Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (22 page)

 
          
‘Just
think!’ I said to Guy and Lorna, who had asked me over to Happiness for Sunday
lunch, ‘our grandmother has received a proposal of marriage.’

 
          
They
looked at me cautiously. Guy was slicing a rather pulpy half-leg of GM lamb, so
lean as to be singularly dry, while Lorna doled out a few potatoes boiled with
their skins on, and some spinach which stayed in the shape of the package,
having been slightly under-microwaved, so it was still crisply frozen in the
middle. I could have been eating linguini in
Dean Street
at Zilli’s with Harry and Clive, but this
afternoon we were going to visit Alison. I had decided to act with Harry as if
I was not particularly anxious for his company. I have never before in all my
life played games with men - which just might be, as Felicity once pointed out,
the reason I did not have one to call my own. But I seemed to have begun to
learn how, prompted by Harry’s upfrontedness: he was so little a gamesman when
it came to matters of the heart, it behoved me to be a gameswoman. Holly would
call from the States and I would hand the mobile over with a smile and say, ‘
It’s
Holly,’ and not, ‘that bitch again’.

 
          
The
adoption had fallen through. The mother turned out to have sold her baby to
four different parents at $200,000 or more a throw, and though prepared to
actually hand it over to Holly and Harry (such integrity) for an additional $
100,000,
they had decided that the baby might inherit the
genes of dishonesty. I did not even murmur to Harry that ‘dishonesty’ was
socially defined, and you would have to know a great deal more before
disqualifying a baby on those particular grounds. You could as well claim the
baby would inherit the genes of sensible self-interest and a sense of humour. I
even had a sudden desire to fly over to LA at once, and take the baby for
myself, but that was absurd. I did not want a baby. I wondered to what an
extent competition between women, in the old days, had led them into repeated
pregnancies. But no, it was probably just the absence of contraception; in the
face of male sexual drive once you were married pregnancy would just happen.
Krassner quite wore me out. He could not fall asleep, he said, in the absence
of sex. He was half-joking. He was in fact a considerate and emotional lover,
who wanted me to say such simple things as, ‘I love you,’ which I found
difficult. Like most Americans, he talked a lot during lovemaking. The English
tend to be silent, in a world minus language and so the more intense.

 
          
Holly
would not have sex with Harry while she was filming - it made her puffy around
the eyes in the morning - so I took care never to appear reluctant, no matter
how tired I was. And though by day my body cried out to be close to him, and I
believe he felt the same need to lean into me as I did to him, here I was at
Guy’s and Lorna’s and not at Zilli’s, parting with knife and fork bits of
gristle and a strange glutinous fibre which the lamb had grown in place of fat,
not olive oil, glistening agilely around my fork. Lorna did not even know their
house was called Happiness, she said she might once have known but was at pains
to forget, though Guy acknowledged that as a child he had been sufficiently
inquisitive to pull aside the creepers and find out. Both were more interested
in the inside of books than in the real world. They ate to sustain life, and
asked me over out of vestigial politeness, rather than enthusiasm.

 
          
The
matter of Felicity’s proposal did stir a certain interest. ‘Someone after her
money, I suppose,’ said Lorna. ‘The same thing happened to poor Mother. That’s
really why we had to have her put away.’

           
Put
away
sounded rather unfortunate. Even Guy noticed.

 
          
‘She’s
not exactly put away, Lorna,’ said Guy. ‘You couldn’t go on nursing her. Your
back was bad. She is very happy where she is, well looked after and safe.’

           
‘She’d start wandering,’ said Lorna.
‘Dangerous so near the river. It got very bad last summer. She’d begun to give
money away. I took away her chequebook, but she was very cunning. She’d go
round to the bank and get another. He coerced it out of her, of course.’

 
          
‘He’,
on close questioning, turned out to be a semi-naked, glistening young thug
working in the boatyard, casual labour, rough trade: Alison had asked him home,
the police had been called; rough trade had a police record. And Alison was not
yet seventy: think what could happen when a woman was eighty-five.
‘Eighty-three,’ I said. For some reason the two years seemed to make a
difference. And Alison was sixty-eight, not yet seventy. Were older women not
to be allowed their excursions into unreason? I supposed, when money was
involved, not. They must be locked up, before they gave it all away.

 
          
Lorna
and Guy ate glumly on. I longed for the noise and good cheer of Zilli’s. There
was a singularly pretty waitress there: long legs and an intelligent face.
Perhaps Harry, bereft of my company, and spiteful, would offer her a part in
his next film. Not that spite seemed in his nature. He might I suppose do it in
the spirit of sheer exuberance. If I wasn’t under his nose he would forget
about me. He lived in the present, not the past, or the future. Holly summonsed
him, he went; but to make her go away. Easier to do as she said,
so
long as work permitted, than work out what she meant to
him. How could I hope to disturb such a solid relationship?

 
          
I
told Lorna and Guy that I was flying over to
Rhode Island
to see Felicity, to find out more about her
romance, and they could see the necessity, though obviously thinking it a
wicked waste of money and Guy wrote down the number of a bucket shop where I
could find the cheapest flight available.

 
          
‘You’ll
have to nip it in the bud,’ Guy said. ‘Or some con artist will end up with the
Utrillo on his wall, not you.’ They were coming round to the idea that their
grandmother was quite well off.

 
          
I
said my walls were singularly unsuited to
a
Utrillo,
which was the last of my concerns, and this seemed to shock them. There was
apple pie for dessert, which Lorna had made herself. Lots of thick heavy pastry
and a thin sliver of apple squeezed between, but never mind. I was touched that
she’d tried. I said Lorna and Guy could have the Utrillo, if and when Felicity
died, it was only fair: it would look right on their walls, which were the
right shape for framed paintings.

 
          
I
regretted having said it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Guy went
out to make coffee and Lorna took out the dessert plates and I could hear them
murmuring in the kitchen. I saw a kind of gleam in their eyes when they came
back which I hadn’t seen before, and I remembered that Lois’s blood ran in
their veins, as well as Anton’s. Perhaps Felicity had known what she was doing
when she gave Alison away, and with the baby, that baby’s progeny.
But too late now.

 
          
The
Glentyre Nursing Home was much as these places are in this country. The same
satellite TV goes unwatched: chairs, though they may begin informally grouped,
end up with their backs to the wall, where the occupants insist that they be.
Even a slight touch of paranoia is enough to make you want to keep an eye on
what the others in the room are doing.
Safer not to have your
back to anyone.
The same smell seeped into the very fabric of the walls,
of urine and disinfectant and old-fashioned face powder. The same staff: a few
cheerful and kind, most sullen and underpaid.
The same sense
of waiting, of bemusement that life has come to this.
Communal (that is
to say, lowest common denominator) taste when it comes to the colour of walls
and drapes. The food provides nothing that anyone is likely to object to, a
consideration which more than anything leaves the flavour of sadness in the
mouth. What we value all our life, what fires us and sparks us, the sense of
our individuality, dampened down, crushed, deprived of oxygen. No outrage
allowed.

 
          
The
three of us trooped in to see Alison, who was bed-bound: they had not warned me
of that. She sat against pillows in a small single room. She stared into space.
She looked wilfully old, as if she were pretending. She had my hair, but it was
white and crinkly: it spread in a witch’s fuzz around her face. She had
Felicity’s eyes and Anton’s heavy jaw, around which old flesh drooped, and when
she turned those still beautiful eyes towards us they were sulky and dull. I
know one should not say it of those who are past improvement, but I did not
like her. Pulses of noise came and went: the roar of young male voices rising
and falling in unison: the sports stadium was all but next door: Sunday
afternoon’s fixture at Twickenham was under way: but what was it to her? ‘Who
are you?’ she asked. ‘Did Lorna send you? She never comes herself.’

 
          
‘I’m
here, Mummy,’ said Lorna.

           
‘Lorna had me drugged and locked up
in here,’ Alison confided in me. ‘I was all right until they started giving me
pills. Now my legs don’t work.’

 
          
‘Your
legs don’t work because you had a stroke, Mummy,’ said Lorna.

           
‘Guy was always in love with me,’
Alison told me.
‘Even when his father was alive.
But
then he had me walled up in this prison.’ ‘Now why would I do a thing like
that, Mummy?’ asked Guy. Sunday lunch, however meagre, had given him a well-fed
bursting look, or it might just be that his blood pressure was already
mounting, and we’d been only two minutes in the room. ‘I was running off with
a nice young man and my son couldn’t stand it,’ explained Alison. ‘He thought I
might change my will. He didn’t know I’d changed it already.’

 
          
‘I
don’t think there’s any point in we two staying,’ said Guy. ‘We thought you
ought to see for yourself. We’ll go and wait in the car while you try and get
through to Mother.’

 
          
Getting through to Mother
was clearly a
phrase frequently used: it had a familial, helpless kind of feel about it.

           
‘That got rid of them,’ said Alison,
once they’d gone. ‘They come here sometimes and pretend to be my family but
they’re not. I was adopted, so they’re no blood relatives of mine.’ I sat on a
wicker chair and once I was settled she directed me to another, from which I
first had to remove a rubber hot water bottle and a variety of woollen
garments. No sooner was I sitting down when she asked me for some water. Then
she told me not to sit in the chair I had just cleared because it was where she
kept her hot water bottle. I could see she would have been the sort of mother
who never gave her children a moment’s peace. The minute they’d sat down she’d
think of something for them to get up and do, and if they were busy and on
their feet she’d suggest they sat down: their ceaseless activities were making
her feel tired. I understood Guy’s and
Lorna’s liking
for what I saw as dullness but which they saw as peace and quiet. To the end of
their days, they would appreciate just moving from one side of a room to
another without being told what to do: and if it was the room where they had
spent so much of their childhood, so much the better.

 
          
She
asked me if I were the cleaning girl and I said no, I was her half-niece, and
that I was glad she had brought up the subject of adoption because I had news
of her real mother. She peered at me suspiciously and pushed her hair back from
her head with a hand that was uncannily like Felicity’s. She felt around for
her purse and pushed it under her pillow, pointedly.

 
          
They
send people in to steal from me,’ she complained. They even stole me once, when
I was a baby.’

 
          
I
tried to explain that she was given away, perforce, by her birth mother, not
stolen by her adoptive parents, but she would have none of it. She had been
dropped in Woolworths and not handed in. Anyone honest would have spoken to the
Manager about it. I could not make up my mind whether she was teasing me or
not. I could see the resemblance to Felicity and liked her rather more. Alison
took a plastic beaker out of her locker, into which was wodged a rather nasty
lump of tissue paper. She removed the paper and showed me a collection of blue
and green capsules, pink flat pills and large white tablets.

 
          
T
saved these,’ she said. They’re trying to poison me. The sooner I’m dead the
more money they inherit.’

 
          
‘Who’re
they?’ I asked, though I knew the answer.

 
          
‘Guy and Lorna.
They don’t even come and visit me.’

 
          
They
were in this room just a minute ago.’

 
          
‘No.
Guy and Lorna are little children. They take after their father.
A very dull man.’
This last was said with a Felicity-ish
sigh. ‘I should never have been born, you know. It was a great mistake. But I
always liked the river. It should have been called Mother Thames, not Father
Thames.
Old Mother Thames keeps rolling
along
,
down to the mighty sea.’

 
          
She
sang this last in a high-pitched, quavery voice. A member of staff came in with
a cup of tea.

 
          
‘Singing
again, dear,’ she said. ‘That’s nice.’

 
          
When
she’d gone Alison poured her cup of tea into a pot plant with a shaky hand. It
was a miniature palm, much overwatered. Not a single leaf but was tipped with
brown.

 
          
‘Your
real mother,’ I began again, ‘is alive and well and living in
Rhode Island
.’

 
          
Alison
looked at me as if trying to decipher what I was saying. I think she managed
because she seemed to give the matter some thought and then said quite sharply:
‘That’s all very well, but
finders
keepers. Tell that
to them in Woolworths. If you want to keep your purse don’t drop it. Good
layers, though, Rhode Island Reds.’ She closed her eyes and the interview was
over, and with it my hope of enriching my grandmother’s life. What a lot of
money I had spent and to how little purpose. I joined Guy and Lorna in the car.
Lorna tried not to look too reproachfully at her watch. They liked to be in and
out of the Glentyre Nursing Home like a shot, and who could blame them?

 
          
‘Now
we’ll be caught up in the rugby crowd,’ she complained. We were, too, but after
the Glentyre the thronging of thoughtless young male flesh, the sound of
drunken revelry, the very air fetid with testosterone, was a relief. When I
finally got back home the waitress from Zilli’s was not there in my place, of
course she was not. Harry was, waiting.