Читать книгу Rhode Island Blues - Fay Weldon - Страница 10

Nurse Dawn looked out of the French windows of the Atlantic Suite which Dr Rosebloom had so recently and suddenly vacated, and averted her eyes. She did not like the woods, which were allowed to creep so near to the portals of the property. It was too gentle and crowded and coy a landscape for her. She felt circumscribed and somehow on hold, as if her life had not properly begun.

The sky seemed too small. It was too quiet. If you listened you could hear the tiresome swish of ocean as a background to birdsong. There was somewhere to go and everyone else knew where except her.

A group of guests passed in the corridor on the other side of the door, their voices drifting. They were chanting, which was gratifying, but not gratifying enough, on their way from an Ascension meeting in the Library, still brimming with cheerful animation, summoned up somehow from within their feeble beings.

‘What do Golden Bowlers do?

We live life to the full.’

Self-hypnosis could do so much: in the end, whatever Dr Grepalli had to say on the subject, joie de vivre failed in the face of bad knees, and dimming eyes. Silence fell again. There seemed today some dulling barrier between Nurse Dawn and the enjoyment of life. Everything became a source of irritation. People raved about the wondrous colours of the trees in these parts after the first few sharp frosts of autumn, but to her the trees in their autumn dress looked garish, like colours from a child’s painting set. And now in November there was no splendour in their absence of dress, their dank nakedness. She wanted to be back home to the wheat plains and a great expanse of sky, where the roads were straight and dusty and yellow, and dry, even at this time of year; and the sound of wind, not sea, was the background to everyday life; and twisters came like the sudden vengeance of God, reminding one of sin, and with sin, salvation. But it could not be. This was where the money was, where she had managed to carve her niche. There were as many old people back there as here, of course, and as much work to be done for them, but they were a grittier, suspicious lot. They would be embarrassed rather than charmed by Dr Grepalli’s methods, and far less easy about parting with their money. They thought more about their relatives and what good their small savings could do when they were gone than about their own comfort and state of mind. And coming out of a rural community as they did, they tended to lose heart as they reached their gnarled and wrinkled end: what was the point of you if your back was bad or your legs wouldn’t work. Here at the prosperous edges of the sea, oldsters seemed to keep going longer and in better shape. Certainly they’d acquired more money in their lifetimes, doing less.

Nurse Dawn had a profit-share in the Golden Bowl: she had persuaded Dr Grepalli that this was only just and fair. She hadn’t exactly asked him to marry her and he hadn’t exactly declined: she hadn’t exactly threatened to inform the Golden Years Welfare Board (originally appointed by Dr Homer Grepalli, Joseph’s father) that she and he enjoyed a sexual relationship, and he hadn’t exactly asked her not to.

‘Dawn,’ he’d remarked once, as her head nuzzled beneath the bedclothes, ‘I hope you’re doing this because you want to, not because you think it will help you control me. You are something of a control-freak, as you must realize. Which suits me: and suits our guests; as we get older we feel relieved if there is someone around telling us what to do, even if we don’t care to do it. But I do want you to be aware I’m not open to blackmail.’

‘The Board wouldn’t like it,’ she had surfaced to say, shocked. ‘The Board wouldn’t mind in the least,’ Dr Grepalli said. ‘They’re all free-love civil libertarians: pre-Aids thinkers, existentialists, older than we are—not a single one below sixty, and far less censorious than our generation. Nevertheless I can see the justice of giving you a twenty per cent share of my own annual profit-related bonus, since you do so much for my morale and the wellbeing of the guests, who all adore you. As I do.’

Dr Grepalli was too self-aware and ironically minded ever to do as he really wanted—or rather have done to him—which would be to be tied up by a ferocious woman in a nurse’s uniform, who would insult him and walk all over him in high-heeled shoes, and brandish a whip, but Nurse Dawn seemed a heaven-sent compromise, and it suited him to pay her, and added an agreeable complexity to their relationship. It was part of the unspoken deal. Both knew it.

Nurse Dawn had worked the twenty per cent share out as a good $700 a week on top of her existing salary, and rising. Guests paid not a decreasing but an increasing sum—year by year—for their stay. This was only reasonable. They needed more care. More trays of food had to be fetched and carried, more medication provided and more eccentricities and forgetfulness coped with. Relatives and lawyers sometimes protested at the Golden Bowl’s charging arrangements, seeing, annually, an exponential loss of expected family inheritance, but soon came to see the sense of it. The older anyone’s relatives were, after all, the less likely was anyone to want to take them home again.

‘The longer you Stay,

The more you Pay,

Lucky Golden Bowler!’

The unspoken benefit, of course, was that guests were conscious that management had an incentive to keep them alive as long as possible. Let your room fall empty, as Dr Rosebloom had, and the newcomer entered at the lower rate. Golden Bowlers were encouraged to see the Golden Bowl as home, and their fellow guests as family: it was hoped that little by little they would loosen close ties with their birth families. It was easier for everyone that way, as it was seen to be for nuns and monks. And after eighty that was more or less what guests amounted to: sex being hardly a motivating force in their lives any longer, they could focus on their spirituality. Family and friends were of course allowed to visit, but were never quite welcomed. News from outside too often upset. Relatives would turn up merely to pass on bad news that the resident was helpless to do anything about. Someone had died, someone else gone to prison, been divorced, great-great-grandchildren were on Ritalin.

By and large, or so it was concluded at the Golden Bowl, the relatives you ended up with were a disappointment: not at all what one had dreamed of when young. They were usually a great deal plainer than one had hoped: the good genes were so easily diluted, while the bad ran riot. The bride’s handsome husband turned out to be an anomaly in a family as plain as the back of a bus, and it was only apparent at the wedding. Took only one son to marry a dim girl with big teeth in a small jaw and you’d produce a whole race of descendants in need of orthodontics but not the wit or will to afford them. If the boy hadn’t gone to that particular party on that particular night—and fallen for an ambitious girl with small teeth in a big jaw—how different the room full of descendants would look: how much greater the sum of their income. The old easily grew sulky, seeing how much of life was chance, how little due to intent. Unfair, unfair! It’s the familiar cry of the small child, too; only between the extremes of age do we have the impression there’s anything we can do about anything.

The decorators were packing up in Dr Rosebloom’s suite. Nurse Dawn was pleased with the work they had done, but did not tell them so. Rather she chose to find flaws in a section of the pink striped wallpaper where the edges were admittedly slightly mismatched. The decorators were duly apologetic and agreed, after a short brisk discussion, to accept a lesser fee. Nurse Dawn also got a percentage of any savings she could make on the annual maintenance budget, in the management of which she had lately found serious shortcomings.

In Nurse Dawn’s opinion praise should be used sparingly, since it only served to make those who received it complacent. Her children, had she had any, would have grown up to be neurotic high-achievers: come home proudly with news of a silver medal, and be scolded for not getting the gold. The decorators slunk away, disgraced. Nurse Dawn strolled around the suite, observing detail, trying to envisage its next occupant. That was how she made her choices: in much the same way as she chose numbers for the lottery, willing good fortune to come her way, envisaging the numbers as they shot up on the screen.

The bathroom had been pleasingly redone with marble veneer tiles that could have passed for the real thing, and gold stucco angels surrounded the new bathroom cabinet. Nurse Dawn’s fallback position, she decided, would be the eighty-year-old female applicant, the Pulitzer Prize winner, who smoked. She would be given the suite on condition she gave up smoking. This she would promise to do: this she would fail to do: and Nurse Dawn would be at a psychological advantage from the outset. There wasn’t actually much to be feared from lung cancer: if you were a smoker and it hadn’t got you by eighty it was unlikely to do so at all: nor would other forms of cancer be likely to surface. Death would be by stroke or heart attack or simply the incompetence of being which afflicted the individual as the hundredth year approached. The Pulitzer winner was of the lean hard-bitten hard-drinking kind: they tended to last well. The Golden Bowl could, she supposed, do worse.

Nurse Dawn’s attention was drawn to a Mercedes sweeping through the opening of the gold-and-metal appliqué gates, copies of the ones at the entrance to London’s Hyde Park, put up in honour of the Queen Mother, aged a good ninety-eight at the time of their erecting. The Mercedes did not proceed to the front of the house where regular parking was obviously to be found, but drew up outside the French windows of the Rosebloom Suite, which everyone much got out of the habit of calling it, only a few feet from where Nurse Dawn stood, lamenting the view. Three women got out. A skinny young person in sweater and jeans, with Botticelli hair and a high forehead, and two women in their later years. One, in her mid-seventies, Nurse Dawn supposed, was hideously attired in an orange velvet tracksuit and crimson headband, and had a bulky waist—which did not augur well for a long life span—but the other one, dressed in strange and impractical gauze and gossamer floating drapes, looked slight but promising. Early eighties, passing at first glance for ten years younger. A one-time actress or dancer, maybe. Her movements were both energetic and graceful: her back was scarcely bowed—HRT from early middle age, Nurse Dawn surmised, always a plus—a graceful head poised on a long neck, tactfully scarved to hide the creases.

‘Parking’s round the front, in the space designated,’ called Nurse Dawn, as the party disembarked, but they took no notice, though they had heard perfectly well.

‘There’s lots of room,’ the young woman said. ‘And we’re here now.’ She had an English accent. If the relatives were English and far away so much the better. ‘Can we talk to whoever’s in charge?’ ‘I’m in charge,’ said Nurse Dawn, and seeing it was more or less true, felt much better. She might have reached her forties without husband, children, or home of her own, which was the fate of many, God alone knew, but at least she was accumulating money in her bank account, very fast indeed, and would not, as her mother had always promised her, end up with nothing.

She saw how Felicity lingered in the Rosebloom Suite, with its pretty pink and white paper, admired the view, laughed with pleasure at the absurdities of the bathroom cabinet, and heard her say, ‘I could live in a place like this. It seems more me than that great creaky house ever did.’

She heard Joy reply, shocked, at the top of her voice, ‘That’s your home you’re talking about, Miss Felicity.’

Nurse Dawn was pleased to understand it was the quiet one, not the noisy one, who was looking for a home. If she made so much noise now what would she be doing in ten years’ time? The vocal cords were often the last to go. And Felicity’s reply, ‘I was never happy with my own taste. I don’t think we need look further than here,’ came almost as a relief.

The English girl said, ‘Come on now, this is the first place we’ve seen. You can’t make up your mind just like that.’

‘I can,’ said Felicity. ‘And I have. What was I told this morning? It furthers one to have somewhere to go? This is the somewhere.’

Nurse Dawn led the party through to the front reception area, where they should have been in the first place, imbuing a proper sense of reverence, where busts of Roman Caesars stood on marble plinths, and said, ‘You must understand we have a long waiting list, and all applicants must first be vetted, and then voted for. We’re very much a family here.’ This deflated the spirit of the group considerably, as Nurse Dawn had intended. She preferred supplicants to pickers and choosers.

Being a woman of quick decision she had already decided to accept Felicity for the Atlantic Suite, but it was wise to let her fret a little. She would be quite an asset: she moved and spoke gracefully, and was of good appearance, and though no kind of intellectual, unlike the Pulitzer Prize winner, would not annoy the other guests by smoking. Moreover, she quoted from the I Ching—‘it furthers one to have somewhere to go’ could only come from this source—which meant Dr Grepalli would put up no objection. Jungians clung to one another in their absurdities.