Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (4 page)

           
It is all dumbing down and lowest
common denominator stuff and not annoying the other. It has to be if you want
to get on. And lying stretched out nightly alongside another human being,
comforting though it may
be,
is as likely to drain the
essential psyche as to top it up.

 
          
‘It
was very annoying of Exon to die on me,’ she said. ‘I was much fonder of him
than I thought. I never loved him, of course. I never loved anyone I was
married to. I tried but I couldn’t.’ And she looked
so
wretched as she said this that I forgot
London
, I forgot films, I forgot floppy-haired,
sweaty, exhausted Director Krassner and everything but Felicity. I put my hand
on hers, old and withered as it was compared to mine, and to my horror tears
rolled out of her eyes. She was like me, offer me a word of sympathy and I am
overwhelmed with self-pity.

 
          
‘It’s
the painkillers,’ she apologized. ‘They make me tearful. Take no notice. I
bullied you into coming. It was bad of me. The fall made me feel older than
usual and in need of advice. But I’m okay. I can manage. You can go home now if
you like. I won’t object.’ ‘Oh, charming,’ I thought, and said, ‘But I don’t
know anything about life in these parts. I know nothing about gated living, or
congregate living, or any of the things you have this side of the
Atlantic
. We just have dismal old people’s homes.
Why can’t you just stay where you are in this house and have someone live in?’
‘It would be worse than being married,’ she said. ‘There wouldn’t be any sex to
make up for being so overlooked.’

 
          
I
said I supposed she’d just have to ask around and do whatever it was her
friends did in similar situations. She looked scornful. I could see how she got
up their noses. ‘They’re not friends,’ she said. ‘They’re people I happen to
know. I tried to stop Joy meeting you at the airport, but she will have her
way. I worried every moment.’

 
          
She
wanted me to go for a walk with her after breakfast but I declined. I did not
trust the Lyme tick to keep to the woods. There didn’t seem much to see,
either. Just this long wide
Divine Road
with curiously spaced new-old houses every
now and then at more than decent intervals. Here, Felicity said, lived
interchangeable people of infinite respectability. She explained that the
greater the separation, the bigger the lot, the more prestigious the life.
Money in the
US
was spent keeping others at a distance, which was strange, since there
was so much space, but she supposed the point was to avoid any sense of
huddling
, which the poor of
Europe
, in their flight to the Promised Land, had
so wanted to escape. Strung out along these roads lived men who’d done well in
the insurance business or in computers, and mostly taken early retirement,
with wives who had part-time jobs in real estate, or in alternative health
clinics, or did good works: and a slightly younger but no wilder lot from the
university - but no-one of her
kind.
She
hadn’t lived with her own kind, said Miss Felicity (Exon had liked to call her
this and it had stuck) for forty-five years. What had happened to Miss
Felicity, I wondered, when she was in her late thirties? That would have been
around the time of her second and most sensible American marriage, to a wealthy
homosexual in
Savannah
. The end of that marriage had brought her the Utrillo - white period,
Parisian scene with branch of tree: very pretty - which now hung in state in
the bleak, high Passmore lounge which no-one used, to the right of the gracious
hall with its curving staircase and unlocked front door. The second night of my
stay - the first night I was too exhausted to care -1 crept out after Felicity
had gone to bed and locked it.

 
          
‘It’s
a bit late to go looking for people of your own kind,’ I said.
‘Even if you’d recognize them when you came across them.
Couldn’t you just put up with being comfortable?’ She said I always had been a
wet blanket and I apologized, though I had never been accused of such a thing
before. There was no shortage of money. Exon, who had died of a stroke, she
told me, the day after handing in a naval history of
Providence
to his publishers, had left her well
provided for. He had died very well insured, as people who live anywhere near
Hartford
tend to be. She could go anywhere, do
anything. It seemed to me that she had stayed where she was, four months
widowhood for every year of wifehood - a very high interest rate of
thirty-three per cent as if paying back with her own boredom, day by day, the
debt she owed sweet, tedious Exon. Now, recovering from whatever it was had to
be recovered from, she was preparing for her next dash into the unknown: only
at eighty-five, or -three, or however old she really was (she was always vague,
but had now reached the point where vanity requires more years, not fewer) the
dash must be cautious: the solid brick wall of expected death standing
somewhere in the mist, not so far away. She was sensible enough to know it, and
wanted my approval, as if paying off another debt, this one owed to the future.
I was touched. It was almost enough to make me want children, descendants of my
own, but not quite.

 
          
By
the afternoon Miss Felicity’s plunge into a new life had taken on a certain
urgency: Vanessa, one of the part-time real estate wives, called on her mobile
phone to say that she had a client she was sure would just adore the house, and
who was prepared to take it, furniture and all, and had $900,000 to spend but
would want to move in within the month. Miss Felicity, faced with the reality
of a situation she had brought upon herself, and too proud to draw back, and
moved by my advice (I had woken in the night with a mean and manic fear that
now we were getting on so well she would change her mind and want to come and
live in London, to be near me) had calmed down and decided she would like to
stay in the neighbourhood, and, what was more, had settled in to the idea of
‘congregate living’. She would start looking this very day.

 
          
Joy,
summoned for coffee, and today dressed in yellow velour and with a pink ribbon
in her hair, was alarmed at so much haste. Felicity might make more from her
house if she hung on, she shrieked. Joy’s brother-in-law might want to move
back into the neighbourhood, and maybe would be interested in the property:
these major life decisions should not be taken in a hurry. But Felicity,
meantime, unheeding, was unwinding the bandage round her ankle.

 
          
‘What
are you doing?’ demanded Joy.

 
          
‘Rendering
myself fit for congregate living,’ said Felicity. ‘I don’t want to give the
impression that I need to be assisted. Let’s see what there is around Mystic.’

           
‘Mystic!’ screamed Joy, teeth bared.
Every one of them a dream of the dentist’s art, but you can never do anything
about the gums. ‘You can’t possibly want to be anywhere near
Mystic
.
Too many tourists.’

 
          
‘I’ve
always just loved the name,’ said Felicity. Joy raised her plucked eyebrows to
heaven. What few hairs she allowed to remain, the better to reinforce the
pencilled line, were white and spiky and
tough.           .

 
          
‘I
thought the whole point,’ yelled
Joy,
‘was that you
wanted assistance.
Assisted care.
Someone
to help you take a shower in the mornings.’

 
          
‘That
is definitely going too far,’ said Felicity and left the room, giving a little
flirtatious kick backward with one of her heels, while Joy forgot to smile and
ground her white teeth. ‘There’s nothing whatsoever the matter with that
ankle,’ yelled Joy. ‘She just wanted you over here and she got her own way.’

 
          
The
seaside town of Mystic (population 3,216) lies a little to the north of where
the Quinebourg River splits and meets the Atlantic just before Connecticut
turns into Rhode Island. In the summer the place is full of holiday-makers and
gawpers: it is less fashionable and expensive than Cape Cod further up, or the
tail of Long Island opposite, but it has some good houses, some good wild
stretches of beach, and attracts admirers of the old 1860 wooden bridge, which
still rises and falls to let the shipping traffic through. Or so the brochures
said and so it proved to be. Joy insisted on coming with us on our tour of the
area: so we went in her new and so far undented Mercedes - obtained for her by
her brother-inlaw Jack, a retired car dealer - and I was allowed to drive.

 
          
Old
people do indeed seem to congregate around the town: the Mystic Office of
Commerce handed out brochures a-plenty. I could understand the charm of the
name,
Mystic
, tempting in the hope,
so needed as life draws to its inevitable end, that there is more to it than
meets the eye. A place close enough to nature to make sunsets and stormy
weather a matter of reflection, in which to develop a sense of oneness with the
universe, in which to lose, if only temporarily, the pressing consideration of
the shortness of our existence here on earth.
A more benign
and tranquil version of nature than in most other places in the
US
.
No hurricanes, no earthquakes, no wild
fluctuations of heat and cold to disturb old bones, only the Lyme tick which
no-one took any notice of, in spite of the fact that the illness is serious
enough to carry off the aged and delicate. Maybe Mystic’s convenient distance
from New York, not so near as to make popping in to see the old relative an
everyday affair, not so far as to make a fortnightly visit too difficult, was
the greater attraction. Or perhaps homes for the elderly were just these days a
fine growth market: this is trading country, as a British admiral once
observed, seeing the New England settlers trading with his fleet during the
War of Independence. For whatever reason there were more residential homes for
the aged up and down these ponds, these woods, these beaches, and these back
roads, than I’d have thought possible.

 
          
When
I asked what exactly we were looking for, Felicity said, ‘Somewhere with good
vibes’, at which Joy snorted and said she thought cleanliness, efficiency, good
food and a good deal was more to the point.

 
          
Good vibes!
I thought Felicity would be
lucky to find them anywhere in
New England
.
Although a landscape may look stunningly pleasant and tranquil, the ferocious
energies of its past - and few landscapes are innocent - are never quite over.
The impulse to exterminate the enemy, to loot and plunder, to gain confidence
with false smiles before stabbing in the back, is hard to overcome: if it’s not
with us in the present it seeps through from the past. And these are dangerous
parts: the first coast of the
New World
to be colonized, three and a half hundred years back. Bad things have been able
to happen here for a long, long time. A massacre here, death by hunger there;
an early settlement vanished altogether over winter: no trace left at all when
the ships come creeping up the coast with the spring. And who in the world to
say what happened? We all await the great debriefing when everything will be
made known, the Day of Judgement which will never come.

 
          
Later
the plantation owners of the South made this coast their summering place: later
still the mob leaders from
Chicago
: then the Mafia. Of course they did.
Like calls to
like.
The strong colour of old wallpaper had ample time to show through
to the new, and they liked it. The edginess of something about to happen,
something just happened. Vacations can be so dull.

 
          
Good vibes!
Maybe it was in Felicity’s
nature forever to be moving on, in search of a landscape innocent of earlier
crimes. If so she would be better advised to go
West
than East, where there wasn’t so much history. Joy was by nature a stayer in
one place, Felicity a mover on. Felicity would always listen and learn and be
enriched,
Joy would shut her mind to new truths. Felicity
was inquisitive and never averse to a little trouble and discomfiture, Joy
never wanted to stir anything up. Therein lay the difference between them,
though God knows both ended up in much the same condition in life, living in
the same kind of clapboard house, in the same kind of widowhood, albeit Joy
today in startling yellow velour, and Miss Felicity in a floating cream and
green dress bought at great expense at Bergdorf Goodman, and an embroidered
jacket of vaguely ethnic but tasteful origin, cut so as to hide any thickening
of the waist or stooping of the shoulders. She held herself erect. From the
back she could have been any age: except perhaps her ankles were too thin to
belong to a truly youthful person.

 
          
We
took the coast road out of Mystic to historic
Stonington
, the
Rhode Island
side of the river from Mystic, where
there’s a statue of a Pequot Indian with a large stone fish under each arm. Old
people tottered around it, relatives holding dependent arms: a group whizzed
about it in mechanized wheelchairs, never too old to be a danger to others.
They came, in whatever state, to contemplate the past, since there was so
little future to contemplate: they invaded the nearby souvenir shops by the
busload, while old limbs still had the strength. We all want to think of our
nation’s past as wondrous and charming, as we would want to think of our own.
But Joy declined to get out of the car.

 
          
‘I’m
no tourist,’ she said. ‘I live round here. As for those Red Indians, they take
everything and give nothing back. If
China
invaded they wouldn’t object to being
defended, I can tell you that.’

           
Felicity slammed the door as she got
out of the car. But Joy lowered the window.

 
          
‘Scarcely
a pureblooded Pequot left,’ she shouted after us. ‘They’ve all intermarried
with the blacks anyway. Now they run their casinos tax-free on Reservation
land. They rake in millions and are let off taxes, just because their ancestors
had a hard time. Poor Mr Trump, they say he’s having a real bad time in
Atlantic City
, because of Indians.’

 
          
‘Hush!’
begged Felicity.

 
          
‘You’re
so English, Felicity! If the old can’t speak the truth
who
can?’ Calm, quiet people turned to stare at Joy. Her white- powdered,
hollow-eyed face stared out of the darkness of the car, her chin resting on the
ledge of the lowered window, which I thought was rather dangerous. Supposing it
suddenly shot up? I couldn’t think who she reminded me of and then I realized
it was Boris Karloff in
The
Mummy.
Some people, as they get older,
simply lose their gender.

 
          
‘I’ve
nothing against them personally,’ she shrieked. ‘But if I was one of them I
wouldn’t want to be called a Native American. The way I was brought up, a
native is a savage.’ Felicity and I, realizing there was no other way of
silencing her, simply gave up our exploration of the town and got back into the
car. Joy smiled in triumph.

 
          
We
saw a couple of what were called congregated communities, but they were built
around golf courses. Those who lived there looked as if they had stepped
straight out of the advertisements: the strong, well-polished, smiling elderly,
their hair wet-combed if they still had any - and there were some amazing heads
of hair, not necessarily natural, to be seen, in both sexes. The men wore
bright polo shirts, the women shell suits. They made Felicity feel frail. By
mistake we saw an assisted living home where the old sat together with their
zimmer frames, backs to the wall, glaring at anyone who dared to come into
their space. The sense of quiet depression was such I could have been back in
my own country. The smell of cheap air freshener got into my lungs. Felicity
looked shocked. Joy wouldn’t step inside the room they showed us, so proudly.

 
          
* * *

 
 
          
‘I’d
rather die,’ she shrieked. ‘Why don’t they just polish themselves off?’ If the
inhabitants heard they did not stir. Management did, and showed us hastily out,
but not before giving us their list of charges.

 
          
I
relented. Nothing we saw looked at all suitable for my grandmother’s dash into
the future. I told Felicity if she wanted to come back to
London
I’d do what I could for her: find her
somewhere near me, even with me. I declared myself prepared to move house to
live somewhere without stairs, into the one-floor living that seemed to be a
requisite for anyone over sixty. I spoke coolly and my reluctance by-passed my
brain and settled itself in my stomach in the form of a bad pain: appendix,
maybe.

 
          
‘She’ll
drive you crazy,’ shouted Joy. ‘You’ll regret it.’

 
          
Felicity
persisted that she did not want to return to
London
, even to be near me. (The pain at once
subsided.) I was too busy, too taken up with my own life. She would just feel
the lonelier because she’d never get to see me, and I would just feel the
guiltier for the same reason. Besides, she was used to the
US
.

 
          
Life
in
England
was too cramped, too divorced from its own history, the young had no
interest in the old, the IRA left bombs around, the plumbing was dreadful and
she was too old to make new friends. And we certainly could not live together.
Joy was right, I would kill her, or she me. I did not argue. We went home in
depressed silence.