Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (11 page)

 
          
* * *

           
‘Now I suppose I’ve gone and upset
you,’
came
Felicity’s voice, softer now, and then,
blessedly: ‘Oh, go on then do what you like.’ I heard muffled voices at the
other end: remonstrations: and then my grandmother’s voice again, to me.

 
          
‘Sorry
about that. It was Nurse Dawn, telling me not to have late-night telephone
conversations. You remember Nurse Dawn?’ ‘Of course I do. And what business is
it of hers?’

 
          
‘She
says talking to relatives is like eating cheese before going to bed; it leads
to bad dreams.’

 
          
‘Doesn’t
that depend on the conversation?’

 
          
‘That’s
what I told her.’

 
          
‘This
one was a bad dream to begin with. How did she know you were on the phone?’

 
          
‘There
isn’t a direct outside line. It goes through the operator. She must have told.
I don’t think this is a complex for the elderly at all. I think it’s a CIA
training ground for surveillance techniques and psychological warfare. I’d
better go now.’

 
          
I
quite liked being described by Felicity as a relative. It made me feel warmed
and safe, and not so unlike other people after all. But I also quite liked the
thought of this grandmother of mine feeling obliged to do what Nurse Dawn told
her. Perhaps at the Golden Bowl I would find allies; people who would
understand what it was like to have Angel for a mother and Felicity for a
grandmother. Then I felt disloyal, and weak for wanting to
belong
, and sorry for Felicity, because her life was drawing to an
end, and there was nothing she could do about it, not even a rewind button to
press, no way of cutting the footage together differently: the picture was
locked.
No way now of editing out the boring bits.
These had to be lived through in real time, with a body that was inexorably
running down, and not all the efforts of the Golden Bowl could help her.

 
          
I
would certainly not have a baby by Krassner, or anyone, ever.
The smaller the family the better.
One minute you resented
them, or they were making you cry, the next you were feeling responsible for
them, missing them.

 
          
All
I could hear over the phone now was the wheeling of the stars, the singing of
celestial spheres. She was gone. I listened a little on the open line to the
chirrupings of the cosmos, before putting down the receiver. A group of tarts
clip-clopped on brazen heels down the street below, back no doubt from some
Arabian orgy in one of the big
Park Lane
hotels, calling one another a cheerful good
night. People always manage to find areas of pleasure in their lives, whatever
others may think of them. They get together and have a good time. It’s that or
death.

 
          
I
slipped back into bed beside Krassner whose organ extended ramrod-like at the
touch of my body against his, though he still did not wake. I did not interpret
this as either love or lust: he was just a man of easy sexuality with quick,
automatic and healthy responses. I felt shredded, raw, and cold of spirit,
flesh and heart, and made no attempt to take advantage of so easy a prey. I was
to be back in the editing suite sooner than I had
thought,
cutting a film called
Hope Against Hope
,
a legal thriller, with a female director, Astra Barnes. When Krassner went back
to Holly at least I would have something to do. I took the usual comfort from
this. It wasn’t good enough.

 
          
On
1 December, in the face of opposition from Nurse Dawn and even Dr Grepalli, who
came tapping at her door to warn her against so doing, Felicity went to a
funeral. The body of a man had been discovered in a beach hotel in Mystic and
Felicity’s name was in his address book, as living at
1006 Divine Road
. Joy’s brother-in-law had happily given the
police her new address. The death was by natural causes: drunk, the man had
choked on his own vomit. His name was Tommy Salzburger. Fie had been in the
neighbourhood for only two days. The police had come up to the Golden Bowl to
interview Felicity: fortunately they had telephoned first and Nurse Dawn had
ensured they came not in a police car and not in uniform, so they could pass
for insurance brokers or lawyers: the kind of professionals who do visit Golden
Bowlers on occasion. To be on the safe side Nurse Dawn also persuaded them to
park their car outside Felicity’s French windows, to the side of the building,
so their presence did not become a matter of curiosity for the other guests.

 
          
Tommy
Salzburger was Felicity’s stepson by her first marriage to Sergeant Jerry
Salzburger of the United States Air Force, one time of
Atlanta
, long deceased. Miss Felicity freely
admitted it. She had no idea why Tommy was in the neighbourhood, she had not
seen him for fifteen years or so, but if his turning up in Mystic was anything
to do with her,
which
she pointed out could be purely
coincidental (maybe like her latest husband he was interested in naval history;
appearances could deceive), he was probably after money. She had lent him sums
in the past, never returned. He was a gambler and a drinker.

 
          
The
police had called her the next day to say Tommy Salzburger had a girlfriend
with two of his children living in the locality: he had turned up there but she
had turned him away from her door: no doubt he died while attempting to drown
his sorrows. Felicity surprised them by asking where the funeral was, and
shocked Nurse Dawn by saying she was going.

 
          
‘You
will be upset,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘You will catch cold and bring back germs into
the building. It isn’t fair to the other guests. No-one will expect you to go.
Old people, like children, are excused from funerals.’

 
          
‘But
I want to go,’ said Felicity. And when Joy called up asked if she’d come along
to keep her company, and rather to her surprise Joy shouted that she would,
since now she had a chauffeur, whose services she shared with Jack.

 
          
‘We
don’t have to actually get out of the car when we get there, do we?’ Joy
pleaded.

 
          
A
flesh-and-blood child was one thing but a vagrant stepchild from an unfortunate
and short-lived marriage who
wasn’t even a blood relation
hardly
merited catching cold. Better to watch from the Mercedes window.
She never liked burials, as this one was to be, the turning over of graveyard
dirt. There had been plagues in the area, albeit long ago, and mass burials,
everyone knew, and heaven knew what still lingered. There were bound to be
germs about. Cremation was more hygienic.

 
          
‘You’re
old enough to be excused,’ Joy shouted into Felicity’s shrinking ear. ‘You
could have got out of
it,
I don’t see why you didn’t.’

 
          
‘He
was a very nice little boy,’ said Felicity, ‘though he grew up to be a nuisance
to everyone. I go to his burial in memory of the child he used to be, not the
man he became. And if I don’t go, who will?’

 
          
‘We
get the funerals we deserve,’ cried Joy, to the world. Joy felt better able to
assert herself now that she had Jack living next door. She felt protected. Jack
was a sociable person; gusts of male energy swept through her house whenever he
visited, which was every day. He did the sort of things men did. He had the
Volvo taken to the garage and the dents got rid of. He had the low stone walls
rebuilt. Somehow the drapes begun to hang less limply: the cushions seemed to
plump themselves. There was a purpose to the place. When Jack said, as he often
did, that she, Joy, reminded him of her deceased sister Francine, she did not
sulk or feel hurt: she accepted the comparison gracefully, even as a
compliment. With Jack in the house she had at last what was hers by rights.
There was no special reason for thinking this, other than everything her
sister Francine had ever had, Joy, being the older sister, felt was hers by
rights.

 
          
If you just hung round long enough and kept cheerful things seemed
to turn out okay.
Francine had come along three years after Joy was
born, and Francine had died three years before Joy, so Joy already had six
years’ more life than Francine, albeit a little deaf and a little
short-sighted. That alone was a kind of victory: there might be more to come.
Could you marry your deceased sister’s husband? It was the kind of thing
Felicity might well know: Joy had called Felicity at the Golden Bowl to find
out, but instead of being able to discuss the matter had been roped in to
accompany her friend to the funeral of some derelict she personally had never
met and nobody seemed to like.

 
          
In
honour of the funeral and her friend’s presumed grief, Joy was dressed in
suitable black, her hair was less blonde than usual, and her mascara kept to a
minimum. She wore a bright yellow fluffy teddy-bear brooch to keep everyone’s
spirits up; its eyes were real diamonds balanced on emerald spikes, which spun
when the wearer moved. Jack had bought them for her from a friend who imported
jewellery. The shop price would have been in the region of $5,000 but Harry had
acquired them for $500. He was like that.

 
          
Miss
Felicity was still displeased with
Sophia,
and anxious
for her too. To suddenly start searching for distant relatives was the kind of
impetuous thing Angel would do, though real mental illness would surely have
surfaced in her granddaughter by now. To worry about it, she assured herself,
was a symptom of the free- floating anxiety a doctor had once told her she
suffered from: lighting like a fly here or there without real cause or purpose.
All you could do was wait for it to go away, which assuredly it would. In the
meantime she could only hope that Sophia’s search would lead nowhere, and that
no news from her was good news.

 
          
*                
*                
*

 
 
          
The
graveyard where Tommy was to be buried was next to a small clapboard church
outside Mystic, prettily sited in a snowy landscape. Just a light sprinkling of
the stuff: just enough to make everything seem fresh and clean, and cover up
the layer of rotting autumnal leaves which at this time of year got everywhere,
staining the landscape with the dankness of decay. The chauffeur turned out to
be Charlie, the very same Charlie from
New York
who had collected Sophia for her Concorde
flight, and whose looks had so alarmed Joy. He had left his card on the hall
table, at Passmore, from whence it had inadvertently fallen to the floor. Jack,
moving in, had come across the card and read in this event a sign from God. Joy
was talking of employing a chauffeur and handyman as well as a housekeeper: let
it be Charlie. She could well afford it: when Joy protested that she could not
Jack
said
he’d made such a good deal on the house,
thanks to her, he would be happy to pay something towards the cost of a
chauffeur; he would only occasionally want to borrow him. (Of such sensible
arrangements are future difficulties made.) Charlie had been summoned and
interviewed: he was from the former
Yugoslavia
: he had arrived three years back as part of
a refugee settlement programme. He was taken on in trust and hope.

 
          
He
was to live in the guesthouse above Joy’s garage block. Of course, his family
could join him. Anything else would be inhumane. Everyone must do their bit to
make the world a better place. Of course, Joy was to sign forms without reading
them: of course the guesthouse would fill up with wives, children, sisters,
sisters-in-law, young girls with soulful looks and permanent tears in their
eyes, old ladies in headscarves. Two of the tearful girls would turn out to be
pregnant: no-one liked to inquire too closely about the father, or fathers. Of
course, thanks to Charlie’s cleverness on the Internet and his familiarity
with immigration law, relatives once scattered all over the world were to fly
in to
Boston
and find themselves united in the
Connecticut
woods. A wife, a dark-eyed, bouncing,
energetic, always pregnant young woman, was to replace Joy’s mean-minded
housekeeper. In time the family would clear some of the woodland which bordered
on Joy’s land, the ownership of which had never quite been established, and
start to grow their own food. They were even eventually to keep a cow, which
required massive amounts of feed to keep it nourished, since grazing in these
wooded parts was not good, and for which Joy would in her kindness pay. But
since the diamond eyes alone of Joy’s new teddy-bear brooch, the gift from Jack
that showed just how precious she was to him, would keep many a cow in comfort,
what was the big deal? Charity begins at home. None of this was quite what Jack
or Joy had intended, but in the end it is impossible for the softhearted to
keep the teeming, seething rest of the world out, nor should they try too hard.
Care for animals today, care for people tomorrow. It escalates.

 
          
In
the meantime, on the first day of December, Miss Felicity and Joy drove to
Tommy’s funeral, driven by Charlie, who made an excellent, polite if melancholy
and wild-eyed chauffeur. He wore a peaked cap, under which locks of black curly
hair escaped. He owned a laptop. While sitting in the Mercedes waiting on his
employers’ bidding he would consult it on obscure points of immigration law.
The life of the battery was only three hours. Charlie let it be known that he
preferred not to be kept waiting longer than this, or if he was, at least to
have access to a power point. Tommy’s funeral, Felicity was able to reassure
him, was unlikely to last more than half an hour.

 
          
The
cemetery was forlorn: sea birds wheeled above, as if they mistook themselves
for vultures. A few people clustered round an open grave, and stared openly as
the Mercedes drew up a little distance away and the two expensive old ladies
were handed out by Charlie. Otherwise all there was to look at was an open
grave, a not very expensive coffin being lowered on ropes by impassive
attendants, and a perfunctory parson.

 
          
Joy’s
feet were cold. She wished she had worn her fur-lined boots with the high
heels, but though they kept her feet warm they tended to make her totter. She
did not want Charlie to see her tottering: she wanted to seem in command of
herself and her body. Now that Jack was next door and Charlie in the
guesthouse, the relaxed and slovenly days were over: she had a male audience.
She wished she were not here by a graveside: it depressed her unutterably. She
wished she were not Felicity’s friend, at the very least that she had been
allowed to stay in the car. The elderly should keep away from funerals: it was
not healthy to be reminded of mortality. Life was a long road uphill; you
travelled in a vehicle driven by others; it was better to appreciate the
scenery than to speculate about what was going to happen when you reached the
top and looked down the other side.

 
          
One
of Joy’s grandsons played computer games: she’d seen how you could topple down
over the edge into a brilliant white nothingness: it had really scared her.
These days she saw her own life like this, something almost virtual, perched on
the edge of an abyss. Jack would stretch out his hand but nothing could stop
her falling through the brilliance, and swimming round in the white waves below
would be Francine, dragging her under in death as she had in life, laughing her
victory. Joy realized she was sleeping, dreaming almost, standing there by an
open grave. You could topple in, if you weren’t careful.

 
          
She
paid attention. She counted. There were twelve mourners round the dismal hole
in the ground, and some of those were probably from the church, brought in for
the occasion. She wondered who had paid. Proper burials were expensive. The
deceased had obviously been neither rich nor distinguished. Any normal person
in Felicity’s position would simply have sent a wreath. Nurse Dawn had actually
come down the steps pleading with Miss Felicity to stay, prattling about chills
and depression and breaking ankles in the snow and the need to focus on life,
not death. Felicity had been right about the Golden Bowl. They were certainly
determined to look after you.

 
          
And
what was Felicity to this Tommy, or Tommy to Felicity? A stepson, Felicity
claimed, by a long-past marriage. How was one to say what people’s marital
pasts really were? Everyone told lies, even Joy to
herself,
she’d been to a therapist: she knew all about that. Lovers became husbands in
memory, husbands became lovers. After a certain age you were entitled to alter
the facts to suit your comfort. And memory itself became patchy. You could
remember the wedding venue, you could remember the canapes, you could remember
what your new mother-in-law wore, and wishing she wouldn’t, but did you
remember the face of the man who turned to you and gave you the ring? Not
necessarily.

 
          
Joy
had been married four times; she had certificates to prove it: one doctor, one
lawyer, two insurance men in that order: if you left a husband you went up in
the world: if they left you, you tended to have to take what was on offer. Men
changed on the day you married them: though they always claimed it was you that
did: that you didn’t bother any more. By which they meant you couldn’t be
relied upon not to fall asleep in the middle of what they were saying, having
heard it so many times before. She should never have left the doctor: at least
the patients kept changing and had different symptoms and sometimes even died:
but one law case is much like another, and what fascinates an insurance man is
hard to keep awake for. This was the kind of thing you could discuss with Miss
Felicity: Joy had been glad enough to see her go but now she was gone Joy
missed her. No more popping next door: now it was a drive to the Golden Bowl,
and just as well she had Charlie: Jack didn’t like her driving. Jack was
beginning to behave like a husband, that is to say she was beginning to fall
asleep while he was talking. He was in and out all the time: she didn’t even
have the benefit of his bank balance let alone his company in bed. Francine had
had all that. But at least Francine hadn’t lived to inherit. Well, everyone had
their own experience. Felicity might be mean about passing on her own life
experience but at least was interested in yours. Joy looked forward to the
drive home in the back of the Mercedes. They could catch up with a thing or
two.

 
          
She’d
thought Felicity might have an ex-husband here today, which would explain her
insistence on coming, but no. There was one rather good-looking elderly man,
standing opposite them on the other side of the still open grave, with the
coffin lying there uncovered while the preacher droned on and the wind howled
and her feet froze, but he was not her type. Joy liked men more blond and
bullish: grey-suited and thick-necked. Wealthy men got shinier and plumper as
they got older: this one was too bony to be any kind of success, tall and
lanky, more Felicity’s style than hers, but at only around seventy was well out
of Felicity’s age range. His overcoat looked as if it was borrowed and his
shoes were unpolished. Maybe Charlie would end up looking like this. Hook
nose, alert eyes, one of those lucky heads of hair which didn’t just fall out
as time passed, and turned proper white, not even grey. She’d never felt at
ease with a man with plentiful hair. There was something unnatural about it:
they were cheating. Men were meant to go bald. It was God’s punishment for their
maleness. The man with the thick white hair was with a middle-aged woman in a
cheap coat standing next to two dismal-looking teenage boys, presumably the
deceased’s family. Even while Joy watched he said something to the woman and
she rounded up the two boys and walked away, overcome with what looked more
like temper than grief. Joy wondered what that was about.