Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (34 page)

 
          
William
took her not to Foxwoods, but to a house called Passchendale in the woods up by
Hopkington, towards the Connecticut- Rhode Island State Line. They left Route
195 at Exit 3 and thereafter, sometimes uphill, sometimes down, followed a
network of roads, tracks and lanes, deeper and deeper into woodland, narrowing
with every corner they turned, every mile they travelled, until green
rhododendrons, like the laurel thickets already showing new furled deep green
buds for spring, brushed fingers up against the Saab windows, and then as
suddenly gave way to more open hill and dale landscapes.

 
          
‘I
have to admit there’s a shorter way,’ he said. ‘This is the scenic route. Too
early for the blossom but at least you get the views. And we had to come here
sooner or later. After Foxwoods, this is the other place that explains me.’

 
          
‘Passchendale!
What a peculiar name for a house,’ she said,
as lightly as she could.
‘A battle in the First World War?
A memorial to slaughter?
Or perhaps it’s just
particularly muddy? In which case I’m glad I changed my shoes.’

 
          
He
smiled at her. ‘You’ve even heard of Passchendaele,’ he said. ‘You must be the
only person left in all
America
who has and I’m the lucky guy who found
you.’

 
          
‘You’re
marrying me for my age,’ she said. ‘I was right to suspect it.’

 
          
There
was hardly anyone about: they passed one group of walkers and one pack of crazy
cyclists, and a single vehicle packed with screaming young people, far too
early for the season’s parties, William said, and that was all. Where the road
ran for once a little straighter and wider, skirting the Green Falls pond, a
deer sprang over a low stone wall to stand in front of the vehicle, stared at
them briefly with brown eyes, and leapt away again into the woods. ‘I always
think that’s lucky,’ he said. ‘See a deer and the dice roll right.’

 
          
‘If
it doesn’t kill you first,’ she said. She had cricked her neck as he slammed on
the brakes. Who was it once told her their car had to be written off after a
deer leapt straight over a hedge and landed on the bonnet? She couldn’t
remember. There was so
much trivia
she didn’t
remember: was heaven a place where you remembered everything, she wondered, or
nothing? ‘The thing about a deer is that it doesn’t look before it leaps.’

 
          
‘That’s
why they’re lucky,’ he said. She hoped they would get wherever it was soon: her
knees were stiffening, she wanted to stretch them. William showed so few signs
of decrepitude. She was older than he was: perhaps she ought to take the fact
seriously. But really she could not. She put her hand on his knee as they
drove. She’d had the nails manicured by the beauty therapist who came weekly to
the Golden Bowl. Once so white, soft and delicate, now claws - but elegant
claws. She had liked her hands through all their stages. She glowed in her own
self-approval, and his, and forgot her knees.

 
          
The
other side of pine and birch, ginkos and hickory, holly and young dogwood,
where the forest held a rich undergrowth of huckleberry and pepperbush, the
final narrowest track of all opened up into a grassed clearing, stone-walled,
where stood a large tall shingle house, the wood panels stripped of colour
where they were exposed, but holding the bleached remnants of green paint where
each was protected by its fellow, so it seemed fashioned in a translucent,
layered patchwork. Creepers crept over old windows. The place was beautiful but
had seen better days. It even seemed to lean a little.

 
          
‘If
that house had knees,’ said Felicity, ‘they’d be very stiff.’

 
          
‘It
would need new ones,’ said William. ‘And I can’t afford them. Ozymandius, king
of kings, with hip and knee replacements. This summerhouse is all that’s left
of the family home: three centuries on and this is where the Johnsons from
Massachusetts
ended up. The poorer branch, that is.
Look on my works
,
ye Mighty
,
and despair
.’

 
          
‘Shelley
,
⁵
she said.

 
          
‘You
know everything
,
⁵
he said. ‘It’s such a
comfort.
⁵
But
he knew the names of all the
trees, and could identify every one, and there was something erotic in that.
Between them they brought together the interests and obsessions of two
lifetimes, and she was older than he was, but still he knew more.

           
They circumnavigated the house. It
was empty but only recently so. The birds had not yet finished the nuts in the
feeder, which hung from the lower branches of the chestnut tree in the patch of
level hillside to the back of the house, which looked over wooded valley and
pond, and you could almost swear to the ocean itself. A brown thrasher, reddish
brown above, brown streaks on white below, stood on the wooden edge on the
feeder and sang a little until realizing it was overlooked, when it flew off.
Its place was taken almost immediately by a mocking bird, a pattern of shiny
greys, which set up the same song, completing the interrupted cadence, before
flying off as well, leaving the feeder swinging. It seemed like an omen to
Felicity, and a good one.
A rebirth, a new chance, the
finishing of what had begun.
Hexagram Sixty Four in
the
I Ching.
She could all but
see the page before her.

 
          
Before completion.
Success.

           
But
if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing,

           
Gets
his tail in the water,

           
There
is nothing that would further.

 
          
In
other words, take care. You were not there yet. Things moved towards fruition
but could still go wrong. Felicity had not yet told William about her weakness
for the
I Ching.
She had the feeling
he might object. It might seem to him to be her weakness, as gambling was his.
The point where each could look at the other and decide
I have been deluded. This man, this woman
,
is not for me.
You could argue and argue that the
I Ching
came more out of Confucianism
than superstition, that Carl Gustav Jung himself had written the Foreword and
given it respectability, but it might be too like fortune-telling, altogether
too vulgar, for William’s peace of mind. And paradoxically, his own sense of
the force called Luck being so strong, being almost religious in its intensity,
the
I Ching
could seem too close a
neighbour to his own beliefs for comfort. The most serious quarrels are
between dogmas that are nearly identical, but not quite. He threw the dice, she
threw the coins. It might be wiser not to mention it. Forsake the
I Ching
and go to church and thank God
for her good fortune, and pray that he gave up gambling.

 
          
‘This
seems more than grand enough for a summerhouse,’ she said, cautiously. ‘If this
is the poorer branch, what happened to the richer?’

 
          
They
too had fallen on hard times, it seemed; peeled off at the turn of the century
when the textile trade collapsed and gone to New York to be bankers, come back
to build their great summer houses outside Providence, then lost everything in
the great collapse of 1929. The houses themselves had been swept away by the
hurricane of 1937. Only William’s cousin Henry, who’d gone off to California in
the forties to work on the new computer technology, could be said to be doing
well and he had got to ninety without becoming Bill Gates.

 
          
‘I
guess the family just ran out of steam,’ William said.

 
          
He
had a key. They went inside. Nothing had been changed since the fifties. She
recognized the crockery, the pans,
the
furniture of
the mid-century. A wooden wireless stood on legs in a mahogany cabinet. A mass
of small, high rooms, corridors with violet walls and faded rugs, half-stairs
to unforeseen landings, everywhere paintings, on the walls or stacked up against
them. Wood carvings: bronze castings; elegant, earthy, dark polished shapes,
life-size, vaguely human, limbs and torsos folding in on one another. At the
back of the house a vast studio with a good north light, two storeys high, once
no doubt warm and dry, now cold and damp with a whiff of decay which she knew
would soon spread to the rest of the house, if nobody did something soon.
Everything tidy and organized: brushes still in turps which someone had
replenished, a not quite finished painting on the easel as if the artist had
stopped mid-stroke.
A muted greenish grey landscape, in
fitting with the quietness of everything around.

 
          
‘My
father’s studio,’ said William. ‘He died seven years ago.
My
childhood home.’

=
        
A layer of dust covered everything;
small nibbling creatures had made the place their own: spiders were happy here.
‘When I can afford it,’ he said, ‘I get someone in to clean it up.’

 
          
Felicity
remembered Rufus, Angel’s husband: and the messy chaotic colours of his studio:
the intensity and folly of his life. Artists were obsessional in different
ways: but she’d never known one who in their bid for an elusive immortality
wasn’t parasitical on the vitality of their children. Artists taught the
morality of aesthetics, not the politics of survival. William rolled dice:
Sophia cut film. Neither
were
ever quite engaged in
what went on around them; neither could quite fit into the energetic mainstream
of life. At least the landlords had appeared after Rufus’s death to claim their
unpaid rent and take back the apartment and solved the problem of what to do
with the paintings by burning as many as they could find, finishing the work
Angel had begun. But what was to be done with these? Too good to throw away,
hopeless in the art market: these days you can’t create a reputation after
death. They were part of the house.

 
          
‘Why
don’t you live here?’ she asked. ‘It’s so beautiful.’

 
          
‘It’s
my father’s place,’ he said. ‘I can’t live in his shadow. I don’t like
solitude, and besides I don’t own it any more. Now it belongs to Margaret. She
doesn’t even know I have a key.’

 
          
‘Your
stepdaughter owns it?’

 
          
‘It’s
her revenge,’ he said.

 
          
‘Revenge
for what?’ asked Felicity, but he was disinclined to tell her. Wandered off
explaining that the house had been built in 1919, a summerhouse, when his
father came home from the war in
Europe
.

 
          
‘But
what was he doing there?’ she asked.

 
          
‘Refusing
to fight the Hun,’ said William. ‘He was a Quaker, a conchy, an ambulance
driver. For a year they made him pick bodies out of the mud at Passchendaele,
one small town in
Belgium
. German bodies, Canadian bodies, British bodies: they took turns to be
slaughtered. It was that or prison back home.’ ‘But that was our war,’ said
Felicity.
‘A European war, European madness.’

 
          
The
Great War, as it was called, the War to End All Wars, except of course it
didn’t. The virus just lay low for a while, as it will, the body politic going
into remission, before surfacing again. Bombs fly, blood flows, bodies are
broken. War was a recurring madness, like Angel’s manic depression. Nations
were always building up to them or recovering from them. It was what nations
did. She seemed to have seen so many. Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, World
War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War of Nuclear Terror, the Gulf War,
Yugoslavia.
Always the same excitement, the same terror by
proxy, the same paroxysms of lies, exultant claims of glory.
The virus
changed its form of course, became more virulent. The casualties of war, once
confined to the soldiery, were now ninety per cent civilian. With any luck she
wouldn’t see the next one.

 
          
‘No
it wasn’t,’ William said. ‘It was
America
’s war too. The Germans were inciting the
Mexicans to invade. My father got drafted. He was furious. It interrupted his
painting.’ More furious still, William said, when he got home to find himself
unpopular with one half of
Rhode Island
for having taken part in an unpopular war - isolationism resulted - and
equally unpopular with the other half for being a coward and a conchy. He built
the summerhouse, away from everyone, and called it Passchendale to remind
himself of the folly of war. He grew still more furious when he married an
Italian-American Catholic girl from
Providence
five years later, and no-one came to the
wedding.