Fay Weldon - Rhode Island Blues

The bathroom had been pleasingly redone with marble veneer tiles that could have passed for the real thing, and gold stucco angels surrounded the new bathroom cabinet. Nurse Dawn’s fallback position, she decided, would be the eighty-year-old female applicant, the Pulitzer Prize winner, who smoked. She would be given the suite on condition she gave up smoking. This she would promise to do: this she would fail to do: and Nurse Dawn would be at a psychological advantage from the outset. There wasn’t actually much to be feared from lung cancer: if you were a smoker and it hadn’t got you by eighty it was unlikely to do so at all: nor would other forms of cancer be likely to surface. Death would be by stroke or heart attack or simply the incompetence of being which afflicted the individual as the hundredth year approached. The Pulitzer winner was of the lean hard-bitten hard-drinking kind: they tended to last well. The Golden Bowl could, she supposed, do worse.

Nurse Dawn’s attention was drawn to a Mercedes sweeping through the opening of the gold-and-metal appliqué gates, copies of the ones at the entrance to London’s Hyde Park, put up in honour of the Queen Mother, aged a good ninety-eight at the time of their erecting. The Mercedes did not proceed to the front of the house where regular parking was obviously to be found, but drew up outside the French windows of the Rosebloom Suite, which everyone much got out of the habit of calling it, only a few feet from where Nurse Dawn stood, lamenting the view. Three women got out. A skinny young person in sweater and jeans, with Botticelli hair and a high forehead, and two women in their later years. One, in her mid-seventies, Nurse Dawn supposed, was hideously attired in an orange velvet tracksuit and crimson headband, and had a bulky waist—which did not augur well for a long life span—but the other one, dressed in strange and impractical gauze and gossamer floating drapes, looked slight but promising. Early eighties, passing at first glance for ten years younger. A one-time actress or dancer, maybe. Her movements were both energetic and graceful: her back was scarcely bowed—HRT from early middle age, Nurse Dawn surmised, always a plus—a graceful head poised on a long neck, tactfully scarved to hide the creases.

‘Parking’s round the front, in the space designated,’ called Nurse Dawn, as the party disembarked, but they took no notice, though they had heard perfectly well.

‘There’s lots of room,’ the young woman said. ‘And we’re here now.’ She had an English accent. If the relatives were English and far away so much the better. ‘Can we talk to whoever’s in charge?’ ‘I’m in charge,’ said Nurse Dawn, and seeing it was more or less true, felt much better. She might have reached her forties without husband, children, or home of her own, which was the fate of many, God alone knew, but at least she was accumulating money in her bank account, very fast indeed, and would not, as her mother had always promised her, end up with nothing.

She saw how Felicity lingered in the Rosebloom Suite, with its pretty pink and white paper, admired the view, laughed with pleasure at the absurdities of the bathroom cabinet, and heard her say, ‘I could live in a place like this. It seems more me than that great creaky house ever did.’

She heard Joy reply, shocked, at the top of her voice, ‘That’s your home you’re talking about, Miss Felicity.’

Nurse Dawn was pleased to understand it was the quiet one, not the noisy one, who was looking for a home. If she made so much noise now what would she be doing in ten years’ time? The vocal cords were often the last to go. And Felicity’s reply, ‘I was never happy with my own taste. I don’t think we need look further than here,’ came almost as a relief.

The English girl said, ‘Come on now, this is the first place we’ve seen. You can’t make up your mind just like that.’

‘I can,’ said Felicity. ‘And I have. What was I told this morning? It furthers one to have somewhere to go? This is the somewhere.’

Nurse Dawn led the party through to the front reception area, where they should have been in the first place, imbuing a proper sense of reverence, where busts of Roman Caesars stood on marble plinths, and said, ‘You must understand we have a long waiting list, and all applicants must first be vetted, and then voted for. We’re very much a family here.’ This deflated the spirit of the group considerably, as Nurse Dawn had intended. She preferred supplicants to pickers and choosers.

Being a woman of quick decision she had already decided to accept Felicity for the Atlantic Suite, but it was wise to let her fret a little. She would be quite an asset: she moved and spoke gracefully, and was of good appearance, and though no kind of intellectual, unlike the Pulitzer Prize winner, would not annoy the other guests by smoking. Moreover, she quoted from the I Ching—‘it furthers one to have somewhere to go’ could only come from this source—which meant Dr Grepalli would put up no objection. Jungians clung to one another in their absurdities.

You can run, but you can’t hide. When we got back to Passmore there was a black limo waiting, with New York plates. I was needed back in the Soho editing suite, urgently. I was to take the nine p.m. Concorde flight out of Kennedy. Tomorrow Forever was, as I say, a big-budget film. The percentage cost of Concorde tickets for a deviant editor was minuscule, compared even to leaving the Versace sequences on the cutting room floor. I told the driver to wait while I thought about it, but Felicity asked him in and gave him coffee and cookies. Joy made a hasty exit: the driver was some kind of bearded mountain tribesman and made her nervous. He rose to his feet when she left the room, and bowed with exquisite courtesy, but that only made her the more nervous.

I could not work out at first how anyone knew where to find me. Air travel slows my mind. True, I’d told my friend Annie where I was going. But she wouldn’t have told anyone: and the designer upstairs had my key to let out the cat but I’d just told him vaguely I was off to visit a sick relative: I then remembered that some of my conversation with Felicity had been through the answering machine. The bastard Krassner must have listened to what we said, and then put his people on to it. Film folk can do anything if they put their mind to it. They bribe phone operators and computer hackers and dig dirt on anyone they want. They are ruthless in defence of the people’s entertainment and their own profit, which comes to the same thing. Perhaps Krassner had stayed in my apartment for some time after he woke—how many days ago was it now, four? I had not envisaged that until now: I had simply assumed that being at the best of times in such a hurry, he would have woken, perhaps found some coffee, to which he was welcome, and left at once, back to work. If he had time to spare he would surely have more glamorous and rewarding women than me to pursue and persecute. I felt the less inclined to return and fish the team out of whatever trouble they were now in. I called the editing suite but no-one replied. No doubt they were too busy to so much as pick up the phone for a call they had not initiated.

I had woken up a little. I liked the clear air and the woods and the deer ticks kept at a safe distance from the house, and Felicity was cheerful and Joy was funny and we’d spent a good morning at the Golden Bowl, and the world of downtown Soho seemed a long way away and not a place anyone would gladly return to, not even by way of Concorde and free gifts in best-quality leather which nobody ever wanted. Felicity had been enchanted by the Golden Bowl: we had been shown over its gracious Library, its sparkling clean kitchens, where only the best and freshest food was prepared, and not a sign of a Lite packet anywhere; its Refectory, where guests could sit and eat by themselves at little round one-person tables—though Nurse Dawn did not approve of this: the digestive processes apparently function better if eating is a social affair—its elegant community rooms, its nursing wing, empty of patients: we met Nurse Dawn’s team of nurse-attendants, all bright, cheerful and friendly: we met the Professor of Philosophy, though his eyes were dull and all he wanted to talk about was the state of the golf course. We were told that Felicity could bring her own furniture in if she required though most Golden Bowlers chose to abandon the material trophies of the past, the better to live in the present. She should live very much as she lived at home. Various amiable and reasonably intelligent persons passed us in the corridors, of whom only a small percentage had walking frames, and one or two of the elderly gentlemen gave Felicity a second look. That really pleased her. In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king, and in a nation-state such as the Golden Bowl Felicity would have more people at hand to admire her than she would if she kept the company of those younger than herself. We looked in at a Psychic Nourishment session in the Conservatory—the soul needs nourishment as much as does the body, according to Dr Joseph Grepalli, whom we were privileged to actually meet in his very grand offices. He had the rooms above the Portico: the only suite to which stairs were required. His wide windows looked out over the long rectangle of the lily pool. There were learned books in his bookcase.