Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (30 page)

 
          
After
her disagreeable conversation with Nurse Dawn, Felicity, upset and
panicky
, called William at the Rosemount. She wanted his
assurance that she was not to blame, that sooner or later Dr Bronstein would
have ended up in the West Wing, and a little sooner made no difference. She
wanted to be told that Nurse Dawn was not vindictive and dangerous, just
stupid, tactless and a little nasty and doing her job as she saw it. That it
was not her fate to be cast back into the convent again and again. That the
Golden Bowl was not some kind of prison, where the mind kept the body in chains
and the body did what it wanted, not what you wanted. No, rather it was that as
you got older the sense that the spirit was incarcerated in the body became
more intense: the temptation was to project it outwards. It was not the Golden
Bowl which kept you in one place against your will, it was your body, now
reluctant to run, jump and skip.

 
          
True
enough that had she gone along with Dr Bronstein for his interview with the
psychiatrist she could have pointed out that if powerful negative emotions were
sufficient to block off recall of the President’s name, why then the same thing
would apply to Kosovo. It was not just a place on the map which anyone familiar
with current events should know, but a terrible place of massacre and chaos in
the heart. She could have explained that it was not an ageing brain which made
you forgetful - it was the battering upon the doors of knowledge by the hammer
of experience. If you suddenly sold your diamonds and gave the proceeds to a
dogs’ home it wasn’t because you’d gone batty but because you’d come to the
legitimate conclusion that dogs, creatures you despised, were worth more than
people. The less able you were to act the more to the point your actions
became, perforce. The old who spat out food showed what they thought of food,
just as babies did, without inhibition. It didn’t use up much energy.

 
          
Of
all these things and more Felicity wanted to speak to William. So few people in
a lifetime who understood what you were talking about. All those men in the
Old Glory
days, and earlier in
London
, who’d come and gone with hardly a word of
talk
. No exchange of ideas, just sometimes information.
They say the weather's getting better
tomorrow
or
Chamberlain's back from
Munich
with a peace deal
or
I like your dress.
How
about getting it off.
She’d always thought herself that her mind
made a more interesting offer than her body: and theirs too, of course, to her.
More than the temporary loan of that piece of rampant flesh they seemed
prepared to offer. If the body was used too much, and the whole person denied,
the brain and the spirit would atrophy along with the sensibilities, which was
why you could mostly tell a prostitute. It was the way the face muscles set
when the attempt to ward off disgust had gone on for too long, the process of
toughening
up been
too protracted. It was when you
succeeded you were in trouble, when the spirit retreated, leaving the
lineaments of all things tawdry behind. Not that she had ever been quite a
prostitute, just a good-time girl who when offered payment would not refuse.
She would have paid for sex, if she could afford it, if she hadn’t been paid
for it first.

 
          
William
would reassure her, calm the panic: all she was feeling was the vestigial trace
of what she had been through with Angel: the feeling that you should do
something, though you didn’t know quite what, to stop disaster happening. A bad
dream of secrets kept from you, the need to search for the little trap door
which was the way out of the dark into sunlight once again. Except you knew
there wasn’t any trap door: the dark was permanent. With time your eyes got
used to it, but that was all. What went on in Dr Bronstein’s head was pretty
much what went on in Angel’s: that is to say it wasn’t ‘normal’. Little areas of
the brain which lit up in ‘normal’ people when certain things happened did not light
up in Angel’s brain, or if Nurse Dawn was to be believed, in Dr Bronstein’s.
Not any more. However you defined
normal
:
and what happened or failed to happen was to a different degree, of course, in
Angel. Angel’s disordered brain was housed in an active, flailing, young body,
the lights lit up all over the place: Dr Bronstein’s in a body too old to be
much threat to anyone. Even thinking about it brought the feeling of panicky
helplessness swirling in again out of her past: she was swept out to sea by a
current she wasn’t strong enough to fight, even had she known how, found anyone
to tell her the secret. Love itself miscarried. Only perhaps you deceived
yourself. Perhaps you’d had it aborted. The end of the world was your own
doing.

 
          
She
called the Rosemount. Maria answered. She said that Mr Johnson had left already
for the Casino. ‘Thank you,’ said Felicity and put the phone down.

 
          
There
had been two abortions. In the early days they were illegal, and no exceptions:
they cost
UK
£200 or US $500 depending which side of the
Atlantic
you were, and the price seemed to stay the
same for decades. Fathers, if they were decent, were expected to find the money
for you. It was a cheaper option than marriage. If they weren’t decent, or you
didn’t know why they were, or they’d given you a false name in the first place,
you borrowed or stole or sold yourself before it began to show, before three
months when they said the soul came in. And you could never be sure if you were
really pregnant or not until ten weeks - anxiety wreaked havoc with the cycle -
which gave you two weeks or less to find the money and the doctor.

 
          
There
were three results: you lived and were safe, you did yourself damage and died,
you
lived and were found out and went to prison: they cost
£200 or $500 depending and what did you have in return?
That
your body was not invaded by an alien growth.
It was enough. Sex with
strangers could be admirable: babies by strangers hardly could be. A mean
initial trick by God to link the two, before humans intervened and separated
them, distancing sex from babies so you could have the pleasure without the
consequence. Except as Sophia had once pointed out, that was an oxymoron; the
pleasures of sex were survival-friendly: the less reluctant a woman was to have
sex the more babies she would have: left to itself the sex-hungry gene must in
time dominate. Now necessity meant the size of women’s families got smaller
and smaller, babies turned into status symbols or were aborted as of right, we
were going to end up in a world in which no-one liked sex any more. The process
of enantiodromia, according to Exon: you go as far as the tramlines will let
you, and then run back the other way. There’s nowhere else to go, if you’re a
zealot.
Rhode
Island
,
the puritan state, ending up the Mafia playground: then back the pendulum
swings again. The yearning for celibacy hadn’t yet got to Sophia in
London
, thank God. It would be nice if Sophia had babies,
but Felicity doubted that she ever would. If you loved instinctively and
without reason, as Sophia had loved her mother, and that love was brought to
such an end, with what amounted to a vicious attack - what else was hanging
yourself so your child would find you - you would lack the resolution to carry
on the generations. The love of the child for the mother, the love of the
mother for the child, being so unconnected with that other love, sexual
passion, which you sought out with a partner, turning the strange into the
unstrange.

 
          
She
wanted to be at Foxwoods. Yet William had gone without her. He hadn’t even told
her he was going. She wanted to be sitting at a slot machine in a stupor, all
thoughts safely locked in her unconscious, on hold, maturing,
the
drum spinning, fate rewarding you or failing to reward
you.
Telling you its plans, the pattern of your destiny.
And no harm
done.
She loved William.
Lucky in love, lucky at cards, lucky, lucky, lucky.

 
          
She
supposed so. Maria had answered the phone. William sometimes collected Maria’s
child from school. Perhaps he was the child’s father? That had not occurred to
her. He was surely of grandfather, even great-grandfather age. But strange
things happened. In fact, she could see, she had let very little occur to her
about William, considering how much they talked. Perhaps she was just
determined to be lucky, the last forlorn hope of a desperate woman whose life
had been a disappointment? How pathetic she must seem to the rest of the world.

 
          
* * *

           
Maria had called William ‘Mr
Johnson’. She wouldn’t have called him that if they were on intimate terms. Or
would she? Felicity thought she might very well cry. Why hadn’t William told
her he was going to Foxwoods when he spoke to her earlier? Was gambling so
solitary a vice? He’d confessed his addiction, demonstrated it, expected her
acquiescence, and now he was just going to leave her at home? He didn’t want to
share his life with her after all, only parts of it? Perhaps he’d changed his
mind? Perhaps she had shown herself inadequate in some way? Perhaps he had
expected her to hover behind him, constantly watching over his fortunes? Not to
go off on her own, as she had, and gamble of her own accord. Not that playing
the quarter slots was exactly gambling: you couldn’t make or lose a fortune.
Perhaps she was too dull, too cautious for William Johnson, gambling man?

 
          
She
hadn’t felt so insecure since she realized that Buckley was bisexual, and that
she was the least of his interests, and was kept at home as a cover he scarcely
needed since everyone
knew\
or felt
so jealous since she’d realized he’d married her in order to have Angel in the
house, the pale, beautiful elf-like child with the supple body, wild eyes and
the red-gold, surprising, plentiful hair. His appreciation had been aesthetic
rather than sexual, thank God - surely, since he preferred boys - but even so
it had been enough to make her feel second best. Jealousy had nothing to do
with sexual passion - she had been impervious to Buckley’s charms, and he to
hers - but to do with wanting someone’s total attention. It was bad enough
having girl children, all rivalry,
all
competition as
they were, but you should at least be able to win for a time. But from the
beginning Angel had been a creature of grace: all eyes turned to the child, not
to the mother. She hadn’t been accustomed to it.

 
          
Had
she not gone to the funeral she would not have met William: she would be
sitting in this room in mental and emotional comfort, bored out of her skull,
but at least not subject to the panics and anxieties of being involved with a
man.

 
          
Had
she not gone to the funeral, Dr Bronstein would not be in the West Wing, and
she not be torn by ambivalence; knowing she should go and visit him and
frightened to do so for fear of what she would see. Perhaps Nurse Dawn was
right, perhaps she, Felicity, was too old to tell a damp leather seat from a
dry one. The future did not bear thinking about, although it was everyone’s
future. Perhaps falling in love with William - and they were right, it was an
indignity and an absurdity - was compulsive, a strategy for postponing thoughts
of death and the physical and mental decline that led up to it.

 
          
Thus
thoroughly mortified and depressed, Felicity sat, as everyone from time to time
must sit, young or old, until she was disturbed by a commotion from outside the
French windows. It was the sound of the arrival of Joy and Jack, turning up as
William was wont to do, but today had not. Joy’s little white face appeared at
the window, and the glitter of her jewels in a halo of misty pink velour. The
thin fingers found the strength for tapping. The glass was no barrier to her
voice.

 
          
‘Miss
Felicity, Miss Felicity, let us in!’

 
          
Jack,
once burly, now thinning, good white teeth gleaming and smiling jovially in a
square fleshy
jaw,
appeared beside his deceased wife’s
sister. His neck had shrunk. To Felicity it seemed his head sat squarely on his
shoulders almost without any narrow bit in between.

 
          
The
world won’t leave you alone, it will always find you out, or your money,
Felicity concluded. Dr Bronstein’s great-great- grandson and his partner had
found him out, to make sure he was looked after for his own good. This morning
no doubt they would be preening themselves for the compassion they had shown.
They had journeyed a long way to make sure the old man was properly looked
after: the fact that they now controlled his money would go down well with the
bank: would give them security to raise a mortgage or start some fine new
business, and provide them with the life which was theirs by right of
youthfulness.