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‘You just have to be patient,’ said Joy, softer again. ‘Don’t sell to this stupid client of Vanessa’s. Anyone who wants to move in within the month is bound to be a bad neighbour. You do owe a little consideration to the rest of us.’
She took the wheel of the car and bumped off in a way that never happened when I drove. It was scarcely more than a year old, and fitted with every possible kind of gadget to ensure a smooth ride. I don’t know how she managed it.
When we got back to the serenity of Passmore we found that a brochure had been pushed through the letterbox. It was from an establishment called The Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement. Felicity examined it over toasted cinnamon bagels spread with Cream Cheese Favorite Lite. ‘This Golden Bowl place,’ said Felicity, ‘doesn’t sound too bad at all. They have a Nobel Prize winner in residence, and a Doctor of Philosophy. Fancy being able to have a conversation with someone other than Joy. And what synchronicity that it should arrive today!’
It would have been even more synchronicitous if it had arrived in the morning rather than the afternoon, so we could have visited it when in the area, but I held my tongue. The Golden Bowl charged at least double the fees of any other institution we’d seen, and they went up ten per cent each year. Which when you worked it out meant that in ten years’ time you would be paying double. But by then Miss Felicity would be well into her nineties. It might not be so bad a deal. It was a gamble who would end up making money out of whom.
I hoped her liking for the place wasn’t because it was the most expensive on offer. Reared in penury as she had been, Felicity now had an almost innocent faith in the power of money: she believed that the more you spent the better value you would get. She always bought the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu. She’d choose caviar not because she liked it but because of what it cost.
The Golden Bowl, according to its brochure, was an establishment run on therapeutic lines. Golden Bowlers (ouch! but never mind) were encouraged to live life to the full. Age need not be a barrier to the exploration of the self, or the exercise of the mind. Golden Bowlers were not offered the consolations of religious belief, which came with difficulty to the highly educated: but rather in some vague, Jungian notion of ‘adjustment to the archetype’ in which all staff were trained, and could bring joy and relief through the concluding years. Reading between the lines, those who ran the Golden Bowl held no truck with reincarnation; death was death, and that was that. What they were after was reconciliation with what had gone before since nothing much was to come. And they mentioned the word death, which nobody else had done.
It was persuasive, and Felicity and I were persuaded. I should have spoken out more firmly against a Residential Home for the Aged where the residents were known as Golden Bowlers. I should have realized that the connection with Ecclesiastes, which I assumed, was minimal. It wasn’t mentioned in the brochure.
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth,
while the evil days come not,
nor the years draw nigh,
when thou shalt say,
I have no pleasure in them;
While the sun,
or the light,
or the moon,
or the stars,
be not darkened,
nor the clouds return after the rain:
How did it go after that? My mother Angel would teach me chunks of the Bible. It was her lasting gift to me, along with life itself, of course.
…and desire shall fail:
because man goeth to his long home,
and the mourners go about the streets:
or ever the silver cord be loosed,
or the golden bowl be broken at the fountain,
…then shall the dust return to the earth as it was:
and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
Felicity would never acknowledge that the Golden Bowl, whatever that was meant to represent, was cracked. A day would never dawn when she took no pleasure at all in it. There was bound to be trouble. ‘Vanity of vanities,’ saith the preacher, ‘all is vanity.’ But we were blithe: we put our trust in synchronicity.
The next morning Felicity consulted the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Oracles with the Foreword by Jung himself, to see what that had to say about the Golden Bowl. She had been in her fifties in the midsixties, when I was born, when the I Ching was all the rage.
She had just found her pencil and got round to throwing the coins when Joy appeared shouting in through the French windows, a vision in orange velvet with a crimson headband, determined that this day she would really make her mark upon the world. Felicity had the grace to hastily hide the coins under a sheet of paper. And then we all set off in high spirits to inspect the Golden Bowl, Felicity, Joy and me, in Joy’s Mercedes. Once again I drove. It was fun, all of a sudden.
‘This place is going to be just as terrible as the others,’ Joy assured us, quite softly. She was wearing her hearing aid and it was a bright morning so no doubt the world was less misty than usual. ‘But it’s nice to be driven.’ This morning she had a flask of vodka with her and lifted it to her lips from time to time as she sat in the back seat. I could see her in the mirror. She had apparently decided I was to be trusted.
‘I didn’t have time to read the coins,’ Felicity confided in me on the way. ‘But I threw Duration leading to Biting Through. Thirty-two leading to twenty-one: lots of changing lines, which means we’re in a volatile situation.’ I hadn’t heard talk like this since I was a little girl, when my mother would scarcely buy groceries without consulting the Chinese Book of Wisdom.
‘Oh yes,’ I remarked. ‘Is that good or bad?’
‘Duration.’ She quoted from memory. ‘Success. No blame.
Perseverance furthers. It furthers one to have somewhere to go.’
‘Like the Golden Bowl?’
‘I should think that’s what it meant, wouldn’t you?’ I concentrated on the road. Over the hills I could catch a glimpse of the sea, a thin edge of blue melting into a hazy sky. It was a good day for November: there had been a sharp, hard wind during the night but it had dropped, and the sky was left watery bright. Maybe on just such a day the sails of the Viking longships had caught the sun as they approached the coast. On such a day perhaps the captain of an English privateer had stumbled on deck and said, ‘Beautiful morning for November,’ while wondering if he would live to see the evening. To wonder about death was more commonplace once than it is now, and the present must have seemed the more glorious. Inland the trees, heretofore muzzy with wet leaves, had become stark and bare and beautiful overnight.
‘Poor Joy,’ said Felicity loudly, to anyone who cared to hear. ‘She has such a drink problem.’ Joy had turned off her hearing aid.
6 (#ulink_3919f96f-72fb-584c-802a-c68f717d7582)
Nurse Dawn looked out of the French windows of the Atlantic Suite which Dr Rosebloom had so recently and suddenly vacated, and averted her eyes. She did not like the woods, which were allowed to creep so near to the portals of the property. It was too gentle and crowded and coy a landscape for her. She felt circumscribed and somehow on hold, as if her life had not properly begun.
The sky seemed too small. It was too quiet. If you listened you could hear the tiresome swish of ocean as a background to birdsong. There was somewhere to go and everyone else knew where except her.
A group of guests passed in the corridor on the other side of the door, their voices drifting. They were chanting, which was gratifying, but not gratifying enough, on their way from an Ascension meeting in the Library, still brimming with cheerful animation, summoned up somehow from within their feeble beings.
‘What do Golden Bowlers do?
We live life to the full.’
Self-hypnosis could do so much: in the end, whatever Dr Grepalli had to say on the subject, joie de vivre failed in the face of bad knees, and dimming eyes. Silence fell again. There seemed today some dulling barrier between Nurse Dawn and the enjoyment of life. Everything became a source of irritation. People raved about the wondrous colours of the trees in these parts after the first few sharp frosts of autumn, but to her the trees in their autumn dress looked garish, like colours from a child’s painting set. And now in November there was no splendour in their absence of dress, their dank nakedness. She wanted to be back home to the wheat plains and a great expanse of sky, where the roads were straight and dusty and yellow, and dry, even at this time of year; and the sound of wind, not sea, was the background to everyday life; and twisters came like the sudden vengeance of God, reminding one of sin, and with sin, salvation. But it could not be. This was where the money was, where she had managed to carve her niche. There were as many old people back there as here, of course, and as much work to be done for them, but they were a grittier, suspicious lot. They would be embarrassed rather than charmed by Dr Grepalli’s methods, and far less easy about parting with their money. They thought more about their relatives and what good their small savings could do when they were gone than about their own comfort and state of mind. And coming out of a rural community as they did, they tended to lose heart as they reached their gnarled and wrinkled end: what was the point of you if your back was bad or your legs wouldn’t work. Here at the prosperous edges of the sea, oldsters seemed to keep going longer and in better shape. Certainly they’d acquired more money in their lifetimes, doing less.
Nurse Dawn had a profit-share in the Golden Bowl: she had persuaded Dr Grepalli that this was only just and fair. She hadn’t exactly asked him to marry her and he hadn’t exactly declined: she hadn’t exactly threatened to inform the Golden Years Welfare Board (originally appointed by Dr Homer Grepalli, Joseph’s father) that she and he enjoyed a sexual relationship, and he hadn’t exactly asked her not to.
‘Dawn,’ he’d remarked once, as her head nuzzled beneath the bedclothes, ‘I hope you’re doing this because you want to, not because you think it will help you control me. You are something of a control-freak, as you must realize. Which suits me: and suits our guests; as we get older we feel relieved if there is someone around telling us what to do, even if we don’t care to do it. But I do want you to be aware I’m not open to blackmail.’
‘The Board wouldn’t like it,’ she had surfaced to say, shocked. ‘The Board wouldn’t mind in the least,’ Dr Grepalli said. ‘They’re all free-love civil libertarians: pre-Aids thinkers, existentialists, older than we are—not a single one below sixty, and far less censorious than our generation. Nevertheless I can see the justice of giving you a twenty per cent share of my own annual profit-related bonus, since you do so much for my morale and the wellbeing of the guests, who all adore you. As I do.’
Dr Grepalli was too self-aware and ironically minded ever to do as he really wanted—or rather have done to him—which would be to be tied up by a ferocious woman in a nurse’s uniform, who would insult him and walk all over him in high-heeled shoes, and brandish a whip, but Nurse Dawn seemed a heaven-sent compromise, and it suited him to pay her, and added an agreeable complexity to their relationship. It was part of the unspoken deal. Both knew it.
Nurse Dawn had worked the twenty per cent share out as a good $700 a week on top of her existing salary, and rising. Guests paid not a decreasing but an increasing sum—year by year—for their stay. This was only reasonable. They needed more care. More trays of food had to be fetched and carried, more medication provided and more eccentricities and forgetfulness coped with. Relatives and lawyers sometimes protested at the Golden Bowl’s charging arrangements, seeing, annually, an exponential loss of expected family inheritance, but soon came to see the sense of it. The older anyone’s relatives were, after all, the less likely was anyone to want to take them home again.
‘The longer you Stay,
The more you Pay,
Lucky Golden Bowler!’
The unspoken benefit, of course, was that guests were conscious that management had an incentive to keep them alive as long as possible. Let your room fall empty, as Dr Rosebloom had, and the newcomer entered at the lower rate. Golden Bowlers were encouraged to see the Golden Bowl as home, and their fellow guests as family: it was hoped that little by little they would loosen close ties with their birth families. It was easier for everyone that way, as it was seen to be for nuns and monks. And after eighty that was more or less what guests amounted to: sex being hardly a motivating force in their lives any longer, they could focus on their spirituality. Family and friends were of course allowed to visit, but were never quite welcomed. News from outside too often upset. Relatives would turn up merely to pass on bad news that the resident was helpless to do anything about. Someone had died, someone else gone to prison, been divorced, great-great-grandchildren were on Ritalin.
By and large, or so it was concluded at the Golden Bowl, the relatives you ended up with were a disappointment: not at all what one had dreamed of when young. They were usually a great deal plainer than one had hoped: the good genes were so easily diluted, while the bad ran riot. The bride’s handsome husband turned out to be an anomaly in a family as plain as the back of a bus, and it was only apparent at the wedding. Took only one son to marry a dim girl with big teeth in a small jaw and you’d produce a whole race of descendants in need of orthodontics but not the wit or will to afford them. If the boy hadn’t gone to that particular party on that particular night—and fallen for an ambitious girl with small teeth in a big jaw—how different the room full of descendants would look: how much greater the sum of their income. The old easily grew sulky, seeing how much of life was chance, how little due to intent. Unfair, unfair! It’s the familiar cry of the small child, too; only between the extremes of age do we have the impression there’s anything we can do about anything.
The decorators were packing up in Dr Rosebloom’s suite. Nurse Dawn was pleased with the work they had done, but did not tell them so. Rather she chose to find flaws in a section of the pink striped wallpaper where the edges were admittedly slightly mismatched. The decorators were duly apologetic and agreed, after a short brisk discussion, to accept a lesser fee. Nurse Dawn also got a percentage of any savings she could make on the annual maintenance budget, in the management of which she had lately found serious shortcomings.
In Nurse Dawn’s opinion praise should be used sparingly, since it only served to make those who received it complacent. Her children, had she had any, would have grown up to be neurotic high-achievers: come home proudly with news of a silver medal, and be scolded for not getting the gold. The decorators slunk away, disgraced. Nurse Dawn strolled around the suite, observing detail, trying to envisage its next occupant. That was how she made her choices: in much the same way as she chose numbers for the lottery, willing good fortune to come her way, envisaging the numbers as they shot up on the screen.
The bathroom had been pleasingly redone with marble veneer tiles that could have passed for the real thing, and gold stucco angels surrounded the new bathroom cabinet. Nurse Dawn’s fallback position, she decided, would be the eighty-year-old female applicant, the Pulitzer Prize winner, who smoked. She would be given the suite on condition she gave up smoking. This she would promise to do: this she would fail to do: and Nurse Dawn would be at a psychological advantage from the outset. There wasn’t actually much to be feared from lung cancer: if you were a smoker and it hadn’t got you by eighty it was unlikely to do so at all: nor would other forms of cancer be likely to surface. Death would be by stroke or heart attack or simply the incompetence of being which afflicted the individual as the hundredth year approached. The Pulitzer winner was of the lean hard-bitten hard-drinking kind: they tended to last well. The Golden Bowl could, she supposed, do worse.
Nurse Dawn’s attention was drawn to a Mercedes sweeping through the opening of the gold-and-metal appliqué gates, copies of the ones at the entrance to London’s Hyde Park, put up in honour of the Queen Mother, aged a good ninety-eight at the time of their erecting. The Mercedes did not proceed to the front of the house where regular parking was obviously to be found, but drew up outside the French windows of the Rosebloom Suite, which everyone much got out of the habit of calling it, only a few feet from where Nurse Dawn stood, lamenting the view. Three women got out. A skinny young person in sweater and jeans, with Botticelli hair and a high forehead, and two women in their later years. One, in her mid-seventies, Nurse Dawn supposed, was hideously attired in an orange velvet tracksuit and crimson headband, and had a bulky waist—which did not augur well for a long life span—but the other one, dressed in strange and impractical gauze and gossamer floating drapes, looked slight but promising. Early eighties, passing at first glance for ten years younger. A one-time actress or dancer, maybe. Her movements were both energetic and graceful: her back was scarcely bowed—HRT from early middle age, Nurse Dawn surmised, always a plus—a graceful head poised on a long neck, tactfully scarved to hide the creases.
‘Parking’s round the front, in the space designated,’ called Nurse Dawn, as the party disembarked, but they took no notice, though they had heard perfectly well.
‘There’s lots of room,’ the young woman said. ‘And we’re here now.’ She had an English accent. If the relatives were English and far away so much the better. ‘Can we talk to whoever’s in charge?’ ‘I’m in charge,’ said Nurse Dawn, and seeing it was more or less true, felt much better. She might have reached her forties without husband, children, or home of her own, which was the fate of many, God alone knew, but at least she was accumulating money in her bank account, very fast indeed, and would not, as her mother had always promised her, end up with nothing.
She saw how Felicity lingered in the Rosebloom Suite, with its pretty pink and white paper, admired the view, laughed with pleasure at the absurdities of the bathroom cabinet, and heard her say, ‘I could live in a place like this. It seems more me than that great creaky house ever did.’
She heard Joy reply, shocked, at the top of her voice, ‘That’s your home you’re talking about, Miss Felicity.’
Nurse Dawn was pleased to understand it was the quiet one, not the noisy one, who was looking for a home. If she made so much noise now what would she be doing in ten years’ time? The vocal cords were often the last to go. And Felicity’s reply, ‘I was never happy with my own taste. I don’t think we need look further than here,’ came almost as a relief.
The English girl said, ‘Come on now, this is the first place we’ve seen. You can’t make up your mind just like that.’
‘I can,’ said Felicity. ‘And I have. What was I told this morning? It furthers one to have somewhere to go? This is the somewhere.’
Nurse Dawn led the party through to the front reception area, where they should have been in the first place, imbuing a proper sense of reverence, where busts of Roman Caesars stood on marble plinths, and said, ‘You must understand we have a long waiting list, and all applicants must first be vetted, and then voted for. We’re very much a family here.’ This deflated the spirit of the group considerably, as Nurse Dawn had intended. She preferred supplicants to pickers and choosers.
Being a woman of quick decision she had already decided to accept Felicity for the Atlantic Suite, but it was wise to let her fret a little. She would be quite an asset: she moved and spoke gracefully, and was of good appearance, and though no kind of intellectual, unlike the Pulitzer Prize winner, would not annoy the other guests by smoking. Moreover, she quoted from the I Ching—‘it furthers one to have somewhere to go’ could only come from this source—which meant Dr Grepalli would put up no objection. Jungians clung to one another in their absurdities.
7 (#ulink_35b39b5f-73b9-5b0a-aec1-7915b291327a)
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?
