Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (2 page)

 
          
* * *

 
 
          
‘I
hope you’re not taking after your mother,’ said Felicity. ‘Off at a tangent,
all the time.’ That was, I supposed, one way of describing the effects of
paranoid schizophrenia, or manic depression or whatever she was said to have.

 
          
‘Look,’
I said, ‘don’t try to frighten me.’ The great thing about being brought up
around the deranged is that you know you’re sane. ‘And you haven’t answered my
question.’

 
          
‘I
was heating the milk to put in my coffee,’ said Felicity. ‘Eighty- six I may
be, standards I still have.’

 
          
She
was growing older by the minute, as if she was wishing away her life. I
couldn’t bear it. I kept forgetting how angry I was with her, how badly she had
behaved, how reasonable my resentment of her. I loved her. Before my mother
died, after my father had disappeared, I’d come home one day to find her
darning my school socks. No-one else had ever done that for me, and I was hopeless
at it, and there was no money to buy new. I’d been going round with holes in my
heels, visible above my shoes. I still have a problem bothering about ladders
in tights. I just can’t care.

 
          
‘Oh,
Grandma,’ I found myself wailing, ‘I’m so glad you’re okay. I’m so sorry I
didn’t come over.’

 
          
‘I’m
not okay,’ she said. ‘I told you. I have a nasty burn on my forearm. The skin
is bright red, wrinkled and puckered. I know it is normally wrinkled and
puckered, and you have no idea how little I like my body these days, but it’s
not normally bright red and oozing. You just wait ’til you’re my age. And you
will be. We just take turns at being young.’

 
          
‘Can’t
you call Joy?’ I asked.

 
          
‘She’s
too deaf to hear the phone,’ said Felicity. ‘She’s hopeless. It has to be
faced. I’m too old to live alone. I may even be too old for community living.
Don’t worry’ - for my heart had turned cold with fear and self-interest and my
tears were already drying on my cheeks, and she seemed to know it - ‘I’m not
suggesting we two live together.
Just because we’re both on
our own doesn’t mean that we’re not both better off like that.
It’s just
that I need help with some decisions here.’

 
          
I
refrained from saying that I did not live on my own, but surrounded by tides of
human noise which rose and fell at predictable times likes the surges of the
sea; that I had good friends and an enviable career, and a social life between
gigs; and it was the life I chose, much peopled by the visible and the
invisible, the real and the fantastic, and extraordinarily busy. Felicity was
sufficiently of her generation to see
on
your own
as being without husband and children, which indeed, at
thirty-two, I was. We know how to defend ourselves, we the survivors of the
likes of Felicity and Angel, against the shocks and tribulations that accompany
commitment to a man, or a child, or a cause.

 
          
‘Can
we talk about this tomorrow, please?’ I said. ‘Can’t you call out a doctor to
look at your arm?’

 
          
‘He’d
only think I was making a fuss,’ she said, as if this went without saying, and
I remembered that for all her years in America she was still English at heart.
‘You really aren’t being very helpful, Sophia.’ She put the phone down. I
called her back. There was no reply. She was sulking. I gave up, lay fully clothed
on the bed and went to sleep, and in the morning thought that perhaps I had
imagined the whole conversation. There was to be little time to think about it.

           
It was a hideous morning in the
cutting room: Harry Krassner was there, of course - a large, hairy, noisy,
charismatic man. Powerful men in film tend to fall into two types - the
passionate endomorphs, who control you by rushing at you, physically or
psychically, and charming and overwhelming you, and the bloodless ectomorphs,
who do it by a mild sneer in your presence and a stab in the back as soon as
you turn. Krassner was very much the former type.
Clive the
Producer, small and gay and treacherous, the latter.

 
          
As
we tried to concentrate on the screen, and resolve our differences, the room filled
up with people in one state of crisis or another. The tabloids had discovered
Leo Fox, our handsome young lead, was gay: Olivia, his fictional girlfriend,
had declared mid-interview in one of the broadsheets that she was a lesbian.
Harry was good enough to remark that in the circumstances I had done a good job
with the sex scenes. I refrained from retorting that had he supplied me with
twenty per cent more footage I could have made a better job of it still: Clive
failed to refrain from remarking that perhaps the casting director and the PR
people should be sacked: the dotty woman from wardrobe insisted on being
present though obviously there was absolutely nothing she could do about
anything at this stage. Harry’s stubbly chin brushed against my bare shoulder
rather frequently. The shoulder was not meant to be enticing: the air
conditioning had broken down, naturally, and the temperature was way above
normal. I was down to my camisole, and wore no bra. I don’t have breasts of any
great weight or size.

 
          
‘You’ve
got beautiful skin,’ he said, at one juncture, while we were rewinding. I could
feel the idiot lady from wardrobe bristle. Sexual harassment! But it wasn’t
like that. He had just noticed I had beautiful skin - I do: very pale, like
Angel’s - and remarked upon it: it was a statement of fact, not a come-on. I
simply do not rate in the love lives of these people: they are married to women
to die for, in the 99.9 percentile when it comes to brains, beauty and style,
and for their lovers they have the most beautiful creatures in the world to
choose from. That the girl- or boyfriends are very often pains in the butt,
shaped by cosmetic surgery, drug-addicted or compulsive kleptomaniacs, or
solipsistic to a degree, or could hardly string two words together or work the
microwave - forget an editing deck - is neither here nor there.
Hollywood
lovers have legs long enough to wrap around
the likes of Harry’s neck: brains are the opposite of what is required, which
is rough trade of any gender, though with the edges smoothed over, to serve as
a trophy to success. The brave deserve the fair. I might have a good skin and
Harry might notice it but I was still just part of the production team talent.

 
          
The
trouble is that if you mix with people like this, share space with them and
common purpose, the men you meet in the club or the pub or in the lending
library just don’t seem up to much. Even Clive, coming into a room, slight and
gay and bad-tempered- looking as he is, and the boring end of the business,
seems to suck all the vitality out of the space and take it for himself,
leaving everyone else feeling and looking vapid.

 
          
If
I went home alone from parties it was from lack of interest in any man present
- there was a whole new race about of slender, shaven-headed,
just-about-non-gay men in dark clothing, all laying tentative hands upon one’s
arm, with liquid, suggestive, cocaine- driven eyes - but who cared? They were
as likely to be as interested in a free breakfast as in free sex: a dildo would
be as provocative, and less given to complaint.

 
          
*                
*                
*

 
 
          
The
day proceeded: there was no lunch break: at one stage Harry threw coffee across
the room, complaining about its quality. Clive was in danger of rubbing Danish
pastry into the sound deck, and I pointed it out to him, and from his
expression got the feeling I would never be employed again by him - not that I
cared, I hated the film by this stage, a load of pretentious rubbish, and
anything he ever made would have the same loathsome quality, so why should I
ever want any job he had to offer? Harry laughed when I said as much: I tossed
my head and my hair (red and crinkly) fell out of its tough restraining
ponytail and Harry said ‘Wow!’; the scriptwriter banged upon the door and was refused
entry, the wardrobe woman pointed out that she had spent $100,000 dollars
unnecessarily, since I had abandoned the entire Versace sequence, and I asked
her to leave, since obviously she had only been hanging around using up our
valuable oxygen in order to make this stupid point - in a $30,000,000 film what
was $100,000 dollars - and she slammed out.

 
          
The
credits and titles people became hysterical and complained we had left them no
time, which we hadn’t: while we were midprovisional-dub the composer - they
always take things literally - who was rumoured to have OD’d turned up and wept
at what he heard, so we wished openly he had been left to die.

 
          
The
PR debacle was at least turned around: young Leo announced to the media
mid-morning that he was bisexual - people are always reassured by
classifications - and Olivia mid-afternoon that her lesbianism wasn’t a
permanent state: she’d just once been seduced by her English teacher at school,
and everyone who watched the sex scenes would see for themselves just how much
she truly, erotically, madly fancied Leo. A crisis about a double booking in
the preview theatre was narrowly averted, and by
midnight
Clive admitted the fine cut was ninety-five
per cent right and no-one would notice the missing five per cent except
he
himself, the only one with any taste, and declared the
picture locked.

 
          
I
emerged gasping into the fetid
Soho
air
with Harry, who asked if I had a bed he could sleep upon. He did not want to
face the glitter of his hotel. I thought this was a feeble reason but said okay.
He trailed after me to my peculiar residence, climbed my many flights of stairs
with a kind of dazed, dogged persistence, looked around my place, said, ‘Very
central,’ demanded whisky which I refused him, put his head upon my unshaken
pillow, pulled my matted duvet over him and fell sound asleep. The phone rang.
It was Felicity. She said she had tripped and sprained her ankle and it would
be her hip next. I said I would come over on the next available flight. I lay
on the sofa and slept. I did not attempt to join Harry in the bed. There would
be no end of trouble if I did. Women should not venture out of their league or
their hearts get broken. And I was just production team talent who happened to
have a bed which the director didn’t need a taxi to get to. And Clive was too
mean to provide a limo.

           
Not far from Mystic, not far from
Wakefield
, well protected from any traffic noise by
woods and hills, just out of
Connecticut
and into
Rhode Island
, stood the Golden Bowl Complex for Creative
Retirement.
Rhode Island
is a small dotted oblong on a map, one of the six states that compose
New England
, the smallest, prettiest,
most
crowded and (they say) most corrupt state of them all,
though who’s to judge a thing like that? It is the indigenous home of a breed
of russet feathered hens, the Rhode Island Red, now much appreciated by
fanciers the world over. It is crowded in upon, squashed, by
Connecticut
,
Massachusetts
and the
Atlantic Ocean
; it is lush with foliage: birches, poplars
and ginkos that turn gold in autumn, and mountain maples and ash, and hickories
that turn orange, and red oak and red maple, sassafras and dogwood that turn
scarlet. It is sprinkled with wild flowers in spring: ornithological rarities
and their watchers spend their summers here. It has sheltered beaches and rocky
coves, faded grandeurs, and a brooding, violent history of which an agreeable
present makes light. It is the home of the brave,
the better dead than red state
. In November, of course, it is much
like anywhere else, dripping and damp and anonymous. Better to turn the
attention inward, not out.
So thought Nurse Dawn, executive
nursing officer of the Golden Bowl Complex.

 
          
The
Golden Bowl is constructed much in the fashion of the former
Getty
Museum
outside
Los Angeles
; that is to say it is an inspired version
of a Roman villa, pillared and pooled, lilied and creepered, long and low, and
faced with a brilliant white stone which in
California
looks just fine but under soft
Rhode Island
skies can startle. The young and unkind
might say it glared rather than glowed: the elderly however valued its
brightness, and marvelled at the splendour in which they could finish their
days, and for this reason the local heritage groups had bitten back protest and
allowed its existence.

 
          
Even
as Sophia travelled to
Boston
on her sadly delayed visit to her grandmother, Nurse Dawn, together
with Dr Joseph Grepalli, specialist in the medical arts and Director of the
Golden Bowl, contemplated a bed rendered empty by the sudden death of its
previous occupant, Dr Geoffrey Rosebloom. The windows were open, for the
decorators were already at work; new white paint was being applied throughout
the suite - Dr Rosebloom had been a secret smoker, and the ceilings were
uncomfortably yellowed - and an agreeable classic pink-striped wallpaper pasted
up over the former mauve and cream flowers. So long as wallpapers are pale they
can be put up fresh layer upon old layer, without ever having to strip off the
original. The difficulty with strong colours is that if there’s any damp around
they tend to seep through to discolour the new. Only after about six layers
will the surface begin to bubble and the wall have to be stripped down to its
plaster, but that will happen on average only every five years or so. The pink
and white was only the second layer since the Golden Bowl had been opened
twenty-two years back. The occupant before Dr Rosebloom had been one hundred
and two years old, in good health and spirits to the end, and had also died suddenly
in the same bed. The mattress had been in good condition and management had not
considered it necessary to replace it at the time.

 
          
‘Two
sudden deaths in the same bed,’ said Dr
Grepalli,
‘is
too much.’ He was a genial and generous man. ‘This time round the mattress at
least must be replaced.’

 
          
‘You
can hardly blame the bed for the deaths,’ said Nurse Dawn, who pretended to be
genial and generous but was not. ‘Dr Rosebloom smoked - look at the state of
the ceiling: if he’d had more self-control we wouldn’t
be
having
to repaint - I daresay some respiratory trouble or other
triggered the infarction.’

           
‘Ah, Nurse Dawn,’ said Dr Grepalli,
affectionately, ‘you would like everyone to live for ever in perfect health,
behaving properly.’ ‘So I would,’ she said. ‘Why would God let some of us live
longer than others, if he didn’t want us to learn more in the extra time?’ In
her book self-improvement must be continuous, and no respite offered even to
the elderly.

 
          
The
Golden Bowl housed some sixty guests, known to themselves and others as Golden
Bowlers. All had had to be over seventy-five at the time they joined the
community, and still capable of congregate living. If you were, this augured
well for your longevity. The weak had been carried off by now; only the vital
and strong remained. The average age of death among Golden Bowlers was a ripe
ninety-six, thanks to the particular nature and character of the guests as
selected by Nurse Dawn. She had no actuarial training: she worked by instinct.
One look was enough. This one would last.
Welcome.
That one wouldn’t.
We are so sorry, we
have no spaces.

 
          
Death
was far from an everyday occurrence at the Golden Bowl, albeit one that was
inevitable. Guests moved, within the same building complex, from Congregate
Living (when you just didn’t want to be alone) to Assisted Living (when you
needed help with your stockings) to Continuing Care (when you needed help with
your eating) to Nursing Care (when you took to your bed) to, if you were
unlucky, Intensive Care (when you wanted to die but they didn’t let you).
Families were encouraged to hand over complete responsibility. Over-loving
relatives could be more damaging to an old person’s morale, more detrimental to
the Longevity Index, than those who were neglectful. One of Dr Grepalli’s most
successful lectures was on this particular subject. Just as a teacher tends to
dislike parents, and hold them responsible for the plight of the children, so
did Dr Grepalli mistrust relatives and their motives. The doctor was a leading
light in the field of senior care administration, appeared on TV from time to
time, and wrote articles in
The Senior
Citizen Monthly
which would be syndicated worldwide. Golden Bowlers admired
him greatly, and were proud of him. Or so Nurse Dawn assured him.

 
          
* * *

 
 
          
The
longest stay of any Golden Bowler had been twenty-two years: the shortest five
days, but that latter was a statistical anomaly, and therefore not used in any
averaging out. In its twenty-two years of existence only eight patients had ever
moved out before, as it were, moving on. The degree of life satisfaction at the
Golden Bowl was high, just inevitably short, though a great deal less short
than in similar institutions charging similar prices. Not that there were many
around like the Golden Bowl, where you could stay in one place through the
increasing stages of your decrepitude. It was customary for the elderly to be
wrenched out of familiar places and be moved on to more ‘suitable’
establishments, as the degree of their physical or mental incompetence lurched
from one stage to the next, and in the move lost friends, and often
possessions, as space itself closed in around them. At the Golden Bowl,
whatever your condition, you watched the seasons change in familiar trees and
skies, and made your peace with your maker in your own time.

 
          
Joseph
Grepalli and Nurse Dawn shivered a little in the chilly morning air that
dispersed the smell of paint, but were satisfied in their souls. Dr Rosebloom
had died suddenly in his sleep at the age of ninety-seven, not a centenarian,
but every year over ninety-seven helped ease the average up. He had not done
badly, even though he smoked.

 
          
The
mattress and armchair of the deceased - being perfectly clean - were to be
taken to be sold at the used furniture depository: it was remarkable, as Joseph
Grepalli remarked, how though a bed could escape the personality of the one who
slept in it, an armchair seemed to soak up personality and when its user died,
became limp and dismal.

 
          
‘Such
a romantic,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘I do so love that about you, Joseph.’ The
armchair looked perfectly good to her: it was in her interests to keep spending
to a minimum but Joseph had to be kept happy, strong in the knowledge of his
own sensitivity and goodness. New furniture, she agreed, would be bought at a
discount store that very day.

 
          
* * *

 
 
          
The
Golden Bowl had at its practised fingertips the art of providing Instant
Renewal of mind and artifacts to maximize peace of mind and profits too. To
this end policy was that no single room, suite, or full apartment should be
allowed to stay empty for longer than three days at most. But no sooner,
either: it took three days, and even Nurse Dawn agreed on this point, for the
spirit of the departed to stop hanging around, keeping the air shivery,
bringing bad judgement and bad luck. The waiting list was long; it might take
guests a month or so to wind up their affairs and move in, but they would pay
from the moment their accommodation fell available, ready and waiting. That way
the aura of death, the sense of absence caused by death, would be less likely
to endure. As with psychoanalysis, the fact of payment had a healing,
restoring function. It reduced the ineffable to the everyday.

 
          
The
bathroom cabinets had to be replaced; as well: Joseph had a superstition about
mirrors: supposing the new occupant looked in the mirror and saw the former
occupant looking out? Mirrors could be like that, maintained Joseph Grepalli.
They retained memory; they had their own point of view. Aged faces tended to
look alike in the end: one tough grey whisker much like another, but their
owners did not necessarily see it like this. Joseph allowed himself to be
fanciful: he himself was a Doctor of Literature; his father Dr Homer Grepalli,
the noted geriatric physician and psychoanalyst, had bequeathed him the place
and he had made himself an expert. Nurse Dawn was qualified in geriatric
psychiatry, which was all that the authorities required.

 
          
‘We
have twenty-five people on the waiting list
,
⁵
said Nurse Dawn, ‘but none of them truly satisfactory. Drop-down-deaders:
overweight or sociopathic: there is a Pulitzer winner, which is always good
for business, but she’s a smoker.’

 
          
Nurse
Dawn slipped between Joseph’s covers of a night: she was a sturdy, strong-jawed
woman of forty-two, with a big bosom and a dull-skinned face and small dark
bright button eyes. She looked better with clothes off than on. She
clip-clopped down the corridors by day on sensible heels, her broad beam
closely encased in blue or white linen, exhorting Golden Bowlers to further and
deeper self-knowledge.

 
          
‘I
trust your judgement, Nurse Dawn,
^’
said Dr Grepalli. For some reason
he felt uneasy, as if standing in front of the lobster tank at a fish
restaurant, choosing the one to die for his delight.

 
          
‘In
fact the whole
lot of them sound
troublesome and
unprincipled. Not one’s as easy as they used to be. Even the old have developed
an overweening sense of their own importance. They’ve caught it from the
young.’ By troublesome she meant picky about their food, or given to criticism
of the staff, or arguing about medication, or averse to group therapy, or
lacking in get-up-and-go, or worse, having too many relatives who’d died young.
All prospective Golden Bowlers had to provide, as well as good credit
references and a CV, a family history and personality profile built on a
questionnaire devised by Nurse Dawn herself.

 
          
Joseph
Grepalli was a bearish, amiable, charismatic man, not unlike, as Sophia King
was later to discover, Director Krassner. Inside the first Nurse Dawn
was the second, a truly skinny woman not even trying to get out,
preferring
a cup of sweet coffee and a Danish any day.

 
          
‘We
must spread the net,’ said Joseph Grepalli. ‘We must trawl deeper.’ The guests
called him Stephane, after Stephane Grappelli: those who feel helpless always
nickname those in charge: even the mildest of mockery helps.