Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (12 page)

 
          
In
went the token clods of dirt.
A thin and miserable hymn.
Joy opened and closed her mouth dutifully: what was the point of exhausting her
vocal cords: the wind blew away the sound in any case. And now what was this?
What was going on? Felicity and White Hair were exchanging glances, in that
peculiar way people sometimes did when they were young and very aware of each
other, first looking away, not quite meeting the other’s eye,
then
catching it. It was absurd. She nudged Felicity to stop
making a fool of
herself
but Felicity didn’t even
notice. She’d gone bright pink. Or perhaps it was just the cold wind. Whoever
blushed when they were over eighty? Whoever was looking, to see whether you
blushed or not? As you grew older you became more and more invisible.
The eyes of the world slipped by you.
Shop assistants went
on talking as if you didn’t exist. You vanished into a background of little
old ladies. The only answer, Joy had found, was to wear bright colours or a
good deal of gold jewellery. Then people took notice. If she’d worn her
jewellery today, which she foolishly hadn’t out of respect for the deceased,
who clearly wasn’t a candidate for a great deal of respect, why then the man
with the white hair would have been trying to pick up Joy, not Felicity. Joy
and he were much of an age, and Felicity was old, old, old. ‘Do you know that
man?’ asked Joy.

 
          
‘No,’
said Felicity. ‘Not so loud, please.’

 
          
‘He’s
wearing a wig,’ said Joy, hoping out of habit to nip any potential new
unsuitable relationship in the bud. So much one had to do for one’s friends: so
much she remembered of her youth. She might as well have saved her breath.
During the singing of the hymn the man with the hair eased himself round the
graveside and ended up standing next to Felicity. Felicity still had a pretty
voice: at one dire time in her life - one of the few snippets she had disclosed
to Joy - she had sung professionally. The voice was by now admittedly small,
and a trifle quavery, but Felicity knew how to present it to advantage,
trilling away under the stranger’s ear. The pick-up line was of course simple:
they had a corpse in common.

 
          
‘A close relative?’
Joy heard him ask Felicity, in
sympathetic tones. What was he after?
Money?
Felicity
looked expensive; she always did, though her entire wardrobe could have been
bought for a tenth of the cost of Joy’s teddy-bear brooch.

 
          
‘My
stepson,’ said Felicity, and actually batted her eyes. They had aged well -
large grey-green eyes with heavy lids which hadn’t fallen too badly: she might
even at one time have had them lifted. Joy followed Felicity’s coy downward
gaze: she seemed to be examining the stranger’s rather peculiar shoes; heavy,
boatshaped, scuffed and battered things.

 
          
‘That’s
a bit of a downer,’ said the man, taken aback. ‘I’m sorry. I’d no idea.’ He had
a soft voice: Joy thought maybe he’d come down for the occasion from
Boston
. Joy herself tended to speak out of the
side of her mouth: she’d started life in
New Jersey
and wasn’t ashamed of it.

 
          
‘But only a stepson.’
Felicity seemed to have decided on
candour. ‘Not a blood relative. I hadn’t seen him for fifteen years, and I
can’t say he loomed large in my life. I lent him some money and that was the
last I saw of him. You know what people are like. No good turns goes
unpunished.’

 
          
‘That’s
for sure,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Nevertheless, you came to his funeral. You
have a good heart.’

 
          
‘To
stand about in the cold for half an hour,’ she said, ‘to honour what was good
in someone, is no big deal. How else are we to encourage it?’

 
          
This
sort of preachy stuff would be enough to put any sane man off, thought Joy. You
had to admire the way Miss Felicity took risks. Joy’s mother had told her never
try to be too clever with a man: never say anything they wouldn’t say
themselves: nothing put them off quicker, and look how well she, Joy, had done
for herself over the years. Felicity was prepared to risk all at a stroke. It
looked as if she’d blown it, thank God. The conversation lapsed. Now they could
get on back. Joy tugged the sleeve of Felicity’s ethnically embroidered
cream-and-green coat to remind her that she, Joy, existed. That was another
thing. Felicity wore such peculiar clothes: Joy’s mother thought a girl did
best if she took care to look bright and healthy, and not too deep. Felicity
always looked as if there was some secret going on, something held in reserve
behind the gauzy scarves and the embroidery.

 
          
Joy
could see she was wasting her time. Felicity and the man with the white hair
were now looking into each other’s eyes, across the grave. The afternoon had
become enchanted. It’s how Joy had met the lawyer, though already married to
the doctor, eyes meeting across a crowded room. These things did happen. But
Joy had been thirty then, when these things did hurtle at you out of the blue
to hit you and change your life. But Felicity was over eighty, and this was no
crowded room, it was a graveside, clumps of dirt fallen on to a cheap coffin
and no-one had so much as thrown a flower. Two of Joy’s husbands had been
cremated. The more elaborate and expensive the coffin the easier it was to
avoid the thought of the body inside; what had once shared your bed turned to
something that felt like marble, but wouldn’t last as well.
After
the coldness, corruption.
Dead bodies had a kind of compacted solidity,
as if they were more real than you were. None of it bore too much thinking
about. This flirtation, for what else could you call it, might just be
Felicity’s way of
not
thinking about
it. Joy felt overcome by too much thought and overwhelmingly sleepy. She would
go back to the car by herself. Charlie would put a blanket over her knees. He
still frightened her but Jack swore he was okay so she supposed he was.

 
          
‘Do
you have transport?’ asked Miss Felicity of William Johnson, for that was his
name.

 
          
‘I
don’t, as it happens,’ said William. ‘It vanished along with my stepdaughter
some ten minutes back.’

 
          
‘Someone
or other always behaves badly at a funeral,’ observed Miss Felicity. ‘Let me
give you a lift to somewhere more convenient than this hillside.’

 
          
‘I
would like to get in to Mystic,’ he said. ‘It’s where I temporarily reside. We
don’t get many limos at our door.’

 
          
‘Life
has its ups and downs,’ Miss Felicity said. They walked back towards the
Mercedes. He offered her minimal explanations. That Tommy had been his
stepdaughter Margaret’s partner, on and off for fifteen years, that Tommy drank
too much and had never been a good provider. That he, William Johnson, had
stepped in to help the family whenever he could.

 
          
‘She
didn’t seem very grateful,’ said Felicity.

 
          
‘No
good turn goes unpunished, the way you said.’ And he laughed again. She tried
to match her footsteps to his. He slowed his to achieve the same. The sun came
out and the snow sparkled. What had been dank and dismal obligingly changed its
nature and became crisp and romantic. Joy’s impatient face stared at them from
the car.

 
          
They
were in no hurry to reach it.

 
          
‘But
you came along to his funeral, all the same,’ she said, admiration in her
voice.

 
          
‘I
came along all the same,’ said the man. ‘And so did you.’ He said he wasn’t
prepared to attribute all blame to Tommy: Tommy wasn’t all bad. He let it be
known that his wife had died four years back.

 
          
‘How
strange,’ said Felicity, and let it be known that she was widowed, and for the
same length of time that he had been a widower.
To the very
month, as it turned out.
Another bond.
She had,
she said, only just given up living alone, and moved into the Golden Bowl. It
was okay.

 
          
‘It
ought to be at that price,’ he said. He’d read their brochure. He couldn’t
afford anything like that: he had given the marital home to Margaret and lived
off various pensions. The best deal he’d found in the area was a place called
the Rosemount: a dump but a pleasant dump.

 
          
He
lit up a cigarette before he got in the car, and kept everyone waiting.

 
          
‘That’s
the first in five months,’ he said. ‘Funerals are upsetting.’ He stubbed it out
after two minutes and ground it into the snow. ‘Now you know the worst about
me,’ he said.

 
          
‘It
would have to get a lot worse than that,’ she said. ‘I haven’t led an easy
life.’

 
          
Joy
raised her pencilled eyebrows at the prospect of giving this addicted stranger
a lift. That his name was William Johnson did nothing to reassure her. He was a
confidence trickster. The name was too plain and plentiful among the population
to be for real. Felicity and William both climbed into the back seat beside
her. Rather than be squashed she was obliged to clamber out and clamber in
again and sit in the front, next to Charlie. A gentleman would have suggested
he was the one to do that. What was the point of driving round in a limo if you
couldn’t keep undesirables out? That was the whole point of them. She hadn’t
felt as raw and flustered as this since she’d been at high school, and her best
friends had started dating and leaving her out in the cold. Did nothing in life
ever get better? She could see she had replaced the one bad sister, Francine,
with another, Felicity, and how could she discuss this with Felicity if
Felicity paid her no attention at all? Her first husband had been trained in
Freudian psychoanalysis: he would marvel at her insights. ‘A woman’s intuition,’
he would say, lovingly. ‘It certainly can’t be brain!’ He had been eighteen years
older than she. She had left him for a Jungian. You entered into a certain
world when you first married and tended to stay in it, if only because the men
you met were so often your husband’s colleagues. She’d always envied Francine,
who had married a car dealer and stayed married, though she thought Jack had
affairs.
Anything for a laugh.
Just getting a smile
out of Francine was a problem.

 
          
Joy
heard Felicity tell the alleged William Johnson that she had first come to the
States as a GI bride, married to Tommy’s father. The plantation home in
Atlanta
she had been told about, and shown
photographs of, turned out to be a shack with hens, Rhode Island Reds, running
around. When she had charged her husband with deceiving her he had replied, ‘I
wanted it to be true.’

 
          
Lies,
thought Joy. This was the first she’d ever heard of such a story. ‘This must be
an upsetting kind of day for you, then,’ said William. ‘Some things are better
not remembered.’

 
          
‘I’ve
known worse,’ Felicity said.
A GI bride?
Joy was
shocked. One of the bad girls of
Europe
,
fortune hunters, who’d pounced upon American servicemen overseas and robbed the
girls back home of husbands? Could it be true? Joy had an uneasy feeling that
it might be. Serve Felicity right if she fell in with a confidence trickster.
They would be much of a muchness. Joy would do nothing to save her.

 
          
‘How
old are you, William?’ she heard Felicity ask. So up front, how did she get
away with it?

 
          
‘Seventy-two,’
he replied.

 
          
‘A
mere chicken,’ she said, ‘compared to me. I’m eighty-one.’ More lies!

 
          
‘Women
age better than men,’ he said. ‘I’d have thought you were younger than me.
Anyone would.’

 
          
Joy
raised eyes to heaven, and turned her head - with some difficulty: she was
having trouble with arthritis in the neck - and said William had better give
directions as to where exactly it was he wanted to go.

 
          
‘The
Rosemount Retirement Home,’ he said. ‘Mystic. Not too far out of your way.’

 
          
‘Not
out of Miss Felicity’s way,’ observed Joy, ‘if it were her car. But it is some
way out of mine.’

 
 
          
‘I
am very sorry about that,’ he said, courteously enough, and she felt mean at
once and said he was welcome.

 
          
William
Johnson directed Charlie through the narrow back streets of Mystic, where
no-one of any interest lived. The Mercedes pulled up outside a large, shabby
wooden house: a few old folk, well- wrapped up in rugs, sat nodding on the
verandah. A clothesline was visible at the side of the house, from which male
undergarments hung, neatly pinned. Joy clicked disapproval. A sign outside
read:

 
          
The Rosemount
Retirement Home.

           
Peace
of Mind for Those who
Deserve
it.

 
          
‘Calm,
quiet and comfortable, and l get a sea view, which is more than I deserve,’
said William, by way of explanation. He got out and indicated his thanks. He
smiled at Joy in a friendly and forgiving fashion, which infuriated her. He
nodded to Charlie. He pressed Felicity’s ringed fingers against his withering
cheek.

 
          
‘This
is revolting,’ thought Joy. He turned and went up the path; the gate was rusty
and hung loose. Felicity looked after him fondly as Charlie drove off.

 
          
‘I
forgot to take his telephone number,’ said Felicity. ‘But you know how it is
with men. If they’re really interested in you, they’ll find you. He knows where
I live.’ A kind of snort came from the front: it was Charlie, but he managed to
make the sound of mirth turn into a sneeze.