Читать книгу: «Rhode Island Blues»

4

I arrived at Felicity’s house, Passmore, 1006 Divine Road, just past midnight. The United Airlines Heathrow-Boston flight left at 12.15—I was on standby so had the will-I-fly, won’t-I-fly? insecurity to endure for more than an hour. I never like that. I am not phobic about flying. I just prefer to know where I’m going to be in the near future. I’d left the Great Director still asleep in my bed, and a note saying I’d gone to look after my sick grandmother, and I’d be back after the weekend. They didn’t need me for the dub. Any old editor would do now the picture was locked and no-one could interfere with what was important. I’d have enough eventual control of the music to keep me happy when I got back. I know a good tune but nothing about music proper and am prepared (just about) to let those more knowledgeable than me have the first if not the last say on a film to which I am to give my imprimatur.

I was upgraded to Business Class, which was fine. The travel agent had passed on the info that I was involved with the new Krassner film Tomorrow Forever (ridiculous title: it had started out as a sultry novel called Forbidden Tide, stayed as a simple Tomorrow for almost a year of pre-production, which was okay, since it was a kind of time travel film backwards and forwards through Leo and Olivia’s relationship: the Forever had crept in towards the end of filming and suited the posters, so it had stayed) and showbiz gets all privileges going. Do you see how difficult it is to get these fictional exercises out of my mind? Now I’m giving you the plot of Tomorrow Forever, which I have stopped myself doing so far.

It was an easy flight: I can never sleep on aircraft, and so watched a video or so on the little personal TV provided with every expensive seat. I miss the general screen now available only at the cheap back of the plane, where you share your viewing pleasure with others, but I would, wouldn’t I? Films are meant to be watched with other people: compared to the big screen videos are poor pathetic things, solitary vice.

Boston is one of the easiest airports through which to enter the US as an alien. Immigration’s fast. I took a short internal flight to Hartford, the Yankee city, these days national home of the insurance business. So far so good. But at Hartford, alas, I was met by Felicity’s friend and neighbour Joy, determined to drive me the fifteen miles to Passmore, at 1006 Divine Road. Joy lived in Windspit, number 1004. If flying doesn’t make me nervous, other people’s driving does, especially when the driver is both near-sighted and deaf, and shouts very loud as if to make sure the world is very sure of her, even though she is not very sure of it.

‘I’m seventy-nine, you wouldn’t think it, would you,’ Joy shrieked at me, summoning a porter to take my bag to her Volvo. Her face was gaunt and white, her hair was wild, blonde and curly, her mouth opened wide in a gummy smile. She was dressed more like a Florida golfing wife, in emerald green velvet jump suit, than the decorous widow my grandmother had described. She was wonderfully good-hearted, or believed she was, just noisy. The Volvo was dented here and there and the wing mirror hung at an angle.

‘Not for a moment,’ I said. I did not want to worry or upset her. There was no way of getting to my destination without her help. The wooded roads were gathering dusk. Joy would put her foot on the brake instead of the accelerator, or vice versa, or both together, and when the Volvo stopped with a shudder she’d decide she had run over some dumb creature and we’d stop and get out and search for the victim with a torch she kept handy for the purpose. She did not pull the car over to the side of the road before doing so, either. Luckily at this time of night the back roads were more or less deserted. No Indian tracker she: she made so much noise any wounded animal with the strength to flee would have left long ago.

‘I’m not like you English, I don’t beat about the bush. I’m an upfront kind of person,’ she shouted as we climbed back into the car after vain pursuit of a non-existent limping skunk. ‘I can’t be left to be responsible for your grandmother any more. It isn’t fair on me. She must go into a congregate community, with others her own age.’ I agreed that she should, though the term was unfamiliar to me.

‘It would be okay if Felicity would do as she’s told, but she won’t,’ roared Joy later, by way of explanation. I agreed that it was difficult to get Felicity to do as she was told.

‘Now that that bullying bastard of a husband has died and left her in peace poor Felicity deserves something for herself.’

I had met Exon (like the oil disaster, minus the extra ‘x’) and he had never struck me as a bullying bastard, just a rather dull nice pompous man, a Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut, who had died four years back, and who had had a lot to put up with from Felicity. I said as much to Joy. It was unwise. She slammed her feet down on both brake and accelerator together and when the bump and stop came—Volvos can do a lot but cannot mind read—insisted on turning off the headlights to save the battery and going right into the forest with her torch, clambering up banks and down gullies in search of a deer she was convinced she had winged. This time I refused to go with her. I had remembered Lyme’s disease, the nasty lingering flu-like illness which you could catch from the deer tick, a creature the size of a pin’s head which jumps around in these particular woods. They leap on to human flesh, dig themselves in and bite. All is well if you bother to do a body search and your eyesight is good and you pluck them off with tweezers within twenty-four hours: but overlook just one and they bed in and you can be off work for months. I was safer in the Volvo with the doors and windows closed. I did not know how high the ticks could jump. The next thing would be—if this were a comedy film—Joy would break her ankle, and the volume of her distress would be awesome. Even as I thought these uncharitable thoughts there was a rumble and a rising roar and an eighteen-wheel truck swerved past us, the breath of its passing shadowing the windows, missing me and the Volvo by inches. It went blazing and blaring off into the dark. I simply blanked my mind, as I do during the commercials on TV, waiting for real life to start again. I was in shock.

‘These truck drivers should be prosecuted,’ she yelled when she got back into the driving seat seconds later. ‘They should remember there might be cars parked out here, with their lights off to save the batteries.’

‘Of course they should,’ I said. ‘Though we weren’t exactly parked.’ Her veined hands tightened on the wheel.

‘I can see you have a lot of Felicity in you,’ she said. She’d quieted considerably. ‘You English can be so sarcastic. This car could have been a write-off and you’re so cool about it.’

I refrained from comment. We drove the rest of the way in silence. She seemed chastened. There were no more animal stops and she peered ahead into the dappled dark and tried to pay attention. There was something very sweet about her.

One way and another, what with travel, terror, amazement, and the effort of not saying what I thought, by the time I got to Felicity’s I was exhausted. Felicity had waited up, playing Sibelius very loud, the privilege of those who live a fair distance from their neighbours. Lights were low and seductive, the furniture minimalist. She reclined on a sofa, wrapped in a Chinese silk gown of exquisite beauty, which fell aside to show her long graceful legs. Not a sign of a varicose vein, but she was, I noticed, wearing opaque tights, where once she would have been proud to show the smooth whiteness of bare unblemished skin. The central heating was turned up so high she could not have been feeling the cold. She looked frailer than when I last saw her, which disconcerted me. She had always been light and thin and pale, and fine-featured, but now she looked as if someone should slap a red fragile sticker on her. Her hair, so like mine in colour and texture, had faded and thinned, but there was still enough of it to make a show. Her eyes were bright enough, and her mind sharp as ever. She looked younger, in fact, than her friend Joy. She had one arm in a sling and a bandaged ankle, which she kept prominently on display, just in case I decided she could look after herself. I was family, and she was claiming me.

‘How was Joy’s driving?’ Felicity was kind enough to ask me, having been the one to inflict her on me. ‘I hope she wasn’t too noisy.’

Crazed by weariness I replied by singing A Tombstone Every Mile at the top of my voice, a trucker’s song about the notorious stretch of wooded road which had claimed more truckers’ lives than anywhere else in the entire US and had been the title song of a pale Convoy imitation I’d once worked on. I could see that if someone like Joy had been travelling the road by night for the last fifty years a myth of haunting might well arise. I tried to explain my thinking to Felicity but my head fell in sleep into my hot cholesterol-lowered, pasteurized, fat-free, sugar-free Milk and Choco Lite Drink.

Oddly enough, what most exhausted me was the recurring vision of Director Krassner’s locks of unkempt hair creeping out between my duvet and my pillow back home. I was in flight, I could see that. Perhaps I had come not so much to rescue Felicity as to escape emotional entanglement. Felicity woke me up sufficiently to lead me to the spare room, where she took off my coat and my boots and stretched me out with a pillow under my head. She seemed to have become more maternal with the passing of the years. I felt I was at home. She could claim me if she wanted me.

The minute proper sleep was possible it eluded me. I wondered whether to call the cutting room in the morning and decided not. Just as social workers have to harden their hearts against empathy with their clients, and nurses must learn not to grieve when patients die, so film editors must steel themselves against too much involvement with their projects. A gig is a gig. You must forget and move on. But this was a big film. It was hard. The PR budget was about three-quarters again on top of the actual shooting budget: the studio had put a lot behind it. It would move into the group consciousness of nations. It would take up oceans of column inches. The editor, that is to say me, the one on whom the success or otherwise of the film depended—forget script, forget stars, everything depends upon the cut—would of course hardly get a mention. Writers complain of being overlooked, but their fate is as nothing compared to that of the editor. The sense of martyrdom is quite pleasant, though, and feeling sorry for yourself nurturing through the lonely nights.

The bed creaked. Like so much else it was wooden. Everything echoes in these new-old houses: the wood forever shifts and complains: the timber is twenty years old, not the two hundred it pretends to be. Raccoons and squirrels scamper in the lofts. Sexual activity between humans could not happen without everyone else in the house knowing. Giant freezers and massive washing machines, enviable to British minds, root the house in one place, where it seems determined to dance free in another. In the morning I looked out over a damp November landscape which seemed determined to keep nature at bay. The land had been cleared of native trees and laid down in grass; low stone walls separated well-maintained properties: there were no fences or hedges to provide privacy, as there would have been in England: distance alone was enough. Lots of space for everyone for those with nothing to hide and a good income. How could Felicity have lived alone here for four years? I asked her over breakfast the next morning—Waffles-Go-Liteley and sugar-free maple syrup and caffeine-rich coffee, thank God.

‘I was trying to oblige time to pass slowly,’ she said. ‘Someone has to do it. Time is divided out amongst the human race: the more of them there are the less of it there is to go round.’ I wondered what poor dead Exon would have made of this statement. Taken her to task and demanded a fuller explanation, probably. He had always been part charmed, part infuriated by what he called Felicity’s Fancies. During the twelve-year course of her marriage to him, at least in my presence, the fancies had dwindled away to almost nothing. Now it seemed the wayward imaginative tendency was reasserting itself, bouncing back. This is what I had always objected to about marriage: the way partners whittle themselves down to the level of the other without even noticing.

It is all dumbing down and lowest common denominator stuff and not annoying the other. It has to be if you want to get on. And lying stretched out nightly alongside another human being, comforting though it may be, is as likely to drain the essential psyche as to top it up.

‘It was very annoying of Exon to die on me,’ she said. ‘I was much fonder of him than I thought. I never loved him, of course. I never loved anyone I was married to. I tried but I couldn’t.’ And she looked so wretched as she said this that I forgot London, I forgot films, I forgot floppy-haired, sweaty, exhausted Director Krassner and everything but Felicity. I put my hand on hers, old and withered as it was compared to mine, and to my horror tears rolled out of her eyes. She was like me, offer me a word of sympathy and I am overwhelmed with self-pity.

‘It’s the painkillers,’ she apologized. ‘They make me tearful. Take no notice. I bullied you into coming. It was bad of me. The fall made me feel older than usual and in need of advice. But I’m okay. I can manage. You can go home now if you like. I won’t object.’ ‘Oh, charming,’ I thought, and said, ‘But I don’t know anything about life in these parts. I know nothing about gated living, or congregate living, or any of the things you have this side of the Atlantic. We just have dismal old people’s homes. Why can’t you just stay where you are in this house and have someone live in?’ ‘It would be worse than being married,’ she said. ‘There wouldn’t be any sex to make up for being so overlooked.’

I said I supposed she’d just have to ask around and do whatever it was her friends did in similar situations. She looked scornful. I could see how she got up their noses. ‘They’re not friends,’ she said. ‘They’re people I happen to know. I tried to stop Joy meeting you at the airport, but she will have her way. I worried every moment.’

She wanted me to go for a walk with her after breakfast but I declined. I did not trust the Lyme tick to keep to the woods. There didn’t seem much to see, either. Just this long wide Divine Road with curiously spaced new-old houses every now and then at more than decent intervals. Here, Felicity said, lived interchangeable people of infinite respectability. She explained that the greater the separation, the bigger the lot, the more prestigious the life. Money in the US was spent keeping others at a distance, which was strange, since there was so much space, but she supposed the point was to avoid any sense of huddling, which the poor of Europe, in their flight to the Promised Land, had so wanted to escape. Strung out along these roads lived men who’d done well in the insurance business or in computers, and mostly taken early retirement, with wives who had part-time jobs in real estate, or in alternative health clinics, or did good works: and a slightly younger but no wilder lot from the university—but no-one of her kind. She hadn’t lived with her own kind, said Miss Felicity (Exon had liked to call her this and it had stuck) for forty-five years. What had happened to Miss Felicity, I wondered, when she was in her late thirties? That would have been around the time of her second and most sensible American marriage, to a wealthy homosexual in Savannah. The end of that marriage had brought her the Utrillo—white period, Parisian scene with branch of tree: very pretty—which now hung in state in the bleak, high Passmore lounge which no-one used, to the right of the gracious hall with its curving staircase and unlocked front door. The second night of my stay—the first night I was too exhausted to care—I crept out after Felicity had gone to bed and locked it.

‘It’s a bit late to go looking for people of your own kind,’ I said. ‘Even if you’d recognize them when you came across them. Couldn’t you just put up with being comfortable?’ She said I always had been a wet blanket and I apologized, though I had never been accused of such a thing before. There was no shortage of money. Exon, who had died of a stroke, she told me, the day after handing in a naval history of Providence to his publishers, had left her well provided for. He had died very well insured, as people who live anywhere near Hartford tend to be. She could go anywhere, do anything. It seemed to me that she had stayed where she was, four months widowhood for every year of wifehood—a very high interest rate of thirty-three per cent as if paying back with her own boredom, day by day, the debt she owed sweet, tedious Exon. Now, recovering from whatever it was had to be recovered from, she was preparing for her next dash into the unknown: only at eighty-five, or –three, or however old she really was (she was always vague, but had now reached the point where vanity requires more years, not fewer) the dash must be cautious: the solid brick wall of expected death standing somewhere in the mist, not so far away. She was sensible enough to know it, and wanted my approval, as if paying off another debt, this one owed to the future. I was touched. It was almost enough to make me want children, descendants of my own, but not quite.