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'I'm
old enough to speak the truth,' said my grandmother, her voice bouncing
over the Atlantic waves, ridiculously girlish. 'Nothing stops me
now, Sophia, not prudence, or kindness, or fear of the consequences.
I am eighty-five. What I think I say. It is my privilege. If people
don't like what they hear they can always dismiss it as dementia.'
My
grandmother Felicity had seldom refrained from speaking the truth
out of compassion for others, but I was too tired and guilty to
argue, let alone murmur that actually she was only eighty-three,
not eighty-five. Felicity spoke from her white clapboard house on
a hillside outside Norwich, Connecticut, with its under-floor music
system and giant well-stocked fridge, full of uneatable doughy products
in bright ugly bags, Lite this and Lite that, and I listened to
her reproaches in a cramped brick apartment in London's Soho. Her
voice echoed through an expensive, languid, graceful, lonely, spacious,
carpetless house: she kept the doors unlocked and the windows undraped,
squares of dark looking out into even blacker night, where for all
anyone knew axe murderers lurked. My voice in reply lacked echo:
here in central London the rooms were small and cluttered and the
windows were barred, and thick drapes kept out the worst of the
late-night surge of noise as the gay pubs below emptied out and
the gay clubs began to fill. I felt safer here than I ever did when
visiting Felicity on her grassy hillside. A prostitute worked on
the storey below mine, sopping up any sexual fury which might feel
inclined to stray up the stairs, and a graphic designer worked above
me, all fastidious control and expertise, which I liked to think
seeped downwards to me.
Mine
was a fashionable, expensive and desirable address for London. I
could walk to work, which I valued, though it meant pushing my way
through crowds both celebratory and perverse: the tight butts of
the sexually motivated and the spreading butts of gawking tourists
an equal nonsense. Was there no way of averaging them out, turning
them all into everyday non-loitering citizens? But then you might
as well be living in a suburb, and for my kind of person that meant
the end.
I was
tired because I had just got back from work, and it was late at
night. I was guilty because it was two weeks since my grandmother's
noisy friend and neighbour Joy — neighbour in the sense that
their two great lonely houses were just about within hailing distance
— had called me to shout down the line that Felicity, who lived
alone, had had a stroke and was in hospital in Hartford. I had a
deadline to meet. I am a film editor. There comes a certain point
in a film production when the editor ceases to be dispensable: when
you just can't afford to be ill, go insane, have a sick grandmother.
Joy's call came at just such a moment. You have to be there in the
editing suite and that's that. There are things in your head which
are in nobody else's. Tomorrow was a feature film, a US/UK
co-production with pretensions, a big budget, a big-time director
(Harry Krassner), and a host of marketing people now hovering and
arranging PR and previews, while I still struggled under pressure
of time to make something erotic out of not-enough footage of teenage
copulation which neither party had seemed to go to with much pleasure.
I did not fly to my grandmother's side. I simply forgot her until
I could afford to remember her. Now here she was again, her suppertime
my bedtime, not that she ever acknowledged a difference in time
zones if she could help it.
I gritted
my teeth. Sometimes the ghost of my mad mother stands between myself
and Felicity, damming up the flow of family feeling; a sepulchral
figure, like one of those school-crossing ladies who step out unexpectedly
into the road to let the children through, making the traffic squeal
to an unwilling halt.
I had
a recurring dream when I was small in which my mother did exactly
that, only the sign in her hand read not 'Children crossing'
but 'Your fault, Felicity'. Except I knew that if she ever
turned the sign, the other side would have my name on it. It would
read, 'You're to blame, Sophia'. I always managed to wake
myself up before I had to face the terror of the other side. I could
do that as a child — control my dreams. I think that's why
I'm reckoned to be a good film editor: what is this job of mine
but the controlling of other people's fantasies? I take sleeping
pills, most nights: they stop my own dreams. I have enough of them
by day to keep anyone sane.
As
it happened Felicity had been let out of hospital within the day,
having suffered nothing more than a slight speech impediment, which
had by now cleared. But I wasn't to know that at the time.
'Sophia,'
she was saying, 'I want to sell this house. The truth is I'm bored
to hell. I keep waiting for something to happen but happenings seem
to have run out. Is it my age?' Well, come the eighth decade I daresay
'happenings', by which most women mean love striking out of a clear
sky, would indeed run out. Everything must come to an end. She said
she was thinking of moving into assisted housing: some kind of old-persons'
community. I said I was not sure this was a recipe for a lively
life. She said just because people were old didn't mean they weren't
still alive. She was going to hold her nose and jump: the house
was already on the market, she was already selling bits and pieces
in the local flea markets, there were some family things I might
want to have, and if so I had better come over and claim them.
I felt
the tug of duty and the goad of guilt and the weight of my ambivalence:
all the emotions, in fact, commonly associated with dealing with
family. She being my only relative, I felt the burden more acutely.
I loved her. I just wanted her far away and somewhere else. And
if I were to read my own behaviour finely, it was worse than this.
*
* *
As
I'd callously worked on after Joy's first phone call, resisting
the notion that in the face of death all things to do with life
should pause, I knew that if Felicity would only just die the issue
of fault would be set to rest, forever unresolved. I could just
be me, sprung out of nowhere, product of my generation, with the
past irrelevant, family history forgotten, left to freely enjoy
the numerous satisfactions of here and now, part of the New London
Ciabatta Culture, as the great Harry Krassner was accustomed to
describing it.
Myself,
Sophia King, film editor, living day-by-day in some windowless room
with bad air conditioning and the soothing hum of computerized technology,
but free of the past. Easier by far to make sense of Harry Krassner's
uneven footage than of real life, to let images on film provide
beginnings, middles, ends and morals. Real life is all subtext,
never with a decent explanation, no day of judgement to make things
clear, God nothing more than a long-departed editor, too idle to
make sense of the reels. Off to his grandmother's funeral mid-plot,
no doubt.
Go
into therapy, peel off the onion layers, turn the dreams into narrative,
still the irritating haphazardness of everyday real life remains.
Film seems more honest to me: actuality filtered through a camera.
Felicity must not be allowed to interfere with my life, in death
any more than she had in life. Bored she might be, but she had her
comforts, money from dead husbands, a Utrillo on her wall, a neighbour
called Joy, who shouted energetically down the telephone. I remembered
how, when I was ten years old and Felicity was my only source of
good cheer, she had cut herself off from me, left her daughter Angel,
my mother, to die without her, fled back home to the States and
not even come back for the funeral. I had forgotten how angry I
was with her: how little I was prepared to forgive her. What had
been her own emergency, her own internal editing, so desperately
required that she abandoned us? Once, when I was small, ordinary
simple family love had flowed from me to Felicity only to be fed
back by her, through this act, as unspoken condemnation.
My
mother had done even worse by the pair of us, of course, and returned
love with hate, as insane people will to their nearest and dearest,
be they parent or child, and there can be nothing worse in the world.
But at least my mother Angel had the excuse of being mad. Felicity
was reckoned sane.
'You
didn't come over and visit me in hospital when for all you knew
I might have been dying,' said Felicity now, at my sleeping time,
suppertime for her. What did she care about my convenience? What
was the point of reminding her of the past?
'You
were only in hospital for a night,' I protested.
'It
might have been my last night,' she said. 'I was fairly frightened,
I can tell you.'
Oh,
brutal! And I was so tired. I had only just returned from the cutting
room when the phone call came. Harry Krassner would be in at ten
the next morning, with the producer, for what I hoped against hope
would be an acceptance of the fine cut. I was not sure which seemed
the more fictional — Felicity's phone call or the hours I'd
just lived through. My eyes were tired and itching. All I wanted
to do was sleep. This voice out of the past: still with the actressy
lilt, just a little croakier than last time she'd phoned, a few
months back, might have been coming out of some late-night film
on TV for all it was impinging upon my consciousness. Yet she and
I were each other's only relative. My mother's death was decades
back. We both had new skins. I had to pay attention. 'You'd have
been back home even before I'd got to the hospital,' I pointed out.
'You weren't to know that,' she remarked, acutely. 'But then you
never thought family was very important.'
'That
isn't true,' I snivelled. 'It's you who chose to live somewhere
else. This is home.'
This
was ridiculous: it was like the first time you go to visit a therapist:
all they have to do is say something sympathetic and look at you
kindly: whereupon self-pity overwhelms you and you weep and weep
and weep, believe you must really be in a mess and sign up for two
years. I put my weakness down to exhaustion: some feeling that I
wasn't me at all, just one of the cast of some bad late-night TV
film, providing the formulaic reaction.
'It
was that or go under myself,' she said, snivelling a little herself.
'All I ever got from family was reproaches.' (A splendid case of
projection, but Felicity, like so many of her generation, was a
pre-Freudian. Hopeless to start wrangling, let alone say she'd started
it.) She pulled herself together magnificently. 'It was a moment
of weakness in me to want you to be present while I died. If someone
is not there while you live why should you want them there when
you die? Just because they share a quarter of your genetic make-up.
It isn't rational. Do you have any views as to what death actually
is?'
'No,'
I said. If I had I wasn't going to tell Felicity and certainly not
while I was so tearful and tired.
'You
wouldn't,' said my grandmother Felicity. 'You have been permanently
depressed since Angel died. You won't allow yourself a minute's
free time in case you catch yourself contemplating the nature of
the universe. I don't blame you, it's fairly rotten.' The stroke
must have had some effect on Felicity for since my mother Angel's
death she had scarcely mentioned her name in my presence. My deranged
mother died when she was thirty-five: my father hung around to do
a desultory job of bringing me up, before dying himself when I was
eighteen, of lung cancer. He didn't smoke, either, or only marihuana.
'The
fact is,' said Felicity, who had deserted my mother and me at the
time of our worst tribulations, and I could not forget it, 'I'm
not fit to live on my own any more. I spilt a pint of boiling milk
over my arm yesterday and it's hurting like hell.'
'What
did you want boiling milk for?' I asked. This is the trouble with
being a film editor. It's the little motivations, the little events,
you have to make sense of before you can approach the bigger issues.
There
was a silence from the other end. I thought longingly of bed. I
had not made it that morning; that is to say I had not even shaken
out the duvet and replaced it with some thought for the future.
It's like that towards the end of a film gig. Afterwards, you can
clean and tidy and housewife to your heart's content, put in marble
bathrooms with the vast wages you've had no time or inclination
to spend: in the meantime home's just somewhere you lay your head
on a sweaty pillow until it's time to get up and go to work again.
*
* *
'I
hope you're not taking after your mother,' said Felicity. 'Off at
a tangent, all the time.' That was, I supposed, one way of describing
the effects of paranoid schizophrenia, or manic depression or whatever
she was said to have.
'Look,'
I said, 'don't try to frighten me.' The great thing about being
brought up around the deranged is that you know you're sane. 'And
you haven't answered my question.'
'I
was heating the milk to put in my coffee,' said Felicity. 'Eighty-six
I may be, standards I still have.'
She
was growing older by the minute, as if she was wishing away her
life. I couldn't bear it. I kept forgetting how angry I was with
her, how badly she had behaved, how reasonable my resentment of
her. I loved her. Before my mother died, after my father had disappeared,
I'd come home one day to find her darning my school socks. No-one
else had ever done that for me, and I was hopeless at it, and there
was no money to buy new. I'd been going round with holes in my heels,
visible above my shoes. I still have a problem bothering about ladders
in tights. I just can't care.
'Oh,
Grandma,' I found myself wailing, 'I'm so glad you're okay. I'm
so sorry I didn't come over.'
'I'm
not okay,' she said. 'I told you. I have a nasty burn on my forearm.
The skin is bright red, wrinkled and puckered. I know it is normally
wrinkled and puckered, and you have no idea how little I like my
body these days, but it's not normally bright red and oozing. You
just wait 'til you're my age. And you will be. We just take turns
at being young.'
'Can't
you call Joy?' I asked.
'She's
too deaf to hear the phone,' said Felicity. 'She's hopeless. It
has to be faced. I'm too old to live alone. I may even be too old
for community living. Don't worry' — for my heart had turned
cold with fear and self-interest and my tears were already drying
on my cheeks, and she seemed to know it — 'I'm not suggesting
we two live together. Just because we're both on our own doesn't
mean that we're not both better off like that. It's just that I
need help with some decisions here.'
I refrained
from saying that I did not live on my own, but surrounded by tides
of human noise which rose and fell at predictable times likes the
surges of the sea; that I had good friends and an enviable career,
and a social life between gigs; and it was the life I chose, much
peopled by the visible and the invisible, the real and the fantastic,
and extraordinarily busy. Felicity was sufficiently of her generation
to see on your own as being without husband and children,
which indeed, at thirty-two, I was. We know how to defend ourselves,
we the survivors of the likes of Felicity and Angel, against the
shocks and tribulations that accompany commitment to a man, or a
child, or a cause.
'Can
we talk about this tomorrow, please?' I said. 'Can't you call out
a doctor to look at your arm?'
'He'd
only think I was making a fuss,' she said, as if this went without
saying, and I remembered that for all her years in America she was
still English at heart. 'You really aren't being very helpful, Sophia.'
She put the phone down. I called her back. There was no reply. She
was sulking. I gave up, lay fully clothed on the bed and went to
sleep, and in the morning thought that perhaps I had imagined the
whole conversation. There was to be little time to think about it.
Excerpted
from RHODE ISLAND BLUES © Copyright by Fay Weldon. Reprinted with
permission from the publisher, Grove Atlantic. All rights reserved.
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