Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      

      One day I’d come home from school to find Angel beating hell out of a pillow, claiming the devil was in it, and feathers floating through the air like the snowflakes in The Snow Queen – and had panicked and phoned Felicity in Savannah. The next day, by which time the feathers had melted and the devil had left, my grandmother swept into our semi-derelict house in a froth of scarves, lamenting and fussing about the place and bringing in psychiatrists and social workers. If I hadn’t made the call I daresay my mother and I would have got by okay. She would have drifted in and out of psychotic episodes, making cakes and barricading the house against the landlord: taking petitions to Downing Street: going into smart restaurants and breaking plates in sympathy with veal calves long before animal rights became fashionable, and I’d have coped. Twenty years on, in fact, and Angel might still be alive, with new drugs keeping her in control, or at any rate more like other people. And I’d still have a mother.

      The last lucid thing Angel had said to me when they declared her to be a danger to herself and others, and had jabbed her full of medication, and I was sitting next to her in the ambulance on the way to the psychiatric unit (from which she was to escape) was that it was all Felicity’s fault. Felicity had destroyed her, and would destroy me too.

      ‘Your grandmother is evil,’ she said. I accepted then that Angel was indeed raving. Felicity was no worse or better than anyone else: she was better than the teachers at the various schools I’d gone to and not gone to: morally better than my father who’d walked out rather than have to do the dirty work of having his wife put away, and simply abandoned me, his child, to cope. She was less use to me than studying, or my passion for cinema, and certainly less use to me than my friends. I’d always had friends and mothers of friends who’d take me in, when times were bad. Children meet with great kindness. In fact Felicity did her best, I knew, within the boundaries of her own nature. But then everyone does. And a mother’s last words are difficult to forget, if only traditionally. You know how it is.

      

      Nor did I want Felicity, thirty years later, to be raising these painful matters at five in the morning. I would rather be lying beside Krassner, making the most of such time as I had with him: me, the person without past, without family, the one who just sometimes walked out of the editing suite and engaged in the real world.

      

      I switched the conversation before I got angry and upset. I gave Felicity the information I was saving like the icing on the lemon drizzle cake my mother would buy in the early days, when we had a nice apartment like other people and my father was selling a painting or two and could pay the rent.

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