‘Funny thing,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen that Judge in here. You’d have thought he’d have known the pattern, that the debts were a temporary thing.’ At the time Passchendale was all he had left, so Meryl got it, in Judge speak, before he could spend that too. Meryl had gone to live in California: Margaret owned the house now, but chose not to live in it, for all she cared it could just fall down. £She told me as much at Tommy’s funeral,’ said William. £She’s a bitter wee soul.’
He’d gone into some other gear since the funeral, he told Felicity. His luck had turned. He had energy, and hope, and a sense of future. He found himself stopping while he was still ahead.
‘Yes, but you’re back the next day,’ she observed.
‘You’re a hard woman,’ he said. He shook tomato ketchup vigorously over the hamburger. The previous week, he boasted, he’d changed the pattern of play, paid attention, played crazy, and won big. Enough to pay off credit cards, the bank, and enough over to buy the car.
‘How much?’ she said.
‘Three hundred thousand,’ he said, almost shyly. ‘You give me courage. I’d get shaky when the bets went up. At five hundred I’d be really scared, blinded. Money moves fast at that level. The night I won, I was up to ten times as much: five thousand. If you mean to win big you’ve got to spend big.’
‘No wonder Kathleen wanted to touch you,’ said Miss Felicity, primly. She was excited by the sum. Quarters in the slots were okay, but just a tickling of the surface of possibility. A way to keep your hand in, that was all. Otherwise forget it. The real life was when the orange chips, $1,000, were playing fast: at the purple tables, minimum bet $500, while the lookers-over-shoulders crowded in, to watch the guys with the special chips, $1,000 plus, move in. This was when the tension of the place rose; the life beat quickened, the noise levels rose and fell with every drama, when the nerves stretched. Real man stuff. More, if you kept your nerve in a Casino a woman could be a man. When Dr Rosebloom’s view of the universe came true: come on, you old whiskery thing, what are you, man, woman, mouse? This was what he’d been trying to say: why the shifting, mouthing glint behind the mirror glass. Time’s short. Don’t waste what’s left.
‘You should have bought back your father’s house,’ she said, ‘not spread it about like that.’
‘I thought about it,’ he said, ‘but some of those debts had got rather pressing. I cut up the cards when I paid them off: I had eight of them all up to their limit. I’m a strictly cash man from now on. I can’t get into trouble. I got a hundred dollars to spend. If it goes, we leave. Why should I want trouble? I want you. You’re not going to put up with this kind of shit, not if it gets serious.’ ‘Where are we going to live if we do get married?’ she asked. ‘We never got round to that. You wouldn’t want to live in the Golden Bowl, and Nurse Dawn wouldn’t like it. I don’t think I’d want to live in the Rosemount. Not that I’ve ever been inside. You never asked me.’
‘We can rent somewhere around here,’ he said. ‘You can get really nice places cheap. People are leaving all the time, without a forwarding address. Another problem while we’re about it. There’s a girl working at the Rosemount who’s convinced I’m the father of her child.’
She was back again somewhere else, some other time. We’d run off together hut I’ve made this girl pregnant. I can’t just abandon her. Who was that? She couldn’t remember the name, the face. Oh yes, Angel’s father, that was it. He’d lulled her with folk songs.
Oh are you going to Strawberry Fair
Where the days are merry and bright?
Remember me to one who lives there,
She was once a true love of mine.
And then off they go to the other one, and you never see them again. For someone conceived in love, however one-sided, Angel had been very angry. Perhaps that was her, Felicity’s, trouble. She’d spent so much of her life being brave she had forgotten to be angry. Angel had taken it all on herself.
‘Felicity?’ he was saying, this port in a storm, any port in a storm, this gambling man. ‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘I heard,’ she said, drearily.
‘Don’t be like that, the girl’s crazy,’ he said, ‘I haven’t touched her. She just wants it to be true. I’ve been an okay guy to her. I got her the job in the first place. She’s an illegal, but she still has to live. I once helped her peg out some sheets. She thinks I’m her father. Felicity, she’s not my kind. She’s young, she’s pudgy, she’s got bad teeth and she doesn’t speak English. I like to talk to my women.’ She was almost convinced. At any rate she glimmered a smile at him.
‘It’s as I say,’ said Felicity, ‘no good deed goes unpunished.’
‘She wanders round the place pointing at me, saying, He father! He father! I wish she wouldn’t. It’s the only English she seems to know. It’s half a joke and half not. She seems to thinks it’ll flatter me. But other people take it literally. It’s getting awkward. Maria doesn’t like it, Charlie neither. She’s the sister of one of his wives. You know he has two? He says it’s his religion. He threatened to beat me up last week. That’s why I had to get my own car. That’s why my luck turned. If you really need something, God provides.’ ‘You could have gone for a cheaper model. You could have bought that old house back for what you spent on that.’
‘I had to have a decent vehicle, if I’m to take you out and about.’ ‘I’m not going to feel bad about it,’ Miss Felicity said. ‘If that’s what you want.’
He looked hurt.
‘How am I meant to win tonight,’ he asked. ‘If you keep putting a broom between my spokes?’
‘If it’s to do with Charlie it’ll be a set-up,’ she said. ‘Quit worrying. Maybe she wants nationality, who’s to say?’
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ he said. ‘That begins to make more sense.’
‘What worries me,’ she said, ‘if you’re not going to use credit, what are you going to use for money tonight? Or is it going to be the quarter slots? What’s the use of all this grand talk if that’s where it ends up?’
‘You’ve got to know when to quit,’ he said. ‘And you can do okay on the quarter slots: it’s a kind of rest from risks. Build up slowly again.’
‘I’d rather marry a rich man than a poor man,’ she said. ‘Forget it.’
She had Amex in her purse, and Visa. What were her spending limits? She had no idea. If you were a gambler of course you would. You wouldn’t add stuff up, in case you found out what you didn’t want to know, you wouldn’t do too may sums in case the answers frightened you, but you’d know your credit limits. You’d have no sense in other words, you’d be the one after the conversion experience, lost to all doubt, proselytizing, giving up everything to the God of Luck. Yes, sorry, God. No Goddess, she. Not like the Muse, which governed the Arts, gracious, ladylike and dull. This was the God of Money; hard, glittering, erect. What you built up, compulsively you threw away. An expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Well, that might be true for the out-ofworkers, for the blue-haired brigade, for the graveyard shift in the early morning, when only the desperate played on, when hope was at its lowest ebb. But it wasn’t true for her. Already the buzz was rising: the new car down there on the plinth began to revolve, catching the extra light now shining on it, the music changing beat, the place was bright and noisy again, new crowds surging in, bent on pleasure not survival: the erotic undercurrent swirling again. The tide was full. Diamond tiepins, dangling earrings, natty suits and low-cut dresses, the cocktail waitresses on the run. William rose and stretched.
‘Would they give me cash on my credit cards?’ she asked.
‘I swore I’d never ask you to do that,’ he said.
‘You didn’t ask me,’ she said, ‘I offered.’
They went to the Main Cashier, a pink-faced young woman with orange curly hair rather like Joy’s, but who seemed otherwise too young for such responsibility. Felicity put her MasterCard on the counter.
‘Will you give her cash on this?’ William
asked,
‘Not usually,’ said the young woman, ‘because she’s a stranger. But if she’s friend of yours, Mr Johnson? You can vouch for her?’
‘Oh she is,’ he said. ‘I can.’
‘Make it ten thousand,’ said Felicity. The cashier’s eyebrows flew to her hairline, and she made sure Felicity saw that they did. She made Felicity identify herself on the phone to MasterCard’s Customer Services, giving her date of birth and her mother’s maiden name. They had Lois’s name on record, that being the only one Felicity could remember. Or perhaps no-one had ever got round to telling her Sylvia’s. Lois Wasserman. She repeated the name. Wasserman, surging up yet again from the past.
‘You can run,’ she said to William, puzzling him. ‘But you can’t hide.’
The transaction was allowed. The cashier carefully counted out the money in front of two witnesses.
‘My lucky night too,’ said Felicity to William. ‘I know it. The wheel comes full circle. Fate takes away, but fate gives back. You’ve just got to hang around.’
She bought chips: four oranges, ten purple, the rest in black. She handed half to William.
‘We’re in competition,’ she said. ‘Bet you a thousand I do better than you.’
‘Done,’ he said, and went off laughing into the crowds. She had expected him maybe to show a little more gratitude, and linger a little longer, but he was a man and she was a woman, and the transaction between them was complex, and anyway the tables called. If you took up with a gambler, what did you expect? She changed her chips back into cash, bought ten rolls of quarters, paid the rest back into MasterCard, and went to the slots to enjoy herself.
48
Nurse Dawn took a trip to the West Wing to see how Dr Bronstein was settling in. The West Wing, unlike the Main House, which was redolent of fine wax polish and lavender, always smelt faintly of disinfectant and boiled vegetables: there was no disguising the fact that the rooms over here, though comfortable, pink and plump with furniture, were more like hospital cubicles than anything you would find in a hotel. Each room had piped oxygen on tap, plugs and leads for heart monitors, life-support systems and so on, leaving little room for bookshelves or mementos of the past. It was Dr Grepalli’s belief that although intellectual and emotional stimulation helped prolong life and energy in those in the pre-West Wing stage, after a certain point of mental deterioration had been reached, the best thing you could do to lengthen life was to soothe, tranquillize and minimize all disturbance to the physical and mental equilibrium. If breathing became difficult the patient would find the air oxygen-enriched: if the heart fluttered or faltered, electrical impulses would take over: a steady diet of tranquillizers kept guests in a state of dozy bliss. Meals were regular, and lay as palely and as minimally spiced as could be contrived upon the plate; white fish, cauliflower and mashed potato the ideal: followed by perhaps apple dumplings. Recipes were taken from a cookery book, Nursery Cooking for Healthy Minds and Bodies, published in 1890, written by his great-grandfather, Dr Emilio Grepalli, and found by Joseph among his mother Helen’s effects after her death. Just so, without spices, condiments or colours which might inflame and incite, had his own early diet been. The digestive system must be rested, given nothing to complain about, if nothing to rejoice about either. Breast milk being a case in point. And if this was true at the beginning of life how much more so at the end. Old age was indeed a second childhood: better to accept it than to fight it. Boredom, in fact, was what kept the very old going.
In the West Wing blood pressures were monitored twice daily: beta-blockers fed into tender veins in which the blood pulsed with too much determination. If cancers occurred - and they seldom did, inasmuch as Nurse Dawn had filtered out all those with a genetic propensity to the disease - they were usually slow growing (it is the young who are so suddenly, utterly and tragically consumed by cancer) and medical intervention unnecessary before natural death intervened.
Most guests in the West Wing were over ninety. Visitors were not encouraged: after a few visits in which their aged relatives made no response, but simply stared at them out of heavy, contented eyes, most stopped visiting and waited patiently for the years to pass, the Great Gates to creak open, and for the distribution of such wealth that remained after the Golden Bowl had subsumed what it would and what it must. People in their youth often claim they want quality of life, not quantity of life, but when it comes to it most want simply just to hang on in there, and medical science makes it possible. No-one these days can expect too much. It is not good for a society for the wealth of one generation to be handed down to the next. Is not this the point of our inheritance taxes? Occasionally the Golden Bowl was remembered in a will, but not often, and since it would have been drawn up in happier, pre-West Wing days, there could be no doubting the mental capacity of the one who made it. Who wanted trouble, or disagreeable questions, let alone litigation? Of all visitors, lawyers were the most discouraged in the West Wing.
Nurse Dawn was surprised to see Dr Bronstein out of his bed, sitting at his table, wearing not the appropriate dressing gown and slippers but an open-necked shirt and jeans and working on a laptop computer.
‘Is that sensible, Dr Bronstein?’ she asked. ‘We wouldn’t want you to tire your eyes.’
The old are not paper parcels, as she was fond of observing over in the main house, to be sent here and there without their consent, but once they are institutionalized it is not a good idea to encourage them in too much independence. You cannot legally lock them in or restrain their movements, but in their own best interests you can surely use psychological pressure. It looked to Nurse Dawn as if Dr Bronstein has detached his own drip and got out of bed. There was no law against it but it shouldn’t happen.
‘Those poor old eyes are already looking tired and sore,’ she added. ‘Remember the lace-makers of Bruges? How they all went blind from close work?’
‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘That was before electricity. For once in my life I have the time, the leisure, the peace, and still sufficient use of my senses to write my book on the moral duty of the scientist in the contemporary world.’
Nurse Dawn laughed merrily.
‘Contemporary!’ she cried. ‘How long since you retired? Thirty years?’
‘I’ve kept up with the reading,’ said Dr Bronstein, but he was a little shaken. Had it really been as long as that? The active years are so vivid and full of event, they stay undimmed in the memory, and seem as much like only yesterday as do the college days of a woman who’s spent the last thirty-five years a housewife.
‘What a dear little laptop,’ said Nurse Dawn, next. ‘I haven’t seen that before. I wonder where we got that?’ Now that Dr Bronstein’s great-great-grandson had power of attorney the doctor was no longer in a position to write his own cheques. But supposing such West Wing patients who could still read off the numbers from their credit cards took to shopping on the Web? It wouldn’t do. ‘Miss Felicity gave it to me,’ said Dr Bronstein. ‘She’s been over to visit once or twice.’
‘Oh has she,’ said Nurse Dawn. Those in the Main House were not encouraged to visit the West Wing. It could be depressing. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I daresay Miss Felicity won’t have to travel so far in future. She’ll be joining you here in the West Wing soon enough.’ ‘Miss Felicity might not like it in here,’ said Dr Bronstein. ‘She doesn’t have a book to write.’
‘Miss Felicity may not have as much choice as she thinks,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘Since considering her recent conduct no court in the world is going to believe she’s capable of looking after her own affairs.’
She slammed the door as she went out, and told the Floor Nursing Officer to keep Dr Bronstein’s lights low.
49
Dr Joseph Grepalli went down to the Atlantic Suite to have a word with Miss Felicity about the Utrillo. She should either have it moved to a bank vault, pay for its insurance herself, gift it away to a member of her family to avoid inheritance taxes, or simply sell the thing and put the money
in the vault. She could not just simply leave it on her walls, pretend it was a print, and let the Golden Bowl be responsible for its safekeeping. That would be irresponsible.
He knocked on her door and was surprised to find there was no reply. It was unusual for guests not to be in their rooms during the Quiet Hour. He checked at the front desk and was told Miss Felicity had not showed up for Sona Harmony at eleven, and had neither eaten lunch in the Dining Hall or ordered Room Service.
‘She might have slipped out by the side,’ said the girl at the desk. ‘She sometimes does.’
‘You’d see the car,’ said Dr Grepalli. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘Not if Charlie parks round the side,’ said the girl. She was new to the job, and spoke not very good English. She left her desk and stretched to close a window. She was pretty, thought Dr Grepalli: large soulful dark eyes in an agreeably sullen gypsyish face; tall and statuesque and quite commanding in her bearing, with long strong thighs and white high heels. He was surprised Nurse Dawn had hired her: female employees were for the most part on the slight, plain side. She told him her name was Amira.
She worked part time. She offered without being asked to show documents proving her right to work in the United States. He said that was not necessary and asked her where Miss Felicity was likely to be.
‘At the Casino with her boyfriend,’ said Amira.
Dr Grepalli felt like a child again, living in a world where everyone knew more than he did, where secrets were kept, and revelations made just when he was at his weakest. It was at the moment that you closed your eyes for sleep that family disharmony would erupt: when you were at home with measles that uncles crept out of bedrooms they had no business to be in, and all life shuddered and jolted into a different gear and your headache was worse than ever. Amira laid her hand on the doctor’s arm. The pressure was quite urgent.
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