Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon
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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