скачать книгу бесплатно
‘Look,’ I said, ‘don’t try to frighten me.’ The great thing about being brought up around the deranged is that you know you’re sane. ‘And you haven’t answered my question.’
‘I was heating the milk to put in my coffee,’ said Felicity. ‘Eightysix I may be, standards I still have.’
She was growing older by the minute, as if she was wishing away her life. I couldn’t bear it. I kept forgetting how angry I was with her, how badly she had behaved, how reasonable my resentment of her. I loved her. Before my mother died, after my father had disappeared, I’d come home one day to find her darning my school socks. No-one else had ever done that for me, and I was hopeless at it, and there was no money to buy new. I’d been going round with holes in my heels, visible above my shoes. I still have a problem bothering about ladders in tights. I just can’t care.
‘Oh, Grandma,’ I found myself wailing, ‘I’m so glad you’re okay.
I’m so sorry I didn’t come over.’
‘I’m not okay,’ she said. ‘I told you. I have a nasty burn on my forearm. The skin is bright red, wrinkled and puckered. I know it is normally wrinkled and puckered, and you have no idea how little I like my body these days, but it’s not normally bright red and oozing. You just wait ’til you’re my age. And you will be.
We just take turns at being young.’
‘Can’t you call Joy?’ I asked.
‘She’s too deaf to hear the phone,’ said Felicity. ‘She’s hopeless. It has to be faced. I’m too old to live alone. I may even be too old for community living. Don’t worry’—for my heart had turned cold with fear and self-interest and my tears were already drying on my cheeks, and she seemed to know it—‘I’m not suggesting we two live together. Just because we’re both on our own doesn’t mean that we’re not both better off like that. It’s just that I need help with some decisions here.’
I refrained from saying that I did not live on my own, but surrounded by tides of human noise which rose and fell at predictable times likes the surges of the sea; that I had good friends and an enviable career, and a social life between gigs; and it was the life I chose, much peopled by the visible and the invisible, the real and the fantastic, and extraordinarily busy. Felicity was sufficiently of her generation to see on your own as being without husband and children, which indeed, at thirty-two, I was. We know how to defend ourselves, we the survivors of the likes of Felicity and Angel, against the shocks and tribulations that accompany commitment to a man, or a child, or a cause.
‘Can we talk about this tomorrow, please?’ I said. ‘Can’t you call out a doctor to look at your arm?’
‘He’d only think I was making a fuss,’ she said, as if this went without saying, and I remembered that for all her years in America she was still English at heart. ‘You really aren’t being very helpful, Sophia.’ She put the phone down. I called her back. There was no reply. She was sulking. I gave up, lay fully clothed on the bed and went to sleep, and in the morning thought that perhaps I had imagined the whole conversation. There was to be little time to think about it.
2 (#ulink_36b8577f-6b39-50c5-ba06-06750b55338e)
It was a hideous morning in the cutting room: Harry Krassner was there, of course—a large, hairy, noisy, charismatic man. Powerful men in film tend to fall into two types—the passionate endomorphs, who control you by rushing at you, physically or psychically, and charming and overwhelming you, and the bloodless ectomorphs, who do it by a mild sneer in your presence and a stab in the back as soon as you turn. Krassner was very much the former type. Clive the Producer, small and gay and treacherous, the latter.
As we tried to concentrate on the screen, and resolve our differences, the room filled up with people in one state of crisis or another. The tabloids had discovered Leo Fox, our handsome young lead, was gay: Olivia, his fictional girlfriend, had declared mid-interview in one of the broadsheets that she was a lesbian. Harry was good enough to remark that in the circumstances I had done a good job with the sex scenes. I refrained from retorting that had he supplied me with twenty per cent more footage I could have made a better job of it still: Clive failed to refrain from remarking that perhaps the casting director and the PR people should be sacked: the dotty woman from wardrobe insisted on being present though obviously there was absolutely nothing she could do about anything at this stage. Harry’s stubbly chin brushed against my bare shoulder rather frequently. The shoulder was not meant to be enticing: the air conditioning had broken down, naturally, and the temperature was way above normal. I was down to my camisole, and wore no bra. I don’t have breasts of any great weight or size.
‘You’ve got beautiful skin,’ he said, at one juncture, while we were rewinding. I could feel the idiot lady from wardrobe bristle. Sexual harassment! But it wasn’t like that. He had just noticed I had beautiful skin—I do: very pale, like Angel’s—and remarked upon it: it was a statement of fact, not a come-on. I simply do not rate in the love lives of these people: they are married to women to die for, in the 99.9 percentile when it comes to brains, beauty and style, and for their lovers they have the most beautiful creatures in the world to choose from. That the girl—or boyfriends are very often pains in the butt, shaped by cosmetic surgery, drug-addicted or compulsive kleptomaniacs, or solipsistic to a degree, or could hardly string two words together or work the microwave—forget an editing deck—is neither here nor there. Hollywood lovers have legs long enough to wrap around the likes of Harry’s neck: brains are the opposite of what is required, which is rough trade of any gender, though with the edges smoothed over, to serve as a trophy to success. The brave deserve the fair. I might have a good skin and Harry might notice it but I was still just part of the production team talent.
The trouble is that if you mix with people like this, share space with them and common purpose, the men you meet in the club or the pub or in the lending library just don’t seem up to much. Even Clive, coming into a room, slight and gay and bad-tempered-looking as he is, and the boring end of the business, seems to suck all the vitality out of the space and take it for himself, leaving everyone else feeling and looking vapid.
If I went home alone from parties it was from lack of interest in any man present—there was a whole new race about of slender, shaven-headed, just-about-non-gay men in dark clothing, all laying tentative hands upon one’s arm, with liquid, suggestive, cocainedriven eyes—but who cared? They were as likely to be as interested in a free breakfast as in free sex: a dildo would be as provocative, and less given to complaint.
The day proceeded: there was no lunch break: at one stage Harry threw coffee across the room, complaining about its quality. Clive was in danger of rubbing Danish pastry into the sound deck, and I pointed it out to him, and from his expression got the feeling I would never be employed again by him—not that I cared, I hated the film by this stage, a load of pretentious rubbish, and anything he ever made would have the same loathsome quality, so why should I ever want any job he had to offer? Harry laughed when I said as much: I tossed my head and my hair (red and crinkly) fell out of its tough restraining ponytail and Harry said ‘Wow!’; the scriptwriter banged upon the door and was refused entry, the wardrobe woman pointed out that she had spent $100,000 dollars unnecessarily, since I had abandoned the entire Versace sequence, and I asked her to leave, since obviously she had only been hanging around using up our valuable oxygen in order to make this stupid point—in a $30,000,000 film what was $100,000 dollars—and she slammed out.
The credits and titles people became hysterical and complained we had left them no time, which we hadn’t: while we were mid-provisional-dub the composer—they always take things literally—who was rumoured to have OD’d turned up and wept at what he heard, so we wished openly he had been left to die.
The PR debacle was at least turned around: young Leo announced to the media mid-morning that he was bisexual—people are always reassured by classifications—and Olivia mid-afternoon that her lesbianism wasn’t a permanent state: she’d just once been seduced by her English teacher at school, and everyone who watched the sex scenes would see for themselves just how much she truly, erotically, madly fancied Leo. A crisis about a double booking in the preview theatre was narrowly averted, and by midnight Clive admitted the fine cut was ninety-five per cent right and no-one would notice the missing five per cent except he himself, the only one with any taste, and declared the picture locked.
I emerged gasping into the fetid Soho air with Harry, who asked if I had a bed he could sleep upon. He did not want to face the glitter of his hotel. I thought this was a feeble reason but said okay. He trailed after me to my peculiar residence, climbed my many flights of stairs with a kind of dazed, dogged persistence, looked around my place, said, ‘Very central,’ demanded whisky which I refused him, put his head upon my unshaken pillow, pulled my matted duvet over him and fell sound asleep. The phone rang. It was Felicity. She said she had tripped and sprained her ankle and it would be her hip next. I said I would come over on the next available flight. I lay on the sofa and slept. I did not attempt to join Harry in the bed. There would be no end of trouble if I did. Women should not venture out of their league or their hearts get broken. And I was just production team talent who happened to have a bed which the director didn’t need a taxi to get to. And Clive was too mean to provide a limo.
3 (#ulink_e163459f-505b-57be-85a2-33738e0d6d40)
Not far from Mystic, not far from Wakefield, well protected from any traffic noise by woods and hills, just out of Connecticut and into Rhode Island, stood the Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement. Rhode Island is a small dotted oblong on a map, one of the six states that compose New England, the smallest, prettiest, most crowded and (they say) most corrupt state of them all, though who’s to judge a thing like that? It is the indigenous home of a breed of russet feathered hens, the Rhode Island Red, now much appreciated by fanciers the world over. It is crowded in upon, squashed, by Connecticut, Massachusetts and the Atlantic Ocean; it is lush with foliage: birches, poplars and ginkos that turn gold in autumn, and mountain maples and ash, and hickories that turn orange, and red oak and red maple, sassafras and dogwood that turn scarlet. It is sprinkled with wild flowers in spring: ornithological rarities and their watchers spend their summers here. It has sheltered beaches and rocky coves, faded grandeurs, and a brooding, violent history of which an agreeable present makes light. It is the home of the brave, the better dead than red state. In November, of course, it is much like anywhere else, dripping and damp and anonymous. Better to turn the attention inward, not out. So thought Nurse Dawn, executive nursing officer of the Golden Bowl Complex.
The Golden Bowl is constructed much in the fashion of the former Getty Museum outside Los Angeles; that is to say it is an inspired version of a Roman villa, pillared and pooled, lilied and creepered, long and low, and faced with a brilliant white stone which in California looks just fine but under soft Rhode Island skies can startle. The young and unkind might say it glared rather than glowed: the elderly however valued its brightness, and marvelled at the splendour in which they could finish their days, and for this reason the local heritage groups had bitten back protest and allowed its existence.
Even as Sophia travelled to Boston on her sadly delayed visit to her grandmother, Nurse Dawn, together with Dr Joseph Grepalli, specialist in the medical arts and Director of the Golden Bowl, contemplated a bed rendered empty by the sudden death of its previous occupant, Dr Geoffrey Rosebloom. The windows were open, for the decorators were already at work; new white paint was being applied throughout the suite—Dr Rosebloom had been a secret smoker, and the ceilings were uncomfortably yellowed—and an agreeable classic pink-striped wallpaper pasted up over the former mauve and cream flowers. So long as wallpapers are pale they can be put up fresh layer upon old layer, without ever having to strip off the original. The difficulty with strong colours is that if there’s any damp around they tend to seep through to discolour the new. Only after about six layers will the surface begin to bubble and the wall have to be stripped down to its plaster, but that will happen on average only every five years or so. The pink and white was only the second layer since the Golden Bowl had been opened twenty-two years back. The occupant before Dr Rosebloom had been one hundred and two years old, in good health and spirits to the end, and had also died suddenly in the same bed. The mattress had been in good condition and management had not considered it necessary to replace it at the time.
‘Two sudden deaths in the same bed,’ said Dr Grepalli, ‘is too much.’ He was a genial and generous man. ‘This time round the mattress at least must be replaced.’
‘You can hardly blame the bed for the deaths,’ said Nurse Dawn, who pretended to be genial and generous but was not. ‘Dr Rosebloom smoked—look at the state of the ceiling: if he’d had more self-control we wouldn’t be having to repaint—I daresay some respiratory trouble or other triggered the infarction.’
‘Ah, Nurse Dawn,’ said Dr Grepalli, affectionately, ‘you would like everyone to live for ever in perfect health, behaving properly.’ ‘So I would,’ she said. ‘Why would God let some of us live longer than others, if he didn’t want us to learn more in the extra time?’ In her book self-improvement must be continuous, and no respite offered even to the elderly.
The Golden Bowl housed some sixty guests, known to themselves and others as Golden Bowlers. All had had to be over seventy-five at the time they joined the community, and still capable of congregate living. If you were, this augured well for your longevity. The weak had been carried off by now; only the vital and strong remained. The average age of death among Golden Bowlers was a ripe ninety-six, thanks to the particular nature and character of the guests as selected by Nurse Dawn. She had no actuarial training: she worked by instinct. One look was enough. This one would last. Welcome. That one wouldn’t. We are so sorry, we have no spaces.
Death was far from an everyday occurrence at the Golden Bowl, albeit one that was inevitable. Guests moved, within the same building complex, from Congregate Living (when you just didn’t want to be alone) to Assisted Living (when you needed help with your stockings) to Continuing Care (when you needed help with your eating) to Nursing Care (when you took to your bed) to, if you were unlucky, Intensive Care (when you wanted to die but they didn’t let you). Families were encouraged to hand over complete responsibility. Over-loving relatives could be more damaging to an old person’s morale, more detrimental to the Longevity Index, than those who were neglectful. One of Dr Grepalli’s most successful lectures was on this particular subject. Just as a teacher tends to dislike parents, and hold them responsible for the plight of the children, so did Dr Grepalli mistrust relatives and their motives. The doctor was a leading light in the field of senior care administration, appeared on TV from time to time, and wrote articles in The Senior Citizen Monthly which would be syndicated worldwide. Golden Bowlers admired him greatly, and were proud of him. Or so Nurse Dawn assured him.
The longest stay of any Golden Bowler had been twenty-two years: the shortest five days, but that latter was a statistical anomaly, and therefore not used in any averaging out. In its twenty-two years of existence only eight patients had ever moved out before, as it were, moving on. The degree of life satisfaction at the Golden Bowl was high, just inevitably short, though a great deal less short than in similar institutions charging similar prices. Not that there were many around like the Golden Bowl, where you could stay in one place through the increasing stages of your decrepitude. It was customary for the elderly to be wrenched out of familiar places and be moved on to more ‘suitable’ establishments, as the degree of their physical or mental incompetence lurched from one stage to the next, and in the move lost friends, and often possessions, as space itself closed in around them. At the Golden Bowl, whatever your condition, you watched the seasons change in familiar trees and skies, and made your peace with your maker in your own time.
Joseph Grepalli and Nurse Dawn shivered a little in the chilly morning air that dispersed the smell of paint, but were satisfied in their souls. Dr Rosebloom had died suddenly in his sleep at the age of ninety-seven, not a centenarian, but every year over ninety-seven helped ease the average up. He had not done badly, even though he smoked.
The mattress and armchair of the deceased—being perfectly clean—were to be taken to be sold at the used furniture depository: it was remarkable, as Joseph Grepalli remarked, how though a bed could escape the personality of the one who slept in it, an armchair seemed to soak up personality and when its user died, became limp and dismal.
‘Such a romantic,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘I do so love that about you, Joseph.’ The armchair looked perfectly good to her: it was in her interests to keep spending to a minimum but Joseph had to be kept happy, strong in the knowledge of his own sensitivity and goodness. New furniture, she agreed, would be bought at a discount store that very day.
The Golden Bowl had at its practised fingertips the art of providing Instant Renewal of mind and artifacts to maximize peace of mind and profits too. To this end policy was that no single room, suite, or full apartment should be allowed to stay empty for longer than three days at most. But no sooner, either: it took three days, and even Nurse Dawn agreed on this point, for the spirit of the departed to stop hanging around, keeping the air shivery, bringing bad judgement and bad luck. The waiting list was long; it might take guests a month or so to wind up their affairs and move in, but they would pay from the moment their accommodation fell available, ready and waiting. That way the aura of death, the sense of absence caused by death, would be less likely to endure. As with psychoanalysis, the fact of payment had a healing, restoring function. It reduced the ineffable to the everyday.
The bathroom cabinets had to be replaced; as well: Joseph had a superstition about mirrors: supposing the new occupant looked in the mirror and saw the former occupant looking out? Mirrors could be like that, maintained Joseph Grepalli. They retained memory; they had their own point of view. Aged faces tended to look alike in the end: one tough grey whisker much like another, but their owners did not necessarily see it like this. Joseph allowed himself to be fanciful: he himself was a Doctor of Literature; his father Dr Homer Grepalli, the noted geriatric physician and psychoanalyst, had bequeathed him the place and he had made himself an expert. Nurse Dawn was qualified in geriatric psychiatry, which was all that the authorities required.
‘We have twenty-five people on the waiting list,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘but none of them truly satisfactory. Drop-down-deaders: overweight or sociopathic: there is a Pulitzer winner, which is always good for business, but she’s a smoker.’
Nurse Dawn slipped between Joseph’s covers of a night: she was a sturdy, strong-jawed woman of forty-two, with a big bosom and a dull-skinned face and small dark bright button eyes. She looked better with clothes off than on. She clip-clopped down the corridors by day on sensible heels, her broad beam closely encased in blue or white linen, exhorting Golden Bowlers to further and deeper self-knowledge.
‘I trust your judgement, Nurse Dawn,’ said Dr Grepalli. For some reason he felt uneasy, as if standing in front of the lobster tank at a fish restaurant, choosing the one to die for his delight.
‘In fact the whole lot of them sound troublesome and unprincipled. Not one’s as easy as they used to be. Even the old have developed an overweening sense of their own importance. They’ve caught it from the young.’ By troublesome she meant picky about their food, or given to criticism of the staff, or arguing about medication, or averse to group therapy, or lacking in get-up-and-go, or worse, having too many relatives who’d died young. All prospective Golden Bowlers had to provide, as well as good credit references and a CV, a family history and personality profile built on a questionnaire devised by Nurse Dawn herself.
Joseph Grepalli was a bearish, amiable, charismatic man, not unlike, as Sophia King was later to discover, Director Krassner. Inside the first Nurse Dawn was the second, a truly skinny woman not even trying to get out, preferring a cup of sweet coffee and a Danish any day.
‘We must spread the net,’ said Joseph Grepalli. ‘We must trawl deeper.’ The guests called him Stéphane, after Stéphane Grappelli: those who feel helpless always nickname those in charge: even the mildest of mockery helps.
4 (#ulink_6c6fda3e-56dc-54e5-b974-73bc4ccf3c4b)
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.
It is all dumbing down and lowest common denominator stuff and not annoying the other. It has to be if you want to get on. And lying stretched out nightly alongside another human being, comforting though it may be, is as likely to drain the essential psyche as to top it up.
‘It was very annoying of Exon to die on me,’ she said. ‘I was much fonder of him than I thought. I never loved him, of course. I never loved anyone I was married to. I tried but I couldn’t.’ And she looked so wretched as she said this that I forgot London, I forgot films, I forgot floppy-haired, sweaty, exhausted Director Krassner and everything but Felicity. I put my hand on hers, old and withered as it was compared to mine, and to my horror tears rolled out of her eyes. She was like me, offer me a word of sympathy and I am overwhelmed with self-pity.
‘It’s the painkillers,’ she apologized. ‘They make me tearful. Take no notice. I bullied you into coming. It was bad of me. The fall made me feel older than usual and in need of advice. But I’m okay. I can manage. You can go home now if you like. I won’t object.’ ‘Oh, charming,’ I thought, and said, ‘But I don’t know anything about life in these parts. I know nothing about gated living, or congregate living, or any of the things you have this side of the Atlantic. We just have dismal old people’s homes. Why can’t you just stay where you are in this house and have someone live in?’ ‘It would be worse than being married,’ she said. ‘There wouldn’t be any sex to make up for being so overlooked.’
I said I supposed she’d just have to ask around and do whatever it was her friends did in similar situations. She looked scornful. I could see how she got up their noses. ‘They’re not friends,’ she said. ‘They’re people I happen to know. I tried to stop Joy meeting you at the airport, but she will have her way. I worried every moment.’
She wanted me to go for a walk with her after breakfast but I declined. I did not trust the Lyme tick to keep to the woods. There didn’t seem much to see, either. Just this long wide Divine Road with curiously spaced new-old houses every now and then at more than decent intervals. Here, Felicity said, lived interchangeable people of infinite respectability. She explained that the greater the separation, the bigger the lot, the more prestigious the life. Money in the US was spent keeping others at a distance, which was strange, since there was so much space, but she supposed the point was to avoid any sense of huddling, which the poor of Europe, in their flight to the Promised Land, had so wanted to escape. Strung out along these roads lived men who’d done well in the insurance business or in computers, and mostly taken early retirement, with wives who had part-time jobs in real estate, or in alternative health clinics, or did good works: and a slightly younger but no wilder lot from the university—but no-one of her kind. She hadn’t lived with her own kind, said Miss Felicity (Exon had liked to call her this and it had stuck) for forty-five years. What had happened to Miss Felicity, I wondered, when she was in her late thirties? That would have been around the time of her second and most sensible American marriage, to a wealthy homosexual in Savannah. The end of that marriage had brought her the Utrillo—white period, Parisian scene with branch of tree: very pretty—which now hung in state in the bleak, high Passmore lounge which no-one used, to the right of the gracious hall with its curving staircase and unlocked front door. The second night of my stay—the first night I was too exhausted to care—I crept out after Felicity had gone to bed and locked it.
‘It’s a bit late to go looking for people of your own kind,’ I said. ‘Even if you’d recognize them when you came across them. Couldn’t you just put up with being comfortable?’ She said I always had been a wet blanket and I apologized, though I had never been accused of such a thing before. There was no shortage of money. Exon, who had died of a stroke, she told me, the day after handing in a naval history of Providence to his publishers, had left her well provided for. He had died very well insured, as people who live anywhere near Hartford tend to be. She could go anywhere, do anything. It seemed to me that she had stayed where she was, four months widowhood for every year of wifehood—a very high interest rate of thirty-three per cent as if paying back with her own boredom, day by day, the debt she owed sweet, tedious Exon. Now, recovering from whatever it was had to be recovered from, she was preparing for her next dash into the unknown: only at eighty-five, or –three, or however old she really was (she was always vague, but had now reached the point where vanity requires more years, not fewer) the dash must be cautious: the solid brick wall of expected death standing somewhere in the mist, not so far away. She was sensible enough to know it, and wanted my approval, as if paying off another debt, this one owed to the future. I was touched. It was almost enough to make me want children, descendants of my own, but not quite.
5 (#ulink_0d5709ed-b9f4-5987-9728-a9f10c2932ba)
By the afternoon Miss Felicity’s plunge into a new life had taken on a certain urgency: Vanessa, one of the part-time real estate wives, called on her mobile phone to say that she had a client she was sure would just adore the house, and who was prepared to take it, furniture and all, and had $900,000 to spend but would want to move in within the month. Miss Felicity, faced with the reality of a situation she had brought upon herself, and too proud to draw back, and moved by my advice (I had woken in the night with a mean and manic fear that now we were getting on so well she would change her mind and want to come and live in London, to be near me) had calmed down and decided she would like to stay in the neighbourhood, and, what was more, had settled in to the idea of ‘congregate living’. She would start looking this very day.
Joy, summoned for coffee, and today dressed in yellow velour and with a pink ribbon in her hair, was alarmed at so much haste. Felicity might make more from her house if she hung on, she shrieked. Joy’s brother-in-law might want to move back into the neighbourhood, and maybe would be interested in the property: these major life decisions should not be taken in a hurry. But Felicity, meantime, unheeding, was unwinding the bandage round her ankle.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Joy.
‘Rendering myself fit for congregate living,’ said Felicity. ‘I don’t want to give the impression that I need to be assisted. Let’s see what there is around Mystic.’
‘Mystic!’ screamed Joy, teeth bared. Every one of them a dream of the dentist’s art, but you can never do anything about the gums.
‘You can’t possibly want to be anywhere near Mystic. Too many tourists.’
‘I’ve always just loved the name,’ said Felicity. Joy raised her plucked eyebrows to heaven. What few hairs she allowed to remain, the better to reinforce the pencilled line, were white and spiky and tough.
‘I thought the whole point,’ yelled Joy, ‘was that you wanted assistance. Assisted care. Someone to help you take a shower in the mornings.’
‘That is definitely going too far,’ said Felicity and left the room, giving a little flirtatious kick backward with one of her heels, while Joy forgot to smile and ground her white teeth. ‘There’s nothing whatsoever the matter with that ankle,’ yelled Joy. ‘She just wanted you over here and she got her own way.’
The seaside town of Mystic (population 3,216) lies a little to the north of where the Quinebourg River splits and meets the Atlantic just before Connecticut turns into Rhode Island. In the summer the place is full of holiday-makers and gawpers: it is less fashionable and expensive than Cape Cod further up, or the tail of Long Island opposite, but it has some good houses, some good wild stretches of beach, and attracts admirers of the old 1860 wooden bridge, which still rises and falls to let the shipping traffic through. Or so the brochures said and so it proved to be. Joy insisted on coming with us on our tour of the area: so we went in her new and so far undented Mercedes—obtained for her by her brother-in-law Jack, a retired car dealer—and I was allowed to drive.
Old people do indeed seem to congregate around the town: the Mystic Office of Commerce handed out brochures a-plenty. I could understand the charm of the name, Mystic, tempting in the hope, so needed as life draws to its inevitable end, that there is more to it than meets the eye. A place close enough to nature to make sunsets and stormy weather a matter of reflection, in which to develop a sense of oneness with the universe, in which to lose, if only temporarily, the pressing consideration of the shortness of our existence here on earth. A more benign and tranquil version of nature than in most other places in the US. No hurricanes, no earthquakes, no wild fluctuations of heat and cold to disturb old bones, only the Lyme tick which no-one took any notice of, in spite of the fact that the illness is serious enough to carry off the aged and delicate. Maybe Mystic’s convenient distance from New York, not so near as to make popping in to see the old relative an everyday affair, not so far as to make a fortnightly visit too difficult, was the greater attraction. Or perhaps homes for the elderly were just these days a fine growth market: this is trading country, as a British admiral once observed, seeing the New England settlers trading with his fleet during the War of Independence. For whatever reason there were more residential homes for the aged up and down these ponds, these woods, these beaches, and these back roads, than I’d have thought possible.
When I asked what exactly we were looking for, Felicity said, ‘Somewhere with good vibes’, at which Joy snorted and said she thought cleanliness, efficiency, good food and a good deal was more to the point.
Good vibes! I thought Felicity would be lucky to find them anywhere in New England. Although a landscape may look stunningly pleasant and tranquil, the ferocious energies of its past—and few landscapes are innocent—are never quite over. The impulse to exterminate the enemy, to loot and plunder, to gain confidence with false smiles before stabbing in the back, is hard to overcome: if it’s not with us in the present it seeps through from the past. And these are dangerous parts: the first coast of the New World to be colonized, three and a half hundred years back. Bad things have been able to happen here for a long, long time. A massacre here, death by hunger there; an early settlement vanished altogether over winter: no trace left at all when the ships come creeping up the coast with the spring. And who in the world to say what happened? We all await the great debriefing when everything will be made known, the Day of Judgement which will never come.
Later the plantation owners of the South made this coast their summering place: later still the mob leaders from Chicago: then the Mafia. Of course they did. Like calls to like. The strong colour of old wallpaper had ample time to show through to the new, and they liked it. The edginess of something about to happen, something just happened. Vacations can be so dull.
Good vibes! Maybe it was in Felicity’s nature forever to be moving on, in search of a landscape innocent of earlier crimes. If so she would be better advised to go West than East, where there wasn’t so much history. Joy was by nature a stayer in one place, Felicity a mover on. Felicity would always listen and learn and be enriched, Joy would shut her mind to new truths. Felicity was inquisitive and never averse to a little trouble and discomfiture, Joy never wanted to stir anything up. Therein lay the difference between them, though God knows both ended up in much the same condition in life, living in the same kind of clapboard house, in the same kind of widowhood, albeit Joy today in startling yellow velour, and Miss Felicity in a floating cream and green dress bought at great expense at Bergdorf Goodman, and an embroidered jacket of vaguely ethnic but tasteful origin, cut so as to hide any thickening of the waist or stooping of the shoulders. She held herself erect. From the back she could have been any age: except perhaps her ankles were too thin to belong to a truly youthful person.
We took the coast road out of Mystic to historic Stonington, the Rhode Island side of the river from Mystic, where there’s a statue of a Pequot Indian with a large stone fish under each arm. Old people tottered around it, relatives holding dependent arms: a group whizzed about it in mechanized wheelchairs, never too old to be a danger to others. They came, in whatever state, to contemplate the past, since there was so little future to contemplate: they invaded the nearby souvenir shops by the busload, while old limbs still had the strength. We all want to think of our nation’s past as wondrous and charming, as we would want to think of our own. But Joy declined to get out of the car.
‘I’m no tourist,’ she said. ‘I live round here. As for those Red Indians, they take everything and give nothing back. If China invaded they wouldn’t object to being defended, I can tell you that.’
Felicity slammed the door as she got out of the car. But Joy lowered the window.
‘Scarcely a pureblooded Pequot left,’ she shouted after us. ‘They’ve all intermarried with the blacks anyway. Now they run their casinos tax-free on Reservation land. They rake in millions and are let off taxes, just because their ancestors had a hard time. Poor Mr Trump, they say he’s having a real bad time in Atlantic City, because of Indians.’
‘Hush!’ begged Felicity.
‘You’re so English, Felicity! If the old can’t speak the truth who can?’ Calm, quiet people turned to stare at Joy. Her white-powdered, hollow-eyed face stared out of the darkness of the car, her chin resting on the ledge of the lowered window, which I thought was rather dangerous. Supposing it suddenly shot up? I couldn’t think who she reminded me of and then I realized it was Boris Karloff in The Mummy. Some people, as they get older, simply lose their gender.
‘I’ve nothing against them personally,’ she shrieked. ‘But if I was one of them I wouldn’t want to be called a Native American. The way I was brought up, a native is a savage.’ Felicity and I, realizing there was no other way of silencing her, simply gave up our exploration of the town and got back into the car. Joy smiled in triumph.
We saw a couple of what were called congregated communities, but they were built around golf courses. Those who lived there looked as if they had stepped straight out of the advertisements: the strong, well-polished, smiling elderly, their hair wet-combed if they still had any—and there were some amazing heads of hair, not necessarily natural, to be seen, in both sexes. The men wore bright polo shirts, the women shell suits. They made Felicity feel frail. By mistake we saw an assisted living home where the old sat together with their zimmer frames, backs to the wall, glaring at anyone who dared to come into their space. The sense of quiet depression was such I could have been back in my own country. The smell of cheap air freshener got into my lungs. Felicity looked shocked. Joy wouldn’t step inside the room they showed us, so proudly.
‘I’d rather die,’ she shrieked. ‘Why don’t they just polish themselves off?’ If the inhabitants heard they did not stir. Management did, and showed us hastily out, but not before giving us their list of charges.
I relented. Nothing we saw looked at all suitable for my grandmother’s dash into the future. I told Felicity if she wanted to come back to London I’d do what I could for her: find her somewhere near me, even with me. I declared myself prepared to move house to live somewhere without stairs, into the one-floor living that seemed to be a requisite for anyone over sixty. I spoke coolly and my reluctance by-passed my brain and settled itself in my stomach in the form of a bad pain: appendix, maybe.
‘She’ll drive you crazy,’ shouted Joy. ‘You’ll regret it.’
Felicity persisted that she did not want to return to London, even to be near me. (The pain at once subsided.) I was too busy, too taken up with my own life. She would just feel the lonelier because she’d never get to see me, and I would just feel the guiltier for the same reason. Besides, she was used to the US.
Life in England was too cramped, too divorced from its own history, the young had no interest in the old, the IRA left bombs around, the plumbing was dreadful and she was too old to make new friends. And we certainly could not live together. Joy was right, I would kill her, or she me. I did not argue. We went home in depressed silence.
