Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (26 page)

 
          
If
Joy murmured about not having the control on the iron set to
very hot,
since so doing crinkled up
silks and left scorch marks on the tablecloths, Esma would weep and talk about
massacres and mass graves, which Joy couldn’t bear. Otherwise Esma was picking
up American habits very fast: she had arrived in the country bundled up inside
layers of clothing: now she wore dresses with full skirts and tight belts, and
you could see the shape of her body.

 
          
Joy
thought maybe the two girls were Esma’s, and the two boys belonged to the other
wife, Amira, but could not be sure, again because of difficulties with the
language. The two girls, around twelve, giggled and hid and peeked if you
caught sight of them, but the boys, both about ten, Joy thought, swaggered
about and had once got hold of the shotgun she kept in the garage, and fired at
innocent songbirds, and brought their dead bodies into her kitchen for her to
admire, just as a cat would. Francine would really have hated that. You could
almost hear her ghost protesting. Charlie, summoned, had disarmed and shouted
at the boys, but Joy dismissed that as just for show. She was not stupid. But
for some reason unclear to herself she did not like Jack criticizing this
unfortunate family. Jack was still a newcomer, living in what still felt like
Felicity’s house. Granted he had been instrumental in employing Charlie in the
first place, Windspit was her (Joy’s) property, her (Joy’s) guest apartment,
her (Joy’s) limo. Jack should remember that. If Charlie’s lapse was anyone’s
fault, it was Felicity’s. Felicity took advantage of her (Joy’s) goodness, ordering
Joy’s chauffeur around as if Charlie were her own.

 
          
Felicity
went too far. If now Felicity had got herself into trouble, she had only
herself to blame. What made Felicity think she was so special that at her age
she could be loved for herself and herself alone, not for her income? Pride
comes before a fall, and the fall would bruise and hurt her but had to happen.
Felicity didn’t of course deserve to
die
,
and it was Joy’s duty to warn her that William Johnson was at best a bigamist
and at worst a serial wife killer.

 
          
Joy
called the Golden Bowl to let them know she would be coming soon to visit Miss
Felicity, and asked Esma to drop a copy of the Agency report in the post to the
Director, Dr Grepalli. Esma said she would do it as soon as she had milked the
cow and put the goats in the goat shed over at Passmore - once Felicity’s
garden studio - so the document did not get off that night. In the world of the
stock keeper, bits of paper take second place.

 
          
My
grandmother called me at
midnight
.

 
          
‘So
how’s love?’ I asked.

 
          
‘Just
fine,’ she said.
‘My dear, the irrationality!
I’d
forgotten. The sky brightens, the future beckons,
you
start again! William turns out to be a gambling man, I’m afraid to say, but I
can put up with it.’

 
          
‘You
mean gambling Las Vegas-style?’ I asked. ‘
Atlantic City
? Crime, vice and pole dancers?’

 
          
‘Foxwoods-style,’
she replied.
‘Reservation money, not Mafia.
The Mashantucket Tribal Nation.
Frankly, all rather on the
muted side: you can hear the backwoods calling. But I was never one for the
high life. Casinos are fantastic, Sophia. You hand them money and they hand it
back with interest.’

 
          
‘Sounds
just like investing,’ I said.
‘Though I must warn you it’s
rumoured not to be as safe.’

 
          
‘One
can only go by one’s own experience,’ she said. ‘I went in with $50 and came
out with $150. I am naturally lucky, or so William tells me.’

 
          
‘Beginner’s
luck,’ I said.

 
          
‘That
is an irrational concept, Sophia. Why should a beginner be
more
lucky
than anyone else? No, it’s me. Since William and I got together
he’s been on a lucky roll.’

 
          
I
envisaged an elderly man sitting at the slots, feeding in a quarter at the
time.
The pair of them, side by side, holding hands between
rolls, as much interested in each other as what went on behind the windows.
Why shouldn’t they? Just two of many grey heads lined up on stools beneath
bright lights, safety in numbers. You couldn’t get into too much trouble, a
quarter at a time. Cherries, red sevens, triple bars, whatever, whizzing away
on command, the little orgasmic shudder when they stop, for good or bad. A sex
substitute, according to a docudrama I once cut, though I wasn’t quite
convinced. Not all pleasures have to relate back to sex. But at eighty-odd you
do what you can. You get fruit machines on rail stations all over
Britain
but the pleasure’s furtive and solitary,
the payout’s disgraceful and the train pulls in to rescue you. ‘In fact he’s
been able to afford a new car, a top-of-the-range Saab,’ said Felicity. ‘I
don’t have to borrow Joy’s Mercedes any more.’

 
          
This
didn’t sound so good. If they were playing the slots, it was certainly not the
quarter machines.

 
          
‘He
plays mostly craps,’ she said, reassuringly. ‘You get the best odds.
Blackjack’s most fun, but you can get overexcited. William’s no fool. And he
knows when to stop.’

 
          
‘Oh
yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I said, and no more. This woman was in love, and who wanted
to rub her nose in reality? I hadn’t heard so much nonsense since my friend
Evie fell in love with a drug dealer and told everyone he was going to go
straight because of her. The odd thing was that he did.

 
          
Felicity
sounded intolerably cheerful. Personally I’d had a hard day in the cutting
room, and a row with Harry. He had been no help at all: he’d been too absorbed
with himself to so much as remember there was an outside world, and I said so.
He’d sat and stared into space or flicked through magazines and let me get on
with it. I felt, since his presence was being paid for by the studio, he might
just sometimes give the job in hand a little attention, if only for form’s
sake. He said that was absurd: I was an independent female perfectly capable
of making my own decisions.

 
          
I
said I’d been doing that all my life and was tired of it.

 
          
He
said I was pre-menstrual and I thought I would kill him. There was no sharp
weapon around, though, so I solved my problem by simply editing out a whole
thirty seconds of Astra Barnes’s filmic meanderings instead of wrestling it
into shape.

 
          
‘I
bet you don’t tell Holly she’s pre-menstrual,’ I observed casually when it was
done without so much as a comment from him and he was sitting still reading the
paper and smoking. It was a tiny room, but what did he care?

 
          
‘She
doesn’t have periods,’ he said. ‘She’s too slim.’

 
          
He
was behaving monstrously. He
was
a
monster I had inadvertently let into my life. What was I doing with this alien
being? I had to get rid of him somehow.

 
          
‘In
the
US
we know how to keep our bodies under control,’ he added. ‘We don’t
guzzle Danishes.’

 
          
The
PA had brought in Danishes and coffee at lunchtime, without being asked. I’d
eaten one. He’d eaten two, both the apricot, which I preferred. I made do with
apple.

 
          
‘Oh
yes?’ I asked. ‘They all look pretty vast to me. I hear many American citizens
have to be moved around with cranes, they’re so heavy.’

 
          
‘They’re
the other ones,’ he said. ‘Not the real Americans. In this country you don’t
even know how to get hot water out of a shower except in a dribble.’

 
          
‘We
don’t like to waste hot water,’ I said. ‘The
US
uses up seventy per cent of the entire
world’s energy in its selfish obsession with its own comfort.
North America
is single-handedly destroying the planet.’

 
          
‘We
know how to live,’ he said, ‘and
stand
tall. The rest
of the world just creeps around in its own shit.’

 
          
‘
Europe
’s as big as the
US
,’ I said. ‘You watch out.’

 
          
‘
Europe
’s primitive,’ he said. ‘Look what happened
in the Balkans.’ ‘That’s an anomaly,’ I said. ‘At least we don’t still have
chain- gangs, and schoolkids shooting up their own classmates.’ This was
ridiculous, but we couldn’t stop.

 
          
‘You
don’t even shave your armpits,’ he said.

 
          
‘At
least I don’t wear a wig like Holly,’ I said. ‘At least I have hair. Why don’t
you go back to her? You only live with me so you don’t have to take a taxi to
work.’

 
          
‘That’s
about the level of it,’ he said, icy.

 
          
‘Personally,
I take
Buffalo
’s view of you,’ I said. ‘They got it just
about right. Small town boy! So do me a favour, just shuffle off.’

 
          
What
was upsetting Harry - and I would have been more sympathetic, he was quite right,
if I hadn’t been pre-menstrual, which I was, but who’s going to admit to a
thing like that - was a stinking review of
Forever
Tomorrow
in the local
Buffalo
newspaper. All over the rest of the States the film had met with
critical approval, if not staggering commercial success. Just not in
Buffalo
, Harry’s home town. Headed
Local Boy Makes Bad
, the piece dismissed
the film as exploitative, sentimental, badly cast, badly acted and amateurishly
filmed.
The striving for effect was painful, the contents
embarrassing.
Harry Krassner had lost the plot and all
Buffalo
was disappointed. He might see himself as
the Boy from Buffalo Made Good but
Buffalo
was quite happy to see the back of him,
thank you very much. The journalist had even dug up a former schoolteacher to
say Harry had been an arrogant child, too full of himself to get his homework
assignments in on time. And so on and so forth. It was the kind of thing they
say, in fact, when they really want to go for you, and there’s something
personal behind it. I asked. Yes, Harry knew the journalist. Irene Degusto.
She’d been at school with him.

 
          
‘You
got out of
Buffalo
,’ I said. ‘Irene didn’t. Of course she’s
going to be vile. You probably stood her up at Junior Prom or whatever you call
your adolescent shindigs.’

 
          
‘Whose
side are you on?’ Harry demanded, and that’s how the row began, because of
course I was on Harry’s side. But women always make the mistake of trying to
explain away misfortune, and to comfort and console, believing they will thus
lessen the blow, when they would be better advised simply to join in male rage,
despair and general ranting.

 
          
It
was our first row. It had left both of us so exhausted and surprised that we
crept home, and had the sweetest of languid sex, which took us both even more
by surprise, it was so intense: it felt more like love than passion. I think
even Harry was shaken. As ever, Felicity called when all I wanted was sleep.
She had the knack of it. But she wanted to talk about her new love, as women
do, at any age, regardless of who wants to listen, and she must do it
now
,
now
,
now
, not wait ’til I got over there.
I’d booked the ticket. I was flying on Saturday. Today was Thursday. I said as
much.

 
          
‘So
long as you don’t marry him,’ I said, ‘and you don’t start lending him money,
and you don’t mind being seen as a gambler’s moll, I suppose you can’t get into
any real trouble between now and then.’

 
          
‘He
has asked me to marry him,’ she said. ‘I’m taking my time replying. I wouldn’t
want to seem too eager.’

 
          
I
was alarmed, but it would be imprudent to show it.

 
          
‘A
gambling moll is one thing, a gambler’s wife is just plain dreary. It just
isn’t you, Felicity.’

 
          
‘You’ve
no idea
what’s
me and what isn’t,’ she said. ‘Things
happened to me when I was very young that you don’t know about.’ ‘I know quite
a lot,’ I said. And then because I was tired and wasn’t thinking I said
something stupid. ‘I know about Lois and Anton. I know what a hard time you
had.
Poor Felicity.’
There was silence. Then the phone
went down. I called back, horrified. At least she picked it up.

 
          
‘Look,
I’m coming over in a couple of days,’ I said. ‘We’ll talk properly then, shall
we? It’s difficult on the phone.’

 
          
‘How
dare you,’ Felicity said to me. ‘How dare you pry into my
life.
I wish I’d never had Angel, I wish she’d never had you. I don’t want to see
you,
I don’t want you to come over. I just want to be left
alone to start over.’

 
          
It
was a double whammy. I doubled up as if in pain.

 
          
‘I’m
coming to
Rhode
Island
and that’s that,’ I said, and put the phone down and realized it was truly
pain: my period had started and my whole body was protesting. I cried for a bit
and then the phone went again.

 
          
‘I’m
sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean that. Of course you must come. But just don’t
interfere
.’

 
          
And
Krassner slept on, as Krassners will. I think that what happens just before I
have a period is that I turn atavistic and want to drive men away. Female cats
do it to tom-cats, just before the females have kittens. Bite and snarl at them
’til they slink off. They say it’s in case the male cat eats the kittens, which
toms sometimes will, but who’s to say what a female cat thinks? You can watch
her behaviour and work out some Darwinist rationale to do with
survival-friendly tactics, but I think it’s just to do with the surge of
impatience any female gets with the male when she’s preoccupied.
This great lolling creature with its impractical masculine
attitudes.
When you’re pre-menstrual the sharp understanding and clear
vision of the unconscious is nearer the surface, that’s all, and it’s probably
the accurate one. The rest of the month is all self-deception and wishful
thinking and unreasonable smiles.