I launched myself across the room at her, thinking I was still the child with two living parents, and nearly knocked her off her feet. ‘Where have you been, Miss Felicity?5
‘At the Casino,’ she said, recovering her balance, shaking off her shoes, massaging her feet. ‘Thank God I changed my shoes. These are meant to be comfortable but still they’re hell. What a day! We’re both of us wiped out. It goes like that. But luck evens out, you know. Lose today, win tomorrow. It’s all there in the I Ching and I must say life bears it out.’ She was bright-eyed with adrenaline. William had dropped her off, she said, and gone home to the Rosemount. They were both exhausted.
Guy and Lorna. Where was Guy?
I confessed. I watched her face go grim with annoyance and then clear again. She looked at me with a fondness I did not deserve. ‘For someone who thinks themselves so clever,’ she said, ‘you are remarkably stupid.’ It didn’t get any worse than that. I couldn’t have borne it and she knew it.
‘What you mean to tell me,’ she said, ‘is that Lois’s grandchildren are after my Utrillo on the grounds that I’m not fit to look after it, and are prepared to go to law to have me put away, and William will be used as evidence against me.’
I said yes, more or less. She went to the phone and called William and told him to get over right away. She put her shoes on again as if she could see the necessity of sudden flight. I was relieved at that.
‘People do get whisked off to the West Wing for less than this,’ she said. ‘I have seen it. Weep tears of blood. I wondered why the I Ching gave me that this morning. But we have time. The enemy is still gathering its forces. Thank the fates I came back when I did, that the Casino wiped us out so we came back early. When the enemy is weak, attack. Sun Sziu’s Art of War.'
She then did an extraordinary thing. She took the quilt from her bed. She got me to help her take the Utrillo down from the wall. She was strong but her poor arms were quite thin and weak. The years take their toll on the body but not if you are lucky on the mind. She wrapped the painting in the quilt. Together we carried it, in the moonlight, to the other side of the rhododendron bushes, where the gardeners had their shed. It had tools inside it, and deck chairs which would be brought out when the weather got warm. It was not locked. Gardeners, like Felicity, tend to have trusting natures, unless circumstances suggest otherwise. She leant the painting against the wall and put a folding table in front of it. Then we went back indoors, and got the pretty girl at the front desk who spoke so little English to bleep Nurse Dawn.
52
Nurse Dawn was showing Guy around the West Wing. The bright moon shone into darkened rooms, where the incontinent and the senile and the simply old drowsed their lives away; where there was no argument and none of the shrieks and howls that sometimes rent the air at the Glentyre back home in Twickenham. Guy said as much to Nurse Dawn. They were getting on famously.
‘It seems a pity for Miss Felicity to be spending her own money on her keep,’ said Guy. ‘If she turns out to be a UK citizen the State back home will provide for her, and very comfortably, though not of course to this degree of comfort.’
‘You are thinking of taking her home?’ asked Nurse Dawn. She had not anticipated this.
‘We’ll see how things go,’ said Guy. ‘If she were in the Glentyre she could be back with her daughter again. Either way, she’s certainly not up to handling her own affairs any more, we both know that. Bad enough having a batty old woman in charge of a major work of art, let alone her being in thrall to an unscrupulous gambler, twenty years younger than she is. I imagine the Golden Bowl could find itself sued if anything went wrong.’
‘I don’t think it can be as much as twenty,’ said Nurse Dawn, playing for time. ‘I’m quite an expert at ages: I’d say more like ten or eleven. What do you mean, go wrong?’
‘If the painting was lost, or stolen, say: or if she was talked into parting with her money, and you had done nothing to prevent it.’ ‘I think the thing to do,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘is for her to be declared incompetent by the visiting psychiatrist, and she can move into the West Wing where we can keep an eye on her. After that the court will make no objection, I’m sure, to having you made her guardian. Sometimes the Golden Bowl takes on that role, but if relatives want the bother, so much the better.’
‘I’d better take the Utrillo back to London for safekeeping,’ said Guy. ‘It’s been in the family for a long time.’
‘If you must,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘We’d love to have it gracing our walls, but insurance costs over here are outrageous.’
They looked into a darkened room and there saw Dr Bronstein sleeping quietly.
‘We’re so proud of Dr Bronstein,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘What a lovely old fellow! He once nearly won the Nobel Prize, you know. He and Miss Felicity are such good friends. She’ll be happy to be near him.’
Guy looked at the tubes and leads attached to Dr Bronstein’s body and could see that being near was about all that could happen. It seemed quite safe. What had to be avoided at all costs was marriage. Things might become complicated in the courts. Considering how temporary marriage was, these days, it always surprised him that the law took the act of trust so seriously.
The screensaver on the computer monitor on the table under the window flickered into colourful life. Birds fluttered across the screen. Nurse Dawn strode across and switched the thing off at the wall. ‘No point in wasting electricity,’ she said. ‘Poor Dr Bronstein can’t actually see it any more, let alone get out of bed. But we encourage our guests to have things they love around them.’
The room was suddenly bathed in light. Dr Bronstein’s eyes jerked open.
‘Joseph!’ exclaimed Nurse Dawn. Dr Grepalli had been sitting in the dark unnoticed, at the far side of Dr Bronstein’s bed. It was he who had turned on the light. ‘What are you doing there? Praying?’
‘That might not be such a bad idea,’ said Dr Grepalli. ‘I just popped in to have a chat with Dr Bronstein, but he does seem to have gone downhill rather fast. I looked at his medication chart, Nurse Dawn, and the stuff he’s getting is remarkably strong.’
‘I am the qualified person round here,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘and I don’t recommend you go round stirring up too many hornets’ nests, Dr Grepalli. I don’t know if the Board realizes you’re a doctor of literature not of medicine, and perhaps it’s time they were informed, and of a few other things that go on round here. Sexual harassment’s only just a start.’ She felt aggrieved. He had abused her and bullied her into bed, using his position of authority as a weapon. But she could see it might not be too easy to prove, the law always siding as it did with the powerful, and softened her position a little. ‘We have too few trained staff here to meet State requirements; good hearts alone don’t qualify. The fact of the matter is they could come in and close us down any time. Of course we’d fight it, but a lot of relatives might withdraw their loved ones in the meantime. We don’t want Dr Bronstein agitated and distressed: I see to it that he isn’t. Why do you think the West Wing is so peaceful? Well, you’re the one in charge round here. You’re not meant to think, you’re meant to know. Now I suggest you leave Dr Bronstein to me.’
At the time of his divorce, Guy had once visited a dominatrix. He had heard that voice before. Dr Grepalli seemed to quail under it. At any rate he rose and left, though not quite willingly, as a person emerging from a hypnosis might still accomplish the entertainer’s tricks. Guy stayed where he was and watched Nurse Dawn’s little high red heels grind into the soft pink pile of the carpet as she prepared a new injection for the old man. Guy liked her more and more. Why couldn’t Lorna be more like this?
Dr Bronstein’s eyes were shut again - ‘There, out of his misery once more,’ said Nurse Dawn - and she and Guy made their way back to the main building, where Nurse Dawn left an urgent message for the Visiting Psychiatrist to call, that evening if possible. Amira, at the desk, was putting on her coat and preparing to leave.
‘You can’t leav
e now,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘You have another hour to go before your shift it is over.’
‘I go,’ said Amira. ‘Charlie wait. Charlie my husband.’ And sure enough Charlie was waiting, big and bright and filling up more space than seemed possible, in the doorway.
‘Amira’s coming with me,’ said Charlie. ‘It isn’t safe for her to walk home alone.’
‘If Amira goes now,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘that’s the last pay cheque she’ll get from me.’
‘I wouldn’t advise that,’ said Charlie. ‘Someone might find out you’d been employing illegals.’ And Amira, happy and smiling, went with Charlie.
‘Always best to stick to the letter of the law,’ said Guy, sympathetically. ‘But if Charlie’s here, Lorna’s back. Let’s go and visit Miss Felicity, before my dear cousin Sophia stirs her up. Sophia is a sweet girl but very naive and the naive can be dangerous.’
What did they find? They found Miss Felicity flown, Sophia gone, a blank space on the wall where the Utrillo had been. The painting had not been up on the wall for long enough to mark the wallpaper: that is, to leave a square behind around which colour had faded and dust had gathered. Lorna sat disconsolately alone. ‘Where has everyone gone?’ she asked, querulously. ‘As I came in Felicity and Sophia were leaving. All this way and I never even got a chance to meet my own grandmother. She just brushed past me.’
‘Were they carrying a painting?’ asked Guy.
‘No,’ said Lorna. ‘Not that I could see. All she had with her was a purse.’
‘Then there’s no evidence they have it,’ said Guy. ‘Only supposition.’
‘There was a bright red Saab coupe waiting for them,’ Lorna went on. Excitement had made her garrulous. ‘My boyfriend the crystallographer had one of those. I thought he was overcompensating for his dullness, you know what men are - long car, small dick - but perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps I misjudged him. That chauffeur is completely insane. He parked on the waterfront in the moonlight, made a pass at me, and then asked me to marry him and when I said of course I wouldn’t he just reversed the Mercedes and took me straight back here and dumped me and the luggage. He must have thought I was desperate. Now what do we do?’
‘What sort of pass?’ asked Guy, red to his gills with mounting fury.
‘It’s nothing to do with you, Guy, nothing,’ said Lorna. ‘You’re my brother, for God’s sake. You don’t own me.’
‘Your brother should learn to control his temper,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘or one day he’ll pop.’
‘Better to let it out than keep it in,’ said Guy, losing interest in her, ‘but you Americans will never learn that.’
Nurse Dawn put her head in her hands and sighed. One side of a border always chose to think ill of the people on the other, no matter who drew the line in the sand, it could be a square line that marked off a politician’s map, like Rhode Island from the rest, or something more sensible like the path of a river or a mountain range. A whole ocean divided herself and this man, for whom she had felt the stirrings of interest. But no more. He could be a turkey cock as much as a man, a mere victim to his own testosterone. She marvelled at her own wisdom, and at how misunderstood she was. You worked so hard to get where you were: there was no appreciation and no gratitude. She had done her best for the Golden Bowl and its old folk. She had believed in Dr Grepalli for a time, and discounted his sexual proclivities. You had to do that with men, or where would you find anyone to admire? But like all the rest, he was hopelessly sentimental, a mixture of greed and the need to like himself. To con the old people he had first to con himself: that was the worst of it. Of course you had to keep the West Wingers drugged out of their minds or they’d swarm all over the place like incontinent flies. She was not going to stay on the coast. The weather was too fitful; too changeable; you never knew where you were. God lived over the plains, you felt His presence there, shimmery and dangerous in the hot air. Sometimes these days she felt He didn’t hear her prayers: she was on the margins of His presence: if she wasn’t careful she would wake one morning without His restraining hand and start increasing a dose here, a dose there, forget the Longevity Index: she would find herself doing Nature’s work, not God’s. She’d lost one job like that already. Dangerous to push deaths up beyond the statistical margins, though almost impossible to prove what had gone on in any but the most recent cases. Bodies were either already cremated or who wanted all that wretched business of disinterment? But she would not risk it, she would go back home where there was less money, and life was richer but shorter, and the old were grateful and left you money in their wills, and God was there to listen, and His wrath appeared in twister form, grey and writhing over a flat landscape, and you could see it coming a mile off. She loved that. She would write a letter to the Board just before she went, concerning Dr Grepalli’s maladministration of the Golden Bowl and the fudging of the Longevity Index.
53
‘I want nothing,’ said Felicity. ‘I want to start again. I have my chequebook, my credit cards, my mobile and the clothes I stand up in. That should be enough for any woman leaving home. I have my Utrillo and its certificate of provenance. I don’t need photographs, I don’t need mementos, I don’t want to live my life in the past, I want to live it now.’
‘Way to go!’ said William Johnson.
I am quite tall and the back seat of a coupe is not the most comfortable place to be, but the excitement of the flight made me forget my cramped circumstances. The painting was in the trunk, still wrapped in its Golden Bowl quilt. I hoped the Golden Bowl did not persecute her for theft of the latter. They would be capable of it. They would be hurt and angry at her flight. Institutions always punish people who run away, and beat them when they are returned, in order to make them like it better. Whack, whack, that’ll teach you not to love us.
‘So what do we do?’ said William Johnson. ‘I have to warn you no cheque of mine will be honoured and my credit cards are up to the limit. You could join me at the Rosemount, into whose account the proceeds of a life policy are paid directly, and which I can’t touch. But I fully expect to be in a better position by the end of the week.’
‘Of course you do, William,’ said my grandmother Felicity, fondly. ‘We can’t get married this moment because the chapels are closed, and it always seems so unkind to wake up Judges to do it.’ I was familiar enough with that scenario, of course. Doris Day and Rock Hudson (or was it Gary Cooper?) back in the fifties, knocking up the Justice of the Peace in the early hours, marrying on impulse, repenting at leisure, but it all ends happily.
‘First thing in the morning will do, and then if anyone is to be my executor and guardian it will be you, William.’ ‘Grandmother-’ I started, but gave up.
‘So what we’ll do now is go and see your friend the art expert.’ We drove to Narragansett Pier, where William’s contact lived in a small wooden beach house. Charming it might be, but I hoped that major works of art would be safe inside: the elements had stripped the house of paint and there was seaweed on the front path. I stayed in the car while they took the painting inside. I called Harry Krassner on Felicity’s mobile. I found him at home watching TV. It wasn’t my phone, I told him. I was being brief. The contact was bad and getting worse. I told him relations between Guy and Lorna and me had broken down and I was coming back as soon as 1 could. Yes, I would have to pay extra but what did I care. Fancy him not out at the pub or the club or the sound studio but at home. 'We're actually watching TV,’ he said. ‘Not even a video. Holly just loves your BBC.’ He said in response to some noise of mine, 'Yes, Holly’s here with me, she’s staying the night, I’ll put her on.’ I went into that strange, dull emergency mode that wreaks havoc with your nerves later. Holly’s strident yet seductive voice crackled over the Atlantic towards me. The signal was getting worse. ‘Harry’s told me so much about you,’ she said. Oh yes? ‘He said it was okay if I stayed the night. I’m like him, brother and sister, I just so hate hotels.’ The voice came and went and I could hardly hear. Felicity
and William were coming out of the house holding hands and without the Utrillo. I interpreted Holly as saying actually there were two of them staying, she was passing through London with her new Swedish girlfriend; there was a lesbian adoption programme in Stockholm for which she qualified. And lots of spare babies after Kosovo. Then the voice cut out altogether.
I asked Felicity what she had done with the painting.
‘Sold it,’ she said. ‘To the man with a mighty chequebook. But he’s not putting it into my bank ’til after we’re married in case anyone tries freezing my account.’
‘He’s honest,’ said William. ‘He’s a cousin.’
I said I didn’t regard that as any kind of qualification. I asked William to drive around until I got a better signal. He did so. He seemed an obliging sort of person: the kind who might irritate a woman but not make her unhappy. Not the kind my family usually went for. I felt I ought to inquire about the rumour of him making the girl at the Rosemount pregnant - old he might be but he was an attractive man with a flash car: it was not beyond the bounds of possibility - and did. Boom or bust time.
It was Felicity who answered, not William.
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘it’s all in her imagination, and anyway it would have been before William met me. Don’t worry about a thing.’ We drove south down Ocean Drive and found a decent signal just before we got to the Towers, a great stone arch which spanned the road - all that was left, William told me, of a spectacular Casino which burnt to the ground in 1900. We stopped the car and I called through to Harry again. ‘She’s just left for the cinema with her friend,’ he said. ‘They hold hands all the time. There’s a lesbian season on at the BFI. I thought you ought to speak to her. You can get paranoiac. I’m just the same, we’ve seen too many films, we know what can happen next: it’s not a criticism.’ ‘People are bisexual,’ I said.
Fay Weldon - Novel 23 Page 33