Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon
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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.
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