Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon

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СКАЧАТЬ 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—I 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.

       5

      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-in-law Jack, a retired car dealer—and СКАЧАТЬ