Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (16 page)

 
          
‘If
it were real,’ she said, ‘I’d get a couple of million for it.’ She had told him
the truth and yet not the truth. It was
a
Utrillo all
right, with papers of provenance to prove it, part of her settlement from old
Buckley, in Savannah, her rescuer and persecutor. Old Buckley, she called him,
out of habit. When he died, she realized, he had been twenty years younger than
she was now.

 
          
Every
day William Johnson came, and every day they talked, and while they talked she
had no doubts. Except she didn’t touch him and the table kept the space between
them, the no-man’s land between desire and fear of consequences.

 
          
Every
time he left he said, ‘Shall I come again tomorrow?’ and every time she said,
‘Of course.’ And he’d look over his shoulder with such an expression of marvel
and pleasure it was impossible to doubt his interest. Only when Nurse Dawn came
bustling in for her five-fifteen look-in as she called it, checking up that
Felicity was alive and well, and hoping she’d come along to the Library for an
Affirmation Session before supper, or whatever the day of the week provided,
did Felicity feel old and useless again, and slightly dotty, since that was how
Nurse Dawn saw her.

 
          
She
sent off by post for cosmetics and face creams and even pretty underwear. Not
that she thought the former would do any good, or the latter be seen. It was
part of the habit of youth, of what you did when you fell in love. She had
married men on grounds of common sense: this one was kind and prosperous and
would look after her: that one because he could take her into high society; the
next as a safe haven, and though God knows that was dull, she had not
complained. She kept her side of the bargain. She did not exploit them. She did
not offer love, but affection and services. It was a trade-off and they knew
it, and were prepared to settle for it, to have at their command her charming
smile, her slender body, the diversion of her conversation and the creature
comforts she offered, if not her total attention. As for love, in Miss
Felicity’s comprehension that was
a wildness
reserved
for outside marriage: something which would obviously collapse if you attempted
to confine it within the boundaries of domestic responsibilities. Within
marriage, love turned into habit: yet without permanence it faded away. But while
it lasted, how magic was the exhilaration, the exultation, the sense of being
properly alive. Just one more time, and this time let me get it right.
True love.
Could it be that if you just hung round for long
enough, your faith intact, it happened? When you least expected it, there it
was at last.

 
          
More
riches! Aardvark Detectives had discovered another relative: a half-sister for
Felicity herself, younger than she by seven years. Mrs Lucy Forgrass, nee
Moore, still alive and in full possession of her faculties, and living in some
style in Highgate in North London: by some style Wendy meant that the Forgrass
home was a large beautifully maintained house in the £l-£1,500,000 bracket and
there was a heated outdoor swimming pool at the end of the garden, in a country
which rarely indulged in such luxuries, and why should it, its skies being
mostly grey. Now as well as cousins I had a half great-aunt. But she could
wait. I had not yet met
Lorna,
I had not yet visited
Alison. I had told Miss Felicity nothing yet of my successes. I did not want to
risk her censure again.

 
          
‘Go
slowly with all of this,’ said Wendy. I found it difficult. Real life is so
slow, film with all the
longueurs
left in, the move from chair to door, the folding of linen,
the
waiting for the taxi. ‘Cut, cut, cut,’ one longs to cry. ‘Go slowly!’ forsooth.
But I did.

 
          
The
Aardvark agency had consulted documents held at Somerset House and now knew the
history of Felicity’s birth family. The child had been born Felicity Moore, on
6 October, 1915. Her father, Arthur Moore, was described as a novelist and
journalist: her mother Sylvia, as a concert pianist. Sylvia, poor thing, had
died of influenza in 1921, in one of the great epidemics that swept Europe
after the Great War and took a greater death toll than that conflict itself.
Felicity would have been six at the time. Her father had married again within
the year - to a Lois Wasserman, from
Vienna
. There had been one child of this union,
Lucy, born in 1922. She would have been eight when Alison was born. Arthur had
died in 1925, when Lucy was three, leaving Felicity orphaned and in the care of
her stepmother. In his will Arthur left everything to Lois and Lucy: Felicity
was ignored, for reasons unknown. And yes, Lucy was still alive, thrice
widowed, and living in Highgate.

 
          
Thrice
widowed! I had once worked on a horror film, a rip-off of
Basic Instinct
, about a serial marriage killer who successively
used an ice axe on her husbands. I should never have taken on such a film, and
never did again. Too much blood and gore and dismemberment viewed over and
over and over, is upsetting. Some editors get hardened to it, I never have.

 
          
I
still did not doubt the wisdom of stirring up the past. I had found an aunt in
Alison, albeit one with Alzheimer’s, a half great-aunt in Lucy with a swimming
pool in Highgate, some cousins in Guy and Lorna, and a cousin once removed in
Guy’s question-of- custody little boy. My Christmas list would soon be full: I
could join the rest of the world in wrapping up parcels and complaining about
it over the festive season. It was enough for me.

 
          
Krassner
had gone home to Holly, not for Christmas - she was Jewish, but then so was he,
through his mother - but because she wanted to adopt a child, and required him
to sign a form declaring something called ‘dedicated fatherhood’. This he had
to do in person: fax or e-mail would not suffice. Adoption is the mother-
hood-of-choice in Hollywood: pregnancy can interfere with a film career, or
spoil a perfect body. Suppose the chance of a lifetime turned up at a day’s
notice and you were just going into labour! An adopted baby may arrive suddenly
but will do so ready-formed and can be left with the staff almost at once.

 
          
Krassner
had seemed surprised when I said but what about the genes? Doesn’t Holly want
her own child? What is the point of a baby who is someone else’s? Krassner said
we Europeans were hung up on heredity. In the
US
rearing was what counted – babies burst
bright and beautiful into the world: it was up to whoever adopted them to keep
them that way. Holly would have checked the birth parents out for health, looks
and sanity. I persisted that I didn’t see how you could really love someone
else’s baby as your own. Krassner said of course you could and it was
irrelevant anyway since I’d decided to have none. Perhaps in the US love isn’t
so passionate and painful a thing as it is in Europe: Krassner flew off easily
enough, with an absent-minded peck goodbye, already in his head halfway to
Hollywood.

 
          
I
was to be out of the cutting room for the three holiday weeks over Christmas
and the New Year. I had proceeded apace with
Hope
Against
Hope
and left great swathes
of it on the floor. Three hours’ meandering mishmash was now a sleek piece of
work premiering in February. I had reason to believe that Astra Barnes, whose
tedious director’s cut had been understandably ruled out of order on commercial
grounds, was badmouthing me all over London but that was to be expected. My
association with Krassner, now more or less public knowledge, did nothing to
damage my professional reputation.
On the contrary.
If
he did not contribute to our living expenses while he was with me no doubt he
bore this in mind: that every day he spent with me put up my earning potential.
These are the rewards of fame.

 
          
Now
Krassner was gone, leaving me with my jealousy, an emotion entirely new to me,
and all I had to take my mind off the worm gnawing at my vitals were my finer
feelings, my friends, and my acquisition of new family. For once work had
failed me. The Aardvark agency closed on 21 December and didn’t reopen until 8
January. I felt abandoned. Wendy was like a tight-laced know-it- all mother,
bustling about, the kind you will grow up to leave behind, such are your
superior sensitivities and their lack of them. It doesn’t mean you don’t miss
them when they go away and leave you.

 
          
I
called Felicity at the Golden Bowl. The operator told me it was afternoon rest
time and she should not be disturbed. I decided it was probably for the best.
Supposing she really hated it there and wanted me to come and rescue her? I
sent her a Christmas card instead. I would wait until I had her family sorted
out and then surprise her thoroughly: I would visit her properly with names and
addresses and telephone numbers and photographs and life would be so rich.

 
          
For
three weeks Felicity faced William Johnson across the table. They debriefed one
another: her politics, his (which in him amounted to nothing specific, just a
state of perpetual indignation): her musical taste, his (they differed on
Wagner, but that tended to be a normal gender divide, or at least they so
persuaded themselves): how in her youth she’d fled England for the new world
of America, to reinvent herself; America, the promised land. Fie in his thirties
going back to England, hoping to uninvent himself in Shakespeare’s land, and
failing: meeting there the woman who was to be his wife, Meryl, bringing her
back. Fle’d wanted children, she hadn’t. She’d had a daughter already, by an
earlier marriage, yes, the one at the funeral, Margaret, the one who had
Tommy’s boys. He looked forward to the Judgement Day, to the great debriefing,
in which all things would be made clear: whether or not he had been unkind to
Meryl, unfair to Margaret, who killed Kennedy, what happened to the
Marie Celeste
, and so forth.

 
          
‘Do
you mean a literal Judgement Day?’ she asked, alarmed, alerted. All this, and
he might turn out to be a Born-again Christian.

 
          
‘Wishful
thinking,’ he said. ‘It would be great to think someone, somewhere was in
charge.
The great gambler, the great dice roller in the sky.’

 
          
The
metaphor was unusual but she thought no more of it. Every day brought new
confidence, greater expectation: layer after layer of agreement or at least
acceptance; getting closer, feeling safer, she giving an account of her life
starting from the present and working backwards, since her life had got better
as she got older: he, for whom it had been the other way around, starting at
the beginning and working forwards, this for both of them being safest. Both,
it seemed to her, putting off the day when they would have to face the problem
of being no longer young. Bad enough at twenty to work out how to proceed from
physical distance to physical intimacy: how to move from the chair to the sofa,
from the sofa to the bed: fifty, sixty years on and the problem was back again.
About some things she still remained silent. It would not surprise her if he
did too. He was no fool, like her old enough to know that some information had
better come after sex and not before or there might be no sex at all.
Conversation between them grew difficult: they’d fall into silences. She became
restless, almost irritable.

 
          
Charlie
would tap on the window to remind them when time was up. She would be the one to
hear it, not William. She realized that he was quite deaf: perhaps his silences
were to do with that, nothing more significant. He just hadn’t heard what she’d
said. The secrecy she had insisted on began to seem silly. It was ridiculous
that Charlie had to be back before Joy woke from her afternoon nap: that
William had to be gone before Nurse Dawn put in her appearance,
bustling
everyone up for their next assault on the day. She
put it to William that he could stay longer if he wanted. But William said he
needed to be back at the Rosemount because he minded Maria’s baby while she
went off to collect her older children from school. Maria?
Just
one of the domestic helpers at the Rosemount.

 
          
‘She’s
thirty-one, I’m seventy-two,’ he said. ‘All I’m good for is baby-sitting.’ And
Felicity hadn’t even asked. He could read her mind by now. She didn’t like it.

 
          
‘But
what did you do all day before I came along?’ she asked. ‘You are a mystery to
me.’

 
          
‘This
and that,’ he replied. ‘What did you do?’

 
          
‘The
same,’ she said. ‘But it suits women to be like that, it doesn’t suit men.’

 
          
He
looked at her seriously for a moment or two as if debating with himself and
then said, ‘Why do I always sit opposite you. Couldn’t I sit next to you, on
the sofa?’

           
He didn’t wait for her answer but
pushed the sofa round so the table was in front of them and now they could lean
into each other when they talked. She felt a charge of electricity when she
touched him, as if she’d laid her finger on the metal of a bell push, first one
in to the office in the morning. If the carpets were nylon and the wall paint
acrylic, the charge could throw you back across the corridor if you were
unlucky. She’d worked in such an office once. She’d complained and lost her
job; or perhaps it had been because the boss wanted to sleep with her and for
once she wouldn’t. The electric charge was quickly gone, anyway, some waiting
energy finally released. Maybe he felt it too. If so, he didn’t show it. Still
nothing was said. She could be wrong about it: he could be teasing her,
manipulating cruelly. She could be making a fool of herself. Maybe all this was
in her head? Eighty-three! But now they leaned into one another, came nearer to
one another’s imperfections and still, it seemed, he did not shrink. His hands,
like hers, were wrinkled and liver-spotted. Though she thought the new creams
she had been using had rather diminished the discolouring on hers. That
encouraged her. She held them up boldly for his inspection. She took a risk.

 
          
‘Such
old hands,’ she said. ‘Can you bear the reality of them? Or do we just go on
talking for ever?’

 
          
‘It
may be all you’ll allow,’ he said. ‘How am I meant to know?’

           
‘We could just lie together on the
bed,’ she said. ‘I’m so old that sitting up straight for so long quite tires me
out. We have to think about these things.’

 
          
He didn’t reply at once. I’ve blown it, she
thought. All my life I’ve blown it.
Gone too fast.
Had too much faith.
Now I’ll have to die knowing I never got
it right, that how you begin you are doomed to go on.

           
He stood up abruptly. ‘You don’t
know how anxious I am,’ he said. ‘I’m an old man. I’ll only disappoint you. I
think I’d better go now.’

 
          
Go
then,
she would have said in her
youth, hurt and angry, sexually rejected. Go
and I never want to see you again.
But now was now and when it came
to it William was younger than she was: what did
he
know what was good for him?

           
‘Oh sit down and shut up,’ she said.
‘You’re such a chicken compared to me.’

           
‘My wife left me because I was too
old and inadequate.’

           
‘Confession time,’ said Felicity.
‘And anyway I don’t believe you. It’s too easy.’

           
He stood at the French windows. It
was touch and go. Then he sat down on the bed. ‘Charlie isn’t here yet with the
car,’ he said. ‘I’m in no position to walk out. So if your back is tired we’d
better just lie on the bed together.’

 
          
He
stretched out on the bed. She lay down beside him. He was five inches taller
than she was. Female hip fitted neatly into male waist: she’d known it would.

 
          
‘Did
you love your wife?’ she asked. It was easier to ask this not looking at him.

           
‘Meryl? I was married to her for
nearly twenty years. You become like one person: it isn’t necessarily the
person you were born to be.’ Not quite a straight reply.

 
          
‘After
twenty years most women would stay. They wouldn’t up and divorce you for
nothing. What had you done?’

           
‘Nothing I did. Perhaps what I was.
Maybe she was like
me,
maybe she felt she wasn’t the
person she was born to be either. Perhaps she wanted to find out who she was before
it was too late. People get desperate.’

 
          
‘But
you didn’t want the marriage to end.’

           
‘Of course not.’

           
That hurt her. She’d forgotten how
such stupid things could hurt, a man loving his wife.

           
‘I had grown into her, for good or
bad,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have the heart for divorce lawyers. She did. She’d
joined a women’s group. They egged her on, I guess. What she didn’t take I gave
to her, and after she died Margaret had it. Now I live at the Rosemount. I
read a lot. I watch the sea and the sky changing, and think about living
somewhere else, doing something with my life.
It’s
okay: if you take it day by day. So the world thinks I’m a loser, so what do I
care? But I never thought this was how it would end.
An old
man at the ocean’s edge.’

 
          
‘And
I’m the old woman of the woods,’ she said, but she was shaken.

 
          
* * *

           
Joy would think he was a madman. In
Joy’s world you looked after yourself, and William Johnson had spectacularly
failed to do so. Joy did not understand the gestures which made living with the
self bearable. A lame duck, Joy would say.
A sponger.
Why are you lying here on a bed with this loser? Felicity wanted to cry: she
wanted to be home again in England, where failure was a more honourable state.
‘Except now I’ve met you life doesn’t seem to have ended,’ he said. ‘I can see
there just might be a rebirth.’

 
          
For once in my life.
No-one can take this away from me. Why has
it had to take so long?
Doubts fled as quickly and suddenly as they had
come. There they were, lying on a bed, flesh touching, albeit the other side of
fabric. The denim of his jeans, the silk of her skirt: her legs still long and
shapely, the skin no longer taut, blotchy; a blue network of veins beneath the
ankles. How much did it matter? What had love ever been about?
The spirit or the flesh?

 
          
‘I
haven’t told you everything about me,’ she said, on impulse. ‘Only the things I
wanted you to know.’

 
          
‘I
guessed as much,’ he said. ‘Speak to me.’

 
          
But
Charlie was tapping at the window.

 
          
‘Saved
by the bell,’ she said. And she stayed lying on the bed, bold as brass, not
minding that Charlie was there to see, watching William Johnson gather his coat
and leave, saying he would be back tomorrow. It was true, it was all true: she
was eighty-three and felt the exhilaration of true love once again and no-one
could take this away from her.

 
          
Miss
Felicity consented to go to the evening’s Reconciliation Class, and was
charming to Nurse Dawn.

 
          
^‘
What do Golden Bowlers do?

           
We
live life to the full/

 
          
she
chanted with the best of them.

 
          
Did
you have to tell people the truth? She could see the wisdom of it when you were
twenty. Secrets were likely to emerge when least convenient and upset the
applecart. Social disgrace, madness in the family, illegitimate babies, a spell
as a whore - whatever it was, was best faced up to at the beginning. But at
this end of life the past was so far away, and seemed to have so little
relevance to the present. Past states, past sins, drifted into forgetfulness.
Better perhaps to let the past be. She’d told Sophia on the satellite link that
she was old enough now to speak the truth. Brave
words,
and ones that might have been true even a couple of months ago but were not
true now. Acquaintance with William Johnson had sent her spinning back into
insecurity as to what she should or shouldn’t say for the best, like an
adolescent. But she was grown up now and if she still wasn’t equipped to make
judgements about the world, when would she ever be? Except when had she ever
thought differently? At fifteen, an assignation, stepping into a snowy garden
while the full moon looked down.
I know
what Vm doing
. Some fifteen years later, stepping across the gang-plank at
Southampton which would lead her to the new land - the seductive upwards tilt
of the heavy damp dark wood, ridged to stop you slipping; the smell of salt sea
and engine oil, the noise of engines and seagulls.
1
know
what I’m doing.

 
          
‘Is
our cup half-empty or our cup half-full?’ inquired Dr Grepalli. ‘Half-full!’
returned the happy chorus. Only Dr Bronstein and Clara Craft seemed unwilling
to join in the general enthusiasm. It occurred to Felicity that Dr Grepalli was
setting his sights too low. Her own cup was pretty much full to overflowing.