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Poor thing.’
‘Things looked kind of permanent, at the Golden Bowl,’ I corrected myself. ‘And they seemed very responsible. They won’t just dump her.’
‘That’s what they want you to feel,’ said Joy. ‘But the marble is only veneer and that terrible white stone is so cheap they can hardly give it away. Why can’t she go somewhere more ordinary? Why does she have to be so special?’
‘The Ching was very positive about the Golden Bowl,’ said Felicity, when I came down with my bag, closing the book and rewrapping it in the piece of dark-red silk kept for the purpose. I felt such affectation to be annoying. ‘Though it seemed to see some kind of lawsuit in the future. Thus the kings of former times made firm the laws through the clearly defined penalties. What do you think that means?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said, briskly. ‘I do not see how throwing three coins in the air six times can affect anything.’
‘Darling,’ said Felicity, ‘it isn’t a question of affecting, but reflecting. It’s Jung’s theory of Synchronicity. But I know how you hate all this imaginative stuff.’
I said I’d rather not talk about it. My mother Angel had kept a copy of the I Ching on her kitchen shelf. She had no truck with silk wrappings or respect. The black-and-red book, with its white Chinese ideograms, was battered and marked by put-down coffee cups. ‘What’s the big deal,’ she would say, ‘it is only like consulting a favourite uncle, some wise old man who knows how the world works. You don’t have to take any notice of what he says.’ She would quote from Jung’s Foreword. ‘As to the thousands of questions, doubts, and criticisms that this singular book stirs up – I cannot answer these. The I Ching does not offer itself with proofs and results, it does not vaunt itself, nor is it easy to approach. Like a part of nature, it waits to be discovered.’
One day when Angel had brought home bacon and sardines from the shop, rather than the milk we needed, because she’d thrown the coins before leaving the house and come up with something disparaging about pigs and fishes, I’d lost my cool and protested. ‘Why do you have to throw those stupid coins, why can’t you make up your own mind, then at least I could have some cereal! You are a terrible mother!’ She’d slapped my face. I kicked her ankles. She seldom resorted to violence. When she did I forgave her: she’d get us confused: it was hard for her to tell the difference between her and me. To rebuke me was to rebuke herself. The sudden violence meant, all the same, that the downward slide into unreason was beginning again, and I knew it, and dreaded the weeks to come. My violence, in retaliation, was childish, but that was okay inasmuch as I was a child; I must have been about ten. Her white skin bruised easily. The blue marks were apparent for days. I felt terrible. I think that was at a time before my father left me alone with her: he simply didn’t understand mental illness. He felt she was wilful and difficult and was doing everything she could to upset and destroy him, while doting on me. I tried to tell him she was crazy but he didn’t believe me. I expect believing it meant he would have to take responsibility for me, and he wasn’t the kind of man to do that. He was an artist of the old school. Children were the mother’s business. Anyway he left, sending money for a time. I was alone with her for six months before Felicity turned up to look after us. I’d found her phone number in my mother’s address book and called her. We’d run out of money and there was no food in the cupboard and my mother wasn’t doing anything about it. My grandmother stayed until my mother was hospitalized, and I was in a boarding school, and then went back to her rich old husband in Savannah, the one who left her the Utrillo. She couldn’t stand any of it. Well, it was hard to stand. Visit my mother in her hospital ward, in a spirit of love, and find her white-faced with wild glazed eyes, tied down, shrieking hate at you. They didn’t have the drugs then they do now, and made no effort to keep the children away. I told them at school I was visiting my mother in hospital, but I didn’t tell them what kind of hospital. In those days to have an insane relative was a shame and a disgrace and a terrible secret thing in a family. No sooner had Felicity flown out than my mother simply died. I like to think she knew what she was doing, that it was the only way out for all of us. She managed to suffocate herself in a straitjacket. ‘Throw the coins and throw the pattern of the times,’ Angel would say cheerfully, in the good times, and she’d quote Jung’s Foreword, which she knew by heart, relieving me of the duty of believing what she believed.
‘To one person the spirit of the I Ching appears as clear as day, to another, shadowy as twilight, to a third, dark as night. He who is not pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is against it does not have to find it true.’
As if that settled everything. I try to keep my mind on the good times, but you can see why I like to live in films rather than in reality, if it can possibly be done. I wondered what Krassner’s hang-up was. I thought I probably didn’t want to know, it was an impertinence to inquire. Art is art, forget what motivates it. What business of anyone else’s is why?
Felicity walked with me to the limo, her step still light, her head held high: age sat on her uncomfortably: it didn’t belong to her: I wanted to cry.
‘Thank you for coming all this way,’ she said. ‘I do appreciate it.
It’s made things easier. That place is okay, isn’t it? Of course I’d rather live with family, but one doesn’t want to be a burden.’
‘That place is a hoot,’ I said. ‘I’d give it a go. If you don’t like it I’ll come over and we’ll try again.’
I sank into the squashy real-leather seat.
‘Of course you’re not my only family,’ said Felicity. ‘There was Alison. Though I daresay they changed her name.’
Charlie was looking at his watch. But I was truly startled. I kept the limo door open. We couldn’t leave until I shut it.
‘Alison?’
‘I had Alison before I had your mother,’ said my grandmother. ‘On my fifteenth birthday. That was in London, back in the thirties. I wasn’t married. That made me a bad girl. They made me keep the baby for six weeks, and breastfeed, then they took her away, put her out for adoption.’
‘How could they be so cruel?’ I stood there with the car door open, in the middle of Connecticut, and the past came up and slammed me. And it wasn’t even mine, it was hers.
‘In the name of goodness,’ she said. ‘Most cruelties are. It was in case we changed our mind, but how could we, we unmarried mothers? We had nowhere to live, nowhere to go.’
‘Who took the baby?’
‘I don’t know. They didn’t tell you. It wasn’t allowed. They said so you could put the past behind you and the baby could live without the stigma of its birth. They said it was for everyone’s good but really it was for our punishment. It was a long time ago. Don’t worry about it. She’d be in her late sixties now, if she made it to that.’
‘An aunt,’ I said, jubilant.
‘Always thinking about yourself,’ said Felicity, wryly, and there was nothing for it. I had to go. Other people took more than three hours to drive to New York, but Charlie the mountain man got to Kennedy in two and a half.
8 (#ulink_cbfacb14-dcca-5441-9abb-3de82b24acee)
Alison! A long lost aunt! So long as she could be traced: so long as she had survived. But sixty something years was not so long a time in a Western society; the probability was that she would be still in this world. Chances were that she would have married, had children, grandchildren; that she could provide me with a host of cousins and little relatives, all only a half step away. As ready a family as one of the cake mixes in my grandmother’s refrigerator: just add water and stir: pop in the oven and there you are, evidence of the continuity of family affection. Go for the pleasure, the ready-made, not the pain and boredom of finding the bowl, the wooden spoon, beating the sugar into the butter until the wrist tired. Just hang around, and lo, a family turns up.
Leaning against Concorde’s flimsy hull on the way back to London (I had a window seat but there was nothing to see outside but navy-blue), sipping orange juice, I wondered from whence these domestic images came. When I was small, in the patches when she was sane, which grew fewer and fewer as the years went by, my mother Angel would bake cakes and I would help. Then I was truly happy: we both were. I would scrape the bowl of the creamy mixture: lick the wooden spoon. The taste of damp wood would come through with the vanilla essence.
So much of the time, at least when I was working, I rejoiced in my lack of family. I was not burdened as others were, by the guilt and obligations that seemed to go along with having parents, of whom one should be seeing more, or doing more for, desire and duty forever conflicting: the problems of children, ditto.
‘Just a grandmother in Connecticut’ seemed more than enough to me: far enough away, and of her own volition, to be out of the dreaded Christmas equation which afflicts so many these days: who goes where: which step-child to which step-house, which natural child to which parent, who is to take in the reproachful aged. ‘Oh, now she’s moved to Rhode Island,’ sounded as if she were not an invention, and static, but a living, moving in-touch person. And only a fraction nearer.
I had noticed, mind you, that if I were out of the editing suite for more than a couple of days I would begin to feel a little uneasy, a little unbolstered up, as it were, by my comparative aloneness in the world. Others had parents and aunts and children: their Easters and Passovers were well peopled: their Christmas lists were full of duty items, and duty, I had come to observe, can feel less onerous than freedom: the need to enjoy oneself can become oppressive. As my due to Christmas festivities I would visit my mother’s headstone at Golders Green crematorium, and consider the meaning of life and death for half an hour or so, until cold seeped through the soles of my boots. Not, I came to the conclusion fairly early on, that there were any conclusions to come to. There was the pleasure one got in getting things right, and a disappointment that one day one could no longer do so, it would be too late. I hoped nobody noticed this lack of affect in me. I put on a brave face. And if someone were needed to work on Christmas Day, I would always volunteer.
Between jobs, the cracks showed. They were beginning to yawn wide enough to fall into. Colleagues were all very well: they adored you until the show ended, and then failed to recognize you in the street the following week; there were drinks and jokes in the pub with proper friends, and dancing and sexual overtures in the club, and films to go to, and plays, and theatre, and books. Girlfriends were fine until they got married or solidly partnered and drifted off into their folies à deux or, with-children, à trois or quatre, when you, little by little, turned into the baby-sitter, and a haze of domestic triviality drooped like a dull cloud over the old association, and the friendship faded away to Christmas card level: and others you thought were permanent in your life you quarrelled with or they quarrelled with you, over ridiculous things, over borrowed clothes or hurt pride or imagined insults, and that was always upsetting, and there was no sex by which to re-register and consolidate former affections. As if female friendship wasn’t made to endure, was a false conceit: as if sexual relationships plus children was all that really kept people together, and God knew even that didn’t seem to be enough. Some tried lesbian togetherness but I never really fancied it: it was either too possessive or too bent on variance for comfort, and you’d still find yourself jumping when the phone rang. Is it him, is it her, what’s the difference? Oddly, the young gay men now around town in such numbers seemed to make more reliable and lasting friends than anyone else: true, their partners changed more frequently and the splits were accompanied by the most dreadful tantrums, but their laughs and their lamentations mixed agreeably: they created more of a noisy family feel than the females managed.
My usual answer to the unease about whither and whence, alone, was simply to begin another job. Directors waited for my services. I was as busy as I needed to be. Get back to the cutting room and the dissection of fantasy, and the possibility of an award, an Oscar even, if not this year, then next, and the comfort of one’s prestige in the film business, the working end of it at any rate, if not the Oscar Versace summit, and I’d be just fine again. But I could see I could do with an aunt. One sprung ready-made into my life, without the complications of a shared past. Alison!
If there was an aunt maybe there would be an uncle to go with her? But maybe not. The men in my family tended to fade out of sight in the bright glare of the female personalities with which they were confronted. Mind you, there was fresh blood in there somewhere: this Alison would have had a father. Who fathered an illegitimate baby back in the nineteen-thirties and then scarpered? Not anyone nice. But I assumed Felicity wanted me to go in search of her long-lost daughter, otherwise she wouldn’t have mentioned her. Would she?
The elderly woman in the Hermeés scarf and sensible shoes in the seat next to me called the steward. He arrived, obsequious, resentful and rubbing damp palms together. It is as difficult for Concorde to provide a more luxurious service than First Class on a regular flight as it is for First Class Regular to do much better than Club Class subsonic. There must be an end to the distinction between one grade of smoked salmon and the rest, the taste and texture of one rare globule of caviar and the next. The battle to justify the extra thousands spent by customers cannot be left to speed and convenience alone. There must be luxury enough to shame the opposition. Catering feels it too must do its best, but imagination fails. The staff just has to learn to bow yet lower, and it hurts, and it shows.
‘Last time I was on this blasted machine,’ said my neighbour, ‘there were shreds of real orange in the juice. I’ll swear this is condensed.’
The steward went forward and came back with the cardboard container to reassure her. ‘Nothing but the best of freshly squeezed real oranges,’ claimed the box. She refused to be reassured.
‘I have no proof the juice came out of that particular box,’ she said. The steward offered to provide witnesses. She declined the offer. The cast, as she called them, would only stick together and lie. ‘Why didn’t you just squeeze fresh oranges?’ she demanded. He said there was a space problem on Concorde. She said oranges, properly packed, wouldn’t necessarily take up more room than boxes. He said they would: oranges were round and boxes were square. So they wrangled on. The human race, even on Concorde, is in search of an occupation. The Mach meter showed 2.2. More than twice the speed of sound. The metal against which my arm rested became uncomfortably hot. I thought maybe the whole machine would melt. I expressed my worry to the steward. He felt the wall of the plane, and studying his once handsome face, grown soft from the habit of an unfelt politeness, and petulant from the obligation to justify, justify, justify, I thought I saw alarm writ there. As one does.
‘Oh it does that sometimes,’ he said. ‘If we overheat the pilot will cut back.’ Even as we spoke the Mach meter fell rapidly to 1.5 and the metal cooled almost instantaneously.
‘There you see,’ he said, triumphantly. The woman beside me snorted and fell asleep. I slept too and dreamed of Aunt Alison, who looked like one of the motherly types you see on packets of cake mixes. She folded me in her arms and said, ‘There, there.’ That was all but when I woke up there were tears on my cheeks.
9 (#ulink_e9ecbab2-9d8e-5921-930f-8e34381d90a8)
The film had been unlocked, that was what had happened, why I had been sent for. A rare event. Young Olivia’s female live-in lover Georgia, slighted by Olivia’s claim that she was no lesbian but the mere victim of child-abuse at the hands of a female teacher, had made an unsuccessful bid to end her life, first e-mailing the news desks with her suicide note: she had been stomach-pumped in time. Georgia’s parents had not helped, joining in the media fray, accusing Olivia, our film’s gentle heroine, of seduction of their daughter, who had been all set to marry a parson. The PR panic was sufficient to infect the studio back in Hollywood. They flew over to sort things out, which only happened in real emergencies. Had they been able, they would have cut off my head and had my brain pickled and turned into some sort of memory bank unit, always accessible, but they couldn’t do that, so they had to pay the price of a Concorde ticket and have my body as well as my brain in the editing suite. They breathed down my neck and shuddered when Harry smoked, which he did more than usual for their benefit. ‘The Studio’ consisted of a sharp young man and a sharper young woman with big hair and a narrow tiny face. She had LA hips, which are wider than those you see skittering about in New York. Californians are built bigger, spreading into available space. Texas is not so far away, in perceptual reality.
The decision finally reached was that I was to recut the love scenes between Leo and Olivia to show an absence of passion rather than a surfeit, as both young people struggled to define their gender identity. This was no great problem for me, since it reflected the actuality of what went on between them on camera. The end was to be changed, which fortunately there was sufficient random footage around to do: a conventional happy ending became one rather less conventional but more convincing. Olivia went off into the sunset with her best friend: Leo with his. The suggestion that the same-sex friends were shortly to be lovers I was able gently and delicately to imply. The film could now be described as brave and edgy, pushing back the frontiers of contemporary experience, it no longer had to be a heart-warming story of young love. It would not please the overseas Islamic markets, but would do fine in the non-Catholic West. ‘The Studio’ were thrilled by their own decision, seeing it as, I quote, ‘seminal to a new generation of gender cinema’. We went into a London pub (their idea) to celebrate and they drank gassy water and managed to score some coke – the supply side in LA had recently run into some trouble, apparently – and got the last flight home.
Nearly everyone was happy about this new turn of events, except by all accounts Krassner, who bit my neck as I did what I was paid to do, and handsomely paid at that. Krassner’s artistic integrity was acknowledged to be under threat, though I had the feeling he would be laughing like the rest of us if he didn’t have a reputation to preserve. The writer was not particularly happy, either, but then writers never are, and Clive our producer, whose film was now going to come in way over budget, was white and exhausted, and in a state of shock, but this is what producers are paid to be.
‘Please do not bite my neck,’ I said to Krassner. But I had come to almost like the slightly sweaty, anxious, obsessive smell of his breath as he craned alongside me towards the screen, and it mingled with mine. Stray strands of black hair interwove with my red tendrils, which by sheer bulk and energy won any encounter. If I tossed my hair out of my eyes, as I did from time to time, a few strands of his would leave his scalp and end up in mine. There seemed an intimacy between us, the greater because we had failed to spend the night together. Matters were still all promise, no disappointment. My bed had held a companionable waft of Krassner as I snatched a couple of hours’ sleep before getting to the cutting room, and to my surprise I hadn’t minded one bit. He’d left a note saying he had wormed the cat: a homey touch, though he had not shaken out the duvet. But then, neither had I before he got under it.
‘I’m not biting,’ he said, now. ‘I’m neurotically gnawing.’ It was true, his teeth – all his, and perfectly capped or veneered or implanted or whatever they did with the teeth of the older man nowadays – slipped gently over the surface of my skin, his full lips following. You don’t get anywhere in film by claiming sexual harassment: that’s for people about to get out of the business anyway. You can get a handsome award but you never work again. For some it’s worth it. Not me. And I liked him gnawing me.
We were three hours into editing when Krassner got a personal phone call from LA. His turn to disentangle his hair from mine, leaving a few more of his strands behind. He took the call. ‘Why hello, darling,’ he said. ‘Yuh, the rumours are correct, we’re up shit creek again. I’m stuck here. Why don’t you fly over to me instead of me going over to you?’
I stopped listening: how stupid I had nearly been: I cut off all reaction. Any shoulder in a storm, that was all my shoulder was to Krassner. Someone nudged me and said that’s Holly Fern on the line – I’d heard of her, who hadn’t: she being the new talent on the block, singing and dancing, according to her people, just like a reborn Ginger Rogers – I thought that was pretty stupid because whoever these days had heard of Ginger Rogers – and with a degree in philosophy which publicity also foolishly did to death. It was from a crap college. ‘Against stupidity,’ my mother Angel once said to me, ‘the Gods themselves strive in vain.’
Nobody had hair as good as mine, but hair isn’t everything, and just because I got up ordinarily with mine in the morning, didn’t mean others couldn’t get the same effect out of a hair salon, if they were prepared to spend half a day achieving it. I wiped Krassner out of my mind, moved my shoulder out of his line. Back at the console he dug me in the ribs and said, ‘Whatzamatter with you?’ but I didn’t deign to reply. It doesn’t do to aim too high, the fall’s too hurtful.
10 (#ulink_dbc4801c-c81c-5481-b7f5-d2df94add4a2)
That night I called Felicity. I tried to get her to tell me more about Aunt Alison but she wouldn’t.
‘I shouldn’t have brought it up,’ she said. ‘What’s the point?’ She quoted from Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters.
‘We have had enough of action, and of motion, we, Roll’d to starboard, Roll’d to larboard, when the surge was seething free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.’
No, she hadn’t heard yet from the Golden Bowl but if they wouldn’t have her she would sell up anyway and go round the corner to the nearest residential house. Joy’s brother-in-law Jack had turned up and made an offer on the house and she had had to disappoint Vanessa.
‘How much?’ I asked.
‘$750,000,’ she said.
‘But that’s lower!’ I was shocked.
‘It’s all he can afford, I won’t have to pay agent fees and I don’t want to disappoint Joy.’
‘How do you know he can’t afford it?’ I asked. ‘Because Joy said so?’ ‘I don’t know what you’ve got against Joy. She’s a better friend than you ever were a granddaughter. Just because she’s a bad driver doesn’t mean she’s a bad person.’
‘No,’ I said bitterly, ‘she just prefers animals to people. Big deal. Is Joy’s sister moving in too?’
‘She died a year ago: Joy hated her, loved him.’ I asked if this meant there was romance in the air and Felicity told me not to be absurd. Joy hated sex but liked to have a man about the place to shout at.
Felicity was not moved by my anxiety that the house was sold, and the Golden Bowl had not yet confirmed her apartment. She said one room was much like another when you got older: one steak as hard on your teeth as the next. The I Ching had given her Biting Through, Chen Chi. She must bite resolutely through obstacles: then she would be rewarded with supreme success. I could tell these were mere delaying tactics: she would talk about anything at all except my lost aunt. I cut her short and asked her directly who the father of her first baby was. I pointed out that these days there is no family decision which can be made without consultation: if you gave away a family member you were giving away relatives for future generations, too, and you had to be answerable to them.
To which she replied tartly that I was a fine one to talk, since I was slipping out from under and having no children at all.
I said no, that’s why I wouldn’t be answerable to anyone, lucky old me. But she had, and so she was. You had to know your genetic background if only to keep the Insurance Companies happy.
She said don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs: she lived in Norwich, Connecticut. There were only two things to bear in mind. Death Only Insurance Policies meant they bet you you’d live longer than you thought you would, and annuities meant you bet them you’d outlive what they predicted. And they had whole departments working on it and you didn’t, and they normally won.
I said, though diverted, don’t change the subject, and repeated the question. ‘Who was the father of your adopted child?’
‘That is simply not the kind of thing you ask in proper circles,’ said Felicity, hoity toity, ‘and it is not your bloodline so what has it got to do with you anyway?’
‘I hope he stayed long enough to take off his boots,’ I said, ‘and give his name.’ Felicity, provoked as I had hoped, spoke haughtily. ‘He was not unknown to me, but it is not something I am prepared to talk about. I gave birth on my fifteenth birthday. Honestly, Sophia, would you want to remember such a thing? I know fifteen is nothing these days, but back in the thirties, certainly in the circles in which I moved, it was really something. I gave birth in a Catholic Home for unwed mothers and bad girls didn’t get given chloroform, which was the only anaesthetic available in childbirth at the time. That was to help teach us the wisdom of not doing it again.’
‘It didn’t work. Later on you had Angel.’
‘I took care to be married, and by that time there was gas-and-air. You really must not pry. So far as I am concerned my life began when I married a chicken farmer from Savannah. Anything that happened before that I have sensibly wiped out of my memory. It is all nothing to do with me.’
I wondered how she would get on at the Golden Bowl, where the old wisdom of not thinking about unpleasant things was hardly encouraged. But Felicity could always invent a life story for herself, and go with that, if she so preferred. Or did the spirit of invention, as with the emotions, as with the body, get tired with age? There was a quaver in her voice: a frisson of self-pity I had never heard before. The telephone conversation ended unsatisfactorily, with me anxious for her welfare and her ordering me to not stir up the past. But I had what I wanted. Two further clues. Her fifteenth birthday and a Catholic Home for unwed mothers.
The Tomorrow Forever team, I know, employed the services of a detective agency. The next day I put them on to the job of finding Alison. They offered to lose the cost in the general film expenses, but I said no, this was private work, I would foot the bill. There was now some talk of changing the title to Forever Tomorrow. I couldn’t see that it made much difference. Felicity’s birthday was 6 October. A Libran, fair and square and in the middle of the sign, better at being a mistress than a wife, not that I held any truck with astrology. There can’t have been a great number of babies born to fifteen-year-olds in London on 6 October 1930, in a Catholic Home for unwed mothers, and presumably some records of adoptions would have been kept. And with any luck the right ones would have survived the blitz, and I had always seen myself as a lucky person, though I knew enough from working on a film called Fire over England that great chunks of the national archive went up in flames in 1941.
If I couldn’t have Krassner I wanted a family. I wanted to be bolstered up, I wanted to be enclosed, I wanted someone to be around if I were ill, I wanted someone to look at my calendar and notice that the cat was due for his second worm pill. You could write yourself notices and pin them on a board as much as you liked, but how did you make yourself look at them? You had to have a back-up system.
11 (#ulink_0effe9ca-a263-53b2-869a-b49e003df003)
‘What do Golden Bowlers do?
They live life to the full!’
By the end of November Felicity was settled into the Atlantic Suite of the Golden Bowl Complex. Her house had been sold to Joy’s brother-in-law Jack, at a knockdown price. At the last moment he had had second thoughts about purchasing and she had brought the price down a further $50,000. It scarcely mattered. She had $5,000,000 in the bank: the interest on which was sufficient to pay all costs at the Golden Bowl, though if she lived to ninety-six or more, and rates continued to rise exponentially by ten per cent a year, she would have to begin to dip into capital. She could afford to buy a small gift here, give a little to charity there, though she had never been the kind to dress up and go to functions and give publicly. Too vulgar for Miss Felicity: too much gold and diamond jewellery on necklines cut too low to flatter old skin.
Felicity’s lawyer Bert Heller, Exon’s old friend, was satisfied that he had done his best by the old lady, as she had once alarmingly overheard him referring to her. Her will was in order and left everything to her granddaughter Sophia in England. Joy was pleased her friend was near enough to visit but that instead of having the responsibility of an elderly widow living alone next door, prone to falls and strokes, she now had the comfort of a brother-in-law as a neighbour, one who would look after, rather than need to be looked after. The move had suited everyone.
All Felicity had to do now, in fact, in the judgement of the outside world, was settle down, not make trouble, and live the rest of her days in peace.
And why not? The Atlantic Suite was composed of three large rooms, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom embossed with plated gold fittings and more than enough closet space: the view was pleasant: the rooms spacious. The world came to her through CNN, if she cared to take an interest in it, though few at the Golden Bowl did. Most preferred to look inwards and wait their turn to get a word in at group therapy. The decor and furnishings were pleasing and she had never been sentimental about her belongings: most had gone to auction. Sometimes Miss Felicity would remember a dress she had particularly liked and wonder what became of it: or a charming plate she’d owned, or a scrapbook she’d once compiled. Did people steal things, had she lost them, had she given them away? Why try to remember? It hardly mattered. She had a photograph of her granddaughter in a silver frame on her bedside table, but that was to keep Nurse Dawn quiet. Nurse Dawn, helping her unpack, had found it and stood it there when first Felicity arrived, and Felicity did not feel inclined to take on Nurse Dawn at the moment: she would wait until something more significant was at stake. To have family photographs on the bedside table suggested that life – by which she supposed she meant sex – was in the past.
Besides, Sophia had inherited Angel’s Botticelli hair: Felicity was not sure she wanted to be presented with the sight of it night and day. So she simply put the photo on its face after room service had been in and every next day room service stood it upright. It was an okay compromise.
Felicity had a nasty attack of flu when she first arrived at the Golden Bowl. Stomach cramps and weak limbs had made her more dependent upon the administrations of Nurse Dawn than she would have wished. When she recovered she found that silly little matters such as when breakfast would be brought to her room in the morning, when the valet service would collect and deliver, limitations on her time in the Library, expected attendance at the Ascension Room gatherings, had been arranged more to fit the Golden Bowl’s convenience than her own. She had remarked on this to Dr Bronstein.
‘It’s very strange,’ was Dr Bronstein’s dark comment, later, ‘how many people find themselves ill and helpless when they first arrive at the Golden Bowl.’
‘It’s hardly likely to be a conspiracy,’ said Felicity. ‘No-one’s going to make us ill on purpose.’
‘Aren’t they?’
Felicity had taken morning coffee in the Ascension Room as soon as she was able. She felt the need of company. She’d joined Dr Bronstein and a Miss Clara Craft at their table. Both smiled agreeably at her, and put down their magazines. Miss Craft, who turned out to be a correspondent for The Post back in the thirties, and who had trouble with her sight, had been flicking through the latest copy of Vogue. She wore a good deal of make-up haphazardly applied, and her sparse hair was arranged in little plaits, which hung here and there from her scalp. Her back was noticeably bowed. Felicity concluded that like so many women who did not choose to thwart the natural processes, Clara took no hormone replacement therapy. Dr Bronstein was smartly presented and was reading Harpers, albeit with a magnifying glass. Nurse Dawn had lingered, hovered, and done her best to overhear.
Dr Bronstein’s eyes were rheumy like a spaniel’s. They dripped moisture, and made him seem in constant need of sympathy. Nurse Dawn resented this. Nor did she like the Doctor’s choice of reading matter which to her was impenetrable but under the terms of residency was provided free. Magazines surely meant Time or Newsweek. Vogue was acceptable, though absurd in Clara Craft’s case. Miss Felicity had taken on herself to read Vanity Fair, which was bad enough, the articles being so long, but at least, unlike Harpers, had a few pretty girls and advertisements to break up the text.
‘Most of us will arrive here exhausted,’ said Felicity, ‘and in culture shock from the winding down of our days. Our immune systems are low. It’s not surprising we get ill. Or perhaps it’s suddenly eating three meals a day, of good natural food. I’ve been living out of packets for the past five years.’
She was well aware Nurse Dawn was listening, under the pretence of tidying up a bowl of flowers. She was stripping away yellowed leaves and faded blooms and putting them in a little bag for removal. She took her time.
‘Natural?’ asked Dr Bronstein. ‘I hope I didn’t hear you say natural. It’s an illusion to believe that because something is natural, it’s good for us. Nature doesn’t care whether we live or die. Nature’s only purpose is to get us to procreative age in one piece, by whatever slipshod manner she can contrive. Once we’re past that she has no interest in us at all. We live by our ingenuity, not by her will. It behoves us oldsters to treat nature as enemy not friend.’
‘Man’s ingenuity!’ interjected Clara Craft. ‘I must tell you, Miss Felicity, I was present when the great airship Hindenburg caught fire as it landed. That was in 1937. One of the most spectacular tragedies of the decade. I was one of those little figures running away from the flames in the newsreel. How I escaped with my life I’ll never know.’
Nurse Dawn, having heard all about the Hindenburg disaster too many times before, and finding herself bored even as an eavesdropper – to whom most things are fascinating by virtue of the secrecy attached – left the room. Miss Felicity – forget Clara’s adventures, which were already being repeated, like a stuck record – found herself glad to be in the company of a man who used the word behove in ordinary speech. Such words had certainly not been in Joy’s vocabulary. Felicity could see her horizons expanding. Once you could lose the sense that age was the most important thing about the old: that the passage of years wiped out individuality and that you were old yourself, just like everyone else around, all was not gloomy. Clara fell suddenly asleep. Vogue dropped to the ground and lay there. Dr Bronstein told her that he was eighty-nine: that until his enforced retirement he had been a biochemist, and, he was happy to admit to Felicity, had been a conspiracy theorist all his life. He was in good health, though he believed his two new titanium knees and one plastic and one steel hip (implanted of necessity over four decades of medical care – he had played baseball for his college team, and squash thereafter, and there is nothing like sport for damaging the joints, but who in the vigour of their youth is ever prepared to believe it) set up some kind of electrical discharge which interfered with his mental processes. He kept up an animated flow if not exactly conversation – he was too deaf for that – but at any rate talk.
That night when Nurse Dawn came by to turn off Felicity’s light – Felicity had told her not to bother, she could turn off her own light perfectly well, but Nurse Dawn had seemed hurt so she’d consented – Nurse Dawn said: ‘A friendly warning. Don’t take too much notice of our Dr Bronstein. He has a problem with authority. Give him a chance and he’ll feel free to buttonhole you for the rest of your life.’
Which Felicity realized with a shock might well be spent as a Golden Bowler. She refrained after all from asking Nurse Dawn if she could have Fat Free Choco Lite for her good-night drink, and decided to go along with whatever Nurse Dawn thought was best. As with the matter of the family photograph, it was of minor importance: she would save her energies for some greater battle which she had no doubt would soon enough come along. In the meantime she would lull Nurse Dawn into complacency. But wasn’t this how one behaved with husbands? Putting off confrontation until a right time which never came? In the end, if only by default, you ended up living their life, not jours. But why not, here at the Golden Bowl?
The good-night drink provided by Nurse Dawn turned out to be semi-skimmed unpasteurized milk with a little acacia honey stirred into it, for, Nurse Dawn said, sweet dreams. As soon as the woman was gone Felicity got out of bed and poured the sickly stuff down the bathroom sink, keeping her eyes averted from the gilt-framed mirror.
On the day she had first moved in she’d thought she’d glimpsed the face of an elderly man looking out at her from the glass. The image had been brief but vivid. She’d told herself that she was overtired but hadn’t quite convinced herself. Vision it had been. Well, these things happened from time to time in one’s life and were overlooked in the name of sanity. She could only hope the vision was not prophetic: that she was looking at herself in ten years’ time. It was sadly true that as one got older the distinction between a male face and a female one lessened, but hardly to so whiskery and rheumy a degree as this. Surely there would never come a time when she, Felicity, would cease to tweeze the hairs from her nose and chin? Or perhaps some kind of ghost looked back at her? Felicity had once owned a cat who continued to haunt the house for a few weeks after its death at the age of ten, under a car: just a flick of a tail out of the corner of the eye: the sound of purring where no purring should be, the feel of fur rubbing up affectionately against her shin: these things happened. She knew well enough that the Atlantic Suite had fallen vacant upon the death of the previous occupant: why else the new bed, the frantic redecoration? If the one she replaced now appeared to her, was it in welcome or in warning?
The apparition had appeared only briefly: she had looked away at once, in shock, and forcing herself to look again, had seen only herself. That of course was bad enough. You looked into a mirror as a young woman and your reflection looked out at you as one who was old. So what, honestly, was the big deal if the one looking out had changed sex as well? The shock of the stranger in the mirror was with you every time you looked into one. So why worry?
She didn’t mention the matter to the management. As you grew older you had to be careful not to give anyone an inkling that you were not in your right mind. Incarcerated as she had once been, though briefly, during the course of a divorce, in a mental home, she had been much impressed by the difficulty of proving you were sane. If you wept because you were locked up and miserable, you were diagnosed as clinically depressed and unfit to leave. If you didn’t weep someone else would decide you were sociopathic, and a danger to the public. Those who ran institutions tended to register criticism as ingratitude at best and insanity at worst, and though the Golden Bowl was not an institution in the locking-up sense, the mere fact of being old made you vulnerable to those who might decide you and your $5,000,000 needed to be protected for your own and its good.
Better to conclude that the unexpected face in the mirror was a projection of one’s own fears rather than some occult phenomenon, and shut up about it. Miss Felicity lived in hope that death would be the final closing down of all experience: she wanted an end rather than a new beginning. All the same, throwing away Nurse Dawn’s over-sweet milk, she tried not to look in the mirror. It was too late, she was tired, she had no appetite for either shock or speculation.
