Rhode Island Blues

11

‘What do Golden Bowlers do?

They live life to the full!’

By the end of November Felicity was settled into the Atlantic Suite of the Golden Bowl Complex. Her house had been sold to Joy’s brother-in-law Jack, at a knockdown price. At the last moment he had had second thoughts about purchasing and she had brought the price down a further $50,000. It scarcely mattered. She had $5,000,000 in the bank: the interest on which was sufficient to pay all costs at the Golden Bowl, though if she lived to ninety-six or more, and rates continued to rise exponentially by ten per cent a year, she would have to begin to dip into capital. She could afford to buy a small gift here, give a little to charity there, though she had never been the kind to dress up and go to functions and give publicly. Too vulgar for Miss Felicity: too much gold and diamond jewellery on necklines cut too low to flatter old skin.

Felicity’s lawyer Bert Heller, Exon’s old friend, was satisfied that he had done his best by the old lady, as she had once alarmingly overheard him referring to her. Her will was in order and left everything to her granddaughter Sophia in England. Joy was pleased her friend was near enough to visit but that instead of having the responsibility of an elderly widow living alone next door, prone to falls and strokes, she now had the comfort of a brother-in-law as a neighbour, one who would look after, rather than need to be looked after. The move had suited everyone.

All Felicity had to do now, in fact, in the judgement of the outside world, was settle down, not make trouble, and live the rest of her days in peace.

And why not? The Atlantic Suite was composed of three large rooms, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom embossed with plated gold fittings and more than enough closet space: the view was pleasant: the rooms spacious. The world came to her through CNN, if she cared to take an interest in it, though few at the Golden Bowl did. Most preferred to look inwards and wait their turn to get a word in at group therapy. The decor and furnishings were pleasing and she had never been sentimental about her belongings: most had gone to auction. Sometimes Miss Felicity would remember a dress she had particularly liked and wonder what became of it: or a charming plate she’d owned, or a scrapbook she’d once compiled. Did people steal things, had she lost them, had she given them away? Why try to remember? It hardly mattered. She had a photograph of her granddaughter in a silver frame on her bedside table, but that was to keep Nurse Dawn quiet. Nurse Dawn, helping her unpack, had found it and stood it there when first Felicity arrived, and Felicity did not feel inclined to take on Nurse Dawn at the moment: she would wait until something more significant was at stake. To have family photographs on the bedside table suggested that life – by which she supposed she meant sex – was in the past.

Besides, Sophia had inherited Angel’s Botticelli hair: Felicity was not sure she wanted to be presented with the sight of it night and day. So she simply put the photo on its face after room service had been in and every next day room service stood it upright. It was an okay compromise.

Felicity had a nasty attack of flu when she first arrived at the Golden Bowl. Stomach cramps and weak limbs had made her more dependent upon the administrations of Nurse Dawn than she would have wished. When she recovered she found that silly little matters such as when breakfast would be brought to her room in the morning, when the valet service would collect and deliver, limitations on her time in the Library, expected attendance at the Ascension Room gatherings, had been arranged more to fit the Golden Bowl’s convenience than her own. She had remarked on this to Dr Bronstein.

‘It’s very strange,’ was Dr Bronstein’s dark comment, later, ‘how many people find themselves ill and helpless when they first arrive at the Golden Bowl.’

‘It’s hardly likely to be a conspiracy,’ said Felicity. ‘No-one’s going to make us ill on purpose.’

‘Aren’t they?’

Felicity had taken morning coffee in the Ascension Room as soon as she was able. She felt the need of company. She’d joined Dr Bronstein and a Miss Clara Craft at their table. Both smiled agreeably at her, and put down their magazines. Miss Craft, who turned out to be a correspondent for The Post back in the thirties, and who had trouble with her sight, had been flicking through the latest copy of Vogue. She wore a good deal of make-up haphazardly applied, and her sparse hair was arranged in little plaits, which hung here and there from her scalp. Her back was noticeably bowed. Felicity concluded that like so many women who did not choose to thwart the natural processes, Clara took no hormone replacement therapy. Dr Bronstein was smartly presented and was reading Harpers, albeit with a magnifying glass. Nurse Dawn had lingered, hovered, and done her best to overhear.

Dr Bronstein’s eyes were rheumy like a spaniel’s. They dripped moisture, and made him seem in constant need of sympathy. Nurse Dawn resented this. Nor did she like the Doctor’s choice of reading matter which to her was impenetrable but under the terms of residency was provided free. Magazines surely meant Time or Newsweek. Vogue was acceptable, though absurd in Clara Craft’s case. Miss Felicity had taken on herself to read Vanity Fair, which was bad enough, the articles being so long, but at least, unlike Harpers, had a few pretty girls and advertisements to break up the text.

‘Most of us will arrive here exhausted,’ said Felicity, ‘and in culture shock from the winding down of our days. Our immune systems are low. It’s not surprising we get ill. Or perhaps it’s suddenly eating three meals a day, of good natural food. I’ve been living out of packets for the past five years.’

She was well aware Nurse Dawn was listening, under the pretence of tidying up a bowl of flowers. She was stripping away yellowed leaves and faded blooms and putting them in a little bag for removal. She took her time.

‘Natural?’ asked Dr Bronstein. ‘I hope I didn’t hear you say natural. It’s an illusion to believe that because something is natural, it’s good for us. Nature doesn’t care whether we live or die. Nature’s only purpose is to get us to procreative age in one piece, by whatever slipshod manner she can contrive. Once we’re past that she has no interest in us at all. We live by our ingenuity, not by her will. It behoves us oldsters to treat nature as enemy not friend.’

‘Man’s ingenuity!’ interjected Clara Craft. ‘I must tell you, Miss Felicity, I was present when the great airship Hindenburg caught fire as it landed. That was in 1937. One of the most spectacular tragedies of the decade. I was one of those little figures running away from the flames in the newsreel. How I escaped with my life I’ll never know.’

Nurse Dawn, having heard all about the Hindenburg disaster too many times before, and finding herself bored even as an eavesdropper – to whom most things are fascinating by virtue of the secrecy attached – left the room. Miss Felicity – forget Clara’s adventures, which were already being repeated, like a stuck record – found herself glad to be in the company of a man who used the word behove in ordinary speech. Such words had certainly not been in Joy’s vocabulary. Felicity could see her horizons expanding. Once you could lose the sense that age was the most important thing about the old: that the passage of years wiped out individuality and that you were old yourself, just like everyone else around, all was not gloomy. Clara fell suddenly asleep. Vogue dropped to the ground and lay there. Dr Bronstein told her that he was eighty-nine: that until his enforced retirement he had been a biochemist, and, he was happy to admit to Felicity, had been a conspiracy theorist all his life. He was in good health, though he believed his two new titanium knees and one plastic and one steel hip (implanted of necessity over four decades of medical care – he had played baseball for his college team, and squash thereafter, and there is nothing like sport for damaging the joints, but who in the vigour of their youth is ever prepared to believe it) set up some kind of electrical discharge which interfered with his mental processes. He kept up an animated flow if not exactly conversation – he was too deaf for that – but at any rate talk.

That night when Nurse Dawn came by to turn off Felicity’s light – Felicity had told her not to bother, she could turn off her own light perfectly well, but Nurse Dawn had seemed hurt so she’d consented – Nurse Dawn said: ‘A friendly warning. Don’t take too much notice of our Dr Bronstein. He has a problem with authority. Give him a chance and he’ll feel free to buttonhole you for the rest of your life.’

Which Felicity realized with a shock might well be spent as a Golden Bowler. She refrained after all from asking Nurse Dawn if she could have Fat Free Choco Lite for her good-night drink, and decided to go along with whatever Nurse Dawn thought was best. As with the matter of the family photograph, it was of minor importance: she would save her energies for some greater battle which she had no doubt would soon enough come along. In the meantime she would lull Nurse Dawn into complacency. But wasn’t this how one behaved with husbands? Putting off confrontation until a right time which never came? In the end, if only by default, you ended up living their life, not jours. But why not, here at the Golden Bowl?

The good-night drink provided by Nurse Dawn turned out to be semi-skimmed unpasteurized milk with a little acacia honey stirred into it, for, Nurse Dawn said, sweet dreams. As soon as the woman was gone Felicity got out of bed and poured the sickly stuff down the bathroom sink, keeping her eyes averted from the gilt-framed mirror.

On the day she had first moved in she’d thought she’d glimpsed the face of an elderly man looking out at her from the glass. The image had been brief but vivid. She’d told herself that she was overtired but hadn’t quite convinced herself. Vision it had been. Well, these things happened from time to time in one’s life and were overlooked in the name of sanity. She could only hope the vision was not prophetic: that she was looking at herself in ten years’ time. It was sadly true that as one got older the distinction between a male face and a female one lessened, but hardly to so whiskery and rheumy a degree as this. Surely there would never come a time when she, Felicity, would cease to tweeze the hairs from her nose and chin? Or perhaps some kind of ghost looked back at her? Felicity had once owned a cat who continued to haunt the house for a few weeks after its death at the age of ten, under a car: just a flick of a tail out of the corner of the eye: the sound of purring where no purring should be, the feel of fur rubbing up affectionately against her shin: these things happened. She knew well enough that the Atlantic Suite had fallen vacant upon the death of the previous occupant: why else the new bed, the frantic redecoration? If the one she replaced now appeared to her, was it in welcome or in warning?

The apparition had appeared only briefly: she had looked away at once, in shock, and forcing herself to look again, had seen only herself. That of course was bad enough. You looked into a mirror as a young woman and your reflection looked out at you as one who was old. So what, honestly, was the big deal if the one looking out had changed sex as well? The shock of the stranger in the mirror was with you every time you looked into one. So why worry?

She didn’t mention the matter to the management. As you grew older you had to be careful not to give anyone an inkling that you were not in your right mind. Incarcerated as she had once been, though briefly, during the course of a divorce, in a mental home, she had been much impressed by the difficulty of proving you were sane. If you wept because you were locked up and miserable, you were diagnosed as clinically depressed and unfit to leave. If you didn’t weep someone else would decide you were sociopathic, and a danger to the public. Those who ran institutions tended to register criticism as ingratitude at best and insanity at worst, and though the Golden Bowl was not an institution in the locking-up sense, the mere fact of being old made you vulnerable to those who might decide you and your $5,000,000 needed to be protected for your own and its good.

Better to conclude that the unexpected face in the mirror was a projection of one’s own fears rather than some occult phenomenon, and shut up about it. Miss Felicity lived in hope that death would be the final closing down of all experience: she wanted an end rather than a new beginning. All the same, throwing away Nurse Dawn’s over-sweet milk, she tried not to look in the mirror. It was too late, she was tired, she had no appetite for either shock or speculation.

Once settled in, she was sleepless. She called her granddaughter Sophia in London. Midnight here meant sevenish there. Of course she had it the wrong way round.

Sophia answered from sleep, alert at once to her grandmother’s voice. ‘Felicity? Is everything okay?’

‘Why are you always so sure something has gone wrong?’

‘Because with most people when they call you at five in the morning it’s some kind of emergency.’ Sophia whispered, up to the satellite, bounce, and down over-sibilant on the other side of the Atlantic. ‘Hang on a moment. I’m going to the other phone.’

‘Why?’ asked Felicity. ‘Is there someone with you?’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Sophia.

Krassner was there, of course, lank hair on the striped pillow, which coincidentally matched Felicity’s pink and white décor. Holly had declined to come over to England to be with him. Forever Tomorrow had come and gone within a couple of months: had some critical acclaim, did well in the central cities though not so well out of town, and in general was expected to earn its keep. The film was to go sooner than hoped on to video and would no doubt make up any lost ground in the fireside medium. Krassner’s reputation hadn’t exactly soared but neither had it been knocked back. He was still in a position to pick and choose his next project. He didn’t like hotels: Sophia’s apartment was within walking distance of most places he was expected to be. He loathed London taxis: they had no springs and you had to get out before you paid the driver, or they complained of back pain. Sophia found herself without the will to make any objection: his convenience had to be suited: he appreciated her, and was courteous and did not play emotional games. She knew he would not stay long. He was childishly and neatly domestic. He brought her aspirin if she had a headache, found her lost gloves, bought fruit and food from the Soho delicatessen and laid it before her; the sex was both peremptory and pleasant, though he always seemed to be thinking of something else. Her friends envied her. Harry Krassner the great director! She was between films. She was happy, poised between a current fantastic reality, and a new film fantasy to begin. Harry understood these things. He said he’d hang about until March, when she went back into the editing suite. Then he’d be going back to LA anyway. Holly was on location till then.

It was not so unusual, these days, thus to fit in the personal between the professional. Everyone she knew did it.

12

I took one of the duvets from the bed and crept into the living room the better to talk undisturbed. Harry, deprived of the extra weight, pulled the remaining cover around him more closely, but did not wake.

‘It’s time you did have someone with you,’ said Felicity. ‘I’m beginning to feel out on a limb. One grandchild is pathetic. There are people in this place with up to twenty descendants.’

‘I don’t think that’s a very good reason for having children,’ I replied. It occurred to me that if I set out to I could have a baby by Harry Krassner. I could simply steal one. And what with today’s new DNA tests I could ensure that he supported it for ever. Did one dare? No. Forces too large for the likes of me to cope with would be involved. Ordinary mortals should not try it on with the gods down from Mount Olympus. Such a baby would be some large hairy thing, hardly a baby at all: it would spring fully formed into the world, with nothing in it of me whatsoever. The subject of offspring of the union had not been mentioned. It was assumed I was a sensible, rational, working adult in the business. Naturally I would be taking contraceptive precautions. As naturally I was.

‘Mind you,’ said Miss Felicity, ‘I can see there’s an argument for quality rather than quantity. The more offspring there are, the plainer and duller they get, generation by generation. Virtues get diluted: things like receding jaws get magnified. And I daresay it’s as well if you don’t have children, Sophia. Our family genes are not the best.’

Oh, thank you very much, Felicity! Schizophrenia may have a strong hereditary component: it may well run in the blood, though some deny it and I would certainly like to. I did not thank Felicity for reminding me. But nor did I want to risk having a child who hated me, as Angel had done Felicity. When the love/hate mode in a person switches as easily as central heating to air conditioning in a well-run hotel, it’s disconcerting and distressing for those around. The more Felicity showed her love for Angel the more Angel resented and feared her. The daughter interpreted maternal concern as control, dinner-on-the-table as an attempt at poisoning. In Angel’s eyes it was Felicity’s fault that my father the artist left home, not the fact that Angel had decided that sex and art didn’t mix, and when he failed to produce a canvas equal to a Picasso, a more or less ongoing state of affairs – how could it not be? – insisted on referring to him as Dinky. (His name was Rufus, which was bad enough.) No, in Angel’s eyes, Felicity had interfered, paying for his canvases, buying oils, mending our roof, whatever. Felicity was a control freak. And so on. Even as a small child I detected the element of wilfulness in my mother Angel’s insanities: to be mad is a great excuse for giving rein to hate and bad behaviour and bad jokes, while handing over to others responsibility for one’s life. The net end is to cause others as much trouble and distress as possible, while remaining virtuous and a victim. Yet I admired my mother’s style. In fact it hadn’t been too bad for me; far worse for Felicity. The child tends to take mothers and their odd ways for granted: the mother is eternally anxious for the child. Angel’s wrath and spite and mockery was seldom directed against me: only once when she decided I was ‘difficult’ and sent me off to boarding school did I get a taste of it. The night before I left for school Angel came into my bedroom saying I was the devil’s spawn, sent by the Whore of Babylon to spy on her, and tried to smother me with the pillow. Scary stuff. But only on that one occasion and that was the worst of it. We’d managed okay till then, Angel and me and sometimes Rufus. Dinky.

When I was eight she decided in the face of all evidence that I had head lice and shaved my head with Dinky’s blunt razor, and kept me away from school for three months. I hadn’t minded that at all. I got books out of the library and lay on my bed all day and read them, and went to the cinema sometimes as many as nine times a week. Once a day on weekdays and twice on Saturday and Sundays. I’d wear a headscarf. Angel would often come with me to the cinema. It was what we did. The school said nothing. I daresay they were pleased not to have Angel turning up at the school gate to collect me. She could look strange and she did throw things. My hair, which had been straight and thin until cropped back to the scalp, thereafter grew rich, thick and crinkly in my mother’s mode, and was what had drawn Krassner towards me. I was grateful. If Angel once decided she and I were to be street people on moral grounds what business was that of the social workers? That particular time I’d been taken away from Angel and our cardboard box under the King’s Cross arches (we were North London people), and been put in a foster home for months, until she’d made it up with Rufus and was in a position to reclaim me. The cardboard box had been okay. It was summer: we’d go into the Ritz Hotel and use their washing facilities. Angel always dressed beautifully, stealing the clothes from stores if necessary. We’d eat in posh restaurants and run away. At the foster home they dressed me from the charity shop and fed me on chip sandwiches. And this time when I finally got home the head lice were real, not imaginary. And Rufus had gone again.