Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (8 page)

 
 
          
The
film had been unlocked, that was what had happened, why I had been sent for.
A rare event.
Young Olivia’s female live-in lover Georgia,
slighted by Olivia’s claim that she was no lesbian but the mere victim of
child-abuse at the hands of a female
teacher,
had made
an unsuccessful bid to end her life, first e-mailing the news desks with her
suicide note: she had been stomach-pumped in time. Georgia’s parents had not
helped, joining in the media fray, accusing Olivia, our film’s gentle heroine,
of seduction of their daughter, who had been all set to marry a parson. The PR
panic was sufficient to infect the studio back in
Hollywood
. They flew over to sort things out, which
only happened in real emergencies. Had they been able, they would have cut off
my head and had my brain pickled and turned into some sort of memory bank unit,
always accessible, but they couldn’t do that, so they had to pay the price of a
Concorde ticket and have my body as well as my brain in the editing suite. They
breathed down my neck and shuddered when Harry smoked, which he did more than
usual for their benefit. ‘The Studio’ consisted of a sharp young man and a
sharper young woman with big hair and a narrow tiny face. She had LA hips,
which are wider than those you see skittering about in
New York
. Californians are built bigger, spreading
into available space.
Texas
is not so far away, in perceptual reality.

 
          
The
decision finally reached was that I was to recut the love scenes between Leo
and Olivia to show an absence of passion rather than a surfeit, as both young
people struggled to define their gender identity. This was no great problem for
me, since it reflected the actuality of what went on between them on camera.
The end was to be changed, which fortunately there was sufficient random
footage around to do: a conventional happy ending became one rather less
conventional but more convincing. Olivia went off into the sunset with her best
friend: Leo with his. The suggestion that the same-sex friends were shortly to
be lovers I was able gently and delicately to imply. The film could now be
described as brave and edgy, pushing back the frontiers of contemporary
experience,
it no longer had to be a heart-warming story of
young love. It would not please the overseas Islamic markets, but would do fine
in the non-Catholic
West
. ‘The Studio’ were thrilled
by
their own
decision, seeing it as, I quote, ‘seminal
to a new generation of gender cinema’. We went into a
London
pub (their idea) to celebrate and they
drank gassy water and managed to score some coke - the supply side in LA had
recently run into some trouble, apparently - and got the last flight home.

 
          
Nearly
everyone was happy about this new turn of events, except by all accounts
Krassner, who bit my neck as I did what I was paid to do, and handsomely paid
at that. Krassner’s artistic integrity was acknowledged to be under threat, though
I had the feeling he would be laughing like the rest of us if he didn’t have a
reputation to preserve. The writer was not particularly happy, either, but
then writers never are, and Clive our producer, whose film was now going to
come in way over budget, was white and exhausted, and in a state of shock, but
this is what producers are paid to be.

 
          
‘Please
do not bite my neck,’ I said to Krassner. But I had come to almost like the
slightly sweaty, anxious, obsessive smell of his breath as he craned alongside
me towards the screen, and it mingled with mine. Stray strands of black hair
interwove with my red tendrils, which by sheer bulk and energy won any
encounter. If I tossed my hair out of my eyes, as I did from time to time, a
few strands of his would leave his scalp and end up in mine. There seemed an
intimacy between us, the greater because we had failed to spend the night
together. Matters were still all promise, no disappointment. My bed had held a
companionable waft of Krassner as I snatched a couple of hours’ sleep before
getting to the cutting room, and to my surprise I hadn’t minded one bit. He’d
left a note saying he had wormed the cat: a homey touch, though he had not
shaken out the duvet. But then, neither had I before he got under it.

 
          
‘I’m
not biting,’ he said, now. ‘I’m neurotically gnawing.’ It was true, his teeth -
all his, and perfectly capped or veneered or implanted or whatever they did
with the teeth of the older man nowadays - slipped gently over the surface of
my skin, his full lips following. You don’t get anywhere in film by claiming
sexual harassment: that’s for people about to get out of the business anyway.
You can get a handsome award but you never work again. For some it’s worth it.
Not me. And I liked him gnawing me.

 
          
We
were three hours into editing when Krassner got a personal phone call from LA.
His turn to disentangle his hair from mine, leaving a few more of his strands
behind. He took the call. ‘Why hello, darling,’ he said. ‘Yuh, the rumours are
correct, we’re up shit creek again. I’m stuck here. Why don’t you fly over to
me instead of me going over to you?’

 
          
I
stopped listening: how stupid I had nearly been: I cut off all reaction. Any
shoulder in a storm, that was all my shoulder was to Krassner. Someone nudged me
and said that’s Holly Fern on the line - I’d heard of her, who hadn’t: she
being the new talent on the block, singing and dancing, according to her
people, just like a reborn Ginger Rogers - I thought that was pretty stupid
because whoever these days had heard of Ginger Rogers - and with a degree in
philosophy which publicity also foolishly did to death. It was from a crap
college. ‘Against stupidity,’ my mother Angel once said to me, ‘the Gods
themselves strive in vain.’

 
          
Nobody
had hair as good as mine, but hair isn’t everything, and just because I got up
ordinarily with mine in the morning, didn’t mean others couldn’t get the same
effect out of a hair salon, if they were prepared to spend half a day achieving
it. I wiped Krassner out of my mind, moved my shoulder out of his line. Back at
the console he dug me in the ribs and said, ‘Whatzamatter with you?’ but I
didn’t deign to reply. It doesn’t do to aim too high, the
fall’s
too hurtful.

 
          
That
night I called Felicity. I tried to get her to tell me more about Aunt Alison
but she wouldn’t.

 
          
‘I
shouldn’t have brought it up,’ she said. ‘What’s the point?’ She quoted from
Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters.

 
          
‘We have had enough of action, and of
motion, we,

           
Roll'd
to starboard, Roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free,

           
Where the wallowing monster spouted his
foam-fountains in the sea.'

 
          
No,
she hadn’t heard yet from the Golden Bowl but if they wouldn’t have her she
would sell up anyway and go round the corner to the nearest residential house.
Joy’s brother-in-law Jack had turned up and made an offer on the house and she
had had to disappoint Vanessa.

 
          
‘How much?’
I asked.

 
          
‘$750
,000
,’ she said.

 
          
‘But
that’s lower!’ I was shocked.

 
          
‘It’s
all he can afford, I won’t have to pay agent fees and I don’t want to
disappoint Joy.’

 
          
‘How
do you know he can’t afford it?’ I asked.
‘Because Joy said
so?’

           
‘I don’t know what you’ve got
against Joy. She’s a better friend than you ever were a granddaughter. Just
because she’s a bad driver doesn’t mean she’s a bad person.’

 
          
‘No,’
I said bitterly, ‘she just prefers animals to people.
Big
deal.
Is Joy’s sister moving in too?’

           
‘She died a year ago: Joy hated her,
loved him.’ I asked if this meant there was romance in the air and Felicity
told me not to be absurd. Joy hated sex but liked to have a man about the place
to shout at.

 
          
Felicity
was not moved by my anxiety that the house was sold, and the Golden Bowl had
not yet confirmed her apartment. She said one room was much like another when
you got older: one steak as hard on your teeth as the next. The
I Ching
had given her
Biting Through, Chen Chi.
She
must bite resolutely through obstacles: then she would
be rewarded with supreme success. I could tell these were mere delaying
tactics: she would talk about anything at all except my lost aunt. I cut her
short and asked her directly who the father of her first baby was. I pointed
out that these days there is no family decision which can be made without
consultation: if you gave away a family member you were giving away relatives
for future generations, too, and you had to be answerable to them.

 
          
To
which she replied tartly that I was a fine one to talk, since I was slipping
out from under and having no children at all.

 
          
I
said no, that’s why I wouldn’t be answerable to anyone, lucky old me. But she
had, and so she was. You had to know your genetic background if only to keep
the Insurance Companies happy.

 
          
She
said don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs: she lived in
Norwich
,
Connecticut
. There were only two things to bear in mind. Death Only Insurance
Policies meant they bet you you’d live longer than you thought you would, and
annuities meant you bet them you’d outlive what they predicted. And they had
whole departments working on it and you didn’t, and they normally won.

 
          
I
said, though diverted, don’t change the subject, and repeated the question.
‘Who was the father of your adopted child?’

 
          
‘That
is simply not the kind of thing you ask in proper circles,’ said Felicity,
hoity toity, ‘and it is not your bloodline so what has it got to do with you
anyway?’

 
          
‘I
hope he stayed long enough to take off his boots,’ I said, ‘and give his name.’
Felicity, provoked as I had hoped, spoke haughtily. ‘He was not unknown to me,
but it is not something I am prepared to talk about. I gave birth on my
fifteenth birthday. Honestly, Sophia, would you want to remember such a thing?
I know fifteen is nothing these days, but back in the thirties, certainly in
the circles in which I moved, it was really something. I gave birth in a
Catholic Home for unwed mothers and bad girls didn’t get given chloroform,
which was the only anaesthetic available in childbirth at the time. That was to
help teach us the wisdom of not doing it again.’

 
          
‘It
didn’t work. Later on you had Angel.’

 
          
‘I
took care to be married, and by that time there was gas-and-air. You really
must not pry. So far as I am concerned my life began when I married a chicken
farmer from
Savannah
. Anything that happened before that I have
sensibly wiped out of my memory. It is all nothing to do with me.’

 
          
I
wondered how she would get on at the Golden Bowl, where the old wisdom of not
thinking about unpleasant things was hardly encouraged. But Felicity could
always invent a life story for herself, and go with that, if she so preferred.
Or did the spirit of invention, as with the emotions, as with the body, get
tired with age? There was a quaver in her voice: a frisson of self-pity I had
never heard before. The telephone conversation ended unsatisfactorily, with me
anxious for her welfare and her ordering me to not stir up the past. But I had
what I wanted. Two further clues.
Her fifteenth birthday and
a Catholic Home for unwed mothers.

 
          
The
Tomorrow Forever
team, I know,
employed the services of a detective agency. The next day I put them on to the
job of finding Alison. They offered to lose the cost in the general film
expenses, but I said no, this was private work, I would foot the bill. There
was now some talk of changing the title to
Forever
Tomorrow.
I couldn’t see that it made much difference. Felicity’s birthday
was 6 October. A Libran, fair and square and in the middle of the sign, better
at being a mistress than a wife, not that I held any truck with astrology.
There can’t have been a great number of babies born to fifteen-year-olds in
London
on
6 October 1930
, in a Catholic Home for unwed mothers, and
presumably some records of adoptions would have been kept. And with any luck
the right ones would have survived the blitz, and I had always seen myself as a
lucky person, though I knew enough from working on a film called
Fire over England
that great chunks of
the national archive went up in flames in 1941.

 
          
If
I couldn’t have Krassner I wanted a family. I wanted to be bolstered up, I
wanted to be enclosed, I wanted someone to be around if I were ill, I wanted
someone to look at my calendar and notice that the cat was due for his second
worm pill. You could write yourself notices and pin them on a board as much as
you liked, but how did you make yourself look at them? You had to have a
back-up system.