Rhode Island Blues
Fay Weldon

Excerpt

Extract from I CHING OR BOOK OF CHANGES translated by Richard Wilhelm, rendered into English by Cary F Baynes (Arkana, 1989) copyright 1950 and 1967 by Bollingen Foundations Inc. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

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WICKED WOMEN

THE CLONING OF JOANNA MAY

DARCY’S UTOPIA

AFFLICTION

About the Author

Also by Fay Weldon

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

‘I’m old enough to speak the truth,’ said my grandmother, her voice bouncing over the Atlantic waves, ridiculously girlish. ‘Nothing stops me now, Sophia, not prudence, or kindness, or fear of the consequences. I am eighty-five. What I think I say. It is my privilege. If people don’t like what they hear they can always dismiss it as dementia.’

My grandmother Felicity had seldom refrained from speaking the truth out of compassion for others, but I was too tired and guilty to argue, let alone murmur that actually she was only eighty-three, not eighty-five. Felicity spoke from her white clapboard house on a hillside outside Norwich, Connecticut, with its under-floor music system and giant well-stocked fridge, full of uneatable doughy products in bright ugly bags, Lite this and Lite that, and I listened to her reproaches in a cramped brick apartment in London’s Soho. Her voice echoed through an expensive, languid, graceful, lonely, spacious, carpetless house: she kept the doors unlocked and the windows undraped, squares of dark looking out into even blacker night, where for all anyone knew axe murderers lurked. My voice in reply lacked echo: here in central London the rooms were small and cluttered and the windows were barred, and thick drapes kept out the worst of the late-night surge of noise as the gay pubs below emptied out and the gay clubs began to fill. I felt safer here than I ever did when visiting Felicity on her grassy hillside. A prostitute worked on the storey below mine, sopping up any sexual fury which might feel inclined to stray up the stairs, and a graphic designer worked above me, all fastidious control and expertise, which I liked to think seeped downwards to me.

Mine was a fashionable, expensive and desirable address for London. I could walk to work, which I valued, though it meant pushing my way through crowds both celebratory and perverse: the tight butts of the sexually motivated and the spreading butts of gawking tourists an equal nonsense. Was there no way of averaging them out, turning them all into everyday non-loitering citizens? But then you might as well be living in a suburb, and for my kind of person that meant the end.

I was tired because I had just got back from work, and it was late at night. I was guilty because it was two weeks since my grandmother’s noisy friend and neighbour Joy—neighbour in the sense that their two great lonely houses were just about within hailing distance—had called me to shout down the line that Felicity, who lived alone, had had a stroke and was in hospital in Hartford. I had a deadline to meet. I am a film editor. There comes a certain point in a film production when the editor ceases to be dispensable: when you just can’t afford to be ill, go insane, have a sick grandmother. Joy’s call came at just such a moment. You have to be there in the editing suite and that’s that. There are things in your head which are in nobody else’s. Tomorrow was a feature film, a US/UK co-production with pretensions, a big budget, a big-time director (Harry Krassner), and a host of marketing people now hovering and arranging PR and previews, while I still struggled under pressure of time to make something erotic out of not-enough footage of teenage copulation which neither party had seemed to go to with much pleasure. I did not fly to my grandmother’s side. I simply forgot her until I could afford to remember her. Now here she was again, her suppertime my bedtime, not that she ever acknowledged a difference in time zones if she could help it.

I gritted my teeth. Sometimes the ghost of my mad mother stands between myself and Felicity, damming up the flow of family feeling; a sepulchral figure, like one of those school-crossing ladies who step out unexpectedly into the road to let the children through, making the traffic squeal to an unwilling halt.

I had a recurring dream when I was small in which my mother did exactly that, only the sign in her hand read not ‘Children crossing’ but ‘Your fault, Felicity’. Except I knew that if she ever turned the sign, the other side would have my name on it. It would read, ‘You’re to blame, Sophia’. I always managed to wake myself up before I had to face the terror of the other side. I could do that as a child—control my dreams. I think that’s why I’m reckoned to be a good film editor: what is this job of mine but the controlling of other people’s fantasies? I take sleeping pills, most nights: they stop my own dreams. I have enough of them by day to keep anyone sane.

As it happened Felicity had been let out of hospital within the day, having suffered nothing more than a slight speech impediment, which had by now cleared. But I wasn’t to know that at the time.

‘Sophia,’ she was saying, ‘I want to sell this house. The truth is I’m bored to hell. I keep waiting for something to happen but happenings seem to have run out. Is it my age?’ Well, come the eighth decade I daresay ‘happenings’, by which most women mean love striking out of a clear sky, would indeed run out. Everything must come to an end. She said she was thinking of moving into assisted housing: some kind of old-persons’ community. I said I was not sure this was a recipe for a lively life. She said just because people were old didn’t mean they weren’t still alive. She was going to hold her nose and jump: the house was already on the market, she was already selling bits and pieces in the local flea markets, there were some family things I might want to have, and if so I had better come over and claim them.

I felt the tug of duty and the goad of guilt and the weight of my ambivalence: all the emotions, in fact, commonly associated with dealing with family. She being my only relative, I felt the burden more acutely. I loved her. I just wanted her far away and somewhere else. And if I were to read my own behaviour finely, it was worse than this.

As I’d callously worked on after Joy’s first phone call, resisting the notion that in the face of death all things to do with life should pause, I knew that if Felicity would only just die the issue of fault would be set to rest, forever unresolved. I could just be me, sprung out of nowhere, product of my generation, with the past irrelevant, family history forgotten, left to freely enjoy the numerous satisfactions of here and now, part of the New London Ciabatta Culture, as the great Harry Krassner was accustomed to describing it.

Myself, Sophia King, film editor, living day-by-day in some windowless room with bad air conditioning and the soothing hum of computerized technology, but free of the past. Easier by far to make sense of Harry Krassner’s uneven footage than of real life, to let images on film provide beginnings, middles, ends and morals. Real life is all subtext, never with a decent explanation, no day of judgement to make things clear, God nothing more than a long-departed editor, too idle to make sense of the reels. Off to his grandmother’s funeral mid-plot, no doubt.

Go into therapy, peel off the onion layers, turn the dreams into narrative, still the irritating haphazardness of everyday real life remains. Film seems more honest to me: actuality filtered through a camera. Felicity must not be allowed to interfere with my life, in death any more than she had in life. Bored she might be, but she had her comforts, money from dead husbands, a Utrillo on her wall, a neighbour called Joy, who shouted energetically down the telephone. I remembered how, when I was ten years old and Felicity was my only source of good cheer, she had cut herself off from me, left her daughter Angel, my mother, to die without her, fled back home to the States and not even come back for the funeral. I had forgotten how angry I was with her: how little I was prepared to forgive her. What had been her own emergency, her own internal editing, so desperately required that she abandoned us? Once, when I was small, ordinary simple family love had flowed from me to Felicity only to be fed back by her, through this act, as unspoken condemnation.

My mother had done even worse by the pair of us, of course, and returned love with hate, as insane people will to their nearest and dearest, be they parent or child, and there can be nothing worse in the world. But at least my mother Angel had the excuse of being mad. Felicity was reckoned sane.

‘You didn’t come over and visit me in hospital when for all you knew I might have been dying,’ said Felicity now, at my sleeping time, suppertime for her. What did she care about my convenience?

What was the point of reminding her of the past?

‘You were only in hospital for a night,’ I protested.

‘It might have been my last night,’ she said. ‘I was fairly frightened, I can tell you.’

Oh, brutal! And I was so tired. I had only just returned from the cutting room when the phone call came. Harry Krassner would be in at ten the next morning, with the producer, for what I hoped against hope would be an acceptance of the fine cut. I was not sure which seemed the more fictional—Felicity’s phone call or the hours I’d just lived through. My eyes were tired and itching. All I wanted to do was sleep. This voice out of the past: still with the actressy lilt, just a little croakier than last time she’d phoned, a few months back, might have been coming out of some late-night film on TV for all it was impinging upon my consciousness. Yet she and I were each other’s only relative. My mother’s death was decades back. We both had new skins. I had to pay attention. ‘You’d have been back home even before I’d got to the hospital,’ I pointed out.

‘You weren’t to know that,’ she remarked, acutely. ‘But then you never thought family was very important.’

‘That isn’t true,’ I snivelled. ‘It’s you who chose to live somewhere else. This is home.’

This was ridiculous: it was like the first time you go to visit a therapist: all they have to do is say something sympathetic and look at you kindly: whereupon self-pity overwhelms you and you weep and weep and weep, believe you must really be in a mess and sign up for two years. I put my weakness down to exhaustion: some feeling that I wasn’t me at all, just one of the cast of some bad late-night TV film, providing the formulaic reaction.

‘It was that or go under myself,’ she said, snivelling a little herself. ‘All I ever got from family was reproaches.’ (A splendid case of projection, but Felicity, like so many of her generation, was a pre-Freudian. Hopeless to start wrangling, let alone say she’d started it.) She pulled herself together magnificently. ‘It was a moment of weakness in me to want you to be present while I died. If someone is not there while you live why should you want them there when you die? Just because they share a quarter of your genetic make-up. It isn’t rational. Do you have any views as to what death actually is?’

‘No,’ I said. If I had I wasn’t going to tell Felicity and certainly not while I was so tearful and tired.

‘You wouldn’t,’ said my grandmother Felicity. ‘You have been permanently depressed since Angel died. You won’t allow yourself a minute’s free time in case you catch yourself contemplating the nature of the universe. I don’t blame you, it’s fairly rotten.’ The stroke must have had some effect on Felicity for since my mother Angel’s death she had scarcely mentioned her name in my presence. My deranged mother died when she was thirty-five: my father hung around to do a desultory job of bringing me up, before dying himself when I was eighteen, of lung cancer. He didn’t smoke, either, or only marihuana.

‘The fact is,’ said Felicity, who had deserted my mother and me at the time of our worst tribulations, and I could not forget it, ‘I’m not fit to live on my own any more. I spilt a pint of boiling milk over my arm yesterday and it’s hurting like hell.’

‘What did you want boiling milk for?’ I asked. This is the trouble with being a film editor. It’s the little motivations, the little events, you have to make sense of before you can approach the bigger issues.

There was a silence from the other end. I thought longingly of bed. I had not made it that morning; that is to say I had not even shaken out the duvet and replaced it with some thought for the future. It’s like that towards the end of a film gig. Afterwards, you can clean and tidy and housewife to your heart’s content, put in marble bathrooms with the vast wages you’ve had no time or inclination to spend: in the meantime home’s just somewhere you lay your head on a sweaty pillow until it’s time to get up and go to work again.

‘I hope you’re not taking after your mother,’ said Felicity. ‘Off at a tangent, all the time.’ That was, I supposed, one way of describing the effects of paranoid schizophrenia, or manic depression or whatever she was said to have.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘don’t try to frighten me.’ The great thing about being brought up around the deranged is that you know you’re sane. ‘And you haven’t answered my question.’

‘I was heating the milk to put in my coffee,’ said Felicity. ‘Eightysix I may be, standards I still have.’

She was growing older by the minute, as if she was wishing away her life. I couldn’t bear it. I kept forgetting how angry I was with her, how badly she had behaved, how reasonable my resentment of her. I loved her. Before my mother died, after my father had disappeared, I’d come home one day to find her darning my school socks. No-one else had ever done that for me, and I was hopeless at it, and there was no money to buy new. I’d been going round with holes in my heels, visible above my shoes. I still have a problem bothering about ladders in tights. I just can’t care.

‘Oh, Grandma,’ I found myself wailing, ‘I’m so glad you’re okay.

I’m so sorry I didn’t come over.’

‘I’m not okay,’ she said. ‘I told you. I have a nasty burn on my forearm. The skin is bright red, wrinkled and puckered. I know it is normally wrinkled and puckered, and you have no idea how little I like my body these days, but it’s not normally bright red and oozing. You just wait ’til you’re my age. And you will be.

We just take turns at being young.’

‘Can’t you call Joy?’ I asked.

‘She’s too deaf to hear the phone,’ said Felicity. ‘She’s hopeless. It has to be faced. I’m too old to live alone. I may even be too old for community living. Don’t worry’—for my heart had turned cold with fear and self-interest and my tears were already drying on my cheeks, and she seemed to know it—‘I’m not suggesting we two live together. Just because we’re both on our own doesn’t mean that we’re not both better off like that. It’s just that I need help with some decisions here.’

I refrained from saying that I did not live on my own, but surrounded by tides of human noise which rose and fell at predictable times likes the surges of the sea; that I had good friends and an enviable career, and a social life between gigs; and it was the life I chose, much peopled by the visible and the invisible, the real and the fantastic, and extraordinarily busy. Felicity was sufficiently of her generation to see on your own as being without husband and children, which indeed, at thirty-two, I was. We know how to defend ourselves, we the survivors of the likes of Felicity and Angel, against the shocks and tribulations that accompany commitment to a man, or a child, or a cause.

‘Can we talk about this tomorrow, please?’ I said. ‘Can’t you call out a doctor to look at your arm?’

‘He’d only think I was making a fuss,’ she said, as if this went without saying, and I remembered that for all her years in America she was still English at heart. ‘You really aren’t being very helpful, Sophia.’ She put the phone down. I called her back. There was no reply. She was sulking. I gave up, lay fully clothed on the bed and went to sleep, and in the morning thought that perhaps I had imagined the whole conversation. There was to be little time to think about it.

2

It was a hideous morning in the cutting room: Harry Krassner was there, of course—a large, hairy, noisy, charismatic man. Powerful men in film tend to fall into two types—the passionate endomorphs, who control you by rushing at you, physically or psychically, and charming and overwhelming you, and the bloodless ectomorphs, who do it by a mild sneer in your presence and a stab in the back as soon as you turn. Krassner was very much the former type. Clive the Producer, small and gay and treacherous, the latter.

As we tried to concentrate on the screen, and resolve our differences, the room filled up with people in one state of crisis or another. The tabloids had discovered Leo Fox, our handsome young lead, was gay: Olivia, his fictional girlfriend, had declared mid-interview in one of the broadsheets that she was a lesbian. Harry was good enough to remark that in the circumstances I had done a good job with the sex scenes. I refrained from retorting that had he supplied me with twenty per cent more footage I could have made a better job of it still: Clive failed to refrain from remarking that perhaps the casting director and the PR people should be sacked: the dotty woman from wardrobe insisted on being present though obviously there was absolutely nothing she could do about anything at this stage. Harry’s stubbly chin brushed against my bare shoulder rather frequently. The shoulder was not meant to be enticing: the air conditioning had broken down, naturally, and the temperature was way above normal. I was down to my camisole, and wore no bra. I don’t have breasts of any great weight or size.

‘You’ve got beautiful skin,’ he said, at one juncture, while we were rewinding. I could feel the idiot lady from wardrobe bristle. Sexual harassment! But it wasn’t like that. He had just noticed I had beautiful skin—I do: very pale, like Angel’s—and remarked upon it: it was a statement of fact, not a come-on. I simply do not rate in the love lives of these people: they are married to women to die for, in the 99.9 percentile when it comes to brains, beauty and style, and for their lovers they have the most beautiful creatures in the world to choose from. That the girl—or boyfriends are very often pains in the butt, shaped by cosmetic surgery, drug-addicted or compulsive kleptomaniacs, or solipsistic to a degree, or could hardly string two words together or work the microwave—forget an editing deck—is neither here nor there. Hollywood lovers have legs long enough to wrap around the likes of Harry’s neck: brains are the opposite of what is required, which is rough trade of any gender, though with the edges smoothed over, to serve as a trophy to success. The brave deserve the fair. I might have a good skin and Harry might notice it but I was still just part of the production team talent.

The trouble is that if you mix with people like this, share space with them and common purpose, the men you meet in the club or the pub or in the lending library just don’t seem up to much. Even Clive, coming into a room, slight and gay and bad-tempered-looking as he is, and the boring end of the business, seems to suck all the vitality out of the space and take it for himself, leaving everyone else feeling and looking vapid.

If I went home alone from parties it was from lack of interest in any man present—there was a whole new race about of slender, shaven-headed, just-about-non-gay men in dark clothing, all laying tentative hands upon one’s arm, with liquid, suggestive, cocainedriven eyes—but who cared? They were as likely to be as interested in a free breakfast as in free sex: a dildo would be as provocative, and less given to complaint.

The day proceeded: there was no lunch break: at one stage Harry threw coffee across the room, complaining about its quality. Clive was in danger of rubbing Danish pastry into the sound deck, and I pointed it out to him, and from his expression got the feeling I would never be employed again by him—not that I cared, I hated the film by this stage, a load of pretentious rubbish, and anything he ever made would have the same loathsome quality, so why should I ever want any job he had to offer? Harry laughed when I said as much: I tossed my head and my hair (red and crinkly) fell out of its tough restraining ponytail and Harry said ‘Wow!’; the scriptwriter banged upon the door and was refused entry, the wardrobe woman pointed out that she had spent $100,000 dollars unnecessarily, since I had abandoned the entire Versace sequence, and I asked her to leave, since obviously she had only been hanging around using up our valuable oxygen in order to make this stupid point—in a $30,000,000 film what was $100,000 dollars—and she slammed out.

The credits and titles people became hysterical and complained we had left them no time, which we hadn’t: while we were mid-provisional-dub the composer—they always take things literally—who was rumoured to have OD’d turned up and wept at what he heard, so we wished openly he had been left to die.

The PR debacle was at least turned around: young Leo announced to the media mid-morning that he was bisexual—people are always reassured by classifications—and Olivia mid-afternoon that her lesbianism wasn’t a permanent state: she’d just once been seduced by her English teacher at school, and everyone who watched the sex scenes would see for themselves just how much she truly, erotically, madly fancied Leo. A crisis about a double booking in the preview theatre was narrowly averted, and by midnight Clive admitted the fine cut was ninety-five per cent right and no-one would notice the missing five per cent except he himself, the only one with any taste, and declared the picture locked.

I emerged gasping into the fetid Soho air with Harry, who asked if I had a bed he could sleep upon. He did not want to face the glitter of his hotel. I thought this was a feeble reason but said okay. He trailed after me to my peculiar residence, climbed my many flights of stairs with a kind of dazed, dogged persistence, looked around my place, said, ‘Very central,’ demanded whisky which I refused him, put his head upon my unshaken pillow, pulled my matted duvet over him and fell sound asleep. The phone rang. It was Felicity. She said she had tripped and sprained her ankle and it would be her hip next. I said I would come over on the next available flight. I lay on the sofa and slept. I did not attempt to join Harry in the bed. There would be no end of trouble if I did. Women should not venture out of their league or their hearts get broken. And I was just production team talent who happened to have a bed which the director didn’t need a taxi to get to. And Clive was too mean to provide a limo.

3

Not far from Mystic, not far from Wakefield, well protected from any traffic noise by woods and hills, just out of Connecticut and into Rhode Island, stood the Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement. Rhode Island is a small dotted oblong on a map, one of the six states that compose New England, the smallest, prettiest, most crowded and (they say) most corrupt state of them all, though who’s to judge a thing like that? It is the indigenous home of a breed of russet feathered hens, the Rhode Island Red, now much appreciated by fanciers the world over. It is crowded in upon, squashed, by Connecticut, Massachusetts and the Atlantic Ocean; it is lush with foliage: birches, poplars and ginkos that turn gold in autumn, and mountain maples and ash, and hickories that turn orange, and red oak and red maple, sassafras and dogwood that turn scarlet. It is sprinkled with wild flowers in spring: ornithological rarities and their watchers spend their summers here. It has sheltered beaches and rocky coves, faded grandeurs, and a brooding, violent history of which an agreeable present makes light. It is the home of the brave, the better dead than red state. In November, of course, it is much like anywhere else, dripping and damp and anonymous. Better to turn the attention inward, not out. So thought Nurse Dawn, executive nursing officer of the Golden Bowl Complex.

The Golden Bowl is constructed much in the fashion of the former Getty Museum outside Los Angeles; that is to say it is an inspired version of a Roman villa, pillared and pooled, lilied and creepered, long and low, and faced with a brilliant white stone which in California looks just fine but under soft Rhode Island skies can startle. The young and unkind might say it glared rather than glowed: the elderly however valued its brightness, and marvelled at the splendour in which they could finish their days, and for this reason the local heritage groups had bitten back protest and allowed its existence.

Even as Sophia travelled to Boston on her sadly delayed visit to her grandmother, Nurse Dawn, together with Dr Joseph Grepalli, specialist in the medical arts and Director of the Golden Bowl, contemplated a bed rendered empty by the sudden death of its previous occupant, Dr Geoffrey Rosebloom. The windows were open, for the decorators were already at work; new white paint was being applied throughout the suite—Dr Rosebloom had been a secret smoker, and the ceilings were uncomfortably yellowed—and an agreeable classic pink-striped wallpaper pasted up over the former mauve and cream flowers. So long as wallpapers are pale they can be put up fresh layer upon old layer, without ever having to strip off the original. The difficulty with strong colours is that if there’s any damp around they tend to seep through to discolour the new. Only after about six layers will the surface begin to bubble and the wall have to be stripped down to its plaster, but that will happen on average only every five years or so. The pink and white was only the second layer since the Golden Bowl had been opened twenty-two years back. The occupant before Dr Rosebloom had been one hundred and two years old, in good health and spirits to the end, and had also died suddenly in the same bed. The mattress had been in good condition and management had not considered it necessary to replace it at the time.

‘Two sudden deaths in the same bed,’ said Dr Grepalli, ‘is too much.’ He was a genial and generous man. ‘This time round the mattress at least must be replaced.’

‘You can hardly blame the bed for the deaths,’ said Nurse Dawn, who pretended to be genial and generous but was not. ‘Dr Rosebloom smoked—look at the state of the ceiling: if he’d had more self-control we wouldn’t be having to repaint—I daresay some respiratory trouble or other triggered the infarction.’

‘Ah, Nurse Dawn,’ said Dr Grepalli, affectionately, ‘you would like everyone to live for ever in perfect health, behaving properly.’ ‘So I would,’ she said. ‘Why would God let some of us live longer than others, if he didn’t want us to learn more in the extra time?’ In her book self-improvement must be continuous, and no respite offered even to the elderly.

The Golden Bowl housed some sixty guests, known to themselves and others as Golden Bowlers. All had had to be over seventy-five at the time they joined the community, and still capable of congregate living. If you were, this augured well for your longevity. The weak had been carried off by now; only the vital and strong remained. The average age of death among Golden Bowlers was a ripe ninety-six, thanks to the particular nature and character of the guests as selected by Nurse Dawn. She had no actuarial training: she worked by instinct. One look was enough. This one would last. Welcome. That one wouldn’t. We are so sorry, we have no spaces.

Death was far from an everyday occurrence at the Golden Bowl, albeit one that was inevitable. Guests moved, within the same building complex, from Congregate Living (when you just didn’t want to be alone) to Assisted Living (when you needed help with your stockings) to Continuing Care (when you needed help with your eating) to Nursing Care (when you took to your bed) to, if you were unlucky, Intensive Care (when you wanted to die but they didn’t let you). Families were encouraged to hand over complete responsibility. Over-loving relatives could be more damaging to an old person’s morale, more detrimental to the Longevity Index, than those who were neglectful. One of Dr Grepalli’s most successful lectures was on this particular subject. Just as a teacher tends to dislike parents, and hold them responsible for the plight of the children, so did Dr Grepalli mistrust relatives and their motives. The doctor was a leading light in the field of senior care administration, appeared on TV from time to time, and wrote articles in The Senior Citizen Monthly which would be syndicated worldwide. Golden Bowlers admired him greatly, and were proud of him. Or so Nurse Dawn assured him.

The longest stay of any Golden Bowler had been twenty-two years: the shortest five days, but that latter was a statistical anomaly, and therefore not used in any averaging out. In its twenty-two years of existence only eight patients had ever moved out before, as it were, moving on. The degree of life satisfaction at the Golden Bowl was high, just inevitably short, though a great deal less short than in similar institutions charging similar prices. Not that there were many around like the Golden Bowl, where you could stay in one place through the increasing stages of your decrepitude. It was customary for the elderly to be wrenched out of familiar places and be moved on to more ‘suitable’ establishments, as the degree of their physical or mental incompetence lurched from one stage to the next, and in the move lost friends, and often possessions, as space itself closed in around them. At the Golden Bowl, whatever your condition, you watched the seasons change in familiar trees and skies, and made your peace with your maker in your own time.

Joseph Grepalli and Nurse Dawn shivered a little in the chilly morning air that dispersed the smell of paint, but were satisfied in their souls. Dr Rosebloom had died suddenly in his sleep at the age of ninety-seven, not a centenarian, but every year over ninety-seven helped ease the average up. He had not done badly, even though he smoked.

The mattress and armchair of the deceased—being perfectly clean—were to be taken to be sold at the used furniture depository: it was remarkable, as Joseph Grepalli remarked, how though a bed could escape the personality of the one who slept in it, an armchair seemed to soak up personality and when its user died, became limp and dismal.

‘Such a romantic,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘I do so love that about you, Joseph.’ The armchair looked perfectly good to her: it was in her interests to keep spending to a minimum but Joseph had to be kept happy, strong in the knowledge of his own sensitivity and goodness. New furniture, she agreed, would be bought at a discount store that very day.

The Golden Bowl had at its practised fingertips the art of providing Instant Renewal of mind and artifacts to maximize peace of mind and profits too. To this end policy was that no single room, suite, or full apartment should be allowed to stay empty for longer than three days at most. But no sooner, either: it took three days, and even Nurse Dawn agreed on this point, for the spirit of the departed to stop hanging around, keeping the air shivery, bringing bad judgement and bad luck. The waiting list was long; it might take guests a month or so to wind up their affairs and move in, but they would pay from the moment their accommodation fell available, ready and waiting. That way the aura of death, the sense of absence caused by death, would be less likely to endure. As with psychoanalysis, the fact of payment had a healing, restoring function. It reduced the ineffable to the everyday.

The bathroom cabinets had to be replaced; as well: Joseph had a superstition about mirrors: supposing the new occupant looked in the mirror and saw the former occupant looking out? Mirrors could be like that, maintained Joseph Grepalli. They retained memory; they had their own point of view. Aged faces tended to look alike in the end: one tough grey whisker much like another, but their owners did not necessarily see it like this. Joseph allowed himself to be fanciful: he himself was a Doctor of Literature; his father Dr Homer Grepalli, the noted geriatric physician and psychoanalyst, had bequeathed him the place and he had made himself an expert. Nurse Dawn was qualified in geriatric psychiatry, which was all that the authorities required.

‘We have twenty-five people on the waiting list,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘but none of them truly satisfactory. Drop-down-deaders: overweight or sociopathic: there is a Pulitzer winner, which is always good for business, but she’s a smoker.’

Nurse Dawn slipped between Joseph’s covers of a night: she was a sturdy, strong-jawed woman of forty-two, with a big bosom and a dull-skinned face and small dark bright button eyes. She looked better with clothes off than on. She clip-clopped down the corridors by day on sensible heels, her broad beam closely encased in blue or white linen, exhorting Golden Bowlers to further and deeper self-knowledge.

‘I trust your judgement, Nurse Dawn,’ said Dr Grepalli. For some reason he felt uneasy, as if standing in front of the lobster tank at a fish restaurant, choosing the one to die for his delight.

‘In fact the whole lot of them sound troublesome and unprincipled. Not one’s as easy as they used to be. Even the old have developed an overweening sense of their own importance. They’ve caught it from the young.’ By troublesome she meant picky about their food, or given to criticism of the staff, or arguing about medication, or averse to group therapy, or lacking in get-up-and-go, or worse, having too many relatives who’d died young. All prospective Golden Bowlers had to provide, as well as good credit references and a CV, a family history and personality profile built on a questionnaire devised by Nurse Dawn herself.

Joseph Grepalli was a bearish, amiable, charismatic man, not unlike, as Sophia King was later to discover, Director Krassner. Inside the first Nurse Dawn was the second, a truly skinny woman not even trying to get out, preferring a cup of sweet coffee and a Danish any day.

‘We must spread the net,’ said Joseph Grepalli. ‘We must trawl deeper.’ The guests called him Stéphane, after Stéphane Grappelli: those who feel helpless always nickname those in charge: even the mildest of mockery helps.

4

I arrived at Felicity’s house, Passmore, 1006 Divine Road, just past midnight. The United Airlines Heathrow-Boston flight left at 12.15—I was on standby so had the will-I-fly, won’t-I-fly? insecurity to endure for more than an hour. I never like that. I am not phobic about flying. I just prefer to know where I’m going to be in the near future. I’d left the Great Director still asleep in my bed, and a note saying I’d gone to look after my sick grandmother, and I’d be back after the weekend. They didn’t need me for the dub. Any old editor would do now the picture was locked and no-one could interfere with what was important. I’d have enough eventual control of the music to keep me happy when I got back. I know a good tune but nothing about music proper and am prepared (just about) to let those more knowledgeable than me have the first if not the last say on a film to which I am to give my imprimatur.

I was upgraded to Business Class, which was fine. The travel agent had passed on the info that I was involved with the new Krassner film Tomorrow Forever (ridiculous title: it had started out as a sultry novel called Forbidden Tide, stayed as a simple Tomorrow for almost a year of pre-production, which was okay, since it was a kind of time travel film backwards and forwards through Leo and Olivia’s relationship: the Forever had crept in towards the end of filming and suited the posters, so it had stayed) and showbiz gets all privileges going. Do you see how difficult it is to get these fictional exercises out of my mind? Now I’m giving you the plot of Tomorrow Forever, which I have stopped myself doing so far.

It was an easy flight: I can never sleep on aircraft, and so watched a video or so on the little personal TV provided with every expensive seat. I miss the general screen now available only at the cheap back of the plane, where you share your viewing pleasure with others, but I would, wouldn’t I? Films are meant to be watched with other people: compared to the big screen videos are poor pathetic things, solitary vice.

Boston is one of the easiest airports through which to enter the US as an alien. Immigration’s fast. I took a short internal flight to Hartford, the Yankee city, these days national home of the insurance business. So far so good. But at Hartford, alas, I was met by Felicity’s friend and neighbour Joy, determined to drive me the fifteen miles to Passmore, at 1006 Divine Road. Joy lived in Windspit, number 1004. If flying doesn’t make me nervous, other people’s driving does, especially when the driver is both near-sighted and deaf, and shouts very loud as if to make sure the world is very sure of her, even though she is not very sure of it.

‘I’m seventy-nine, you wouldn’t think it, would you,’ Joy shrieked at me, summoning a porter to take my bag to her Volvo. Her face was gaunt and white, her hair was wild, blonde and curly, her mouth opened wide in a gummy smile. She was dressed more like a Florida golfing wife, in emerald green velvet jump suit, than the decorous widow my grandmother had described. She was wonderfully good-hearted, or believed she was, just noisy. The Volvo was dented here and there and the wing mirror hung at an angle.

‘Not for a moment,’ I said. I did not want to worry or upset her. There was no way of getting to my destination without her help. The wooded roads were gathering dusk. Joy would put her foot on the brake instead of the accelerator, or vice versa, or both together, and when the Volvo stopped with a shudder she’d decide she had run over some dumb creature and we’d stop and get out and search for the victim with a torch she kept handy for the purpose. She did not pull the car over to the side of the road before doing so, either. Luckily at this time of night the back roads were more or less deserted. No Indian tracker she: she made so much noise any wounded animal with the strength to flee would have left long ago.

‘I’m not like you English, I don’t beat about the bush. I’m an upfront kind of person,’ she shouted as we climbed back into the car after vain pursuit of a non-existent limping skunk. ‘I can’t be left to be responsible for your grandmother any more. It isn’t fair on me. She must go into a congregate community, with others her own age.’ I agreed that she should, though the term was unfamiliar to me.

‘It would be okay if Felicity would do as she’s told, but she won’t,’ roared Joy later, by way of explanation. I agreed that it was difficult to get Felicity to do as she was told.

‘Now that that bullying bastard of a husband has died and left her in peace poor Felicity deserves something for herself.’

I had met Exon (like the oil disaster, minus the extra ‘x’) and he had never struck me as a bullying bastard, just a rather dull nice pompous man, a Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut, who had died four years back, and who had had a lot to put up with from Felicity. I said as much to Joy. It was unwise. She slammed her feet down on both brake and accelerator together and when the bump and stop came—Volvos can do a lot but cannot mind read—insisted on turning off the headlights to save the battery and going right into the forest with her torch, clambering up banks and down gullies in search of a deer she was convinced she had winged. This time I refused to go with her. I had remembered Lyme’s disease, the nasty lingering flu-like illness which you could catch from the deer tick, a creature the size of a pin’s head which jumps around in these particular woods. They leap on to human flesh, dig themselves in and bite. All is well if you bother to do a body search and your eyesight is good and you pluck them off with tweezers within twenty-four hours: but overlook just one and they bed in and you can be off work for months. I was safer in the Volvo with the doors and windows closed. I did not know how high the ticks could jump. The next thing would be—if this were a comedy film—Joy would break her ankle, and the volume of her distress would be awesome. Even as I thought these uncharitable thoughts there was a rumble and a rising roar and an eighteen-wheel truck swerved past us, the breath of its passing shadowing the windows, missing me and the Volvo by inches. It went blazing and blaring off into the dark. I simply blanked my mind, as I do during the commercials on TV, waiting for real life to start again. I was in shock.

‘These truck drivers should be prosecuted,’ she yelled when she got back into the driving seat seconds later. ‘They should remember there might be cars parked out here, with their lights off to save the batteries.’

‘Of course they should,’ I said. ‘Though we weren’t exactly parked.’ Her veined hands tightened on the wheel.

‘I can see you have a lot of Felicity in you,’ she said. She’d quieted considerably. ‘You English can be so sarcastic. This car could have been a write-off and you’re so cool about it.’

I refrained from comment. We drove the rest of the way in silence. She seemed chastened. There were no more animal stops and she peered ahead into the dappled dark and tried to pay attention. There was something very sweet about her.

One way and another, what with travel, terror, amazement, and the effort of not saying what I thought, by the time I got to Felicity’s I was exhausted. Felicity had waited up, playing Sibelius very loud, the privilege of those who live a fair distance from their neighbours. Lights were low and seductive, the furniture minimalist. She reclined on a sofa, wrapped in a Chinese silk gown of exquisite beauty, which fell aside to show her long graceful legs. Not a sign of a varicose vein, but she was, I noticed, wearing opaque tights, where once she would have been proud to show the smooth whiteness of bare unblemished skin. The central heating was turned up so high she could not have been feeling the cold. She looked frailer than when I last saw her, which disconcerted me. She had always been light and thin and pale, and fine-featured, but now she looked as if someone should slap a red fragile sticker on her. Her hair, so like mine in colour and texture, had faded and thinned, but there was still enough of it to make a show. Her eyes were bright enough, and her mind sharp as ever. She looked younger, in fact, than her friend Joy. She had one arm in a sling and a bandaged ankle, which she kept prominently on display, just in case I decided she could look after herself. I was family, and she was claiming me.

‘How was Joy’s driving?’ Felicity was kind enough to ask me, having been the one to inflict her on me. ‘I hope she wasn’t too noisy.’

Crazed by weariness I replied by singing A Tombstone Every Mile at the top of my voice, a trucker’s song about the notorious stretch of wooded road which had claimed more truckers’ lives than anywhere else in the entire US and had been the title song of a pale Convoy imitation I’d once worked on. I could see that if someone like Joy had been travelling the road by night for the last fifty years a myth of haunting might well arise. I tried to explain my thinking to Felicity but my head fell in sleep into my hot cholesterol-lowered, pasteurized, fat-free, sugar-free Milk and Choco Lite Drink.

Oddly enough, what most exhausted me was the recurring vision of Director Krassner’s locks of unkempt hair creeping out between my duvet and my pillow back home. I was in flight, I could see that. Perhaps I had come not so much to rescue Felicity as to escape emotional entanglement. Felicity woke me up sufficiently to lead me to the spare room, where she took off my coat and my boots and stretched me out with a pillow under my head. She seemed to have become more maternal with the passing of the years. I felt I was at home. She could claim me if she wanted me.

The minute proper sleep was possible it eluded me. I wondered whether to call the cutting room in the morning and decided not. Just as social workers have to harden their hearts against empathy with their clients, and nurses must learn not to grieve when patients die, so film editors must steel themselves against too much involvement with their projects. A gig is a gig. You must forget and move on. But this was a big film. It was hard. The PR budget was about three-quarters again on top of the actual shooting budget: the studio had put a lot behind it. It would move into the group consciousness of nations. It would take up oceans of column inches. The editor, that is to say me, the one on whom the success or otherwise of the film depended—forget script, forget stars, everything depends upon the cut—would of course hardly get a mention. Writers complain of being overlooked, but their fate is as nothing compared to that of the editor. The sense of martyrdom is quite pleasant, though, and feeling sorry for yourself nurturing through the lonely nights.

The bed creaked. Like so much else it was wooden. Everything echoes in these new-old houses: the wood forever shifts and complains: the timber is twenty years old, not the two hundred it pretends to be. Raccoons and squirrels scamper in the lofts. Sexual activity between humans could not happen without everyone else in the house knowing. Giant freezers and massive washing machines, enviable to British minds, root the house in one place, where it seems determined to dance free in another. In the morning I looked out over a damp November landscape which seemed determined to keep nature at bay. The land had been cleared of native trees and laid down in grass; low stone walls separated well-maintained properties: there were no fences or hedges to provide privacy, as there would have been in England: distance alone was enough. Lots of space for everyone for those with nothing to hide and a good income. How could Felicity have lived alone here for four years? I asked her over breakfast the next morning—Waffles-Go-Liteley and sugar-free maple syrup and caffeine-rich coffee, thank God.

‘I was trying to oblige time to pass slowly,’ she said. ‘Someone has to do it. Time is divided out amongst the human race: the more of them there are the less of it there is to go round.’ I wondered what poor dead Exon would have made of this statement. Taken her to task and demanded a fuller explanation, probably. He had always been part charmed, part infuriated by what he called Felicity’s Fancies. During the twelve-year course of her marriage to him, at least in my presence, the fancies had dwindled away to almost nothing. Now it seemed the wayward imaginative tendency was reasserting itself, bouncing back. This is what I had always objected to about marriage: the way partners whittle themselves down to the level of the other without even noticing.

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—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 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.

‘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 the Atlantic Suite which Dr Rosebloom had so recently and suddenly vacated, and averted her eyes. She did not like the woods, which were allowed to creep so near to the portals of the property. It was too gentle and crowded and coy a landscape for her. She felt circumscribed and somehow on hold, as if her life had not properly begun.

The sky seemed too small. It was too quiet. If you listened you could hear the tiresome swish of ocean as a background to birdsong. There was somewhere to go and everyone else knew where except her.

A group of guests passed in the corridor on the other side of the door, their voices drifting. They were chanting, which was gratifying, but not gratifying enough, on their way from an Ascension meeting in the Library, still brimming with cheerful animation, summoned up somehow from within their feeble beings.

‘What do Golden Bowlers do?

We live life to the full.’

Self-hypnosis could do so much: in the end, whatever Dr Grepalli had to say on the subject, joie de vivre failed in the face of bad knees, and dimming eyes. Silence fell again. There seemed today some dulling barrier between Nurse Dawn and the enjoyment of life. Everything became a source of irritation. People raved about the wondrous colours of the trees in these parts after the first few sharp frosts of autumn, but to her the trees in their autumn dress looked garish, like colours from a child’s painting set. And now in November there was no splendour in their absence of dress, their dank nakedness. She wanted to be back home to the wheat plains and a great expanse of sky, where the roads were straight and dusty and yellow, and dry, even at this time of year; and the sound of wind, not sea, was the background to everyday life; and twisters came like the sudden vengeance of God, reminding one of sin, and with sin, salvation. But it could not be. This was where the money was, where she had managed to carve her niche. There were as many old people back there as here, of course, and as much work to be done for them, but they were a grittier, suspicious lot. They would be embarrassed rather than charmed by Dr Grepalli’s methods, and far less easy about parting with their money. They thought more about their relatives and what good their small savings could do when they were gone than about their own comfort and state of mind. And coming out of a rural community as they did, they tended to lose heart as they reached their gnarled and wrinkled end: what was the point of you if your back was bad or your legs wouldn’t work. Here at the prosperous edges of the sea, oldsters seemed to keep going longer and in better shape. Certainly they’d acquired more money in their lifetimes, doing less.

Nurse Dawn had a profit-share in the Golden Bowl: she had persuaded Dr Grepalli that this was only just and fair. She hadn’t exactly asked him to marry her and he hadn’t exactly declined: she hadn’t exactly threatened to inform the Golden Years Welfare Board (originally appointed by Dr Homer Grepalli, Joseph’s father) that she and he enjoyed a sexual relationship, and he hadn’t exactly asked her not to.

‘Dawn,’ he’d remarked once, as her head nuzzled beneath the bedclothes, ‘I hope you’re doing this because you want to, not because you think it will help you control me. You are something of a control-freak, as you must realize. Which suits me: and suits our guests; as we get older we feel relieved if there is someone around telling us what to do, even if we don’t care to do it. But I do want you to be aware I’m not open to blackmail.’

‘The Board wouldn’t like it,’ she had surfaced to say, shocked. ‘The Board wouldn’t mind in the least,’ Dr Grepalli said. ‘They’re all free-love civil libertarians: pre-Aids thinkers, existentialists, older than we are—not a single one below sixty, and far less censorious than our generation. Nevertheless I can see the justice of giving you a twenty per cent share of my own annual profit-related bonus, since you do so much for my morale and the wellbeing of the guests, who all adore you. As I do.’

Dr Grepalli was too self-aware and ironically minded ever to do as he really wanted—or rather have done to him—which would be to be tied up by a ferocious woman in a nurse’s uniform, who would insult him and walk all over him in high-heeled shoes, and brandish a whip, but Nurse Dawn seemed a heaven-sent compromise, and it suited him to pay her, and added an agreeable complexity to their relationship. It was part of the unspoken deal. Both knew it.

Nurse Dawn had worked the twenty per cent share out as a good $700 a week on top of her existing salary, and rising. Guests paid not a decreasing but an increasing sum—year by year—for their stay. This was only reasonable. They needed more care. More trays of food had to be fetched and carried, more medication provided and more eccentricities and forgetfulness coped with. Relatives and lawyers sometimes protested at the Golden Bowl’s charging arrangements, seeing, annually, an exponential loss of expected family inheritance, but soon came to see the sense of it. The older anyone’s relatives were, after all, the less likely was anyone to want to take them home again.

‘The longer you Stay,

The more you Pay,

Lucky Golden Bowler!’

The unspoken benefit, of course, was that guests were conscious that management had an incentive to keep them alive as long as possible. Let your room fall empty, as Dr Rosebloom had, and the newcomer entered at the lower rate. Golden Bowlers were encouraged to see the Golden Bowl as home, and their fellow guests as family: it was hoped that little by little they would loosen close ties with their birth families. It was easier for everyone that way, as it was seen to be for nuns and monks. And after eighty that was more or less what guests amounted to: sex being hardly a motivating force in their lives any longer, they could focus on their spirituality. Family and friends were of course allowed to visit, but were never quite welcomed. News from outside too often upset. Relatives would turn up merely to pass on bad news that the resident was helpless to do anything about. Someone had died, someone else gone to prison, been divorced, great-great-grandchildren were on Ritalin.

By and large, or so it was concluded at the Golden Bowl, the relatives you ended up with were a disappointment: not at all what one had dreamed of when young. They were usually a great deal plainer than one had hoped: the good genes were so easily diluted, while the bad ran riot. The bride’s handsome husband turned out to be an anomaly in a family as plain as the back of a bus, and it was only apparent at the wedding. Took only one son to marry a dim girl with big teeth in a small jaw and you’d produce a whole race of descendants in need of orthodontics but not the wit or will to afford them. If the boy hadn’t gone to that particular party on that particular night—and fallen for an ambitious girl with small teeth in a big jaw—how different the room full of descendants would look: how much greater the sum of their income. The old easily grew sulky, seeing how much of life was chance, how little due to intent. Unfair, unfair! It’s the familiar cry of the small child, too; only between the extremes of age do we have the impression there’s anything we can do about anything.

The decorators were packing up in Dr Rosebloom’s suite. Nurse Dawn was pleased with the work they had done, but did not tell them so. Rather she chose to find flaws in a section of the pink striped wallpaper where the edges were admittedly slightly mismatched. The decorators were duly apologetic and agreed, after a short brisk discussion, to accept a lesser fee. Nurse Dawn also got a percentage of any savings she could make on the annual maintenance budget, in the management of which she had lately found serious shortcomings.

In Nurse Dawn’s opinion praise should be used sparingly, since it only served to make those who received it complacent. Her children, had she had any, would have grown up to be neurotic high-achievers: come home proudly with news of a silver medal, and be scolded for not getting the gold. The decorators slunk away, disgraced. Nurse Dawn strolled around the suite, observing detail, trying to envisage its next occupant. That was how she made her choices: in much the same way as she chose numbers for the lottery, willing good fortune to come her way, envisaging the numbers as they shot up on the screen.

The bathroom had been pleasingly redone with marble veneer tiles that could have passed for the real thing, and gold stucco angels surrounded the new bathroom cabinet. Nurse Dawn’s fallback position, she decided, would be the eighty-year-old female applicant, the Pulitzer Prize winner, who smoked. She would be given the suite on condition she gave up smoking. This she would promise to do: this she would fail to do: and Nurse Dawn would be at a psychological advantage from the outset. There wasn’t actually much to be feared from lung cancer: if you were a smoker and it hadn’t got you by eighty it was unlikely to do so at all: nor would other forms of cancer be likely to surface. Death would be by stroke or heart attack or simply the incompetence of being which afflicted the individual as the hundredth year approached. The Pulitzer winner was of the lean hard-bitten hard-drinking kind: they tended to last well. The Golden Bowl could, she supposed, do worse.

Nurse Dawn’s attention was drawn to a Mercedes sweeping through the opening of the gold-and-metal appliqué gates, copies of the ones at the entrance to London’s Hyde Park, put up in honour of the Queen Mother, aged a good ninety-eight at the time of their erecting. The Mercedes did not proceed to the front of the house where regular parking was obviously to be found, but drew up outside the French windows of the Rosebloom Suite, which everyone much got out of the habit of calling it, only a few feet from where Nurse Dawn stood, lamenting the view. Three women got out. A skinny young person in sweater and jeans, with Botticelli hair and a high forehead, and two women in their later years. One, in her mid-seventies, Nurse Dawn supposed, was hideously attired in an orange velvet tracksuit and crimson headband, and had a bulky waist—which did not augur well for a long life span—but the other one, dressed in strange and impractical gauze and gossamer floating drapes, looked slight but promising. Early eighties, passing at first glance for ten years younger. A one-time actress or dancer, maybe. Her movements were both energetic and graceful: her back was scarcely bowed—HRT from early middle age, Nurse Dawn surmised, always a plus—a graceful head poised on a long neck, tactfully scarved to hide the creases.

‘Parking’s round the front, in the space designated,’ called Nurse Dawn, as the party disembarked, but they took no notice, though they had heard perfectly well.

‘There’s lots of room,’ the young woman said. ‘And we’re here now.’ She had an English accent. If the relatives were English and far away so much the better. ‘Can we talk to whoever’s in charge?’ ‘I’m in charge,’ said Nurse Dawn, and seeing it was more or less true, felt much better. She might have reached her forties without husband, children, or home of her own, which was the fate of many, God alone knew, but at least she was accumulating money in her bank account, very fast indeed, and would not, as her mother had always promised her, end up with nothing.

She saw how Felicity lingered in the Rosebloom Suite, with its pretty pink and white paper, admired the view, laughed with pleasure at the absurdities of the bathroom cabinet, and heard her say, ‘I could live in a place like this. It seems more me than that great creaky house ever did.’

She heard Joy reply, shocked, at the top of her voice, ‘That’s your home you’re talking about, Miss Felicity.’

Nurse Dawn was pleased to understand it was the quiet one, not the noisy one, who was looking for a home. If she made so much noise now what would she be doing in ten years’ time? The vocal cords were often the last to go. And Felicity’s reply, ‘I was never happy with my own taste. I don’t think we need look further than here,’ came almost as a relief.

The English girl said, ‘Come on now, this is the first place we’ve seen. You can’t make up your mind just like that.’

‘I can,’ said Felicity. ‘And I have. What was I told this morning? It furthers one to have somewhere to go? This is the somewhere.’

Nurse Dawn led the party through to the front reception area, where they should have been in the first place, imbuing a proper sense of reverence, where busts of Roman Caesars stood on marble plinths, and said, ‘You must understand we have a long waiting list, and all applicants must first be vetted, and then voted for. We’re very much a family here.’ This deflated the spirit of the group considerably, as Nurse Dawn had intended. She preferred supplicants to pickers and choosers.

Being a woman of quick decision she had already decided to accept Felicity for the Atlantic Suite, but it was wise to let her fret a little. She would be quite an asset: she moved and spoke gracefully, and was of good appearance, and though no kind of intellectual, unlike the Pulitzer Prize winner, would not annoy the other guests by smoking. Moreover, she quoted from the I Ching—‘it furthers one to have somewhere to go’ could only come from this source—which meant Dr Grepalli would put up no objection. Jungians clung to one another in their absurdities.

7

You can run, but you can’t hide. When we got back to Passmore there was a black limo waiting, with New York plates. I was needed back in the Soho editing suite, urgently. I was to take the nine p.m. Concorde flight out of Kennedy. Tomorrow Forever was, as I say, a big-budget film. The percentage cost of Concorde tickets for a deviant editor was minuscule, compared even to leaving the Versace sequences on the cutting room floor. I told the driver to wait while I thought about it, but Felicity asked him in and gave him coffee and cookies. Joy made a hasty exit: the driver was some kind of bearded mountain tribesman and made her nervous. He rose to his feet when she left the room, and bowed with exquisite courtesy, but that only made her the more nervous.

I could not work out at first how anyone knew where to find me. Air travel slows my mind. True, I’d told my friend Annie where I was going. But she wouldn’t have told anyone: and the designer upstairs had my key to let out the cat but I’d just told him vaguely I was off to visit a sick relative: I then remembered that some of my conversation with Felicity had been through the answering machine. The bastard Krassner must have listened to what we said, and then put his people on to it. Film folk can do anything if they put their mind to it. They bribe phone operators and computer hackers and dig dirt on anyone they want. They are ruthless in defence of the people’s entertainment and their own profit, which comes to the same thing. Perhaps Krassner had stayed in my apartment for some time after he woke—how many days ago was it now, four? I had not envisaged that until now: I had simply assumed that being at the best of times in such a hurry, he would have woken, perhaps found some coffee, to which he was welcome, and left at once, back to work. If he had time to spare he would surely have more glamorous and rewarding women than me to pursue and persecute. I felt the less inclined to return and fish the team out of whatever trouble they were now in. I called the editing suite but no-one replied. No doubt they were too busy to so much as pick up the phone for a call they had not initiated.

I had woken up a little. I liked the clear air and the woods and the deer ticks kept at a safe distance from the house, and Felicity was cheerful and Joy was funny and we’d spent a good morning at the Golden Bowl, and the world of downtown Soho seemed a long way away and not a place anyone would gladly return to, not even by way of Concorde and free gifts in best-quality leather which nobody ever wanted. Felicity had been enchanted by the Golden Bowl: we had been shown over its gracious Library, its sparkling clean kitchens, where only the best and freshest food was prepared, and not a sign of a Lite packet anywhere; its Refectory, where guests could sit and eat by themselves at little round one-person tables—though Nurse Dawn did not approve of this: the digestive processes apparently function better if eating is a social affair—its elegant community rooms, its nursing wing, empty of patients: we met Nurse Dawn’s team of nurse-attendants, all bright, cheerful and friendly: we met the Professor of Philosophy, though his eyes were dull and all he wanted to talk about was the state of the golf course. We were told that Felicity could bring her own furniture in if she required though most Golden Bowlers chose to abandon the material trophies of the past, the better to live in the present. She should live very much as she lived at home. Various amiable and reasonably intelligent persons passed us in the corridors, of whom only a small percentage had walking frames, and one or two of the elderly gentlemen gave Felicity a second look. That really pleased her. In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king, and in a nation-state such as the Golden Bowl Felicity would have more people at hand to admire her than she would if she kept the company of those younger than herself. We looked in at a Psychic Nourishment session in the Conservatory—the soul needs nourishment as much as does the body, according to Dr Joseph Grepalli, whom we were privileged to actually meet in his very grand offices. He had the rooms above the Portico: the only suite to which stairs were required. His wide windows looked out over the long rectangle of the lily pool. There were learned books in his bookcase.

‘We are blessed by synchronicity, dear lady,’ said Dr Grepalli to Felicity. ‘Our brochure comes through your letter box the very day your granddaughter arrives from London: you make the decision to remake your life amongst others of like mind, and our new Atlantic Suite, now converted from one of the libraries to personal use, is ready for occupation. All these things are a good sign. As Nurse Dawn will have told you there is already a long list of people waiting to join our community, but if you would be good enough to fill in the questionnaire, we’ll see what we can do, and we will let you know within the next couple of weeks.’

He was, even to me, an attractive man, broad-chinned, bright-eyed, on the jowly side. I like men a little fleshy, Kubricky. In fact, Dr Grepalli reminded me of the abominable Krassner. Thinking back, it seemed strange to me now that I had not joined the latter in my bed. My last sexual relationship had been over six months previously, and that had been fleeting. My grandmother Felicity was obviously impressed by Dr Grepalli. Her wrinkled eyelids drooped over her still large, clear eyes. She actually fluttered her lashes, and moistened her lips with her tongue and sat with her hands clasped behind her neck. She had not read as many books on body language as I had, or heard so many directors expound on it, or she would have desisted. She was in her mid-eighties, for God’s sake, and forty years older than he.

To be seen from Dr Grepalli’s side window, at a little distance from the main villa, was a long, low building. Of this particular place we had not had a guided tour. As I looked an ambulance drew up and a couple of men went inside with a trolley, and a couple of nurses came out: the bleached, hard, noisy kind you tend to find in places other than the Golden Bowl. Dr Grepalli decided the sun was getting in our eyes and drew the net curtains between my eyeline and the building. I didn’t ask him what went on in there. But obviously some old people get Alzheimer’s: in the end some fall ill, some die. It can get depressing for others. There would be some form of segregation: there would have to be, to keep the fit in good cheer.

I fought back my doubts. All this was too good to be true.

Dr Grepalli and my grandmother were having a conversation about the I Ching. Let the living and lively respond to the living and lively, while they can. Joy gaped open-mouthed. I don’t think she really understood what was going on, perhaps because she was wearing her hearing aid again and unaccustomed sound came to her undifferentiated.

‘But some of those people were chanting,’ she protested on the way home. ‘They were all out of their minds. And did you see the potatoes in the kitchen? All different shapes and sizes with dirt on them.’

‘Potatoes come from the ground, Joy,’ said Felicity. ‘They are not born in the supermarket. That’s what vegetables look like in real life. I loved that place. All such a hoot. Now all I have to do is wait and see and pray.’

‘Oh they want you all right,’ shouted Joy. ‘They want your money.’

But here was the limo come especially for me, here in my hand was the Concorde ticket, there was the thought of Kubricky-Krassner back home. There was the driver whose name was Charlie, and who looked like a mountain tribesman in The Three Feathers, dangerous and glittery-eyed, glancing with meaning at his watch. It would not do to cross him. ‘You go on back to London, Sophia,’ said Felicity. ‘There’s nothing more you can do here. I’m going to become a Golden Bowler. If I don’t do something I shall just fade away.’

‘I think you’re crazy,’ roared Joy. ‘And you’re selling this place far too cheap. I’m going to ask my deceased sister’s husband, Jack Epstein. He’s in car dealership in Boston.’

I thought I could safely leave them to it. I had done what I had been summoned to do: endorse Felicity’s decisions. She seemed well and positive. She could look after herself okay without me. I decided not to thwart the mountain tribesman but simply to go home. Joy was not best pleased, but didn’t set up too many difficulties, impressed as she was to discover I was the kind of person for whom limos were sent from New York. She had assumed, I suppose, that I was someone’s PA. Or the make-up girl.

Felicity finished asking advice of the I Ching while Joy helped me get my few things together. That is to say she banged and crashed about, and tripped over chairs and the edges of carpets and got in the way.

‘I’d have gone on looking after your grandmother if I could,’ she shouted. ‘But I’m too old for the responsibility.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘I’m family. It’s up to me.’

‘The only family I have left is Jack,’ she said. ‘That’s my deceased sister Francine’s husband.’ Jack and the sister Francine came into her conversation rather frequently, I noticed. Something beyond her betrayal of my grandmother was bothering her.

‘You young things and your careers!’ she said. ‘I’ll help her pack up the house, of course. Someone’s got to. A lot can go in storage, I daresay.’

‘I don’t know how sensible that is,’ I said. ‘When and where is everything ever going to come out of it? Better sell up and use the money.’

I felt brutal saying it, but it was true. The storage space of the Western world is full to overflowing with the belongings of deceased persons, which no-one quite knows what to do with, let alone who’s the legal owner. I cut a prize-winning documentary about this once. You Can’t Take It with You.

‘I’ll get Jack to help her sell the antiques,’ said Joy. ‘There are so many villains around, just waiting to take advantage of old women alone.’

I said that the only thing she had of any real value was the Utrillo, and presumably Felicity would take that with her to the Golden Bowl. Joy asked what a Utrillo was and I explained it was a painting, and described it. Joy doubted that it was worth anything, being so dull, but had always quite liked the frame.

‘It’s not as if Felicity is going far,’ Joy consoled herself. ‘Only just over the state line to Rhode Island. It’s a much rougher place than here, of course, all has-beens and losers, artists and poets, yard sales and discount stores. Everyone rich and poor trying to pick up a bargain, and still they think well of themselves. They’ll have to wake up when the new Boston to Providence Interstate cuts through. Forget all those woods and falling-down grand houses, it’ll be just another commuting suburb. Property prices will soar: the Golden Bowl will sell up and what will Felicity do then?’

‘She’ll go to the barn,

And keep herself warm,

And hide her head under her wing.

Poor thing,’

I murmured, and then was sorry because she had no idea what I was talking about. How could she? When I was small my mother Angel would say the rhyme if I ever worried about the future, and really it was no consolation at all.

‘The north wind doth blow,

And we shall have snow.

And what will poor robin do then?

Poor thing.’

‘Things looked kind of permanent, at the Golden Bowl,’ I corrected myself. ‘And they seemed very responsible. They won’t just dump her.’

‘That’s what they want you to feel,’ said Joy. ‘But the marble is only veneer and that terrible white stone is so cheap they can hardly give it away. Why can’t she go somewhere more ordinary? Why does she have to be so special?’

‘The Ching was very positive about the Golden Bowl,’ said Felicity, when I came down with my bag, closing the book and rewrapping it in the piece of dark-red silk kept for the purpose. I felt such affectation to be annoying. ‘Though it seemed to see some kind of lawsuit in the future. Thus the kings of former times made firm the laws through the clearly defined penalties. What do you think that means?’

‘I have no idea,’ I said, briskly. ‘I do not see how throwing three coins in the air six times can affect anything.’

‘Darling,’ said Felicity, ‘it isn’t a question of affecting, but reflecting. It’s Jung’s theory of Synchronicity. But I know how you hate all this imaginative stuff.’

I said I’d rather not talk about it. My mother Angel had kept a copy of the I Ching on her kitchen shelf. She had no truck with silk wrappings or respect. The black-and-red book, with its white Chinese ideograms, was battered and marked by put-down coffee cups. ‘What’s the big deal,’ she would say, ‘it is only like consulting a favourite uncle, some wise old man who knows how the world works. You don’t have to take any notice of what he says.’ She would quote from Jung’s Foreword. ‘As to the thousands of questions, doubts, and criticisms that this singular book stirs up – I cannot answer these. The I Ching does not offer itself with proofs and results, it does not vaunt itself, nor is it easy to approach. Like a part of nature, it waits to be discovered.’

One day when Angel had brought home bacon and sardines from the shop, rather than the milk we needed, because she’d thrown the coins before leaving the house and come up with something disparaging about pigs and fishes, I’d lost my cool and protested. ‘Why do you have to throw those stupid coins, why can’t you make up your own mind, then at least I could have some cereal! You are a terrible mother!’ She’d slapped my face. I kicked her ankles. She seldom resorted to violence. When she did I forgave her: she’d get us confused: it was hard for her to tell the difference between her and me. To rebuke me was to rebuke herself. The sudden violence meant, all the same, that the downward slide into unreason was beginning again, and I knew it, and dreaded the weeks to come. My violence, in retaliation, was childish, but that was okay inasmuch as I was a child; I must have been about ten. Her white skin bruised easily. The blue marks were apparent for days. I felt terrible. I think that was at a time before my father left me alone with her: he simply didn’t understand mental illness. He felt she was wilful and difficult and was doing everything she could to upset and destroy him, while doting on me. I tried to tell him she was crazy but he didn’t believe me. I expect believing it meant he would have to take responsibility for me, and he wasn’t the kind of man to do that. He was an artist of the old school. Children were the mother’s business. Anyway he left, sending money for a time. I was alone with her for six months before Felicity turned up to look after us. I’d found her phone number in my mother’s address book and called her. We’d run out of money and there was no food in the cupboard and my mother wasn’t doing anything about it. My grandmother stayed until my mother was hospitalized, and I was in a boarding school, and then went back to her rich old husband in Savannah, the one who left her the Utrillo. She couldn’t stand any of it. Well, it was hard to stand. Visit my mother in her hospital ward, in a spirit of love, and find her white-faced with wild glazed eyes, tied down, shrieking hate at you. They didn’t have the drugs then they do now, and made no effort to keep the children away. I told them at school I was visiting my mother in hospital, but I didn’t tell them what kind of hospital. In those days to have an insane relative was a shame and a disgrace and a terrible secret thing in a family. No sooner had Felicity flown out than my mother simply died. I like to think she knew what she was doing, that it was the only way out for all of us. She managed to suffocate herself in a straitjacket. ‘Throw the coins and throw the pattern of the times,’ Angel would say cheerfully, in the good times, and she’d quote Jung’s Foreword, which she knew by heart, relieving me of the duty of believing what she believed.

‘To one person the spirit of the I Ching appears as clear as day, to another, shadowy as twilight, to a third, dark as night. He who is not pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is against it does not have to find it true.’

As if that settled everything. I try to keep my mind on the good times, but you can see why I like to live in films rather than in reality, if it can possibly be done. I wondered what Krassner’s hang-up was. I thought I probably didn’t want to know, it was an impertinence to inquire. Art is art, forget what motivates it. What business of anyone else’s is why?

Felicity walked with me to the limo, her step still light, her head held high: age sat on her uncomfortably: it didn’t belong to her: I wanted to cry.

‘Thank you for coming all this way,’ she said. ‘I do appreciate it.

It’s made things easier. That place is okay, isn’t it? Of course I’d rather live with family, but one doesn’t want to be a burden.’

‘That place is a hoot,’ I said. ‘I’d give it a go. If you don’t like it I’ll come over and we’ll try again.’

I sank into the squashy real-leather seat.

‘Of course you’re not my only family,’ said Felicity. ‘There was Alison. Though I daresay they changed her name.’

Charlie was looking at his watch. But I was truly startled. I kept the limo door open. We couldn’t leave until I shut it.

‘Alison?’

‘I had Alison before I had your mother,’ said my grandmother. ‘On my fifteenth birthday. That was in London, back in the thirties. I wasn’t married. That made me a bad girl. They made me keep the baby for six weeks, and breastfeed, then they took her away, put her out for adoption.’

‘How could they be so cruel?’ I stood there with the car door open, in the middle of Connecticut, and the past came up and slammed me. And it wasn’t even mine, it was hers.

‘In the name of goodness,’ she said. ‘Most cruelties are. It was in case we changed our mind, but how could we, we unmarried mothers? We had nowhere to live, nowhere to go.’

‘Who took the baby?’

‘I don’t know. They didn’t tell you. It wasn’t allowed. They said so you could put the past behind you and the baby could live without the stigma of its birth. They said it was for everyone’s good but really it was for our punishment. It was a long time ago. Don’t worry about it. She’d be in her late sixties now, if she made it to that.’

‘An aunt,’ I said, jubilant.

‘Always thinking about yourself,’ said Felicity, wryly, and there was nothing for it. I had to go. Other people took more than three hours to drive to New York, but Charlie the mountain man got to Kennedy in two and a half.

8

Alison! A long lost aunt! So long as she could be traced: so long as she had survived. But sixty something years was not so long a time in a Western society; the probability was that she would be still in this world. Chances were that she would have married, had children, grandchildren; that she could provide me with a host of cousins and little relatives, all only a half step away. As ready a family as one of the cake mixes in my grandmother’s refrigerator: just add water and stir: pop in the oven and there you are, evidence of the continuity of family affection. Go for the pleasure, the ready-made, not the pain and boredom of finding the bowl, the wooden spoon, beating the sugar into the butter until the wrist tired. Just hang around, and lo, a family turns up.

Leaning against Concorde’s flimsy hull on the way back to London (I had a window seat but there was nothing to see outside but navy-blue), sipping orange juice, I wondered from whence these domestic images came. When I was small, in the patches when she was sane, which grew fewer and fewer as the years went by, my mother Angel would bake cakes and I would help. Then I was truly happy: we both were. I would scrape the bowl of the creamy mixture: lick the wooden spoon. The taste of damp wood would come through with the vanilla essence.

So much of the time, at least when I was working, I rejoiced in my lack of family. I was not burdened as others were, by the guilt and obligations that seemed to go along with having parents, of whom one should be seeing more, or doing more for, desire and duty forever conflicting: the problems of children, ditto.

‘Just a grandmother in Connecticut’ seemed more than enough to me: far enough away, and of her own volition, to be out of the dreaded Christmas equation which afflicts so many these days: who goes where: which step-child to which step-house, which natural child to which parent, who is to take in the reproachful aged. ‘Oh, now she’s moved to Rhode Island,’ sounded as if she were not an invention, and static, but a living, moving in-touch person. And only a fraction nearer.

I had noticed, mind you, that if I were out of the editing suite for more than a couple of days I would begin to feel a little uneasy, a little unbolstered up, as it were, by my comparative aloneness in the world. Others had parents and aunts and children: their Easters and Passovers were well peopled: their Christmas lists were full of duty items, and duty, I had come to observe, can feel less onerous than freedom: the need to enjoy oneself can become oppressive. As my due to Christmas festivities I would visit my mother’s headstone at Golders Green crematorium, and consider the meaning of life and death for half an hour or so, until cold seeped through the soles of my boots. Not, I came to the conclusion fairly early on, that there were any conclusions to come to. There was the pleasure one got in getting things right, and a disappointment that one day one could no longer do so, it would be too late. I hoped nobody noticed this lack of affect in me. I put on a brave face. And if someone were needed to work on Christmas Day, I would always volunteer.

Between jobs, the cracks showed. They were beginning to yawn wide enough to fall into. Colleagues were all very well: they adored you until the show ended, and then failed to recognize you in the street the following week; there were drinks and jokes in the pub with proper friends, and dancing and sexual overtures in the club, and films to go to, and plays, and theatre, and books. Girlfriends were fine until they got married or solidly partnered and drifted off into their folies à deux or, with-children, à trois or quatre, when you, little by little, turned into the baby-sitter, and a haze of domestic triviality drooped like a dull cloud over the old association, and the friendship faded away to Christmas card level: and others you thought were permanent in your life you quarrelled with or they quarrelled with you, over ridiculous things, over borrowed clothes or hurt pride or imagined insults, and that was always upsetting, and there was no sex by which to re-register and consolidate former affections. As if female friendship wasn’t made to endure, was a false conceit: as if sexual relationships plus children was all that really kept people together, and God knew even that didn’t seem to be enough. Some tried lesbian togetherness but I never really fancied it: it was either too possessive or too bent on variance for comfort, and you’d still find yourself jumping when the phone rang. Is it him, is it her, what’s the difference? Oddly, the young gay men now around town in such numbers seemed to make more reliable and lasting friends than anyone else: true, their partners changed more frequently and the splits were accompanied by the most dreadful tantrums, but their laughs and their lamentations mixed agreeably: they created more of a noisy family feel than the females managed.

My usual answer to the unease about whither and whence, alone, was simply to begin another job. Directors waited for my services. I was as busy as I needed to be. Get back to the cutting room and the dissection of fantasy, and the possibility of an award, an Oscar even, if not this year, then next, and the comfort of one’s prestige in the film business, the working end of it at any rate, if not the Oscar Versace summit, and I’d be just fine again. But I could see I could do with an aunt. One sprung ready-made into my life, without the complications of a shared past. Alison!

If there was an aunt maybe there would be an uncle to go with her? But maybe not. The men in my family tended to fade out of sight in the bright glare of the female personalities with which they were confronted. Mind you, there was fresh blood in there somewhere: this Alison would have had a father. Who fathered an illegitimate baby back in the nineteen-thirties and then scarpered? Not anyone nice. But I assumed Felicity wanted me to go in search of her long-lost daughter, otherwise she wouldn’t have mentioned her. Would she?

The elderly woman in the Hermeés scarf and sensible shoes in the seat next to me called the steward. He arrived, obsequious, resentful and rubbing damp palms together. It is as difficult for Concorde to provide a more luxurious service than First Class on a regular flight as it is for First Class Regular to do much better than Club Class subsonic. There must be an end to the distinction between one grade of smoked salmon and the rest, the taste and texture of one rare globule of caviar and the next. The battle to justify the extra thousands spent by customers cannot be left to speed and convenience alone. There must be luxury enough to shame the opposition. Catering feels it too must do its best, but imagination fails. The staff just has to learn to bow yet lower, and it hurts, and it shows.

‘Last time I was on this blasted machine,’ said my neighbour, ‘there were shreds of real orange in the juice. I’ll swear this is condensed.’

The steward went forward and came back with the cardboard container to reassure her. ‘Nothing but the best of freshly squeezed real oranges,’ claimed the box. She refused to be reassured.

‘I have no proof the juice came out of that particular box,’ she said. The steward offered to provide witnesses. She declined the offer. The cast, as she called them, would only stick together and lie. ‘Why didn’t you just squeeze fresh oranges?’ she demanded. He said there was a space problem on Concorde. She said oranges, properly packed, wouldn’t necessarily take up more room than boxes. He said they would: oranges were round and boxes were square. So they wrangled on. The human race, even on Concorde, is in search of an occupation. The Mach meter showed 2.2. More than twice the speed of sound. The metal against which my arm rested became uncomfortably hot. I thought maybe the whole machine would melt. I expressed my worry to the steward. He felt the wall of the plane, and studying his once handsome face, grown soft from the habit of an unfelt politeness, and petulant from the obligation to justify, justify, justify, I thought I saw alarm writ there. As one does.

‘Oh it does that sometimes,’ he said. ‘If we overheat the pilot will cut back.’ Even as we spoke the Mach meter fell rapidly to 1.5 and the metal cooled almost instantaneously.

‘There you see,’ he said, triumphantly. The woman beside me snorted and fell asleep. I slept too and dreamed of Aunt Alison, who looked like one of the motherly types you see on packets of cake mixes. She folded me in her arms and said, ‘There, there.’ That was all but when I woke up there were tears on my cheeks.

9

The film had been unlocked, that was what had happened, why I had been sent for. A rare event. Young Olivia’s female live-in lover Georgia, slighted by Olivia’s claim that she was no lesbian but the mere victim of child-abuse at the hands of a female teacher, had made an unsuccessful bid to end her life, first e-mailing the news desks with her suicide note: she had been stomach-pumped in time. Georgia’s parents had not helped, joining in the media fray, accusing Olivia, our film’s gentle heroine, of seduction of their daughter, who had been all set to marry a parson. The PR panic was sufficient to infect the studio back in Hollywood. They flew over to sort things out, which only happened in real emergencies. Had they been able, they would have cut off my head and had my brain pickled and turned into some sort of memory bank unit, always accessible, but they couldn’t do that, so they had to pay the price of a Concorde ticket and have my body as well as my brain in the editing suite. They breathed down my neck and shuddered when Harry smoked, which he did more than usual for their benefit. ‘The Studio’ consisted of a sharp young man and a sharper young woman with big hair and a narrow tiny face. She had LA hips, which are wider than those you see skittering about in New York. Californians are built bigger, spreading into available space. Texas is not so far away, in perceptual reality.

The decision finally reached was that I was to recut the love scenes between Leo and Olivia to show an absence of passion rather than a surfeit, as both young people struggled to define their gender identity. This was no great problem for me, since it reflected the actuality of what went on between them on camera. The end was to be changed, which fortunately there was sufficient random footage around to do: a conventional happy ending became one rather less conventional but more convincing. Olivia went off into the sunset with her best friend: Leo with his. The suggestion that the same-sex friends were shortly to be lovers I was able gently and delicately to imply. The film could now be described as brave and edgy, pushing back the frontiers of contemporary experience, it no longer had to be a heart-warming story of young love. It would not please the overseas Islamic markets, but would do fine in the non-Catholic West. ‘The Studio’ were thrilled by their own decision, seeing it as, I quote, ‘seminal to a new generation of gender cinema’. We went into a London pub (their idea) to celebrate and they drank gassy water and managed to score some coke – the supply side in LA had recently run into some trouble, apparently – and got the last flight home.

Nearly everyone was happy about this new turn of events, except by all accounts Krassner, who bit my neck as I did what I was paid to do, and handsomely paid at that. Krassner’s artistic integrity was acknowledged to be under threat, though I had the feeling he would be laughing like the rest of us if he didn’t have a reputation to preserve. The writer was not particularly happy, either, but then writers never are, and Clive our producer, whose film was now going to come in way over budget, was white and exhausted, and in a state of shock, but this is what producers are paid to be.

‘Please do not bite my neck,’ I said to Krassner. But I had come to almost like the slightly sweaty, anxious, obsessive smell of his breath as he craned alongside me towards the screen, and it mingled with mine. Stray strands of black hair interwove with my red tendrils, which by sheer bulk and energy won any encounter. If I tossed my hair out of my eyes, as I did from time to time, a few strands of his would leave his scalp and end up in mine. There seemed an intimacy between us, the greater because we had failed to spend the night together. Matters were still all promise, no disappointment. My bed had held a companionable waft of Krassner as I snatched a couple of hours’ sleep before getting to the cutting room, and to my surprise I hadn’t minded one bit. He’d left a note saying he had wormed the cat: a homey touch, though he had not shaken out the duvet. But then, neither had I before he got under it.

‘I’m not biting,’ he said, now. ‘I’m neurotically gnawing.’ It was true, his teeth – all his, and perfectly capped or veneered or implanted or whatever they did with the teeth of the older man nowadays – slipped gently over the surface of my skin, his full lips following. You don’t get anywhere in film by claiming sexual harassment: that’s for people about to get out of the business anyway. You can get a handsome award but you never work again. For some it’s worth it. Not me. And I liked him gnawing me.

We were three hours into editing when Krassner got a personal phone call from LA. His turn to disentangle his hair from mine, leaving a few more of his strands behind. He took the call. ‘Why hello, darling,’ he said. ‘Yuh, the rumours are correct, we’re up shit creek again. I’m stuck here. Why don’t you fly over to me instead of me going over to you?’

I stopped listening: how stupid I had nearly been: I cut off all reaction. Any shoulder in a storm, that was all my shoulder was to Krassner. Someone nudged me and said that’s Holly Fern on the line – I’d heard of her, who hadn’t: she being the new talent on the block, singing and dancing, according to her people, just like a reborn Ginger Rogers – I thought that was pretty stupid because whoever these days had heard of Ginger Rogers – and with a degree in philosophy which publicity also foolishly did to death. It was from a crap college. ‘Against stupidity,’ my mother Angel once said to me, ‘the Gods themselves strive in vain.’

Nobody had hair as good as mine, but hair isn’t everything, and just because I got up ordinarily with mine in the morning, didn’t mean others couldn’t get the same effect out of a hair salon, if they were prepared to spend half a day achieving it. I wiped Krassner out of my mind, moved my shoulder out of his line. Back at the console he dug me in the ribs and said, ‘Whatzamatter with you?’ but I didn’t deign to reply. It doesn’t do to aim too high, the fall’s too hurtful.

10

That night I called Felicity. I tried to get her to tell me more about Aunt Alison but she wouldn’t.

‘I shouldn’t have brought it up,’ she said. ‘What’s the point?’ She quoted from Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters.

‘We have had enough of action, and of motion, we, Roll’d to starboard, Roll’d to larboard, when the surge was seething free,

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.’

No, she hadn’t heard yet from the Golden Bowl but if they wouldn’t have her she would sell up anyway and go round the corner to the nearest residential house. Joy’s brother-in-law Jack had turned up and made an offer on the house and she had had to disappoint Vanessa.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘$750,000,’ she said.

‘But that’s lower!’ I was shocked.

‘It’s all he can afford, I won’t have to pay agent fees and I don’t want to disappoint Joy.’

‘How do you know he can’t afford it?’ I asked. ‘Because Joy said so?’ ‘I don’t know what you’ve got against Joy. She’s a better friend than you ever were a granddaughter. Just because she’s a bad driver doesn’t mean she’s a bad person.’

‘No,’ I said bitterly, ‘she just prefers animals to people. Big deal. Is Joy’s sister moving in too?’

‘She died a year ago: Joy hated her, loved him.’ I asked if this meant there was romance in the air and Felicity told me not to be absurd. Joy hated sex but liked to have a man about the place to shout at.

Felicity was not moved by my anxiety that the house was sold, and the Golden Bowl had not yet confirmed her apartment. She said one room was much like another when you got older: one steak as hard on your teeth as the next. The I Ching had given her Biting Through, Chen Chi. She must bite resolutely through obstacles: then she would be rewarded with supreme success. I could tell these were mere delaying tactics: she would talk about anything at all except my lost aunt. I cut her short and asked her directly who the father of her first baby was. I pointed out that these days there is no family decision which can be made without consultation: if you gave away a family member you were giving away relatives for future generations, too, and you had to be answerable to them.

To which she replied tartly that I was a fine one to talk, since I was slipping out from under and having no children at all.

I said no, that’s why I wouldn’t be answerable to anyone, lucky old me. But she had, and so she was. You had to know your genetic background if only to keep the Insurance Companies happy.

She said don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs: she lived in Norwich, Connecticut. There were only two things to bear in mind. Death Only Insurance Policies meant they bet you you’d live longer than you thought you would, and annuities meant you bet them you’d outlive what they predicted. And they had whole departments working on it and you didn’t, and they normally won.

I said, though diverted, don’t change the subject, and repeated the question. ‘Who was the father of your adopted child?’

‘That is simply not the kind of thing you ask in proper circles,’ said Felicity, hoity toity, ‘and it is not your bloodline so what has it got to do with you anyway?’

‘I hope he stayed long enough to take off his boots,’ I said, ‘and give his name.’ Felicity, provoked as I had hoped, spoke haughtily. ‘He was not unknown to me, but it is not something I am prepared to talk about. I gave birth on my fifteenth birthday. Honestly, Sophia, would you want to remember such a thing? I know fifteen is nothing these days, but back in the thirties, certainly in the circles in which I moved, it was really something. I gave birth in a Catholic Home for unwed mothers and bad girls didn’t get given chloroform, which was the only anaesthetic available in childbirth at the time. That was to help teach us the wisdom of not doing it again.’

‘It didn’t work. Later on you had Angel.’

‘I took care to be married, and by that time there was gas-and-air. You really must not pry. So far as I am concerned my life began when I married a chicken farmer from Savannah. Anything that happened before that I have sensibly wiped out of my memory. It is all nothing to do with me.’

I wondered how she would get on at the Golden Bowl, where the old wisdom of not thinking about unpleasant things was hardly encouraged. But Felicity could always invent a life story for herself, and go with that, if she so preferred. Or did the spirit of invention, as with the emotions, as with the body, get tired with age? There was a quaver in her voice: a frisson of self-pity I had never heard before. The telephone conversation ended unsatisfactorily, with me anxious for her welfare and her ordering me to not stir up the past. But I had what I wanted. Two further clues. Her fifteenth birthday and a Catholic Home for unwed mothers.

The Tomorrow Forever team, I know, employed the services of a detective agency. The next day I put them on to the job of finding Alison. They offered to lose the cost in the general film expenses, but I said no, this was private work, I would foot the bill. There was now some talk of changing the title to Forever Tomorrow. I couldn’t see that it made much difference. Felicity’s birthday was 6 October. A Libran, fair and square and in the middle of the sign, better at being a mistress than a wife, not that I held any truck with astrology. There can’t have been a great number of babies born to fifteen-year-olds in London on 6 October 1930, in a Catholic Home for unwed mothers, and presumably some records of adoptions would have been kept. And with any luck the right ones would have survived the blitz, and I had always seen myself as a lucky person, though I knew enough from working on a film called Fire over England that great chunks of the national archive went up in flames in 1941.

If I couldn’t have Krassner I wanted a family. I wanted to be bolstered up, I wanted to be enclosed, I wanted someone to be around if I were ill, I wanted someone to look at my calendar and notice that the cat was due for his second worm pill. You could write yourself notices and pin them on a board as much as you liked, but how did you make yourself look at them? You had to have a back-up system.

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.

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.

‘I think I’ve found your Alison,’ I said to Felicity. ‘Your long-lost daughter.’ For once it was quiet outside the window. Those of excessive habits had finally gone home to rest and recuperate. The tourists had not yet woken. Only the binmen still clattered along the edges of Berwick Street market, a few blocks away, clearing the detritus of fruit and vegetable. Krassner snored gently on the bed. It was the third successive night he had spent there. The insides of my thighs were agreeably sore. He was due to fly home on Friday. This was early Wednesday morning. When he was gone I would be able to get my clothes to the cleaners and have my hair trimmed and streaked, and do all the other small necessary things you don’t seem to do when there’s a man around because they seem so domestic and boring and not what the film stars do.

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