Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (25 page)

 
          
And
now she was with William, wasn’t she? This was what she’d always wanted, always
trusted would happen: she’d never quite given up. She loved him. He wanted to
marry her. This was his pre-nuptial confession. She had yet to make hers to
him.

 
          
So
he was a gambling man: was that so terrible? It might be if you were a young woman
with children dependent on a gambling man for your comforts. But now both were
free, surely, to entertain themselves as best they could? It was all there was
left to do, at the close of life. And who cared about the money?

 
          
Felicity
had a momentary twinge of guilt about Dr Bronstein. Of course he couldn’t place
Kosovo on the map. Who could? It’s not as if it was a place where academics
gather together.
Reykjavik
in
Iceland
he would know about, a great conference centre at least in the summer
months, volcanoes for side shows, and he would even be able to spell it, but
they wouldn’t ask him about
Reykjavik
. It was one question suit all, just as cheap clothes came One Size Fits
All. Kosovo was the upgrading on
Kuwait
. And Dr Bronstein might so hate Clinton as
to refuse to name him, unaware of the dire consequences of so doing, of being
declared incompetent, and all because she, Felicity, had failed to give him
proper warning. He might very well get the year wrong: the young, for whom time
passed slowly, never realized how easy it was to misremember the exact year you
were in, in sheer amazement at the number since you began: and it was the brisk
and sensible young who did the testing and sorting of those who could still
manage, and those who couldn’t.

 
          
‘It’s
like climbing mountains,’ William was saying. ‘It’s rolling with destiny.’

 
          
‘Or
casting the
I Ching
,’ said Felicity,
forgetting all about Dr Bronstein.
‘Discovering the pattern
of the times.’

 
          
‘We’ll
make a gambler of you yet,’ he said, and turned back to the table. The seas had
closed over the complainant: the urgency of the game was picked up as if it had
never been lost. William’s hand was steady on the dice. He threw a double
three. Everyone seemed to like that and cheered, and she could feel him glow
and could not resent it.

 
          
Presently
Felicity began to feel bored. Whether William was winning or losing she could
not be sure. He flung tokens in the table one side of a line or another:
croupiers raked them in. From time to time he fetched others in. If you didn’t
understand they barked at you, asked what you’d meant. She’d never been to
school: presumably this was what it was like. Her father had wanted her
educated at home, which meant she had educated herself.
Though
he’d allowed her to go to ballet lessons.
White tutus
and points.

           
She remembered her mother teaching
her to read and write. After that there had been Lois, and Lois’s baby - what
was the baby’s name? She couldn’t remember even that.
And
through the haze of the brown silk net, more things to remember.
Uncle
something, with the heavy jaw, who had given her history lessons, and been all
charm, like William, until one day he wasn’t: everything held together, by the
memory of once good times which yet might come again, so suddenly shattered.
And after that, the baby, and a different life.

 
          
Why
did she remember all this now? She had worked so hard at forgetting. She had
told Sophia about the baby. She should not have done it. It stirred up too much
stuff better forgotten. If you dwelt on the past it gave you no time to live in
the present. And then there’d been Angel, who’d run away to
Europe
, got married, gone mad, produced Sophia,
and died. Of course she didn’t want to think of the past. Who would? Bury it
with the noise of the present: that’s why she had always got on with Joy, who
understood the importance of moving in a cloud of shimmering sound waves, even
if she couldn’t hear the sound itself.

 
          
Stocky
girls with plump bosoms, short skirts and massive thighs moved round the tables
carrying trays of cold drinks. Challenging fate is a thirsty business. Their
bare arms were bulky and sweaty: they could never stop: the trays were heavy:
the drinks were long and free, and were exchanged for tips. William had gone to
time and trouble saving five dollars on the way here, picking between gas
stations; now he paid out an unnecessary ten. No Vegas showgirls these, with
legs up to their navels, the pick of all
America
, albeit hard-drug skinny - these were local
girls for local tastes. Once in
Savannah
she’d been just such a girl, supporting
Tommy, though he was none of her own. You did what you could, sold what you
had. She’d always been the girl behind the bar, never the one in the chorus
line, high kicking; the one who got propositioned, not the one who got red
roses. In those days she’d blamed her legs. Not long enough. Ballet lessons
when small had overdeveloped her calf muscles, she’d always suspected. Buckley
had called them English legs, and someone, before Buckley rescued her and
turned her back into the lady she was born to be, had once told her fat legs
meant good in bed, and that was why she was so popular. She thought it was more
to do with the fact that she was nicely spoken and smiled a lot and handled the
customers with tact and politeness, where most of the other girls were tough
and brassy and looked as if they’d give you a social disease, if it were left
up to them. Age had
slimmed
her legs down, of course:
these days they were as skinny as you could wish. Practically stick-like. Some
things, not many, got better with the passage of the years.

 
          
William’s
eyes didn’t follow the girls; she was glad of that. They moved among men who
had their minds on more subtle excitements than sex. She failed to attract his
attention, shrugged, and went to play the slots. If others could work out what
to do, so could she. She turned fifty dollars into quarters, found a vacant
seat flanked by two women so large they overflowed their
seats
- which was
why it was vacant, no doubt, but she didn’t mind - and fed
them into the slot. Feed, press the button,
watch
the
next spin. Wait, feed again. She could make no sense of what was going on, but
the machine knew when it had won and when it hadn’t. When she won it disgorged
coins, and her neighbours, alerted by the clatter, looked at her and smiled,
happy for her. That was nice. When the machine hadn’t won, it stayed silent.
That was all. You could trust a machine to do something as simple as that. But
quite what constituted winning was beyond her. You went into a trance; what
brought you back to reality at intervals was a sense of triumph. Only
eventually did she realize what everyone else around seemed to have been born
knowing, that the lines which went through the middle, above or underneath the
symbols when the drum stopped rolling represented success or failure.
The payline.
In the middle was best.

 
          
Gamblers
believed money was for spending, not for saving; they were generous, not
envious; they were the salt of the earth: thus they defied fate, bent it to their
will. They shared common wisdom: she could feel it emanate down the row, even
from her fleshy neighbours with their scanty hair, double chins and hopeless
bodies. When she had over $150 back she stopped.
So easy.
She filled the bucket provided by the Casino to hold her
winnings,
changed it at a booth, and put $150.50 back in her purse. She went back to
William.

 
          
‘I
won,’ she said. Three hundred per cent profit.
Beginner’s
luck.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said. ‘From now on in
you’re a lucky person
.’

 
          
He
stopped too: $7,500 in profit.
In counters.

 
          
‘The
art,’ he said, ‘
is knowing
when to stop.’

 
          
‘It’s
now,’ she said, so they both did.

 
          
Valerie
Boheimer of Abbey Inquiries, Private Investigators,
Hartford
, equivalent of
London
’s Aardvark Detectives, reported back to Joy
at the end of the week. Joy had had to fork out $1,000 in advance, and further
sums would be payable until the investigation of William Johnson was complete.

 
          
‘What
I do for my friends!’ shrieked Joy to Jack. ‘Do you think that English girl
will pay?’

 
          
‘Depends
what this Valerie finds out,’ said Jack. He was feeling more cheerful, and
becoming accustomed to the noise Joy made. She had been remarkably good about
Charlie: hadn’t sacked him for running around behind her back, using her gas
without a by-your-leave and inciting Felicity to madness and keeping it secret.
Joy balked at making ten living creatures homeless, which would have happened
had she let Charlie go: the ten including various women, four wideeyed
children, and what was more important, two dogs and one cat which had just had
kittens. If the humans went Joy would have felt obliged to take in the animals.
Francine would have fired Charlie on the spot and had the animals put down. No
messing.

 
          
Yet
Francine, Joy’s deceased sister, Jack’s deceased wife, still seemed to live
among them, to trot to and fro between Windspit and Passmore as they did. If
you listened you could almost hear her soft footsteps in the early morning
mists. Francine had never liked animals; she had an asthmatic reaction to cats
and an aversion to dog hairs on her clothes. She had been as quiet as her sister
was noisy, padding cat-like about the house - maybe it was that she wanted no
feline competition. It was not Joy’s fault that Francine had developed cancer.
Joy didn’t believe the nonsense about it being the disease of unspoken grief:
of faulty genes more like it, which Joy hoped
to
God
she didn’t share.

 
          
Jack
had the builders in to Passmore, as Francine would have wanted. Francine liked
everything to be state-of-the-art and spotless, and Jack, after forty years of
top-of-the-range car dealership - Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar, Saab - could afford
it. Indeed, he felt obliged to provide it, even though Francine was underground
and not actually living in the house, or only in spirit. Joy, who had always
been obliged to live more modestly than her sister, could never understand why
Francine, who specialized in moral disapproval, and wouldn’t let a man smoke
or drink spirits or swear in the house, had ended up with wealthier husbands
than she, Joy, had ever managed to acquire. There was a certain breed of
moneymaking men around, it seemed, who needed their wives to look daggers and
keep them on the straight and narrow. They didn’t want fun. In the same way,
she noticed, very good-looking men often had the plainest, dullest wives. But
the very beautiful women often had fat and ugly husbands, so she supposed it
kept the balance right. Except those man were usually wealthy, and the wives
not. Perhaps the female capacity for moral disapproval served as an equivalent
currency.

 
          
Be
that as it may, Felicity, who had married Exon to be disapproved of, so far as
Joy could see, had spent too much time looking in mirrors and buying clothes to
have looked after Passmore properly, and now Jack was left to put up with the
consequences. Felicity had simply not noticed that paint had chipped, that
bathroom sealant had gone mouldy, that there were squirrels and worse under the
roof, and rot under the floorboards. Or perhaps she had indeed noticed, and
that was why she had been so anxious to so suddenly sell up and move into the
Golden Bowl: nothing to do with falls and burns, just a disinclination to face
facts, spend money, and put up with the annoyances of builders. All that would
be left to the purchaser, and Felicity had taken no pains to point out to the
buyer - even though that buyer was Jack, Joy’s own brother-in-law - just how
much would be needed to get the property back into good repair. Joy resented
this on Jack’s behalf. He had paid over the odds.

 
          
Felicity
had kept the place crowded, English-style: ornaments on all surfaces, and no
place mats, so French polish had been scratched to bits and no-one cared. The
walls had been crowded with drawings and paintings, but when it came to packing
up,
Felicity had just thrown up her hands and sold the
lot at a knockdown price. Charlie had organized a field sale for the small
things and it was amazing how much you could get for rubbish, even reckoning
that Charlie probably returned only fifty per cent of the cash he took. Selling
Felicity up had proved a lot of hard work for everyone, and throughout the
process Felicity had been at her most lordly, declaring herself bored with
material possessions, happy to move into the hotel-like, bland, unadorned
nothingness of the Golden Bowl, taking only a few personal belongings and the
Utrillo with her. She had given Joy the first choice of her wardrobe, which Joy
had declined - not her style - and after that had let Charlie and his
family take
their pick. The two little girls, Beck and
Georgina
, though their mouths were grubby, were
seldom seen out without pieces of expensive fabric pinned here and there,
peasant-style by way of Bergdorf Goodman.

 
          
Charlie’s
daughters would be a handful when they grew up: already they eyed even Jack as
if he were natural game: the little boys, whether their cousins or their
brothers, Joy was disinclined to find out, were tough, handsome and surly.
Charlie had the matter of nationality in hand. Immigration officials turned up
from time to time to ask questions but seemed satisfied with what Charlie had
to say and went away.

 
          
Jack
was beginning to feel more at home. Dramas and events did that, gave you
memories,
rooted
you in a place.
Having
the builders in added tension.
If living with Francine was like floating
on a smooth sea, albeit one calmed by an oil spill - he did not know why the
image came to mind - living with Joy was all choppy water, but at least things
happened.

 
          
* * *

 
 
          
Valerie,
the private investigator hired by Joy was blonde, brisk, tough and
professionally indignant. She was not as young as she would like to be but
neglected to flirt with Jack, as most of his older female employees had done in
the past, however minimally. Jack felt his age and asked Joy anxiously if his
neck was becoming shorter and Joy said, yes, it was. His head was sinking into
rolls of flesh above his shoulders. That’s what happened when you retired and
stopped questing, sniffing out money, and relaxed. It had happened to all her
husbands, she assured him. Golf did not help.

 
          
Valerie
reported that the subject William Johnson had four traffic violations, one in
1958, one in 1974, two in 1994, but no criminal record. He had spent some time
in
Europe
. He had cashed in various insurance
policies over the previous ten years to the tune of $900,000. Currently he owed
a total of $82,000 on eight credit cards. He had $208 in his current account.
He had been born in
Providence
in 1927.

 
          
‘Twelve
years younger than she is!’ said Joy, making rapid calculations. ‘What do they
call them?
Toy boys?’

 
          
Valerie
was really quite attractive, thought Jack. When Francine died it had opened the
door again to legitimate adventures of a romantic kind, but here he was again,
hemmed in this time by Joy. Women crowded you: they didn’t want you to get
away. He’d believed that age in a man didn’t matter, only in women, but they’d
got it wrong. Women these days looked through him and beyond him. But he was
only sixty-nine.

 
          
Valerie
continued. The subject came from a once wealthy textile family, originally from
Massachusetts, who had come north to Rhode Island in the 1860s, been burned out
in Narragansett in the great fire of 1900, lost all its money in the crash of
1929, and been finally blown out, uninsured, by the great storm of 1937.
Subject’s father had been an unsuccessful sculptor and painter. The mother was
Italian-American, a Catholic, from
Providence
. There had been a twin brother, who had
been killed in a car crash along with his mother, on
Ocean Drive
, just before World War II. There were no
records of school attendance, but William had gone to college in
Boston
and studied English literature at Queen’s,
New York
, and qualified as a teacher. He had married
three times. ‘Unstable, I told you so,’ said Joy. Jack murmured that Joy
herself had been married four times, and so come to that had Felicity, but Joy
said it was different for women, which baffled Jack. Valerie was anxious to get
on.

 
          
Valerie’s
report went on to detail William Johnson’s marriages. The first at twenty:
Emily, twelve years his senior, who had seen him through college, and died of
cancer eight years later. The second when he was thirty-six, to
eighteen-year-old Sue-Anne, killed in a car crash when she was twenty-five.

 
          
‘What
a chapter of accidents,’ said Joy, meaningfully. Jack pointed out that Joy had
outlived all her husbands, and Joy snorted.

 
          
The
subject William Johnson had been fifty-one when he married Meryl Mason, aged
forty-one, a publisher’s editor from
New York
, who had come to the marriage as mother of
a daughter, Margaret. The Agency could find no record of a divorce, though this
did not necessarily mean there had not been one. Valerie would be happy to find
out, but it would mean upgrading the basic packet of enquiry, and would cost a
further $500. The trouble with these common names was that a great deal of
cross-checking was required. Give the Investigation Industry an unusual name
and they could trim their costs accordingly, but Johnson! Joy said she had
heard more than enough and the fee was outrageous as it was. Valerie said she
needed to get home to change. She was going to a big charity do in
Hartford
with her husband. He was its president and
they couldn’t be late.

 
          
‘Just
look at those age gaps,’ shrieked Joy, after Jack, apologizing, had shown
Valerie out. ‘That’s not love, that’s calculation. This man murdered his wives
for their money. Felicity has got tangled up with a serial killer.’

 
          
‘I
too am a widower,’ said Jack, patiently. ‘I did not murder my wife. And please
not so loud. We don’t want passers-by to hear. It might get back to poor Mr
Johnson.’

 
          
Joy
sulked at that, said Jack was a man and naturally on the man’s side: she had a
headache and was going up to bed. Jack could sleep in the guest room if he
wanted.

           
These days Jack would do this once
or twice a week, the short cut through from Passmore to Windspit being barred
by a stock- fence put up by Charlie to keep his two goats and the cow from
getting out, and Jack having to use the long way round via Divine Road to get
home. Sometimes at night it just seemed too far to go. Joy told Jack that she
spoke perfectly
quietly,
it was other people who
whispered. It was a long way from the road, and who was there to hear anyway?

 
          
‘Charlie
and his family,’ said Jack. ‘They might not be above blackmail.’

 
          
That
didn’t please Joy either. She liked to be the only one to think badly of the
family in the guesthouse. The younger of the two women now in residence - both
of whom claimed to be Charlie’s wife, but maybe that was just a difficulty with
the language - was now engaged to clean Joy’s house, for which she was paid a
considerable sum, and scrubbed the paint so hard it began to look scratched.
Joy discovered that Esma, for that was her name,
Me Joy you Esma
, was using a saucepan scourer for the paint,
silicone polish on the antiques, and glass cleaner on the floors. Esma had to
be excused, Charlie told Joy, accustomed as she was to those rusty tins of
scouring-powder - one powder cleans all - that in dimmer parts of the world,
where there was no consumer choice, were all anyone had by way of cleaning
agents.

 
          
Joy
felt bad mentioning it. Esma spent unconscionable hours ironing, and weeping
into Jack’s shirts, which Joy had agreed to launder for him at Windspit. The
kind of pick-up-and-deliver valet service Francine had been accustomed to
seemed
to be extravagant in a retired man who didn’t even
have an office to go to.