Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (15 page)

 
          
‘Scones
and jam and sandwiches and family snaps!’ I cried.
‘Family at
last!’

 
          
Fie
was puzzled and intrigued. I have the feeling that Americans use their large
country to advantage, simply to get away from family, paying it lip service at
Thanksgiving. They do not like to cluster together as we do, our little family
units our defence against the world. They are braver and tougher than we are.
His parents had started out in Buffalo: his father now lived in Texas, his
mother in Sacramento: both had remarried, and started their lives over. Fie
reminded them both of what both would rather forget, their time together. His
father said how like his mother he was. His mother said how like his father he
was. Both claimed to be proud of him and both wanted money from him. At night,
lying next to me, he would sometimes sigh heavily in his sleep, and I would
feel my heart almost break for him, but there is no healing the world’s grief,
of which he had no more than his share. I really cannot understand why we are
born with such a capacity for it. But there is always cinema, to take us out of
ourselves.

 
          
Felicity
and William met almost daily over a period of six weeks without attracting the
attention of Nurse Dawn. Between two o’clock and five o’clock in the afternoon,
activities at the Golden Bowl ceased: guests were expected to retire to their
suites to rest and meditate. Videos were provided: a supply of black-and-white
movies out of Hollywood second to none, as the brochure put it, plus a whole
range of self-help extravaganzas:
Breathe
Your Way to Tranquillity
,
The Art of
Happy Memory
,
Meet Yourself As You
Really Are
and so on. Most Golden Bowlers, having seen the old movies the
first time round, and exhausted emotionally by the daily effort of
self-improvement and self-revelation, simply slept. Nurse Dawn slipped upstairs
to be with Dr Grepalli, and the other staff relaxed in her absence. The place
dreamed.

 
          
In
the West Wing, the long, low building which Sophia had noticed from Dr
Grepalli’s office, morning or afternoon made little difference. Life-support
systems hummed and buzzed; heart and blood- pressure monitors called for
constant help. Benign old eyes gazed dreamily ceilingwards, all passion
spent,
drifting in the good dreams that today’s hypnotic
drugs induce. It was here in the West Wing that those Golden Bowlers who were
finally lost to senility or incontinence were cared for. This was where, from
time to time, priests came to administer last rites - mostly to keep the staff
happy (many in the caring professions are of Irish or Catholic extraction): the
departing guests themselves beyond worrying about the afterlife, or the
punishment or rewards ahead. This was where the undertakers called with their
discreet vans, to transfer the husks of the once living out the back gates.
Golden Bowlers knew well enough when the back gates were opened: staff talked,
and the gates creaked mightily, in spite of any amount of oiling. Dr Rosebloom
had been one of the few to succumb in the main house: it happened sometimes,
but rarely. Nurse Dawn had an eye for an impending sudden death: the sharp pain
in the big toe, which, though considered innocent enough by the one who
complained about it, could be the precursor of an infarction; sometimes a
sudden pallor, an abstraction, as the soul, almost as if told in advance,
prepared to quit the body.
Then a sedative in the
three-times-daily vitamin drink, and a discreet transfer to the West Wing, and
a return to the main house in a couple of days if happily the crisis passed.
However, Dr Rosebloom had just sneakily and suddenly deceased, almost, Nurse
Dawn felt, to spite her: a wrong note: how the discordance jarred. Nurse Dawn
played the Golden Bowl as if she were a piano player and the organization was
her instrument; she hated fumbles and jumbles. At the moment, she felt in her
fingertips, all was running along well, smoothly, almost merrily, with no false
notes, Pianola style. She could go up to Dr Grepalli’s suite and relax, or at
any rate help him to, with corsets and stiletto heels and a neat little horse
whip, without concern.

 
          
The
arrangement between Felicity and Jack was that Charlie would drop William off
at the Atlantic Suite at two-thirty every weekday and pick him up at four. Joy
took a nap every afternoon: there seemed no reason to agitate her by letting
her know how Charlie was occupied. If he were not around she would assume that
Jack next door had some use for him.

 
          
Seeing
a Mercedes and driver, the security man at the gates of the Golden Bowl opened
them without question to let the vehicle through. Charlie, instead of driving
up to the big front door, which everyone refrained from calling the Golden
Gates, drew up outside the French windows of the Atlantic Suite and there
dropped William off, before casually driving away. Charlie knew where his
bread and butter lay, and how to be discreet. Even in his native land such a
budding relationship would have aroused comment and disapproval. Only in the
United States
, he thought, would the old have health and
energy enough thus to complicate their lives. It gave him a sense of future. He
might even give up smoking the better to fit in.

 
          
Felicity,
on the first visit, obliged to unhinge her vision - a whole day in the making -
of William Johnson from the reality, was relieved to see coming towards her a
lean well-set-up man wearing jeans and an open-necked shirt. He did not hobble,
or dribble, or shuffle, things she might have chosen to forget. From a distance
he could even have been in his forties. Close to, yes, the grey-green eyes were
rheumy, the mouth thinned, all that. What did it matter? So he was seventy-two,
she was eighty-something. That was the way the world went, these days. What was
age, for a woman?
Mostly the absence of oestrogen.
She
had taken one little yellow tablet a day from the age of forty-seven: she had
not even known when the menopause started, if indeed it had ever come. She had
looked in the mirror twenty minutes back and for once had been satisfied with
what she saw. It was a magic mirror, she decided: it threw back your soul to
you, and not your looks.
Mirror mirror on
the wall\ who deserves love most of all?
Me, me, me.
Just one last time.
Please.

 
          
For
the first two weeks the couple sat opposite each other across the table,
studying one another, not touching.

 
          
‘What
happened?’ she asked. ‘Why have you ended up in the Rosemount? Don’t you have
a pension, insurance, entitlements
, like other people?’ He
was vague. He was looking for the right place. He had for many years been a
teacher of English literature in a school in the Bronx, head of a department in
the days when to be a teacher was a noble thing, suggested a life of dedication
to the common cause, bringing a dream to the nation’s children. It wasn’t like
that now, of course. Teachers were nobodies. They had no status. He’d been
offered promotion many a
time,
could have been
principal, joined the School Board, that kind of thing, but he loved actual
teaching too much.
His task, his vocation, his skill.
And there’d been problems with taxes after his ex-wife’s death. A lot had been
paid out that shouldn’t have been. Then lawyers had taken more than he had got
back. Besides, he liked the Rosemount.

 
          
* * *

           
‘I like company,’ he said. ‘Living
alone has its compensations. I’ve tried it. But spend days without hearing a
human voice and when you finally do you can’t understand what
it’s
saying.’

 
          
Sometimes
she felt he was not telling her the whole truth. He was not necessarily lying,
just missing something out. She was not sure she wanted to know what it was. You
trusted or you didn’t. She trusted.

 
          
‘And
after families, I suppose strangers could be a relief,’ she said, and he
agreed, but he was not forthcoming about his family. She asked what life was
like at the Rosemount.

 
          
‘They
try to give you happy pills,’ he said. ‘So long as you never swallow them
you’re okay.’

 
          
‘It
was never happiness one wanted,’ said Felicity.

 
          
‘If
you hurt,’ agreed William, ‘you know you’re alive.’

 
          
That
was on the first meeting, which set the pattern for the ones to come. They talked,
but didn’t touch. Maybe that was all he wanted, just someone to talk to? Maybe
there was no sexual component in his interest in her. She was a woman in her
eighties. It didn’t feel like it, emotionally: apparently you learned nothing
when it came to affairs of the heart. You started afresh in folly every time.
Look in the mirror, and you always saw something different; sometimes you saw
the spirit of yourself, perfectly fresh and youthful: sometimes you saw
corrupted flesh. Once or twice again lately she’d even caught a glimpse of
something shadowy, a flicker of a reproachful Dr Rosebloom: get as old as this,
he was saying, and male or female, what’s the difference? She didn’t want to
risk humiliation by insisting on the distinction. She’d met younger men in her
time
who
, just as girls will do with older men, took
pleasure in inferring a sexual interest only to draw back in shock-horror when
brought to the test.
But what are you
doing! You're old enough to be my mother! I thought we were just friends!
That
started at forty. Foolish she might be, but not as foolish as to risk this
particular hurt. Though the quality of William’s candid stare, the steady
grey-green eyes regarding hers, reassured her. He wasn’t the kind to play
games. Yet they had a glint, an urgency she’d seen in soldiers, excited by the
adventure of killing. She wanted part of it.

 
          
‘It’s
good to have someone to talk to,’ he said, on the third visit. ‘You could talk
to people at the Rosemount,’ she said. ‘Why come all the way out here to do
it?’

 
          
‘At
Rosemount talk is for the exchange of information, not ideas,’ he said. She
could see she did rather better at the Golden Bowl, where the other guests were
hand-picked for intelligence and lifetime achievements, mostly in the sciences,
if only because Nurse Dawn was convinced that those with active minds outlived
those without. With the exception of Dr Bronstein, whose ideas, though so
interesting the first time you heard them, seemed to be on a loop, and were
beginning to be repeated, the great majority of Golden Bowlers were not
chatterers. If they had great thoughts, they kept them to themselves.
Scientists were never ones to share their homework answers, at the best of
times. Sometimes she missed Joy, and the easy, noisy flow of nonsense and
self-regard, which kept the demons out.

 
          
‘Then
why don’t you apply to come here?’

 
          
‘Let
them eat cake,’ he said, and laughed.

 
          
On
the fourth visit he confided more, by way of explanation. A late and painful
divorce had put paid to his savings. He had given his house, not far from here,
on the edge of the Great Swamp, to his stepdaughter. That had been in the days
of his comparative prosperity: now she would not let him back in. He felt King
Learish about it all, he said, lightly.

 
          
‘Why
did she take against you? What did you do?’ he asked. ‘Existed,’ he said,
briefly, ‘as the person I was.’

           
Felicity wanted to make things up to
him. She wanted to be kinder than his wife, better than his stepdaughter. But
what would he accept from her? She had no idea. Just because she had an erotic
impulse to him did not mean he felt the same about her - perhaps he came every
day simply because Charlie turned up and cost him nothing, and there was vodka
and pretzels at the end of the journey. And because he could talk about himself,
somewhere comfortable, away from the washing hanging on the line and the
littered front yard. Perhaps he saw her as a mother.

 
          
She’d
never had a son: for once she was glad, she would be in no danger of treating
him like one, since she had no idea how to go about it.

 
          
Nothing
changed; whenever had falling in love not been like this? Except now there were
no girlfriends to brush up against, to give you a view of what was going to
happen
next, help you with the confusion between what seemed
to be happening and what was really going on:
He loves me, he loves me not.
The only person who might understand
was Sophia in London. But Sophia was impetuous: if Felicity said anything she
might take it into her head to come over and inspect William. The idea made
Felicity uneasy: maybe Sophia would drive William away, or William might fall
for her - that was absurd, she could not possibly be jealous of her own
granddaughter - still it was not safe. She hardly thought she could confide in
Joy, who would shriek and tell her that William was a confidence trickster
after her money.
Which of course, and here was another thing,
and one she really didn’t want to think about, he could be.
What he said
about himself didn’t quite add up.

 
          
‘Is
that
a
Utrillo?’ he asked, on the eighth day.

 
          
‘Only
a copy,’ she said. He got up and studied it.
Houses, a bit of
tree, a street, a sky.
Realer than real.
She
loved it.

 
          
‘I
wouldn’t be so sure about that. It’s a very good painting. White period, too.’