Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon
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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.
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,