Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (10 page)

 
          
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 decor. 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.

 
          
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 1 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 1 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. Angel
would often come with me to the cinema. It was what we did. The school said
nothing. I daresay they were pleased not to have Angel turning up at the school
gate to collect me. She could look strange and she did throw things. My hair,
which had been straight and thin until cropped back to the scalp, thereafter
grew rich, thick and crinkly in my mother’s mode, and was what had drawn
Krassner towards me. I was grateful. If Angel once decided she and I were to be
street people on moral grounds what business was that of the social workers?
That particular time I’d been taken away from Angel and our cardboard box under
the King’s Cross arches (we were North London people), and been put in a foster
home for months, until she’d made it up with Rufus and was in a position to
reclaim me. The cardboard box had been okay. It was summer: we’d go into the
Ritz Hotel and use their washing facilities. Angel always dressed beautifully,
stealing the clothes from stores if necessary. We’d eat in posh restaurants and
run away. At the foster home they dressed me from the charity shop and fed me
on chip sandwiches. And this time when I finally got home the head lice were
real, not imaginary. And Rufus had gone again.

 
          
One
day I’d come home from school to find Angel beating hell out of a pillow,
claiming the devil was in it, and feathers floating through the air like the
snowflakes in
The Snow Queen
- and
had panicked and phoned Felicity in Savannah. The next day, by which time the
feathers had melted and the devil had left, my grandmother swept into our
semi-derelict house in a froth of scarves, lamenting and fussing about the
place and bringing in psychiatrists and social workers. If I hadn’t made the
call l daresay my mother and I would have got by okay. She would have drifted
in and out of psychotic episodes, making cakes and barricading the house
against the landlord: taking petitions to Downing Street: going into smart restaurants
and breaking plates in sympathy with veal calves long before animal rights
became fashionable, and I’d have coped. Twenty years on, in fact, and Angel
might still be alive, with new drugs keeping her in control, or at any rate
more like other people. And I’d still have a mother.

 
          
The
last lucid thing Angel had said to me when they declared her to be a danger to
herself and others, and had jabbed her full of medication, and I was sitting
next to her in the ambulance on the way to the psychiatric unit (from which she
was to escape) was that it was all Felicity’s fault. Felicity had destroyed
her, and would destroy me too.

 
          
‘Your
grandmother is evil,’ she said. I accepted then that Angel was indeed raving.
Felicity was no worse or better than anyone else: she was better than the
teachers at the various schools I’d gone to and not gone to: morally better
than my father who’d walked out rather than have to do the dirty work of having
his wife put away, and simply abandoned me, his child, to cope. She was less
use to me than studying, or my passion for cinema, and certainly less use to me
than my friends. I’d always had friends and mothers of friends who’d take me
in, when times were bad. Children meet with great kindness. In fact Felicity
did her best, I knew, within the boundaries of her own nature. But then
everyone does. And a mother’s last words are difficult to forget, if only
traditionally. You know how it is.

 
          
Nor
did I want Felicity, thirty years later, to be raising these painful matters at
five in the morning. I would rather be lying beside Krassner, making the most
of such time as I had with him: me, the person without past, without family,
the one who just sometimes walked out of the editing suite and engaged in the
real world.

 
          
I
switched the conversation before I got angry and upset. I gave Felicity the
information I was saving like the icing on the lemon drizzle cake my mother
would buy in the early days, when we had a nice apartment like other people and
my father was selling a painting or two and could pay the rent.

 
          
‘I
think I’ve found your Alison,’ I said to Felicity.
‘Your
long-lost daughter.’
For once it was quiet outside the window. Those of
excessive habits had finally gone home to rest and recuperate. The tourists had
not yet woken. Only the binmen still clattered along the edges of
Berwick Street
market, a few blocks away, clearing the
detritus of fruit and vegetable. Krassner snored gently on the bed. It was the
third successive night he had spent there. The insides of my thighs were
agreeably sore. He was due to fly home on Friday. This was early Wednesday
morning. When he was gone I would be able to get my clothes to the cleaners and
have my hair trimmed and streaked, and do all the other small necessary things
you don’t seem to do when there’s a man around because they seem so domestic
and boring and not what the film stars do.

 
          
There
was a long silence from Felicity’s end. The lemon icing
I
so looked forward to was sometimes too tart and sour, I remembered that. When
the silence was broken it was a slap sharp enough to dash the cake from my hand
altogether.

 
          
‘I
didn’t ask you to find her,’ said Felicity. ‘I just told you she existed. I
should have known better than to mention it. I’m sorry I did.’

 
          
‘I’m
finding her for me as much as you,’ I said feebly.

 
          
Therapy
babble,’ said Felicity.
‘For me!
For me! What makes
you so important in the scheme of things? What have you to do with this,
something that happened to me seventy years ago and I’ve spent a lifetime
trying to forget?’

 
          
‘But
what harm can it do? Another family member-’

 
          
You
never knew what you’d get with another person, was Felicity’s view, family
member or not, and she let me know it. They’d come smiling over your threshold
and stay to burn the place down. I was too young to know anything. As you grew
older the soup of life - I beg your pardon? - got thicker and mushier and bits
sank to the bottom and you’d better leave them there, not drag them up to the
surface.

 
          
‘Well,
Gran,’ I said, trying to keep it light, keep my voice from trembling, trying to
remember the sheer unreasonableness of Angel’s hostility, ‘no wonder you like
to live out of packets.
One- minute minestrone with added
vitamins.
Just heat and serve and nothing in the
murk.’

 
          
‘What
are you talking about?’ Miss Felicity demanded. ‘Don’t change the subject. I
can only hope you haven’t set anything in motion you can’t control.’ I just
felt tired and weak and in need of affection. I wanted my mother.

 
          
*                
*                
*

 
 
          
The
door between Krassner and me had swung open. He stirred in his sleep. That was
all going to go wrong too. I must be prepared for it. I was just a convenient
bed, so he didn’t have to take taxis to get to his meetings. I pushed the door
shut with my feet. I have nice feet. Krassner admired them too; he’d gently
pull the toes apart to admire the pink perfection between them, which, he
claimed, when shadowed matched my hair. Men and women together can be so
ridiculous: but it’s such a wonderful vacation from real life, all this mutual
grooming between lovers, or quasilovers, as we were.
Just
practising, or remembering, or passing time, holidaying with the wrong person,
trying to forget the right one.
Except I had never yet met the right
person so what was I going on about? It was all right by me.

 
          
‘You
are two bloodlines and one generation distant from this person,’ Felicity was
saying. ‘It is nothing to do with you. You are like all your generation: you
know nothing and understood nothing. See a problem, sort it out! Most problems
are unsolvable.’

 
          
I
tried not to snivel, thus scolded. The attack was so unexpected. We had parted
so amiably, and so recently, as if we were proper family, apart but supportive.
But the old distresses still pushed their way up to the surface, excoriating. I
was seven years old again, my parents rowing over my existence, my father
angry, my mother at best dysfunctional (though the word hadn’t been invented so
it was a rather rarer condition than now), at worst raving. I was playing
patience with sticky cards laid out on the carpet, willing the hand to solve
itself and not end in stultification. It hits you when you are around this age
that the pattern your life is making at this particular time will recur, ’til
the end of your life, you being the person you are. It will take minimally
different forms but essentially be the same. Pocket money will give way to
earnings, parents to spouses, but nothing’s really going to change, except the
patterns of the carpet, and that’s if you’re lucky. What was Krassner but a
game of patience played with sticky cards that wouldn’t resolve
itself
? I was not beautiful enough, or rich enough, or
interesting enough: mostly I was not brave
enough,
I
didn’t have the courage, the toughness, not to care what others think of me.
Those who care least, win. That’s why Holly does so well out of life.