Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      

      ‘You just have to be patient,’ said Joy, softer again. ‘Don’t sell to this stupid client of Vanessa’s. Anyone who wants to move in within the month is bound to be a bad neighbour. You do owe a little consideration to the rest of us.’

      She took the wheel of the car and bumped off in a way that never happened when I drove. It was scarcely more than a year old, and fitted with every possible kind of gadget to ensure a smooth ride. I don’t know how she managed it.

      

      When we got back to the serenity of Passmore we found that a brochure had been pushed through the letterbox. It was from an establishment called The Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement. Felicity examined it over toasted cinnamon bagels spread with Cream Cheese Favorite Lite. ‘This Golden Bowl place,’ said Felicity, ‘doesn’t sound too bad at all. They have a Nobel Prize winner in residence, and a Doctor of Philosophy. Fancy being able to have a conversation with someone other than Joy. And what synchronicity that it should arrive today!’

      

      It would have been even more synchronicitous if it had arrived in the morning rather than the afternoon, so we could have visited it when in the area, but I held my tongue. The Golden Bowl charged at least double the fees of any other institution we’d seen, and they went up ten per cent each year. Which when you worked it out meant that in ten years’ time you would be paying double. But by then Miss Felicity would be well into her nineties. It might not be so bad a deal. It was a gamble who would end up making money out of whom.

      

      I hoped her liking for the place wasn’t because it was the most expensive on offer. Reared in penury as she had been, Felicity now had an almost innocent faith in the power of money: she believed that the more you spent the better value you would get. She always bought the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu. She’d choose caviar not because she liked it but because of what it cost.

      

      The Golden Bowl, according to its brochure, was an establishment run on therapeutic lines. Golden Bowlers (ouch! but never mind) were encouraged to live life to the full. Age need not be a barrier to the exploration of the self, or the exercise of the mind. Golden Bowlers were not offered the consolations of religious belief, which came with difficulty to the highly educated: but rather in some vague, Jungian notion of ‘adjustment to the archetype’ in which all staff were trained, and could bring joy and relief through the concluding years. Reading between the lines, those who ran the Golden Bowl held no truck with reincarnation; death was death, and that was that. What they were after was reconciliation with what had gone before since nothing much was to come. And they mentioned the word death, which nobody else had done.

      

      It was persuasive, and Felicity and I were persuaded. I should have spoken out more firmly against a Residential Home for the Aged where the residents were known as Golden Bowlers. I should have realized that the connection with Ecclesiastes, which I assumed, was minimal. It wasn’t mentioned in the brochure.

      Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth,

       while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain:

      How did it go after that? My mother Angel would teach me chunks of the Bible. It was her lasting gift to me, along with life itself, of course.

      …and desire shall fail:

       because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken at the fountain, …then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

      Felicity would never acknowledge that the Golden Bowl, whatever that was meant to represent, was cracked. A day would never dawn when she took no pleasure at all in it. There was bound to be trouble. ‘Vanity of vanities,’ saith the preacher, ‘all is vanity.’ But we were blithe: we put our trust in synchronicity.

      The next morning Felicity consulted the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Oracles with the Foreword by Jung himself, to see what that had to say about the Golden Bowl. She had been in her fifties in the midsixties, when I was born, when the I Ching was all the rage.

      She had just found her pencil and got round to throwing the coins when Joy appeared shouting in through the French windows, a vision in orange velvet with a crimson headband, determined that this day she would really make her mark upon the world. Felicity had the grace to hastily hide the coins under a sheet of paper. And then we all set off in high spirits to inspect the Golden Bowl, Felicity, Joy and me, in Joy’s Mercedes. Once again I drove. It was fun, all of a sudden.

      

      ‘This place is going to be just as terrible as the others,’ Joy assured us, quite softly. She was wearing her hearing aid and it was a bright morning so no doubt the world was less misty than usual. ‘But it’s nice to be driven.’ This morning she had a flask of vodka with her and lifted it to her lips from time to time as she sat in the back seat. I could see her in the mirror. She had apparently decided I was to be trusted.

      

      ‘I didn’t have time to read the coins,’ Felicity confided in me on the way. ‘But I threw Duration leading to Biting Through. Thirty-two leading to twenty-one: lots of changing lines, which means we’re in a volatile situation.’ I hadn’t heard talk like this since I was a little girl, when my mother would scarcely buy groceries without consulting the Chinese Book of Wisdom.

      ‘Oh yes,’ I remarked. ‘Is that good or bad?’

      ‘Duration.’ She quoted from memory. ‘Success. No blame.

      Perseverance furthers. It furthers one to have somewhere to go.’

      ‘Like the Golden Bowl?’

      ‘I should think that’s what it meant, wouldn’t you?’ I concentrated on the road. Over the hills I could catch a glimpse of the sea, a thin edge of blue melting into a hazy sky. It was a good day for November: there had been a sharp, hard wind during the night but it had dropped, and the sky was left watery bright. Maybe on just such a day the sails of the Viking longships had caught the sun as they approached the coast. On such a day perhaps the captain of an English privateer had stumbled on deck and said, ‘Beautiful morning for November,’ while wondering if he would live to see the evening. To wonder about death was more commonplace once than it is now, and the present must have seemed the more glorious. Inland the trees, heretofore muzzy with wet leaves, had become stark and bare and beautiful overnight.

      ‘Poor Joy,’ said Felicity loudly, to anyone who cared to hear. ‘She has such a drink problem.’ Joy had turned off her hearing aid.

       6

      Nurse Dawn looked out of the French windows of СКАЧАТЬ