Читать книгу Rhode Island Blues - Fay Weldon - Страница 11

You can run, but you can’t hide. When we got back to Passmore there was a black limo waiting, with New York plates. I was needed back in the Soho editing suite, urgently. I was to take the nine p.m. Concorde flight out of Kennedy. Tomorrow Forever was, as I say, a big-budget film. The percentage cost of Concorde tickets for a deviant editor was minuscule, compared even to leaving the Versace sequences on the cutting room floor. I told the driver to wait while I thought about it, but Felicity asked him in and gave him coffee and cookies. Joy made a hasty exit: the driver was some kind of bearded mountain tribesman and made her nervous. He rose to his feet when she left the room, and bowed with exquisite courtesy, but that only made her the more nervous.

I could not work out at first how anyone knew where to find me. Air travel slows my mind. True, I’d told my friend Annie where I was going. But she wouldn’t have told anyone: and the designer upstairs had my key to let out the cat but I’d just told him vaguely I was off to visit a sick relative: I then remembered that some of my conversation with Felicity had been through the answering machine. The bastard Krassner must have listened to what we said, and then put his people on to it. Film folk can do anything if they put their mind to it. They bribe phone operators and computer hackers and dig dirt on anyone they want. They are ruthless in defence of the people’s entertainment and their own profit, which comes to the same thing. Perhaps Krassner had stayed in my apartment for some time after he woke—how many days ago was it now, four? I had not envisaged that until now: I had simply assumed that being at the best of times in such a hurry, he would have woken, perhaps found some coffee, to which he was welcome, and left at once, back to work. If he had time to spare he would surely have more glamorous and rewarding women than me to pursue and persecute. I felt the less inclined to return and fish the team out of whatever trouble they were now in. I called the editing suite but no-one replied. No doubt they were too busy to so much as pick up the phone for a call they had not initiated.

I had woken up a little. I liked the clear air and the woods and the deer ticks kept at a safe distance from the house, and Felicity was cheerful and Joy was funny and we’d spent a good morning at the Golden Bowl, and the world of downtown Soho seemed a long way away and not a place anyone would gladly return to, not even by way of Concorde and free gifts in best-quality leather which nobody ever wanted. Felicity had been enchanted by the Golden Bowl: we had been shown over its gracious Library, its sparkling clean kitchens, where only the best and freshest food was prepared, and not a sign of a Lite packet anywhere; its Refectory, where guests could sit and eat by themselves at little round one-person tables—though Nurse Dawn did not approve of this: the digestive processes apparently function better if eating is a social affair—its elegant community rooms, its nursing wing, empty of patients: we met Nurse Dawn’s team of nurse-attendants, all bright, cheerful and friendly: we met the Professor of Philosophy, though his eyes were dull and all he wanted to talk about was the state of the golf course. We were told that Felicity could bring her own furniture in if she required though most Golden Bowlers chose to abandon the material trophies of the past, the better to live in the present. She should live very much as she lived at home. Various amiable and reasonably intelligent persons passed us in the corridors, of whom only a small percentage had walking frames, and one or two of the elderly gentlemen gave Felicity a second look. That really pleased her. In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king, and in a nation-state such as the Golden Bowl Felicity would have more people at hand to admire her than she would if she kept the company of those younger than herself. We looked in at a Psychic Nourishment session in the Conservatory—the soul needs nourishment as much as does the body, according to Dr Joseph Grepalli, whom we were privileged to actually meet in his very grand offices. He had the rooms above the Portico: the only suite to which stairs were required. His wide windows looked out over the long rectangle of the lily pool. There were learned books in his bookcase.

‘We are blessed by synchronicity, dear lady,’ said Dr Grepalli to Felicity. ‘Our brochure comes through your letter box the very day your granddaughter arrives from London: you make the decision to remake your life amongst others of like mind, and our new Atlantic Suite, now converted from one of the libraries to personal use, is ready for occupation. All these things are a good sign. As Nurse Dawn will have told you there is already a long list of people waiting to join our community, but if you would be good enough to fill in the questionnaire, we’ll see what we can do, and we will let you know within the next couple of weeks.’

He was, even to me, an attractive man, broad-chinned, bright-eyed, on the jowly side. I like men a little fleshy, Kubricky. In fact, Dr Grepalli reminded me of the abominable Krassner. Thinking back, it seemed strange to me now that I had not joined the latter in my bed. My last sexual relationship had been over six months previously, and that had been fleeting. My grandmother Felicity was obviously impressed by Dr Grepalli. Her wrinkled eyelids drooped over her still large, clear eyes. She actually fluttered her lashes, and moistened her lips with her tongue and sat with her hands clasped behind her neck. She had not read as many books on body language as I had, or heard so many directors expound on it, or she would have desisted. She was in her mid-eighties, for God’s sake, and forty years older than he.

To be seen from Dr Grepalli’s side window, at a little distance from the main villa, was a long, low building. Of this particular place we had not had a guided tour. As I looked an ambulance drew up and a couple of men went inside with a trolley, and a couple of nurses came out: the bleached, hard, noisy kind you tend to find in places other than the Golden Bowl. Dr Grepalli decided the sun was getting in our eyes and drew the net curtains between my eyeline and the building. I didn’t ask him what went on in there. But obviously some old people get Alzheimer’s: in the end some fall ill, some die. It can get depressing for others. There would be some form of segregation: there would have to be, to keep the fit in good cheer.

I fought back my doubts. All this was too good to be true.

Dr Grepalli and my grandmother were having a conversation about the I Ching. Let the living and lively respond to the living and lively, while they can. Joy gaped open-mouthed. I don’t think she really understood what was going on, perhaps because she was wearing her hearing aid again and unaccustomed sound came to her undifferentiated.

‘But some of those people were chanting,’ she protested on the way home. ‘They were all out of their minds. And did you see the potatoes in the kitchen? All different shapes and sizes with dirt on them.’

‘Potatoes come from the ground, Joy,’ said Felicity. ‘They are not born in the supermarket. That’s what vegetables look like in real life. I loved that place. All such a hoot. Now all I have to do is wait and see and pray.’

‘Oh they want you all right,’ shouted Joy. ‘They want your money.’

But here was the limo come especially for me, here in my hand was the Concorde ticket, there was the thought of Kubricky-Krassner back home. There was the driver whose name was Charlie, and who looked like a mountain tribesman in The Three Feathers, dangerous and glittery-eyed, glancing with meaning at his watch. It would not do to cross him. ‘You go on back to London, Sophia,’ said Felicity. ‘There’s nothing more you can do here. I’m going to become a Golden Bowler. If I don’t do something I shall just fade away.’

‘I think you’re crazy,’ roared Joy. ‘And you’re selling this place far too cheap. I’m going to ask my deceased sister’s husband, Jack Epstein. He’s in car dealership in Boston.’

I thought I could safely leave them to it. I had done what I had been summoned to do: endorse Felicity’s decisions. She seemed well and positive. She could look after herself okay without me. I decided not to thwart the mountain tribesman but simply to go home. Joy was not best pleased, but didn’t set up too many difficulties, impressed as she was to discover I was the kind of person for whom limos were sent from New York. She had assumed, I suppose, that I was someone’s PA. Or the make-up girl.

Felicity finished asking advice of the I Ching while Joy helped me get my few things together. That is to say she banged and crashed about, and tripped over chairs and the edges of carpets and got in the way.

‘I’d have gone on looking after your grandmother if I could,’ she shouted. ‘But I’m too old for the responsibility.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘I’m family. It’s up to me.’

‘The only family I have left is Jack,’ she said. ‘That’s my deceased sister Francine’s husband.’ Jack and the sister Francine came into her conversation rather frequently, I noticed. Something beyond her betrayal of my grandmother was bothering her.

‘You young things and your careers!’ she said. ‘I’ll help her pack up the house, of course. Someone’s got to. A lot can go in storage, I daresay.’

‘I don’t know how sensible that is,’ I said. ‘When and where is everything ever going to come out of it? Better sell up and use the money.’

I felt brutal saying it, but it was true. The storage space of the Western world is full to overflowing with the belongings of deceased persons, which no-one quite knows what to do with, let alone who’s the legal owner. I cut a prize-winning documentary about this once. You Can’t Take It with You.

‘I’ll get Jack to help her sell the antiques,’ said Joy. ‘There are so many villains around, just waiting to take advantage of old women alone.’

I said that the only thing she had of any real value was the Utrillo, and presumably Felicity would take that with her to the Golden Bowl. Joy asked what a Utrillo was and I explained it was a painting, and described it. Joy doubted that it was worth anything, being so dull, but had always quite liked the frame.

‘It’s not as if Felicity is going far,’ Joy consoled herself. ‘Only just over the state line to Rhode Island. It’s a much rougher place than here, of course, all has-beens and losers, artists and poets, yard sales and discount stores. Everyone rich and poor trying to pick up a bargain, and still they think well of themselves. They’ll have to wake up when the new Boston to Providence Interstate cuts through. Forget all those woods and falling-down grand houses, it’ll be just another commuting suburb. Property prices will soar: the Golden Bowl will sell up and what will Felicity do then?’

‘She’ll go to the barn,

And keep herself warm,

And hide her head under her wing.

Poor thing,’

I murmured, and then was sorry because she had no idea what I was talking about. How could she? When I was small my mother Angel would say the rhyme if I ever worried about the future, and really it was no consolation at all.

‘The north wind doth blow,

And we shall have snow.

And what will poor robin do then?

Poor thing.’

‘Things looked kind of permanent, at the Golden Bowl,’ I corrected myself. ‘And they seemed very responsible. They won’t just dump her.’

‘That’s what they want you to feel,’ said Joy. ‘But the marble is only veneer and that terrible white stone is so cheap they can hardly give it away. Why can’t she go somewhere more ordinary? Why does she have to be so special?’

‘The Ching was very positive about the Golden Bowl,’ said Felicity, when I came down with my bag, closing the book and rewrapping it in the piece of dark-red silk kept for the purpose. I felt such affectation to be annoying. ‘Though it seemed to see some kind of lawsuit in the future. Thus the kings of former times made firm the laws through the clearly defined penalties. What do you think that means?’

‘I have no idea,’ I said, briskly. ‘I do not see how throwing three coins in the air six times can affect anything.’

‘Darling,’ said Felicity, ‘it isn’t a question of affecting, but reflecting. It’s Jung’s theory of Synchronicity. But I know how you hate all this imaginative stuff.’

I said I’d rather not talk about it. My mother Angel had kept a copy of the I Ching on her kitchen shelf. She had no truck with silk wrappings or respect. The black-and-red book, with its white Chinese ideograms, was battered and marked by put-down coffee cups. ‘What’s the big deal,’ she would say, ‘it is only like consulting a favourite uncle, some wise old man who knows how the world works. You don’t have to take any notice of what he says.’ She would quote from Jung’s Foreword. ‘As to the thousands of questions, doubts, and criticisms that this singular book stirs up – I cannot answer these. The I Ching does not offer itself with proofs and results, it does not vaunt itself, nor is it easy to approach. Like a part of nature, it waits to be discovered.’

One day when Angel had brought home bacon and sardines from the shop, rather than the milk we needed, because she’d thrown the coins before leaving the house and come up with something disparaging about pigs and fishes, I’d lost my cool and protested. ‘Why do you have to throw those stupid coins, why can’t you make up your own mind, then at least I could have some cereal! You are a terrible mother!’ She’d slapped my face. I kicked her ankles. She seldom resorted to violence. When she did I forgave her: she’d get us confused: it was hard for her to tell the difference between her and me. To rebuke me was to rebuke herself. The sudden violence meant, all the same, that the downward slide into unreason was beginning again, and I knew it, and dreaded the weeks to come. My violence, in retaliation, was childish, but that was okay inasmuch as I was a child; I must have been about ten. Her white skin bruised easily. The blue marks were apparent for days. I felt terrible. I think that was at a time before my father left me alone with her: he simply didn’t understand mental illness. He felt she was wilful and difficult and was doing everything she could to upset and destroy him, while doting on me. I tried to tell him she was crazy but he didn’t believe me. I expect believing it meant he would have to take responsibility for me, and he wasn’t the kind of man to do that. He was an artist of the old school. Children were the mother’s business. Anyway he left, sending money for a time. I was alone with her for six months before Felicity turned up to look after us. I’d found her phone number in my mother’s address book and called her. We’d run out of money and there was no food in the cupboard and my mother wasn’t doing anything about it. My grandmother stayed until my mother was hospitalized, and I was in a boarding school, and then went back to her rich old husband in Savannah, the one who left her the Utrillo. She couldn’t stand any of it. Well, it was hard to stand. Visit my mother in her hospital ward, in a spirit of love, and find her white-faced with wild glazed eyes, tied down, shrieking hate at you. They didn’t have the drugs then they do now, and made no effort to keep the children away. I told them at school I was visiting my mother in hospital, but I didn’t tell them what kind of hospital. In those days to have an insane relative was a shame and a disgrace and a terrible secret thing in a family. No sooner had Felicity flown out than my mother simply died. I like to think she knew what she was doing, that it was the only way out for all of us. She managed to suffocate herself in a straitjacket. ‘Throw the coins and throw the pattern of the times,’ Angel would say cheerfully, in the good times, and she’d quote Jung’s Foreword, which she knew by heart, relieving me of the duty of believing what she believed.

‘To one person the spirit of the I Ching appears as clear as day, to another, shadowy as twilight, to a third, dark as night. He who is not pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is against it does not have to find it true.’

As if that settled everything. I try to keep my mind on the good times, but you can see why I like to live in films rather than in reality, if it can possibly be done. I wondered what Krassner’s hang-up was. I thought I probably didn’t want to know, it was an impertinence to inquire. Art is art, forget what motivates it. What business of anyone else’s is why?

Felicity walked with me to the limo, her step still light, her head held high: age sat on her uncomfortably: it didn’t belong to her: I wanted to cry.

‘Thank you for coming all this way,’ she said. ‘I do appreciate it.

It’s made things easier. That place is okay, isn’t it? Of course I’d rather live with family, but one doesn’t want to be a burden.’

‘That place is a hoot,’ I said. ‘I’d give it a go. If you don’t like it I’ll come over and we’ll try again.’

I sank into the squashy real-leather seat.

‘Of course you’re not my only family,’ said Felicity. ‘There was Alison. Though I daresay they changed her name.’

Charlie was looking at his watch. But I was truly startled. I kept the limo door open. We couldn’t leave until I shut it.

‘Alison?’

‘I had Alison before I had your mother,’ said my grandmother. ‘On my fifteenth birthday. That was in London, back in the thirties. I wasn’t married. That made me a bad girl. They made me keep the baby for six weeks, and breastfeed, then they took her away, put her out for adoption.’

‘How could they be so cruel?’ I stood there with the car door open, in the middle of Connecticut, and the past came up and slammed me. And it wasn’t even mine, it was hers.

‘In the name of goodness,’ she said. ‘Most cruelties are. It was in case we changed our mind, but how could we, we unmarried mothers? We had nowhere to live, nowhere to go.’

‘Who took the baby?’

‘I don’t know. They didn’t tell you. It wasn’t allowed. They said so you could put the past behind you and the baby could live without the stigma of its birth. They said it was for everyone’s good but really it was for our punishment. It was a long time ago. Don’t worry about it. She’d be in her late sixties now, if she made it to that.’

‘An aunt,’ I said, jubilant.

‘Always thinking about yourself,’ said Felicity, wryly, and there was nothing for it. I had to go. Other people took more than three hours to drive to New York, but Charlie the mountain man got to Kennedy in two and a half.