Rhode Island Blues - Fay Weldon

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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.

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