Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (20 page)

           
Four months later Felicity felt ill
and was growing fat and had no idea why. Lois, noticing her changing shape, beat
her with her fists and told her the brutal facts of life, that is to say how
sex and procreation were linked. Felicity was a moral imbecile, Lois claimed,
dirty, disgusting and lewd.

 
          
‘If
what you say is true,’ said Felicity, ‘then Anton is the father.’

 
          
Then
there was indeed uproar. Anton denied responsibility, and seemed entertained by
the situation. Felicity was no better than she should be: he had seen her
creeping out of the house at night, in Lois’s beaver coat. God alone knew what
company she kept. She’d been with the servants too much and now behaved like
them. She’d got herself into trouble and was lying to get herself out of it.
Devious, sluttish and sly.

 
          
There
is no way Felicity is going to be believed. Lois throws her forcibly out of the
house, push-pulling her, driving her with the force of her rage. She is driven
by cab to the Society for the Care of Unmarried Mothers, or SCUM, in
Coram Street
in
Bloomsbury
, and there left upon the doorstep, as if
she were an abandoned baby and not an abandoned mother. There being nowhere
else to go Felicity sits down upon the steps to consider her lot in
life,
and by the end of the day is delivered to the care of
nuns who run a sanctuary for the mothers of illegitimate children. She will
work for her keep. Here Felicity stays through her pregnancy, expected to
remain inside the grounds to avoid embarrassment to others, praying three times
a day for God’s forgiveness, fed meagrely, coldly housed, and locked in at
night. The sanctuary is attached to a Convent: Felicity’s job is to scrub the
long tiled corridors, along which the clean and virtuous feet of the exalted
and the celibate so softly tread. She accepts the world’s version of her. This
is what she is fit for. Sometimes she thinks Anton will come and rescue her,
but mostly she doesn’t. She keeps the company of girls and women from twelve to
forty, all of whom, though pregnant, have failed to find a husband. Some are
simply bewildered, some traumatized by rape: some are street girls whose
abortions have failed. Some have been thrown out by their
families,
some never had them in the first place.

 
          
* * *

           
Felicity is one of those stunned by
fate. She is in a state of shock, and the boring, steady rhythms of the days,
the requirements of penitence, the orderly growing of the baby within her, give
her time to recover from all kinds of things from which she did not know she
needed to recover. The death of first mother, then father, the arrival of the
cruel stepmother in between; the sudden, shocking jolts of cruelty and spite
into a life once protected and serene, the understanding that God is not good -
all these things she was able to assimilate and come to terms with, in a short
five months. She cried a lot at first, and was expected to. Otherwise nothing
much happened.
(How to express the importance of
nothing happening
!
A
challenge to any
filmmaker.)
She did learn a thing or two.

 
          
She
saw that she might live among the helpless scrapings of humanity, but that
nature hadn’t given up on them, not one bit, or their bellies and breasts
wouldn’t be swelling so; only society had, so society was an ass. She learned
the more elaborate facts of life, and how she was hard done by: she was taught
how to make a living from selling sex. She discovered she was perceived by the
other girls as beautiful, stylish,
witty
and a cut
above the rest of them. This surprised but gratified her. They placed great
hope in her. They sent her in to deal with the nuns over the matter of no
Sunday supper, and won. It was easy. No one was as bad as Lois. Felicity was
almost glad to be where she was.

 
          
She
knew she would be obliged to hand the baby over for adoption. It called out to
her from the womb for approval and concern and she hardened her heart. She had
no choice. She thought perhaps she could see a lawyer: perhaps she could make
some claim on her father’s house, but how could she afford a lawyer? She had
seen the will in which everything had been left to Lois and Lucy, Arthur having
come across love letters to Sylvia
which
proved that
Felicity was not his child. How did you refute that?

 
          
Little
Lucy contrived to find out where Felicity was and got to see her, just the
once. The news from home, if you could call it home, gave Felicity no reason to
hope for any sudden change of heart from Lois, any regret, any self-reproach,
any
admittance of moral responsibility. The police had
turned up to take Anton away: there was a fraud charge outstanding back home in
Vienna
. He had represented himself as an art
dealer in connection with the theft of a painting by Klimpt: the police had
finally caught up with him. ‘What did Felicity say when you told her that?’ I
asked Lucy, all these decades after the event.

 
          
‘Just
that he should have gone to
Australia
while he could.’

 
          
‘And
that was all? She didn’t seem to hate him?’

 
          
‘Why
should she? She shouldn’t have gone into the garden with him that night. She
didn’t have the instincts of a good girl: she was born bad, my mother was right
about that. Innocence is no excuse. After Felicity went away Anton left as
well; my mother was half-mad. It was probably she who betrayed him to the
police.’ I said that even if you looked at Felicity as fifteen-year-old
jailbait she was only doing to Lois what Lois had done to Sylvia, and serve her
right. But surely she agreed Felicity was very harshly punished?

 
          
‘I
expect it made things easier for Felicity,’ was all Lucy said, ‘when it came to
giving the baby away. Knowing the father was a criminal.’ She didn’t ask me
about Alison’s fate and I didn’t tell her. Talk of Alzheimer’s in the presence
of the old is always tactless.

 
          
‘And
a rapist,’ I said. She looked blank, but as if the other side of blankness she
didn’t like me very much at all.

 
          
‘Adoption
was the best thing,’ said Lucy, firmly. She stood up to leave. The interview
was ended. If I were Phyllis Calvert in
The
Man in Grey
she would certainly throw the windows wide and let the storm
get me.

 
          
It
was at this point that I asked her to reconsider her decision not to be in
touch with Felicity and she refused, but with a sudden surfacing of the charm
and wit which left me liking her. She too had had a lot to put up with. Who
hasn’t?

 
          
At
three
o’clock
on the
afternoon of 3 January Jack had a telephone call from his sister-in-law, Joy.
She was distraught. On three occasions recently she had called Charlie on his
mobile phone and found it switched off. She had on each occasion put on her
snowshoes and gone over to the Guest House, the door of which had been opened
by yet another new female face who did not seem to understand what Joy was
talking about when she asked where Charlie was. English-speaking reinforcements
were called for from within the ranks of Charlie’s ever-growing family.
Obviously, Joy protested to Jack, contracts of employment meant nothing to
these newcomers: the female shrug when finally the question was translated had
suggested men did what they wanted when they wanted and it was no use
complaining. Worse, said Joy, the Mercedes was not in the garage. Hadn’t their
agreement been that Jack would give her warning when he used Charlie’s
services?

 
          
Jack
decided at that moment, as Joy’s voice shrieked over the snowy fields, and he
was able to hear her both over the telephone and from her house as well, that
it was no use trying to replace Francine. He wished he had never shifted house
to here: he was bored, he was lonely,
he
was being
punished for having cheated Felicity out of $200,000.

 
          
He
was taking Prozac. He was at his best in the barbecue season, and this was not
it. This was a lonely and stand-offish neck of the woods: the local women-alone
had been in to look him over as a potential man in their lives, but since he
did not suit them, too noisy and brash, perhaps, for the quiet, genteel
landscape, the even tenor of their lives, they’d left him alone and failed to
ask him over. Sociability alone was not enough. Former friends, the couples he
and Francine had one way or another acquired, came to visit once or twice to
see if he was okay, said how splendid to be living next to family, and disappeared
from his life. He had compounded the misfortune of bereavement - who wanted to
be reminded that eventually it would happen to them - by the sin of
moving away
, always seen as a form of
disloyalty. He was doomed to wither into old age with Joy tormenting him and
only Charlie and his growing household to interest him. He envied the lot of
the toothless old men of the Balkans, so frequently seen on CNN, lumped
together with the women and children while the young men went off to have fun
with guns, but at least included as
family
,
and still battling it out with the old women as to who was in charge. He could
have talked about this to Francine but Joy did not even have CNN, she wasn’t
sufficiently interested in the outside world. Joy seemed as lonely and
isolated as he was, but she didn’t notice, she had the gift of making a lot of
noise, perhaps this was why. He did his best to infuse her lonely house with
noise and energy, but he could not keep it up for long, single-handed. Felicity
had been wise to move the few miles into
Rhode Island
: life seemed livelier there. The nearer the
ocean the better perhaps: more happened. Who knew what ships, enemy or friend,
might not appear any moment, over the horizon.
The flash of a
sail, the drift of a smoke stack.
You had to keep your eyes skinned,
whatever century you lived in.

 
          
‘I
thought you had a rest every afternoon,’ he said.

 
          
‘I
used to,’ Joy snapped. ‘Not any more. Someone told me that it was because of my
afternoon nap that I sleep so badly at night. When you get to our age it’s
important to change the pattern of your days. I thought I might drive over to
visit Miss Felicity. Now this! No chauffeur! What else does one keep a
chauffeur for, but to be spontaneous?’

 
          
Prozac,
or something, or the need for event, had made Jack overconfident. He told Joy
that every afternoon Charlie drove William Johnson to the Golden Bowl to see
Felicity.

           
They’re courting,’ he said. ‘Aren’t
you glad for your friend?’

 
          
There
was a short silence from the other end, and then: ‘Not that con artist she met
at the funeral?’

 
          
‘That’s
him,’ said Jack. ‘Charlie says he seems okay.’

 
          
‘Charlie
would say that,’ said Joy. ‘He’s a con artist too. Look how the devil exploits
us! For all I know he’s running a whorehouse from above my garage. William
Johnson! Obviously a false name: it’s too ordinary not to be. He’s decades
younger than she is: he’s just after her money. You should see the dump he
lives in.’

 
          
‘She
seems to like him,’ said Jack.

 
          
‘If
you mean what I think you mean,’ said Joy, ‘that is revolting. People of that
age have no business having sex. It’s too upsetting for those around. If
Felicity has a toy boy then she’s being taken for a ride. It’s shaming,
embarrassing and humiliating. Next thing is he’ll marry her and run off with
all her money.’

 
          
‘I
guess seventy-two seems quite old to be a toy boy,’ said Jack mildly. ‘And we
have no idea if they’re having sex.’

 
          
‘It’s
Felicity so of course she’s having sex. Exon hadn’t been dead a month but she
was having it off with some antique dealer who came to the door. He must have
been some kind of pervert or else half-blind. He went off with the oak dresser,
and to all accounts she got a good price for it so he must have been halfwitted
as well. Whose side are you on anyway?’ yelled Joy, and Jack watched a deer
which had come cautiously to where woods met the fields, but now took sudden
flight and was gone. Joy said she was calling the Golden Bowl and would not
have her limo,
her
limo, dammit, used
for assignations with unsuitable men by an old lady who had lost her marbles.

 
          
‘What
do we say when they find out?’ asked Felicity. She lay naked in the bed with
William. They touched, her left flank of familiar flesh stretched up against
his right unfamiliar flank, but becoming more accustomed by the day, looking up
at the ceiling, occasionally at each other. They missed the anonymity of the
night, both agreed. Day was all very well until the fourth decade, then the
dimmer the light the better. Close the curtains as you wished
,
daylight was cunning and seeped in round the edges of the window frame. To lie
together in the dark, in the actual night, as other people did, was what both
wanted. But that meant commitment, and declaration to the outside world, and
neither was quite ready for that, though neither was quite sure why. And so far
they simply lay in the bed, because that made talking easier. His hand
sometimes strayed to her breast, to find out more about it, and for once she
wished she had her former body back: it was as if now the power of her will was
obliged to sustain her physical existence and keep proving it: whereas once the
body had run off so boldly with the self, taking over: the firm bosom, the
bouncy flesh, flying ahead of the will, having to be restrained.

 
          
It
was pleasurable, it was companionable,
it
was even
exciting: the nerves still ran from the nipple to everywhere, but that
excitement was not what this was about. It might, she thought, be about true
love, something she had heard speak of, and pretended to experience, but
perhaps never had. Something to undo the time she preferred not to think about,
the first rough hands ever on her reluctant, obedient, unknowing breast.
Contemporary wisdom, which to someone of Felicity’s age and experience seemed
mere folly, maintained that you could never recover sexually or emotionally
from such a beginning as hers. But far worse things had happened after, and
indeed before - how could you compare the death of first mother, then father -
the father who had betrayed you twice, first by bringing the likes of Lois into
the house, next by failing to stay alive and abandoning you to her cruelties
altogether - than that gross hour on a moonlight night in a summerhouse in the
garden.
Anton, with his questing, searching, bullying member,
tearing into your surprised self.
The voice used to groom and entice,
soft lies going ahead, seductive messengers of the evil that followed. The
baby, tearing its way out of your equally surprised self, sheets a mass of
blood to the annoyance of nuns. But you recovered. You forgot. You took good
care to forget: you forgot everything you could. You got on with what was left
of your life, made something of it, just to show your defiance. You would not
be defeated.

 
          
‘Is
something the matter?’ he asked.

 
          
‘I
was remembering things it’s better to forget,’ she said.

 
          
‘We
all have those,’ he said. Her hand, in return for his on her breast, strayed
delicately down to his penis. It lay confidently, and as if about to swell into
life, but not quite yet.

 
          
‘I
can see I’ll have to tell you the truth,’ he apologized. ‘Or it’s never going
to work. Mostly with women it thrives on lies. Not this time.’ She liked being
called
a woman
, even though it
suggested a past rich in sexual event. They were both too
old,
surely, to resent what went before. Anything pursued with energy seemed in
retrospect to be enviable and desirable.

 
          
‘Tomorrow
we’re going out with Charlie,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’ He
wouldn’t say what. It was a surprise. It might turn her off him for ever, but
it might not. But she had to know. Someone else would tell her if he didn’t.
Whatever it was he didn’t seem to be taking it altogether seriously. He leaned
over her, his old eyes looking into her yet older ones, into a mirror which
threw back only pleasant sights, livened by the unexpected.

 
          
What,
what? He wouldn’t say. She drummed impatiently with her heels upon the bed but
got a sharp pain in her thigh so had to stop. What was there to know about
people that would put you off them but wasn’t immediately apparent? She knew
where he lived. Perhaps there was another woman? But she didn’t think so.
Something so fundamental he would have told her, or she would have sensed. She
didn’t of course know what he did when he wasn’t with her, and he had all the
morning to do it
in,
and evenings too. She had assumed
that like her, being retired, he did nothing: that is to say he pottered about,
while the few things there were to do expanded to take up the time available to
do them in, and the effort of doing them became more and more oppressive. If he
did something, whatever it was didn’t make him any money: so much was apparent.
‘Confessionals!’ she said. ‘I suppose you want mine.’

 
          
She’d
let it out little by little, or at any rate what she chose to remember. The
girl she’d once been was no longer her, in any case. She’d shed too many skins,
grown too many new nerve endings since she began. She didn’t feel she was
cheating. She’d begun with the marriage to Jerry, Tommy’s father, the man who’d
neglected to tell her about his wife, but had at least got her across the
Atlantic
, a new life, and a
US
passport for herself and her unborn
daughter Angel.

 
          
*                                 
*                           
*

 
 
          
She’d
spoken of her time in
Savannah
thereafter, when the marriage had collapsed. An entertainer, was how
she’d put it.
Singer, dancer and occasional good-time girl on
the finest riverboat ever,
fin-de-siecle
style.
The slow, shiny water beneath the hull, timeless, the smell of
hot oil,
the
private cabins, red plush and gold
fitments: whatever changed through the decades? Well, some things did. She’d
had the best of it, she thought: not much fun now the whisky had turned into
sparkling water and even cabins dedicated to vice were non-smoking. But then it
was cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women and she was one of the women.
They drive you crazy, they drive you insane.
No-one minds a woman with a past so long as that past was wild for wildness’
sake, and not for money. If now she became vague on certain points,
who
cared any more? Mostly as women got older what they
regretted was what they’d never done, not what they did. She told William
Johnson, fairly and squarely, of the circumstances in which she’d married one
of her patrons, clients,
customers
, call them what you
like, who adored her English accent. He wanted his domestic affairs taken care
of. He had an airline to build. For a year he’d taken her to his grand house
with the portraits of his forebears on the walls, outside that fringed, damp
and mossy town, Savannah, and to his four-poster bed, and just have her lie
there while he listened to her speak. He proposed to her one day as they walked
in the town, a hot sun slanting down between pale cooling fringes of Spanish
moss. How she had been too tired to say no.
Yes
is easy,
no
takes energy: and it was
so hot. How she’d married him in romantic white, to whispers behind elegant
fingers, male and female, how she’d hosted his expensive parties, and run his
elegant house, and helped him buy paintings - she had always had an eye for art
- Edward Hoppers and Mary Cassatts. How the marriage had not been consummated.
How for a while she had been glad of that, pleased to have her body to herself
for a while. But then she began to chafe and feel trapped and full of
complaints. You think you can sell yourself and you can for a while, a day or a
night or a week is nothing, but years? Comfort and security are less important
the more you have of them. He was gay, of course, nothing unusual in this closet
city of gay, pallid, beautiful men, whispering and conspiring as did their
wives - but she’d more or less known that from the beginning. At least he’d
tried, as did so many of his generation. If the expression of homosexual love,
if doing what the desires of your body dictated, was a criminal act, of course
you would try to be heterosexual, and marry, and if that failed, secretly seek
out the company of others like you, and in the end relish the secrecy: it would
be what turned you on. How could she resent it? Five years on she asked him for
a divorce and he sighed and gave her one.