Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (3 page)

           
I arrived at Felicity’s house,
Passmore,
1006 Divine Road
, just past
midnight
. The United Airlines Heathrow-Boston flight
left at 12.15 - I was on standby so had the
will-I-fly,
won’t-I-fly?
insecurity
to endure for more than an
hour. I never like that. I am not
phobic
about flying.
I just prefer to know where I’m going to be in the near future. I’d left the
Great Director still asleep in my bed, and a note saying I’d gone to look after
my sick grandmother, and I’d be back after the weekend. They didn’t need me for
the dub. Any old editor
would do now the picture was locked
and no-one could
interfere with what was important. I’d have enough eventual
control of the music to keep me happy when I got back. I know a good tune but
nothing about music proper and am prepared (just about) to let those more
knowledgeable than me have the first if not the last say on a film to which I
am to give my imprimatur.

 
          
I
was upgraded to Business Class, which was fine. The travel agent had passed on
the info that I was involved with the new Krassner film
Tomorrow Forever
(ridiculous title: it had started out as a sultry
novel called
Forbidden Tide
, stayed
as a simple
Tomorrow
for almost a
year of pre-production, which was okay, since it was a kind of time travel film
backwards and forwards through Leo and Olivia’s relationship: the
Forever
had crept in towards the end of
filming and suited the posters, so it had stayed) and showbiz gets all
privileges going. Do you see how difficult it is to get these fictional
exercises out of my mind? Now I’m giving you the plot of
Tomorrow Forever
, which I have stopped myself doing so far.

 
          
It
was an easy flight: I can never sleep on aircraft, and so watched a video or
so on
the little personal TV provided with every expensive
seat. I miss the general screen now available only at the cheap back of the
plane, where you share your viewing pleasure with others, but I would, wouldn’t
I? Films are meant to be watched with other people: compared to the big screen
videos are poor pathetic things, solitary vice.

 
          
Boston
is one of the easiest airports through
which to enter the
US
as an alien. Immigration’s fast. I took a
short internal flight to
Hartford
, the Yankee city, these days national home of the insurance business.
So far so good.
But at
Hartford
, alas, I was met by Felicity’s friend and
neighbour Joy, determined to drive me the fifteen miles to Passmore, at
1006 Divine Road
. Joy lived in Windspit, number 1004. If
flying doesn’t make me nervous, other people’s driving does, especially when
the driver is both near-sighted and deaf, and shouts very loud as if to make
sure the world is very sure of her, even though she is not very sure of it.

 
          
‘I’m
seventy-nine, you wouldn’t think it, would you,’ Joy shrieked at me, summoning
a porter to take my bag to her Volvo. Her face was gaunt and white, her hair
was wild, blonde and curly, her mouth opened wide in a gummy smile. She was
dressed more like a
Florida
golfing wife, in emerald green velvet jump suit, than the decorous
widow my grandmother had described. She was wonderfully good-hearted, or
believed she was, just noisy. The Volvo was dented here and there and the wing
mirror hung at an angle.

 
          
‘Not
for a moment,’ I said. I did not want to worry or upset her. There was no way
of getting to my destination without her help. The wooded roads were gathering
dusk. Joy would put her foot on the brake instead of the accelerator, or vice versa,
or both together, and when the Volvo stopped with a shudder she’d decide she
had run over some dumb creature and we’d stop and get out and search for the
victim with a torch she kept handy for the purpose. She did not pull the car
over to the side of the road before doing so, either. Luckily at this time of
night the back roads were more or less deserted. No Indian tracker she: she
made so much noise any wounded animal with the strength to flee would have left
long ago.

 
          
‘I’m
not like you
English,
I don’t beat about the bush. I’m
an upfront kind of person,’ she shouted as we climbed back into the car after
vain pursuit of a non-existent limping skunk.
^‘
I can’t be left to be
responsible for your grandmother any more. It isn’t fair on me. She must go into
a congregate community, with others her own age.’ I agreed that she should,
though the term was unfamiliar to me.

 
          
^‘
It
would be okay if Felicity would do as she’s told, but she won’t,’ roared Joy
later, by way of explanation. I agreed that it was difficult to get Felicity to
do as she was told.

 
          
‘Now
that that bullying bastard of a husband has died and left her in peace poor
Felicity deserves something for herself.’

 
          
I
had met Exon (like the oil disaster, minus the extra
^‘
x’) and he had
never struck me as a bullying bastard, just a rather dull nice pompous man, a
Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut, who had died four years
back, and who had had a lot to put up with from Felicity. I said as much to
Joy. It was unwise. She slammed her feet down on both brake and accelerator
together and when the bump and stop came - Volvos can do a lot but cannot mind
read - insisted on turning off the headlights to save the battery and going
right into the forest with her torch, clambering up banks and down gullies in
search of a deer she was convinced she had winged. This time I refused to go
with her. I had remembered Lyme’s disease, the nasty lingering flu-like illness
which you could catch from the deer tick, a creature the size of a pin’s head
which jumps around in these particular woods. They leap on to human flesh, dig
themselves in and bite. All is well if you bother to do a body search and your
eyesight is good and you pluck them off with tweezers within twenty-four hours:
but overlook just one and they bed in and you can be off work for months. I was
safer in the Volvo with the doors and windows closed. I did not know how high
the ticks could jump. The next thing would be - if this were a comedy film -
Joy would break her ankle, and the volume of her distress would be awesome.
Even as I thought these uncharitable thoughts there was a rumble and a rising
roar and an eighteen-wheel truck swerved past us, the breath of its passing
shadowing the windows, missing me and the Volvo by inches. It went blazing and
blaring off into the dark. I simply blanked my mind, as I do during the
commercials on TV, waiting for real life to start again. I was in shock.

 
          
These
truck drivers should be prosecuted,’ she yelled when she got back into the
driving seat seconds later. They should remember there might be cars parked
out here, with their lights off to save the batteries.’

 
          
‘Of
course they should,’ I said.
Though we weren’t exactly
parked.’
Her veined hands tightened on the wheel.

 
          
‘I
can see you have a lot of Felicity in you,’ she said. She’d quieted
considerably. ‘You English can be so sarcastic. This car could have been a
write-off and you’re so cool about it.’

 
          
I
refrained from comment. We drove the rest of the way in silence. She seemed
chastened. There were no more animal stops and she peered ahead into the
dappled dark and tried to pay attention. There was something very sweet about
her.

 
          
One
way and another, what with travel, terror, amazement, and the effort of not
saying what I thought, by the time I got to Felicity’s I was exhausted.
Felicity had waited up, playing Sibelius very loud, the privilege of those who
live a fair distance from their neighbours. Lights were low and seductive, the
furniture minimalist. She reclined on a sofa, wrapped in a Chinese silk gown of
exquisite beauty, which fell aside to show her long graceful legs. Not a sign
of a varicose vein, but she was, I noticed, wearing opaque tights, where once
she would have been proud to show the smooth whiteness of bare unblemished
skin. The central heating was turned up so high she could not have been
feeling the cold. She looked frailer than when I last saw her, which
disconcerted me. She had always been light and thin and pale, and
fine-featured, but now she looked as if someone should slap a red fragile
sticker on her. Her hair, so like mine in colour and texture, had faded and
thinned, but there was still enough of it to make a show. Her eyes were bright
enough, and her mind sharp as ever. She looked younger, in fact, than her
friend Joy. She had one arm in a sling and a bandaged ankle, which she kept
prominently on display, just in case I decided she could look after herself. I
was family, and she was claiming me.

 
          
‘How
was Joy’s driving?’ Felicity was kind enough to ask me, having been the one to
inflict her on me. ‘I hope she wasn’t too noisy.’

 
          
Crazed
by weariness I replied by singing
A
Tombstone Every Mile
at the top of my voice, a trucker’s song about the
notorious stretch of wooded road which had claimed more truckers’ lives than anywhere
else in the entire US and had been the title song of a pale
Convoy
imitation I’d once worked on. I
could see that if someone like Joy had been travelling the road by night for
the last fifty years a myth of haunting might well arise. I tried to explain my
thinking to Felicity but my head fell in sleep into my hot
cholesterol-lowered, pasteurized, fat-free, sugar-free Milk and Choco Lite
Drink.

 
          
Oddly
enough, what most exhausted me was the recurring vision of Director Krassner’s
locks of unkempt hair creeping out between my duvet and my pillow back home. I
was in flight, I could see that. Perhaps I had
come
not so much to rescue Felicity as to escape emotional entanglement. Felicity
woke me up sufficiently to lead me to the spare room, where she took off my
coat and my boots and stretched me out with a pillow under my head. She seemed
to have become more maternal with the passing of the years. I felt I was at
home. She could claim me if she wanted me.

 
          
The
minute proper sleep was possible it eluded me. I wondered whether to call the
cutting room in the morning and decided not. Just as social workers have to
harden their hearts against empathy with their
clients,
and nurses must learn not to grieve when patients die, so film editors must
steel themselves against too much involvement with their projects. A gig is a
gig. You must forget and move on. But this was a big film. It was hard. The PR
budget was about three-quarters again on top of the actual shooting budget: the
studio had put a lot behind it. It would move into the group consciousness of
nations. It would take up oceans of column inches. The editor, that is to say
me, the one on whom the success or otherwise of the film depended - forget
script, forget stars, everything depends upon the cut - would of course hardly
get a mention. Writers complain of being overlooked, but their fate is as
nothing compared to that of the editor. The sense of martyrdom is quite
pleasant, though, and feeling sorry for yourself nurturing through the lonely
nights.

 
          
The
bed creaked. Like so much else it was wooden. Everything echoes in these
new-old houses: the wood forever shifts and complains: the timber is twenty
years old, not the two hundred it pretends to be. Raccoons and squirrels
scamper in the lofts. Sexual activity between humans could not happen without
everyone else in the house knowing. Giant freezers and massive washing
machines, enviable to British minds, root the house in one place, where it
seems determined to dance free in another. In the morning I looked out over a
damp November landscape which seemed determined to keep nature at bay. The land
had been cleared of native trees and laid down in grass; low stone walls
separated well-maintained properties: there were no fences or hedges to
provide privacy, as there would have been in
England
: distance alone was enough.
Lots of space for everyone for those with nothing to hide and a
good income.
How could Felicity have lived alone here for four years? I
asked her over breakfast the next morning - Waffles-Go-Liteley and sugar-free
maple syrup and caffeine-rich coffee, thank God.

 
          
‘I
was trying to oblige time to pass slowly,’ she said. ‘Someone has to do it.
Time is divided out amongst the human race: the more of them there are the less
of it there is to go round.’ I wondered what poor dead Exon would have made of
this statement. Taken her to task and demanded a fuller explanation, probably.
He had always been part
charmed,
part infuriated by
what he called Felicity’s Fancies. During the twelve-year course of her
marriage to him, at least in my presence, the fancies had dwindled away to
almost nothing. Now it seemed the wayward imaginative tendency was reasserting
itself, bouncing back. This is what I had always objected to about marriage:
the way partners whittle themselves down to the level of the other without even
noticing.