create a reputation after death. They were part of the house.

  ‘Why don’t you live here?’ she asked. ‘It’s so beautiful.’

  ‘It’s my father’s place,’ he said. ‘I can’t live in his shadow. I don’t like solitude, and besides I don’t own it any more. Now it belongs to Margaret. She doesn’t even know I have a key.’

  ‘Your stepdaughter owns it?’

  ‘It’s her revenge,’ he said.

  ‘Revenge for what?’ asked Felicity, but he was disinclined to tell her. Wandered off explaining that the house had been built in 1919, a summerhouse, when his father came home from the war in Europe.

  ‘But what was he doing there?’ she asked.

  ‘Refusing to fight the Hun,’ said William. ‘He was a Quaker, a conchy, an ambulance driver. For a year they made him pick bodies out of the mud at Passchendaele, one small town in Belgium. German bodies, Canadian bodies, British bodies: they took turns to be slaughtered. It was that or prison back home.’ ‘But that was our war,’ said Felicity. ‘A European war, European madness.’

  The Great War, as it was called, the War to End All Wars, except of course it didn’t. The virus just lay low for a while, as it will, the body politic going into remission, before surfacing again. Bombs fly, blood flows, bodies are broken. War was a recurring madness, like Angel’s manic depression. Nations were always building up to them or recovering from them. It was what nations did. She seemed to have seen so many. Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War of Nuclear Terror, the Gulf War, Yugoslavia. Always the same excitement, the same terror by proxy, the same paroxysms of lies, exultant claims of glory. The virus changed its form of course, became more virulent. The casualties of war, once confined to the soldiery, were now ninety per cent civilian. With any luck she wouldn’t see the next one.

  ‘No it wasn’t,’ William said. ‘It was America’s war too. The Germans were inciting the Mexicans to invade. My father got drafted. He was furious. It interrupted his painting.’ More furious still, William said, when he got home to find himself unpopular with one half of Rhode Island for having taken part in an unpopular war - isolationism resulted - and equally unpopular with the other half for being a coward and a conchy. He built the summerhouse, away from everyone, and called it Passchendale to remind himself of the folly of war. He grew still more furious when he married an Italian-American Catholic girl from Providence five years later, and no-one came to the wedding.

  ‘A furious father,’ said Felicity, ‘probably isn’t good.’

  ‘He wasn’t furious with me,’ said William. ‘Just the outside world. He refused to sell his paintings. There was no-one out there fit to appreciate them. My mother died when I was four: my twin brother too. I didn’t often get to school. Do you know why I like Foxwoods?’

  ‘The noise, the lights, the people,’ she said. ‘Forget the money. Better than silence and woods and the seasons, for orphans like us.’

  ‘Now you know all about me.’ It seemed to satisfy him.

  ‘I most certainly don’t,’ she said. ‘I may know why, but I still don’t know what. You’re so secretive.’

  ‘You have your secrets too,’ he said.

  ‘Mine are just habitual: more important when I was young than now. Sex, and being a bad girl, and marrying for money, and having a mad daughter. None of it’s relevant to here and now.’ Here and now, with the strange green light coming in from the skylights, the only solid, continuing reality was that of the sculptures and paintings. William and she were the tra
nsients, fitful and unsubstantial by comparison. But she was welcome here: the mad old man didn’t mind her at all. If he were alive he’d even let her buy a painting. Usually in places like this you felt driven out, a trespasser, unwelcome.

  ‘I put all that together anyway,’ William said.

  ‘Take me to Foxwoods now,’ she said. ‘Get me to the slots, for God’s sake. I can’t stand the past. Just remember I don’t have all the time in the world.’

  But before they set off they made love on the bed in the room where William had been born. The bed was wire sprung and had lost its tautness with age and the mattress sagged in the middle: cobwebs hung from the ceiling and the quilt was soft and dusty. They both felt quite at home, with the bed, the place, and one another. He was anxious for her approval, she was happy to give it. Here in the woods there was no-one to judge. And sex for a woman, if she isn’t crying rape, makes her go to the other extreme and feel trustful.

  45

  There are too many people in the world. You feel it at midday in the centre of Manhattan, when there’s gridlock and the yellow cabs are hooting and howling, and those tall buildings bend over you from either side, threatening, like parents over an unwanted cradle. You feel it in London on a Saturday night in Soho, when the gay crowds are out en masse, making you feel clumsy and female and overburdened by bosom. These particular crowds know well enough there are too many people in the world: they have no intention of procreating. What would be the point of creating a further generation, since in their opinion the pinnacle of human wisdom has been reached? Since today’s political correctness is the summit of moral aspiration, why bother about tomorrow?

  Even the heterosexuals among us, myself, Guy, Lorna, there in New York that spring weekend, waiting for Charlie to turn up at the Wyndham and take us to Felicity, failed to see any real need to have children. Guy had a son, it is true, and argued in a desultory way about access, but I felt his heart wasn’t in it.