Fay Weldon - Rhode Island Blues

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.

‘What do Golden Bowlers do?

They live life to the full!’

By the end of November Felicity was settled into the Atlantic Suite of the Golden Bowl Complex. Her house had been sold to Joy’s brother-in-law Jack, at a knockdown price. At the last moment he had had second thoughts about purchasing and she had brought the price down a further $50,000. It scarcely mattered. She had $5,000,000 in the bank: the interest on which was sufficient to pay all costs at the Golden Bowl, though if she lived to ninety-six or more, and rates continued to rise exponentially by ten per cent a year, she would have to begin to dip into capital. She could afford to buy a small gift here, give a little to charity there, though she had never been the kind to dress up and go to functions and give publicly. Too vulgar for Miss Felicity: too much gold and diamond jewellery on necklines cut too low to flatter old skin.

Felicity’s lawyer Bert Heller, Exon’s old friend, was satisfied that he had done his best by the old lady, as she had once alarmingly overheard him referring to her. Her will was in order and left everything to her granddaughter Sophia in England. Joy was pleased her friend was near enough to visit but that instead of having the responsibility of an elderly widow living alone next door, prone to falls and strokes, she now had the comfort of a brother-in-law as a neighbour, one who would look after, rather than need to be looked after. The move had suited everyone.

All Felicity had to do now, in fact, in the judgement of the outside world, was settle down, not make trouble, and live the rest of her days in peace.

And why not? The Atlantic Suite was composed of three large rooms, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom embossed with plated gold fittings and more than enough closet space: the view was pleasant: the rooms spacious. The world came to her through CNN, if she cared to take an interest in it, though few at the Golden Bowl did. Most preferred to look inwards and wait their turn to get a word in at group therapy. The decor and furnishings were pleasing and she had never been sentimental about her belongings: most had gone to auction. Sometimes Miss Felicity would remember a dress she had particularly liked and wonder what became of it: or a charming plate she’d owned, or a scrapbook she’d once compiled. Did people steal things, had she lost them, had she given them away? Why try to remember? It hardly mattered. She had a photograph of her granddaughter in a silver frame on her bedside table, but that was to keep Nurse Dawn quiet. Nurse Dawn, helping her unpack, had found it and stood it there when first Felicity arrived, and Felicity did not feel inclined to take on Nurse Dawn at the moment: she would wait until something more significant was at stake. To have family photographs on the bedside table suggested that life – by which she supposed she meant sex – was in the past.

Besides, Sophia had inherited Angel’s Botticelli hair: Felicity was not sure she wanted to be presented with the sight of it night and day. So she simply put the photo on its face after room service had been in and every next day room service stood it upright. It was an okay compromise.

Felicity had a nasty attack of flu when she first arrived at the Golden Bowl. Stomach cramps and weak limbs had made her more dependent upon the administrations of Nurse Dawn than she would have wished. When she recovered she found that silly little matters such as when breakfast would be brought to her room in the morning, when the valet service would collect and deliver, limitations on her time in the Library, expected attendance at the Ascension Room gatherings, had been arranged more to fit the Golden Bowl’s convenience than her own. She had remarked on this to Dr Bronstein.

‘It’s very strange,’ was Dr Bronstein’s dark comment, later, ‘how many people find themselves ill and helpless when they first arrive at the Golden Bowl.’

‘It’s hardly likely to be a conspiracy,’ said Felicity. ‘No-one’s going to make us ill on purpose.’

‘Aren’t they?’

Felicity had taken morning coffee in the Ascension Room as soon as she was able. She felt the need of company. She’d joined Dr Bronstein and a Miss Clara Craft at their table. Both smiled agreeably at her, and put down their magazines. Miss Craft, who turned out to be a correspondent for The Post back in the thirties, and who had trouble with her sight, had been flicking through the latest copy of Vogue. She wore a good deal of make-up haphazardly applied, and her sparse hair was arranged in little plaits, which hung here and there from her scalp. Her back was noticeably bowed. Felicity concluded that like so many women who did not choose to thwart the natural processes, Clara took no hormone replacement therapy. Dr Bronstein was smartly presented and was reading Harpers, albeit with a magnifying glass. Nurse Dawn had lingered, hovered, and done her best to overhear.