Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon
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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