Rhode Island Blues

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Once settled in, she was sleepless. She called her granddaughter Sophia in London. Midnight here meant sevenish there. Of course she had it the wrong way round.

Sophia answered from sleep, alert at once to her grandmother’s voice. ‘Felicity? Is everything okay?’

‘Why are you always so sure something has gone wrong?’

‘Because with most people when they call you at five in the morning it’s some kind of emergency.’ Sophia whispered, up to the satellite, bounce, and down over-sibilant on the other side of the Atlantic. ‘Hang on a moment. I’m going to the other phone.’

‘Why?’ asked Felicity. ‘Is there someone with you?’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Sophia.

Krassner was there, of course, lank hair on the striped pillow, which coincidentally matched Felicity’s pink and white décor. Holly had declined to come over to England to be with him. Forever Tomorrow had come and gone within a couple of months: had some critical acclaim, did well in the central cities though not so well out of town, and in general was expected to earn its keep. The film was to go sooner than hoped on to video and would no doubt make up any lost ground in the fireside medium. Krassner’s reputation hadn’t exactly soared but neither had it been knocked back. He was still in a position to pick and choose his next project. He didn’t like hotels: Sophia’s apartment was within walking distance of most places he was expected to be. He loathed London taxis: they had no springs and you had to get out before you paid the driver, or they complained of back pain. Sophia found herself without the will to make any objection: his convenience had to be suited: he appreciated her, and was courteous and did not play emotional games. She knew he would not stay long. He was childishly and neatly domestic. He brought her aspirin if she had a headache, found her lost gloves, bought fruit and food from the Soho delicatessen and laid it before her; the sex was both peremptory and pleasant, though he always seemed to be thinking of something else. Her friends envied her. Harry Krassner the great director! She was between films. She was happy, poised between a current fantastic reality, and a new film fantasy to begin. Harry understood these things. He said he’d hang about until March, when she went back into the editing suite. Then he’d be going back to LA anyway. Holly was on location till then.

It was not so unusual, these days, thus to fit in the personal between the professional. Everyone she knew did it.

12 (#ulink_66b32304-4063-510d-8538-7ac9de50cb08)

I took one of the duvets from the bed and crept into the living room the better to talk undisturbed. Harry, deprived of the extra weight, pulled the remaining cover around him more closely, but did not wake.

‘It’s time you did have someone with you,’ said Felicity. ‘I’m beginning to feel out on a limb. One grandchild is pathetic. There are people in this place with up to twenty descendants.’

‘I don’t think that’s a very good reason for having children,’ I replied. It occurred to me that if I set out to I could have a baby by Harry Krassner. I could simply steal one. And what with today’s new DNA tests I could ensure that he supported it for ever. Did one dare? No. Forces too large for the likes of me to cope with would be involved. Ordinary mortals should not try it on with the gods down from Mount Olympus. Such a baby would be some large hairy thing, hardly a baby at all: it would spring fully formed into the world, with nothing in it of me whatsoever. The subject of offspring of the union had not been mentioned. It was assumed I was a sensible, rational, working adult in the business. Naturally I would be taking contraceptive precautions. As naturally I was.

‘Mind you,’ said Miss Felicity, ‘I can see there’s an argument for quality rather than quantity. The more offspring there are, the plainer and duller they get, generation by generation. Virtues get diluted: things like receding jaws get magnified. And I daresay it’s as well if you don’t have children, Sophia. Our family genes are not the best.’

Oh, thank you very much, Felicity! Schizophrenia may have a strong hereditary component: it may well run in the blood, though some deny it and I would certainly like to. I did not thank Felicity for reminding me. But nor did I want to risk having a child who hated me, as Angel had done Felicity. When the love/hate mode in a person switches as easily as central heating to air conditioning in a well-run hotel, it’s disconcerting and distressing for those around. The more Felicity showed her love for Angel the more Angel resented and feared her. The daughter interpreted maternal concern as control, dinner-on-the-table as an attempt at poisoning. In Angel’s eyes it was Felicity’s fault that my father the artist left home, not the fact that Angel had decided that sex and art didn’t mix, and when he failed to produce a canvas equal to a Picasso, a more or less ongoing state of affairs – how could it not be? – insisted on referring to him as Dinky. (His name was Rufus, which was bad enough.) No, in Angel’s eyes, Felicity had interfered, paying for his canvases, buying oils, mending our roof, whatever. Felicity was a control freak. And so on. Even as a small child I detected the element of wilfulness in my mother Angel’s insanities: to be mad is a great excuse for giving rein to hate and bad behaviour and bad jokes, while handing over to others responsibility for one’s life. The net end is to cause others as much trouble and distress as possible, while remaining virtuous and a victim. Yet I admired my mother’s style. In fact it hadn’t been too bad for me; far worse for Felicity. The child tends to take mothers and their odd ways for granted: the mother is eternally anxious for the child. Angel’s wrath and spite and mockery was seldom directed against me: only once when she decided I was ‘difficult’ and sent me off to boarding school did I get a taste of it. The night before I left for school Angel came into my bedroom saying I was the devil’s spawn, sent by the Whore of Babylon to spy on her, and tried to smother me with the pillow. Scary stuff. But only on that one occasion and that was the worst of it. We’d managed okay till then, Angel and me and sometimes Rufus. Dinky.

When I was eight she decided in the face of all evidence that I had head lice and shaved my head with Dinky’s blunt razor, and kept me away from school for three months. I hadn’t minded that at all. I got books out of the library and lay on my bed all day and read them, and went to the cinema sometimes as many as nine times a week. Once a day on weekdays and twice on Saturday and Sundays. I’d wear a headscarf. Angel would often come with me to the cinema. It was what we did. The school said nothing. I daresay they were pleased not to have Angel turning up at the school gate to collect me. She could look strange and she did throw things. My hair, which had been straight and thin until cropped back to the scalp, thereafter grew rich, thick and crinkly in my mother’s mode, and was what had drawn Krassner towards me. I was grateful. If Angel once decided she and I were to be street people on moral grounds what business was that of the social workers? That particular time I’d been taken away from Angel and our cardboard box under the King’s Cross arches (we were North London people), and been put in a foster home for months, until she’d made it up with Rufus and was in a position to reclaim me. The cardboard box had been okay. It was summer: we’d go into the Ritz Hotel and use their washing facilities. Angel always dressed beautifully, stealing the clothes from stores if necessary. We’d eat in posh restaurants and run away. At the foster home they dressed me from the charity shop and fed me on chip sandwiches. And this time when I finally got home the head lice were real, not imaginary. And Rufus had gone again.

One day I’d come home from school to find Angel beating hell out of a pillow, claiming the devil was in it, and feathers floating through the air like the snowflakes in The Snow Queen – and had panicked and phoned Felicity in Savannah. The next day, by which time the feathers had melted and the devil had left, my grandmother swept into our semi-derelict house in a froth of scarves, lamenting and fussing about the place and bringing in psychiatrists and social workers. If I hadn’t made the call I daresay my mother and I would have got by okay. She would have drifted in and out of psychotic episodes, making cakes and barricading the house against the landlord: taking petitions to Downing Street: going into smart restaurants and breaking plates in sympathy with veal calves long before animal rights became fashionable, and I’d have coped. Twenty years on, in fact, and Angel might still be alive, with new drugs keeping her in control, or at any rate more like other people. And I’d still have a mother.

The last lucid thing Angel had said to me when they declared her to be a danger to herself and others, and had jabbed her full of medication, and I was sitting next to her in the ambulance on the way to the psychiatric unit (from which she was to escape) was that it was all Felicity’s fault. Felicity had destroyed her, and would destroy me too.

‘Your grandmother is evil,’ she said. I accepted then that Angel was indeed raving. Felicity was no worse or better than anyone else: she was better than the teachers at the various schools I’d gone to and not gone to: morally better than my father who’d walked out rather than have to do the dirty work of having his wife put away, and simply abandoned me, his child, to cope. She was less use to me than studying, or my passion for cinema, and certainly less use to me than my friends. I’d always had friends and mothers of friends who’d take me in, when times were bad. Children meet with great kindness. In fact Felicity did her best, I knew, within the boundaries of her own nature. But then everyone does. And a mother’s last words are difficult to forget, if only traditionally. You know how it is.

Nor did I want Felicity, thirty years later, to be raising these painful matters at five in the morning. I would rather be lying beside Krassner, making the most of such time as I had with him: me, the person without past, without family, the one who just sometimes walked out of the editing suite and engaged in the real world.

I switched the conversation before I got angry and upset. I gave Felicity the information I was saving like the icing on the lemon drizzle cake my mother would buy in the early days, when we had a nice apartment like other people and my father was selling a painting or two and could pay the rent.

‘I think I’ve found your Alison,’ I said to Felicity. ‘Your long-lost daughter.’ For once it was quiet outside the window. Those of excessive habits had finally gone home to rest and recuperate. The tourists had not yet woken. Only the binmen still clattered along the edges of Berwick Street market, a few blocks away, clearing the detritus of fruit and vegetable. Krassner snored gently on the bed. It was the third successive night he had spent there. The insides of my thighs were agreeably sore. He was due to fly home on Friday. This was early Wednesday morning. When he was gone I would be able to get my clothes to the cleaners and have my hair trimmed and streaked, and do all the other small necessary things you don’t seem to do when there’s a man around because they seem so domestic and boring and not what the film stars do.