Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (37 page)

 
          
‘Don’t
be like that, the girl’s crazy,’ he said, ‘I haven’t touched her. She just
wants it to be true. I’ve been an okay guy to her. I got her the job in the
first place. She’s an illegal, but she still has to live. I once helped her peg
out some sheets. She thinks I’m her father. Felicity, she’s not my kind. She’s
young, she’s pudgy, she’s got bad teeth and she doesn’t speak English. I like
to talk to my women.’ She was almost convinced. At any rate she
glimmered
a smile at him.

 
          
‘It’s
as I say,’ said Felicity, ‘no good deed goes unpunished.’

 
          
‘She
wanders round the place pointing at me, saying,
He
father! He father!
I wish she wouldn’t. It’s the only English she
seems to know. It’s half a joke and half not. She seems to thinks it’ll flatter
me. But other people take it literally. It’s getting awkward.
Maria doesn’t like it, Charlie neither.
She’s the sister of
one of his wives. You know he has two? He says it’s his religion. He threatened
to beat me up last week. That’s why I had to get my own car. That’s why my luck
turned. If you really need something, God provides.’ ‘You could have gone for a
cheaper model. You could have bought that old house back for what you spent on
that.’

 
          
‘I
had to have a decent vehicle, if I’m to take you out and about.’ ‘I’m not going
to feel bad about it,’ Miss Felicity said. ‘If that’s what you want.’

 
          
He
looked hurt.

 
          
‘How
am I meant to win tonight,’ he asked.
‘If you keep putting a
broom between my spokes?’

 
          
‘If
it’s to do with Charlie it’ll be a set-up,’ she said. ‘Quit worrying. Maybe she
wants nationality, who’s to say?’

 
          
‘I
hadn’t thought of that,’ he said. ‘That begins to make more sense.’

 
          
‘What
worries me,’ she said, ‘if you’re not going to use credit, what are you going
to use for money tonight? Or is it going to be the quarter slots? What’s the
use of all this grand talk if that’s where it ends up?’

 
          
‘You’ve
got to know when to quit,’ he said. ‘And you can do okay on the quarter slots:
it’s a kind of rest from risks. Build up slowly again.’

 
          
‘I’d
rather marry a rich man than a poor man,’ she said. ‘Forget it.’

 
          
She
had Amex in her purse, and Visa. What were her spending limits? She had no
idea. If you were a gambler of course you would. You wouldn’t add stuff up, in
case you found out what you didn’t want to know, you wouldn’t do too may sums
in case the answers frightened you, but you’d know your credit limits. You’d
have no sense in other words, you’d be the one after the conversion experience,
lost to all doubt, proselytizing, giving up everything to the God of Luck. Yes,
sorry, God. No Goddess, she. Not like the Muse, which governed the Arts,
gracious, ladylike and dull. This was the God of Money; hard, glittering,
erect. What you built up, compulsively you threw away.
An
expense of spirit in a waste of shame.
Well, that might be true for the
out-ofworkers, for the blue-haired brigade, for the graveyard shift in the
early morning, when only the desperate played on, when hope was at its lowest
ebb. But it wasn’t true for her. Already the buzz was rising: the new car down
there on the plinth began to revolve, catching the extra light now shining on
it, the music changing beat, the place was bright and noisy again, new crowds
surging in, bent on pleasure not survival: the erotic undercurrent swirling
again. The tide was full.
Diamond tiepins, dangling earrings,
natty suits and low-cut dresses, the cocktail waitresses on the run.
William rose and stretched.

 
          
‘Would
they give me cash on my credit cards?’ she asked.

 
          
‘I
swore I’d never ask you to do that,’ he said.

 
          
‘You
didn’t ask me,’ she said, ‘I offered.’

 
          
They
went to the Main Cashier, a pink-faced young woman with orange curly hair
rather like Joy’s, but who seemed otherwise too young for such responsibility.
Felicity put her MasterCard on the counter.

 
          
‘Will
you give her cash on this?’ William asked,

 
          
‘Not
usually,’ said the young woman, ‘because she’s a stranger.
But
if she’s friend of yours, Mr Johnson?
You can vouch for her?’

           
‘Oh she is,’ he said. ‘I can.’

 
          
‘Make
it ten thousand,’ said Felicity. The cashier’s eyebrows flew to her hairline,
and she made sure Felicity saw that they did. She made Felicity identify
herself on the phone to MasterCard’s Customer Services, giving her date of birth
and her mother’s maiden name. They had Lois’s name on
record,
that
being the only one Felicity could remember. Or perhaps no-one had
ever got round to telling her Sylvia’s. Lois Wasserman. She repeated the name.
Wasserman, surging up yet again from the past.

 
          
‘You
can run,’ she said to William, puzzling him. ‘But you can’t hide.’

 
          
The
transaction was allowed. The cashier carefully counted out the money in front
of two witnesses.

 
          
‘My
lucky night too,’ said Felicity to William. ‘I know it. The wheel comes full
circle. Fate takes away, but fate gives back. You’ve just got to hang around.’

 
          
She
bought chips: four oranges, ten purple, the rest in black. She handed half to
William.

 
          
‘We’re
in competition,’ she said. ‘Bet you a thousand I do better than you.’

 
          
‘Done,’
he said, and went off laughing into the crowds. She had expected him maybe to
show a little more gratitude, and linger a little longer, but he was a man and
she was a woman, and the transaction between them was complex, and anyway the
tables called. If you took up with a gambler, what did you expect? She changed
her chips back into cash, bought ten rolls of quarters, paid the rest back into
MasterCard, and went to the slots to enjoy
herself
.

 
          
Nurse
Dawn took a trip to the West Wing to see how Dr Bronstein was settling in. The
West Wing, unlike the Main House, which was redolent of fine wax polish and
lavender, always smelt faintly of disinfectant and boiled vegetables: there was
no disguising the fact that the rooms over here, though comfortable, pink and
plump with furniture, were more like hospital cubicles than anything you would
find in a hotel. Each room had piped oxygen on tap, plugs and leads for heart
monitors, life-support systems and so on, leaving little room for bookshelves
or mementos of the past. It was Dr Grepalli’s belief that although intellectual
and emotional stimulation helped prolong life and energy in those in the
pre-West Wing stage, after a certain point of mental deterioration had been
reached, the best thing you could do to lengthen life was to soothe,
tranquillize and minimize all disturbance to the physical and mental
equilibrium. If breathing became difficult the patient would find the air
oxygen-enriched: if the heart fluttered or faltered, electrical impulses would
take over: a steady diet of tranquillizers kept guests in a state of dozy
bliss. Meals were regular, and
lay
as palely and as
minimally spiced as could be contrived upon the plate; white fish, cauliflower
and mashed potato the ideal: followed by perhaps apple dumplings. Recipes were
taken from a cookery book,
Nursery
Cooking for Healthy Minds and Bodies
, published in 1890, written by his
great-grandfather, Dr Emilio Grepalli, and found by Joseph among his mother
Helen’s effects after her death. Just so, without spices, condiments or colours
which might inflame and incite, had
his own
early diet
been. The digestive system must be rested, given nothing to complain about, if
nothing to rejoice about either.
Breast milk being a case in
point.
And if this was true at the beginning of life
how much more so at the end.
Old age was indeed a second childhood:
better to accept it than to fight it. Boredom, in fact, was what kept the very
old going.

 
          
In
the West Wing blood pressures were monitored twice daily: beta-blockers fed
into tender veins in which the blood pulsed with too much determination. If
cancers occurred - and they seldom did, inasmuch as Nurse Dawn had filtered out
all those with a genetic propensity to the disease - they were usually slow growing
(it is the young who are so suddenly, utterly and tragically consumed by
cancer) and medical intervention unnecessary before natural death intervened.

 
          
Most
guests in the West Wing were over ninety. Visitors were not encouraged: after a
few visits in which their aged relatives made no response, but simply stared at
them out of heavy, contented eyes, most stopped visiting and waited patiently
for the years to pass, the Great Gates to creak open, and for the distribution
of such wealth that remained after the Golden Bowl had subsumed what it would
and what it must. People in their youth often claim they want quality of life,
not quantity of life, but when it comes to it most want simply just to hang on
in there, and medical science makes it possible. No-one these days can expect
too much. It is not good for a society for the wealth of one generation to be
handed down to the next. Is not this the point of our inheritance taxes?
Occasionally the Golden Bowl was remembered in a will, but not often, and since
it would have been drawn up in happier, pre-West Wing days, there could be no
doubting the mental capacity of the one who made it. Who wanted trouble, or
disagreeable questions, let alone litigation? Of all visitors, lawyers were
the most discouraged in the West Wing.

 
          
Nurse
Dawn was surprised to see Dr Bronstein out of his bed, sitting at his table,
wearing not the appropriate dressing gown and slippers but an open-necked shirt
and jeans and working on a laptop computer.

           
‘Is that sensible, Dr Bronstein?’
she asked. ‘We wouldn’t want you to tire your eyes.’

 
          
The
old are not paper parcels, as she was fond of observing over in the main house,
to be sent here and there without their consent, but once they are
institutionalized it is not a good idea to encourage them in too much
independence. You cannot legally lock them in or restrain their movements, but
in their own best interests you can surely use psychological pressure. It
looked to Nurse Dawn as if Dr Bronstein has detached his own drip and got out
of bed. There was no law against it but it shouldn’t happen.

 
          
‘Those
poor old eyes are already looking tired and sore,’ she added. ‘Remember the
lace-makers of
Bruges
? How they all went blind from close work?’

 
          
‘Rubbish,’
he said. ‘That was before electricity. For once in my life I have the time, the
leisure, the peace, and still sufficient use of my senses to write my book on
the moral duty of the scientist in the contemporary world.’

 
          
Nurse
Dawn laughed merrily.

 
          
‘Contemporary!’
she cried. ‘How long since you retired? Thirty years?’

 
          
‘I’ve
kept up with the reading,’ said Dr Bronstein, but he was a little shaken. Had
it really been as long as that? The active years are so vivid and full of
event, they stay undimmed in the memory, and seem as much like only yesterday
as do the college days of a woman who’s spent the last thirty-five years a
housewife.

 
          
‘What
a dear little laptop,’ said Nurse Dawn, next. ‘I haven’t seen that before. I
wonder where we got
that?
’ Now that Dr Bronstein’s
great-great-grandson had power of attorney the doctor was no longer in a
position to write his own cheques. But supposing such West Wing patients who
could still read off the numbers from their credit cards took to shopping on
the Web? It wouldn’t do. ‘Miss Felicity gave it to me,’ said Dr Bronstein.
‘She’s been over to visit once or twice.’

 
          
‘Oh
has she,’ said Nurse Dawn. Those in the Main House were not encouraged to visit
the West Wing. It could be depressing. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I daresay Miss
Felicity won’t have to travel so far in future. She’ll be joining you here in
the West Wing soon enough.’ ‘Miss Felicity might not like it in here,’ said Dr
Bronstein. ‘She doesn’t have a book to write.’

           
‘Miss Felicity may not have as much
choice as she thinks,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘Since considering her recent conduct
no court in the world is going to believe she’s capable of looking after her
own affairs.’

 
          
She
slammed the door as she went out, and told the Floor Nursing Officer to keep Dr
Bronstein’s lights low.