Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (29 page)

 
          
Later that afternoon the Mercedes, Joy and Jack within it, arrived
at the Golden Bowl.
Charlie, as Joy bitterly observed, knew the way
well. They were to visit Dr Grepalli. Valerie Boheimer’s report had gone ahead
of them. Joy wore a diamond and gold choker which lay not on the skin but on
the polo-necked collar of her pink velour running suit. ‘Just because a girl
needs to be grand,’ she said to Jack, ‘doesn’t mean she can’t be comfortable.’
Jack protested he didn’t see the need to be grand, but Joy said it was
important that Dr Grepalli took what they had to say seriously. Felicity’s
future welfare depended upon it.

 
          
Joy
had lately taken to wearing her diamonds nearly every day. Francine had kept
hers in the safe for years, claiming it was far too risky to wear expensive
jewellery in public. If you wore a ring some drug-crazed villain might cut off
your finger to get hold of it, if you wore a bracelet they might take off your
whole arm. Francine had heard of it happening. Precious rings, beads and
bracelets - her neck was too short for chokers, fortunately, Jack always
thought, considering her fears - stayed in their velvet- lined boxes gathering
dust under lock and key, until one day, a year before her death, her cancer
still undiagnosed, she had without warning removed her valuables from the safe
and sold the lot, giving the proceeds to, of all things, a dogs’ home. She had
not even liked dogs. Jack had been upset. They had, after all, been gifts from
him, bought with the sweat of his brow: he had had a hard life: becoming a
wealthy man takes drive, long hours, and concentration. All he had done to
deserve this treatment, so far as he could see, was to try to persuade
Francine to wear at least something - even if only diamond earrings - to the
sixty-fifth birthday party her sister Joy had so kindly organized for her.

 
          
Joy
had hoped that perhaps Jack would dress up a little for the visit to Dr
Grepalli, but she was disappointed. Jack, now a member of the Country Club,
would be playing golf later in the day: he declared he would wear only what was
suitable for that. His days of dressing to please others were over. His pants
were elasticized, his sweaters familiar and baggy.

 
          
When
Dr Grepalli rose to his feet, a handsome, broad-shouldered, benign figure, he
could be seen to be wearing a well-cut grey suit, with white shirt but no tie -
a mixture of formality and casualness designed to put others at ease. None of
Joy’s husbands had ever achieved sartorial success, and she felt it. She
herself preferred ease, a bit of show, a bright colour and a nice fabric, and
couldn’t help it, but had always hoped for more from the men she married.
In vain.

 
          
‘Mr
and Mrs Epstein,’ said Dr Grepalli. ‘Welcome!’

 
          
Joy
and Jack both started to explain together that they were not man and wife but
man and deceased wife’s sister, but both gave up. Jack because Joy drowned him
out and Joy because she lost interest in denying it. She might as well be Mrs
Epstein, the way they had begun to bicker. Francine’s title, once too high an
aspiration for Joy, no longer was. Thank God sex did not enter into it, the
way it did with Felicity. She, Joy, had never liked sex much and increasing age
spared her the necessity of pretending she did. In any case it was young men
who required you to enjoy sex: as they got older they became almost relieved
when you didn’t show too much interest. Yes, to be Mrs Epstein would be all
advantage, no disadvantage. It is better to be a wife than a widow. It would be
an entirely suitable match.

 
          
Dr
Grepalli did not pursue the matter of the couple’s marital status. He was
flicking through the Abbey Inquiries report. He looked up at them with calm
brown eyes. Joy felt a certain frisson; not sexual, certainly not, had she not
decided she was beyond all that; but a kind of emotional spasm which lay just
the other side of spiritual into the worldly. Merely a matter of possibilities,
a suggestion of shared intimacy. But no doubt he looked like that at all the
ladies.

 
          
‘I
appreciate your concern for your friend,
^’
he said, ‘and I know my
executive assistant Nurse Dawn shares it. But old people are not paper parcels.
They have free will, they have feelings,
they
have a
right to love just like anyone else. They may even have a right under the
Constitution not to be followed by private detectives but I’m not sure about
that.
^’

 
          
There
you are you see, Joy,
^’
said Jack. ‘I told you so. You shouldn’t have
done it.
^’

 
          
‘I
had to do it,
^’
shouted Joy. ‘Felicity’s my best friend. She’s in her
second childhood. What about her fortune?
^’

                 
‘She is entitled to dispose of it as she
wants,
^’
said Dr Grepalli. ‘And as fortunes go it is not so very
great. Many of our guests leave their money to philanthropic institutions, not
to their families, and just as well for this nation that they do. Men tend to
be showier with their wealth and dispose of it in their lifetime. Women tend to
wait until they’re dead-
^‘

 
          
‘-Or
want to make a point,
^’
interjected Jack, bitterly, thinking of his
many gifts to Francine, love tokens all, gone to support stray dogs. Was this
how she had thought of him? Or perhaps she just felt bad about her failure to
love all God’s creatures equally and wished to compensate.

 
          
‘So
I don’t think you have a problem there,
^’
the Doctor went on. ‘Those
who earn money are
more free
with it than those who
receive it through the medium of others, which tends to be the case with most
of our lady guests. Their husbands made the money: they stayed home.
^’

                 
‘But supposing she marries,
^’
said
Joy.

 
          
‘Ah
then,
^’
said Dr Grepalli. ‘We may have a problem. Any will and
testament she may have already made becomes invalid. Until and unless she makes
another one all property would automatically go to the new husband.
^’

 
          
‘She
has to be stopped,
^’
yelled Joy. ‘He’s a con artist and a cheat, a
younger man chasing an older woman for her money and that report proves it. You
have to call the police.
^’

           
‘Quieten down a bit, Joy,’ said
Jack. ‘No need to get excited. Calling the cops may be way down the road here.’

 
          
Francine
could be like this, Jack recalled, obsessive, when she got some notion into her
head, though she was quiet about it and brooded rather than shouted. She’d
always believed he was having an affair with Joy. Of course he hadn’t been, in
the true sense of the word. He was no saint, but he would never foul his own
nest.
It’ll happen
, Francine had even
whispered to him once.
It will happen one
day. Men have no taste.
The memory depressed him.

 
          
‘It’s
not me being excited, it’s you just letting things go,’ Joy rounded on him.
Francine would just have given him a look. As a consolation you never had the
feeling that Joy was keeping things back, the better to pounce. She was looking
a little strange today. The diamond choker over the shell suit, or whatever
they called it, was all wrong. But at least she didn’t keep the stuff in the
safe. At least one day he wouldn’t have to open it and find his gifts missing,
sold, the past they symbolized evaporated, gone as if it had never happened. It
was after that that he did begin to see Joy, he had to admit it, and
thirty-five years too late, began to think he might have married the wrong sister.
But too late now.

 
          
Dr
Grepalli turned back to the report.

 
          
‘Four
traffic violations in a lifetime,’ he said, ‘doesn’t seem too much to me.’

 
          
‘It
depends,’ said Joy, having asked him to speak louder and repeat himself three
times, ‘what those violations are.
DUI or DWI.
Driving
under the influence or driving while intoxicated.’

 
          
‘Joy
knows what the difference is,’ said Jack. ‘She had an incident once, and her
alcohol levels were dead on point one five. First thing I did when I moved into
the area was make her get a chauffeur. Not a side-view mirror left in the
neighbourhood and the dents in the old Volvo had to be seen to be believed.
Lucky she had me to trade it in for her.’

 
          
‘Those
dents,’ said Joy, ‘were animals running into my car at night.’ ‘Sometimes one’s
night vision isn’t what it should be, as we approach the golden years,’ said Dr
Grepalli, absently. Old dears tended to bicker on. It should be seen as a
demonstration of custom and affection rather than antagonism. Grown children,
listening to their parents, often made the mistake of believing they were
unhappy, when what they were doing was keeping little ripples of response
flowing from one to the other. ‘At least he doesn’t have a criminal record.’

 
          
‘He
goes under many names,’ said Joy. ‘Anyone called William Johnson is making it
up.
The commonest name in all
America
.’
‘Dr Grepalli may not follow your logic,
Joy,’ said Jack. ‘If it’s common a whole lot of people will have it.’

           
‘And just look at those age gaps,’
Joy shouted. ‘That’s not love, that’s calculation. He marries old women and
then murders them for their money.’

 
          
But
Dr Grepalli’s eye had fallen on something in the report that worried him.

 
          
‘Is
that an actual Utrillo she brought with her?’ he asked. ‘I’d assumed it was a
reproduction.’

 
          
‘What,
that old painting she fusses about? It could be for real. He did own an
airline. But you never know what to believe.’

 
          
‘If
so, it has very serious implications,’ said Dr Grepalli, ‘in so far as our
insurance is concerned. The thing should be in her bank: if there’s a theft we
could be sued. Miss Felicity has no business keeping it on our walls.’ Dr
Grepalli was upset beyond mere reason. Homer Grepalli, his father, had
collected paintings. He had the best collection of schizophrenic art in the
country on his walls, which had distressed Helen, Joseph’s mother, very much.
She complained she felt crowded in by such a bleak and tormented vision:
nothing on these canvases was bright and cheerful: everything was twisted and
inhuman, in black, grey, or if you were lucky, ochre, and at very best a smear
of purple. Why did anyone collect lunatic art? Helen was convinced Homer spent
good money on these paintings on purpose to annoy her, but as Homer had pointed
out to Joseph, his mother was of a paranoiac turn of mind: indeed, she had once
been one of Homer’s patients.

 
          
Little
Joseph had from an early age practised the art of thinking the best of everyone
and everything. His father was not malicious. His mother was not insane. The
artists represented on the wall did not paint like this all the time, only when
they were in a psychotic state. In between episodes their minds would unfold, the
tormented shapes curve and stretch into something healthy and whole: he would
often look at the clawed arthritic hands of his Golden Bowlers, as they sang
the half-full song, and wish for them that time would play backwards, so he
could watch their hands unfold and be open, free and graceful once again. His
telephone beeped a little tune: a Beatles number. Dr Grepalli excused himself
and took the call.

 
          
‘That
was Miss Felicity’s granddaughter, the English girl,’ Dr Grepalli said. ‘She
too seems to be anxious about her grandmother’s welfare. She’s flown over with
two other grandchildren and will be driving up from
New York
tomorrow.’

 
          
‘But
I thought Sophia was her only living relative,’ said Joy. ‘Miss Felicity is
just not capable of speaking the simple truth.’

 
          
‘It’s
amazing how family comes out of the woodwork,’ said Dr Grepalli, ‘when it’s a
matter of inheritance. Thank you for coming to see me, Mr and Mrs Epstein. I
know none of us wants to get into any kind of zero sum game here. Nevertheless
I will have a little talk with Miss Felicity, about this and that.’