Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (21 page)

 
          
‘Five
years without sex?’ asked William, horrified.

 
          
‘Of
course not,’ she said, but did not elaborate other than to say: ‘I never stole
other women’s husbands, or not if I could help it. Most grand
Savannah
marriages were shams, anyway. At parties
you’d see the men gathering together, whispering, smiling, making assignations,
while the women made bright Southern conversation, all charm and trills, and
honey this and honey that, but to no purpose whatsoever.’

 
          
In
the end she’d left. You wait and wait for something to happen, but in the end
you have to stir yourself to make it happen, or nothing ever does.

 
          
‘I
guess that’s where the Utrillo came from,’ said William. ‘Part of a divorce
deal.’ Sometimes she thought he was overly interested in the Utrillo, but she
could see it would bother people not accustomed to it, just sitting on the
wall, using up $2,000,000 or so to no apparent purpose. She’d told them at the
Golden Bowl it was a print. They didn’t have the knowledge or interest to look
at it closely, or know what they were looking for if they did.

 
          
But
what activity of William Johnson’s was it of which she might not approve?

 
          
Something that couldn’t be talked about but had to be seen?
Perhaps he helped out at a funeral parlour? Laid out corpses? She could think
of nothing else. She might ask Dr Bronstein over supper if he had any ideas,
only it would mean shouting, and was too elaborate a matter to be imparted
briefly. And Nurse Dawn would turn up before she was halfway through. Nurse
Dawn need not worry: Felicity’s relationship with Dr Brontstein was
circumscribed by his deafness. He spoke and Felicity listened, perforce. This
seemed to suit him well enough. He could have switched on what he called his
ear machine, but never did, even though it was one of the more expensive
kind
and probably worked. His deafness had become a metaphor
for an ongoing state of affairs - all his life he had used women as witness to
the life, not a true participant in that life - and was the sort of aural fix -
in the same way as TV ads have visual fixes - which happened when you got old
and began to lose your marbles, and used your incapacity to finally get your
way without argument. If a man could not hear you, you could hardly demand that
he listened to what you had to say. She wondered what kind of life Mrs
Bronstein had lived, what troubles she had had to put up with, and if she,
Felicity, could ever end up lying naked next to the good Doctor, and decided,
no, that was impossible. It was a particular man she wanted: this man, William
Johnson, and whatever he did she could not imagine that it would cloud their
relationship. ‘You’re drifting off,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking of another man,
I can tell.’ She laughed and said she was beyond that, she was thinking about
what she would wear tomorrow.

 
          
There
came a tapping on the door. It was Nurse Dawn, an hour early with her sweet,
stern call.

 
          
‘Miss
Felicity, Miss Felicity!’ Felicity was agitated when anyone called her that.
You could never quite trust the motives of the one who used it. It sounded good
in the mouths of friends, derisory in the mouths of enemies. Today Nurse Dawn
sounded smarmy and hoping to please. When Sophia called her Miss Felicity it
was at least with a certain irony, albeit with that faint air of disdain with
which the young treated the old: affectionate but distancing. When Joy did it,
it was to keep her in her place, to mock her Southern past and suggest that she
was unduly pernickety and had to be humoured, but it was done mostly with
affection. When Dr Grepalli used it, it was an attempt to infantilize her.
Nurse Dawn’s
Miss Felicity
suggested
plot, and outrage, and machinations to beware of. If Nurse Dawn had her way Felicity
would be sent off to the West Wing as an incompetent. William lay quiet under
the bedclothes. They were like schoolchildren, discovered.

 
          
‘What
is it, Nurse Dawn? I’m resting.’ How easily lies came, after a lifetime’s
practice. How convincing they sounded.

 
          
‘Could
I come in? The workmen report a leak in the roof. I need to take a look.’

 
          
‘It
will have to wait, Nurse Dawn,’ said Felicity, but Nurse Dawn had used her
passkey and was already in the room. Felicity drew the sheets to her chin, but
William’s clothes were folded over the back of the chair and his shoes were on
the carpet.

 
          
‘Whose
shoes are those?’ asked Nurse Dawn. ‘They can only fit a man’s foot.’

 
          
William
flung back the bedclothes and sat up. Nurse Dawn gave a little shriek but did not
flee.

 
          
‘Miss
Moore is free, white and over twenty-one,’ he said, ‘and that’s not a racist
remark.’

 
          
‘Be
so good as to cover
yourself
up,’ said Nurse Dawn
sourly. ‘You haven’t checked in as a guest of Miss Moore, you are trespassing
on institution property for the purpose of harassing one of our residents and I
must ask you to leave. We can talk about this later when we’re calmer.’ Her
strong face, usually pallidly opaque, as if the effort of self-righteousness
both drained
it and toughened it, was flushed and hot.

 
          
‘I
am perfectly calm,’ said Felicity, whose colour had changed not at all. ‘And
this is dreadfully vulgar. I am not a child to be told what I can and cannot
do.’

 
          
‘There
is not so much difference,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘Once you’re in your second
childhood you have to be looked after for your own good.’

 
          
‘If
you’d just go,’ said William, ‘I could get dressed.’ Felicity quite admired his
physique: the hairs on his chest were white and wiry, and the ribs showed
through pale, thin skin, but his shoulders were broad and still well muscled.
She could see she might be biased in his favour, from the distaste with which
Nurse Dawn regarded him. ‘I am a trained nurse,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘and used to
old men in the nude. I doubt you could show me much that could shock me.’

 
          
But
she left the room, all the same. William dressed. They heard Charlie’s limo
arrive outside.

 
          
‘That’s
a really poisonous woman,’ said William.

 
          
‘She
didn’t seem to like you much,’ agreed Felicity.

 
          
‘We’ll
have to get married,’ said William.
‘If we’re going to go on
meeting.
Otherwise there’ll be endless trouble. What do you say?’

 
          
Miss
Felicity, who had no years to waste, let alone days, opened her mouth to say
yes, of course, but he put his finger on her lips, and told her to think about
it and say nothing until the next evening, by which time she might want to
change her mind. ‘You have so much to offer and I have so little,’ he said, and
she was inordinately flattered, but then a memory came to her out of nowhere,
of the particular wheedling note in a particular voice.
Please
,
please
,
darling, let me. You promised.
Whoever
said that? Yes, out in the garden under the moon in the snow.
The soft brown warmth of her coat, Lois’s coat.
Anton so shaggy and heavy in his raccoon, once he had abandoned
talking.

 
          
Nurse
Dawn went straight to Dr Grepalli.

 
          
‘She
had a man in her bed.’

 
          
‘I
often have a woman in mine
,
⁵
he said.
‘But not this afternoon.’
‘That’s because I had a very
distressing phone call from her friend,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘She is very
concerned. Our Miss Felicity is being taken advantage of by a known criminal, a
con man and a gambler. This can be very dangerous for the Golden Bowl’s
reputation.’

 
          
It
was true enough: one of the unspoken promises to the relatives of those
interred in the Golden Bowl was that old men would be saved from the
machinations of pretty young nurses who were after their fortunes, and old
women likewise from gigolos. Those who, indecently enamoured, marry late in
life, tend to remake their wills so that the money ends up outside the family
that has cared for them so long, and sacrificed so much time and energy on
their behalf. It is the revenge of the grateful.
As William
Johnson once remarked to Felicity, attributing the words to that other, eighteenth-century,
Johnson, the learned doctor and great wit.
‘No good deed but goes
unpunished.’

 
          
‘Oh
dear,’ said Dr Grepalli.
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
So Miss Felicity is still an attractive woman, in spite of her age, or indeed
because of it. I suppose the relationship couldn’t be genuine?’ ‘Don’t be
absurd,’ said Nurse Dawn, and gave up, at least for the time being. Dr Grepalli
was not going to take her seriously. In her experience, the relationship
between men and women was seldom genuine. It was, for the most part, a form of
trade. Your body for my money: you fill my bed, I’ll take you to the party: you
make the will, I’ll cook for you, clean for you, go to your funeral: I’ll act
like your father, if you’ll be a better mother, whatever. Very little was
freely, genuinely offered at the best of times.

 
          
Some
men, she knew, were genuinely attracted to old women, just as some were
genuinely attracted to children, but both were equal perversity, other than
that there was less time available for those abused in their later years to
suffer as a result. Strange how you could sleep with men and be so intimate
with them and still know so little about them: how you tended to believe that
their interest in you was the outer limits of their desire. The wives and lovers
of paedophiles and rapists often have no idea what goes on behind their backs.

 
          
It
wouldn’t do, Nurse Dawn warned herself, to think that old people’s homes were
like children’s homes, and too often attracted as staff those whose interest in
the inmates was unhealthy, being either sadistic or erotic, or both. But if
something gave pleasure, did the motives of those who gave it matter? If a bomb
falls on you, does it make any difference whether it was dispatched in the
genuine interests of world peace or of terrorism? She, Nurse Dawn, placed her
stiletto heel in the small of Dr Grepalli’s back in the interests of promotion,
and an easy life, not because she was genuinely thrilled by so doing, but who
was to say that the happiness of the greatest number was not thereby better
served? His smile within the Golden Bowl kept everyone cheerful, and out of the
West Wing, whatever it was that made Dr Grepalli’s eyes glitter and the corners
of his mouth stretch. But what was the point of talking about these things? Dr
Grepalli dismissed her fears because he didn’t want trouble: if he didn’t look
the problem would go away. Nurse Dawn knew that it would not. There was trouble
ahead.

 
          
‘I’m
losing my touch,’ was all she said, dropping the subject. ‘I made a mistake
accepting the woman, and have to accept it. I should have taken the Pulitzer
Prize winner, even if she did smoke.

           
The fact is, even leaving aside the
lover,
Felicity Moore has trouble growing old gracefully.
She has too many visitors: she brings in the outside world.’

 
          
‘We’re
not a closed community,’ said Dr Grepalli, gently reproachful. He was locking
the door. Nurse Dawn took off her jacket and then her blouse.

 
          
‘She
stirs up the other guests. Now Dr Bronstein has someone to listen to him he
gets overexcited and that makes him incontinent. I don’t want the leather
chairs in the Library soaked. It might be time to get him into the West Wing.
Old Clara Craft has taken to eavesdropping. She hides behind columns and acts
like a madwoman.’

 
          
‘Wasn’t
she a journalist?’ asked Dr Grepalli. ‘The outer and visible
form
of an inward and spiritual state, more apparent as the inhibitions are
loosened with age.’

 
          
‘That’s
as may be,’ said Nurse Dawn, now in suspender belt, black stockings and scarlet
high heels. ‘All I’m saying is that if Felicity Moore could be persuaded to
leave the Golden Bowl it would be to everyone’s advantage.’

 
          
‘Except
to our overall statistics,’ said Dr Grepalli, ‘and it would upset the Board.
They would see it as a failure. Look at it like this. You and 1 have our
pleasures; the old so seldom do. Why grudge them to others? Be generous with
them as you are with me.’

 
          
He
lay naked on the sofa: she bent her head over him and he stroked her soft, dull
hair. She took away his power, for which he was grateful. Responsibility
weighed heavily upon him. She felt her power over him, and that released her,
if only temporarily, from the nagging sense of her lack of it.

 
          
That
evening Miss Felicity called her granddaughter Sophia in
London
’s
Soho
. ‘It’s
two in the morning, Gran,’ complained Sophia. ‘I wish you’d work it out.’

 
          
‘It’s
the only time you’re ever home. How are you ever going to get married if you
have no time for love?’

 
          
‘There’s
always sex beneath the editing desk,’ said Sophia, who was working for Harry
Krassner again. Clive had been brought in as executive producer on
Hope
Against
Hope
,
which was still giving trouble. Astra Barnes was suing the studio: to satisfy
the lawyers a known director had to be brought in to redo the work already satisfactorily
accomplished by Sophia. Clive had brought Harry over from LA, and he was now in
Sophia’s bed again.

 
          
‘It’s
fate,’ Harry Krassner had said.

 
          
‘No
it’s not,’ said Sophia. ‘It’s Clive. It’s in case I start suing as well. He
thinks you’ll keep me busy.’

 
          
‘Or
make you happy,’ said Harry Krassner. ‘You English are so cynical. You have no
soul.’

 
          
‘I
expect Holly has more,’ said Sophia, irked. ‘Why don’t you go back to
her.
’ Then she went to the hairdresser and had six inches of
hair cut off, to punish herself for the remark. She could see she was getting
possessive. She made a scene at the salon, too, seeing her beautiful hair on
the ground, bursting into tears and snarling at the stylist and saying he’d
taken off too much. It was completely out of character.
And
then having to apologize.
After all that Harry Krassner didn’t even
notice that she’d had it cut.

 
          
‘I
thought I’d better tell you,’ said Felicity, ‘I’m in love.’

 
          
‘Is
it reciprocated?’ asked Sophia cautiously, trying to get the measure of the
statement.

 
          
‘I
think so,’ said Felicity. ‘He’s asked me to marry him.’

 
          
There
was an expensive silence from Sophia’s end. Then: ‘I can come over at the end
of the week,’ she said. She would miss five precious days of Krassner in her
bed, but it would have to be done. She would not alter her
behaviour,
abandon her family duty, for any mere man. That way madness lay. She could do
it for a film, but not for herself.