Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (5 page)

 
          
‘You
just have to be patient,’ said Joy, softer again. ‘Don’t sell to this stupid
client of Vanessa’s. Anyone who wants to move in within the month is bound to
be a bad neighbour. You do owe a little consideration to the rest of us.’

 
          
She
took the wheel of the car and bumped off in a way that never happened when I
drove. It was scarcely more than a year old, and fitted with every possible
kind of gadget to ensure a smooth ride. I don’t know how she managed it.

 
          
When
we got back to the serenity of Passmore we found that a brochure had been
pushed through the letterbox. It was from an establishment called The Golden
Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement. Felicity examined it over toasted
cinnamon bagels spread with Cream Cheese Favorite Lite. This Golden Bowl
place,’ said
Felicity,
‘doesn’t sound too bad at all.
They have a Nobel Prize winner in residence, and a Doctor of Philosophy.
Fancy being able to have a conversation with someone other than
Joy.
And what synchronicity that it should arrive
today!’

 
          
It
would have been even more synchronicitous if it had arrived in the morning
rather than the afternoon, so we could have visited it when in the area, but I
held my tongue. The Golden Bowl charged at least double the fees of any other
institution we’d seen, and they went up ten per cent each year. Which when you
worked it out meant that in ten years’ time you would be paying double. But by
then Miss Felicity would be well into her nineties. It might not be so bad a
deal. It was a gamble who would end up making money out of whom.

 
          
I
hoped her liking for the place wasn’t because it was the most expensive on
offer. Reared in penury as she had been, Felicity now had an almost innocent faith
in the power of money: she believed that the more you spent the better value
you would get. She always bought the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu.
She’d choose caviar not because she liked it but because of what it cost.

 
          
The
Golden Bowl, according to its brochure, was an establishment run on therapeutic
lines. Golden Bowlers (ouch! but never mind) were encouraged to live life to
the full. Age need not be a barrier to the exploration of the self, or the
exercise of the mind. Golden Bowlers were not offered the consolations of
religious belief, which came with difficulty to the highly educated: but rather
in some vague, Jungian notion of ‘adjustment to the archetype’ in which all
staff were trained, and could bring joy and relief through the concluding
years.
Reading
between the lines, those who ran the Golden
Bowl held no truck with reincarnation; death was death, and that was that. What
they were after was reconciliation with what had gone before since nothing much
was to come. And they mentioned the word death, which nobody else had done.

 
          
*                
*                
*

 
 
          
It
was persuasive, and Felicity and I were persuaded. I should have spoken out
more firmly against a Residential Home for the Aged where the residents were
known as Golden Bowlers. I should have realized that the connection with
Ecclesiastes, which I assumed, was minimal. It wasn’t mentioned in the
brochure.

 
          
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy
youth,

           
while
the evil days come not,

           
nor
the years draw nigh,

           
when
thou shalt say,

           
I
have no pleasure in them;

           
While
the sun,

           
or
the light,

           
or
the moon,

           
or
the stars,

           
he
not darkened,

           
nor
the clouds return after the rain:

 
          
How
did it go after that? My mother Angel would teach me chunks of the Bible. It
was her lasting gift to me, along with life itself, of course.

 
          
. . .
and
desire
shall fail:

           
because
man goeth to his long home,

           
and
the mourners go about the streets:

           
or
ever the silver cord be loosed,

           
or
the golden bowl be broken at the fountain,

           
.
. .
then
shall the dust return to the earth as it was:

           
and
the spirit shall return unto God who gave
it.

 
          
Felicity
would never acknowledge that the Golden Bowl, whatever that was meant to
represent, was cracked. A day would never dawn when she took no pleasure at all
in it. There was bound to be trouble.
^‘
Vanity of vanities,' saith the preacher,
^‘
all is vanity
.’
But we were blithe: we put our trust in synchronicity.

 
          
The
next morning Felicity consulted the
I
Ching
, the Chinese Book of Oracles with the Foreword by Jung himself, to
see what that had to say about the Golden Bowl. She had been in her fifties in
the midsixties, when I was born, when the
I
Ching
was all the rage.

 
          
* * *

 
 
          
She
had just found her pencil and got round to throwing the coins when Joy appeared
shouting in through the French windows, a vision in orange velvet with a
crimson headband, determined that this day she would really make her mark upon
the world. Felicity had the grace to hastily hide the coins under a sheet of
paper. And then we all set off in high spirits to inspect the Golden Bowl,
Felicity, Joy and me, in Joy’s Mercedes. Once again I drove. It was fun, all of
a sudden.

 
          
‘This
place is going to be just as terrible as the others,’ Joy assured us, quite
softly. She was wearing her hearing aid and it was a bright morning so no doubt
the world was less misty than usual. ‘But it’s nice to be driven.’ This morning
she had a flask of vodka with her and lifted it to her lips from time to time
as she sat in the back seat. I could see her in the mirror. She had apparently
decided I was to be trusted.

 
          
‘I
didn’t have time to read the coins,’ Felicity confided in me on the way. ‘But I
threw
Duration
leading to
Biting Through.
Thirty-two leading to
twenty-one: lots of changing lines, which means we’re in a volatile situation.’
I hadn’t heard talk like this since I was a little girl, when my mother would
scarcely buy groceries without consulting the
Chinese Book of Wisdom.

 
          
‘Oh
yes,’ I remarked. ‘Is that good or bad?’

 
          
‘
Duration
.’
She
quoted from memory.
‘Success.
No blame. Perseverance
furthers. It furthers one to have somewhere to go.’

 
          
‘Like
the Golden Bowl?’

 
          
‘I
should think that’s what it meant, wouldn’t you?’ I concentrated on the road.
Over the hills I could catch a glimpse of the sea, a thin edge of blue melting
into a hazy sky. It was a good day for November: there had been a sharp, hard
wind during the night but it had dropped, and the sky was left watery bright.
Maybe on just such a day the sails of the Viking longships had caught the sun
as they approached the coast. On such a day perhaps the captain of an English
privateer had stumbled on deck and said, ‘Beautiful morning for November,’
while wondering if he would live to see the evening. To wonder about death was
more commonplace once than it is now, and the present must have seemed the more
glorious. Inland the trees, heretofore muzzy with wet leaves, had become stark
and bare and beautiful overnight.

 
          
‘Poor
Joy,’ said Felicity loudly, to anyone who cared to hear. ‘She has such a drink
problem.’ Joy had turned off her hearing aid.

 
          
Nurse
Dawn looked out of the French windows of the Atlantic Suite which Dr Rosebloom
had so recently and suddenly vacated, and averted her eyes. She did not like
the woods, which were allowed to creep so near to the portals of the property.
It was too gentle and crowded and coy a landscape for her. She felt
circumscribed and somehow on hold, as if her life had not properly begun.

 
          
The
sky seemed too small. It was too quiet. If you listened you could hear the
tiresome swish of ocean as a background to birdsong. There was somewhere to go
and everyone else knew where except her.

 
          
A
group of guests passed in the corridor on the other side of the door, their
voices drifting. They were chanting, which was gratifying, but not gratifying
enough, on their way from an Ascension meeting in the Library, still brimming
with cheerful animation, summoned up somehow from within their feeble beings.

 
          
^‘
What do Golden Bowlers do?

 
          
We live life to the full’

 
          
Self-hypnosis
could do so much: in the end, whatever Dr Grepalli had to say on the subject,
joie de vivre
failed in the face of bad
knees, and dimming eyes. Silence fell again. There seemed today some dulling
barrier between Nurse Dawn and the enjoyment of life. Everything became a
source of irritation. People raved about the wondrous colours of the trees in
these parts after the first few sharp frosts of autumn, but to her the trees in
their autumn dress looked garish, like colours from a child’s painting set. And
now in November there was no splendour in their absence of dress, their dank
nakedness. She wanted to be back home to the wheat plains and a great expanse
of sky, where the roads were straight and dusty and yellow, and dry, even at
this time of year; and the sound of wind, not sea, was the background to
everyday life; and twisters came like the sudden vengeance of God, reminding
one of sin, and with sin, salvation. But it could not be. This was where the
money was, where she had managed to carve her niche. There were as many old
people back there as here, of course, and as much work to he done for them, but
they were a grittier, suspicious lot. They would be embarrassed rather than
charmed by Dr Gre- palli’s methods, and far less easy about parting with their
money. They thought more about their relatives and what good their small
savings could do when they were gone than about their own comfort and state of
mind. And coming out of a rural community as they did, they tended to lose
heart as they reached their gnarled and wrinkled end: what was the point of you
if your back was bad or your legs wouldn’t work. Here at the prosperous edges
of the sea, oldsters seemed to keep going longer and in better shape. Certainly
they’d acquired more money in their lifetimes, doing less.

 
          
Nurse
Dawn had a profit-share in the Golden Bowl: she had persuaded Dr Grepalli that
this was only just and fair. She hadn’t exactly asked him to marry her and he
hadn’t exactly declined: she hadn’t exactly threatened to inform the Golden
Years Welfare Board (originally appointed by Dr Homer Grepalli, Joseph’s
father) that she and he enjoyed a sexual relationship, and he hadn’t exactly
asked her not to.

 
          
‘Dawn,’
he’d remarked once, as her head nuzzled beneath the bedclothes, ‘I hope you’re
doing this because you want to, not because you think it will help you control
me. You are something of a control-freak, as you must realize. Which suits me:
and suits our guests; as we get older we feel relieved if there is someone
around telling us what to do, even if we don’t care to do it. But I do want you
to be aware I’m not open to blackmail.’

           
‘The Board wouldn’t like it,’ she
had surfaced to say, shocked. ‘The Board wouldn’t mind in the least,’ Dr
Grepalli said. ‘They’re all free-love civil libertarians: pre-Aids thinkers,
existentialists, older than we are - not a single one below sixty, and far less
censorious than our generation. Nevertheless I can see the justice of giving
you a twenty per cent share of my own annual profit-related bonus, since you do
so much for my morale and the wellbeing of the guests, who all adore you.
As I do.’

 
          
Dr
Grepalli was too self-aware and ironically minded ever to do as he really
wanted - or rather have done to him - which would be to be tied up by a
ferocious woman in a nurse’s uniform, who would insult him and walk all over
him in high-heeled shoes, and brandish a whip, but Nurse Dawn seemed a heaven-sent
compromise, and it suited him to pay her, and added an agreeable complexity
to their relationship. It was part of the unspoken deal. Both knew it.

 
          
Nurse
Dawn had worked the twenty per cent share out as a good $700 a week on top of
her existing salary, and rising. Guests paid not a decreasing but an increasing
sum - year by year - for their stay. This was only reasonable. They needed more
care. More trays of food had to be fetched and carried, more medication
provided and more eccentricities and forgetfulness coped with. Relatives and
lawyers sometimes protested at the Golden Bowl’s charging arrangements, seeing,
annually, an exponential loss of expected family inheritance, but soon came to
see the sense of it. The older anyone’s relatives were, after all, the less
likely was anyone to want to take them home again.

 
          
^‘
The longer you
Stay
,

           
The
more you
Pay
,

           
Lucky
Golden Bowler’

 
          
The
unspoken benefit, of course, was that guests were conscious that management had
an incentive to keep them alive as long as possible. Let your room fall empty,
as Dr Rosebloom had, and the newcomer entered at the lower rate. Golden Bowlers
were encouraged to see the Golden Bowl as
home,
and
their fellow guests as family: it was hoped that little by little they would
loosen close ties with their birth families. It was easier for everyone that
way, as it was seen to be for nuns and monks. And after eighty that was more or
less what guests amounted to: sex being hardly a motivating force in their
lives any longer, they could focus on their spirituality. Family and friends
were of course allowed to visit, but were never quite welcomed.
News from outside too often upset.
Relatives would turn up
merely to pass on bad news that the resident was helpless to do anything about.
Someone had died, someone else gone to prison, been divorced,
great-greatgrandchildren were on Ritalin.

 
          
By
and large, or so it was concluded at the Golden Bowl, the relatives you ended
up with were a disappointment: not at all what one had dreamed of when young.
They were usually a great deal plainer than one had hoped: the good genes were
so easily diluted, while the bad ran riot. The bride’s handsome husband turned
out to be an anomaly in a family as plain as the back of a bus, and it was only
apparent at the wedding.
Took only one son to marry a dim
girl with big teeth in a small jaw and you’d produce a whole race of
descendants in need of orthodontics but not the wit or will to afford them.
If the boy hadn’t gone to that particular party on that particular night - and
fallen for an ambitious girl with small teeth in a big jaw - how different the
room full of descendants would look: how much greater the sum of their income.
The old easily grew sulky, seeing how much of life was chance, how little due
to intent. Unfair, unfair! It’s the familiar cry of the small child, too; only
between the extremes of age do we have the impression there’s anything we can
do about anything.

 
          
The
decorators were packing up in Dr Rosebloom’s suite. Nurse Dawn was pleased with
the work they had done, but did not tell them so. Rather she chose to find
flaws in a section of the pink striped wallpaper where the edges were
admittedly slightly mismatched. The decorators were duly apologetic and
agreed, after a short brisk discussion, to accept a lesser fee. Nurse Dawn also
got a percentage of any savings she could make on the annual maintenance
budget, in the management of which she had lately found serious shortcomings.

           
In Nurse Dawn’s opinion praise
should be used sparingly, since it only served to make those who received it
complacent. Her
children,
had she had any, would have
grown up to be neurotic high-achievers: come home proudly with news of a silver
medal, and be scolded for not getting the gold. The decorators slunk away, disgraced.
Nurse Dawn strolled around the suite, observing detail, trying to envisage its
next occupant. That was how she made her choices: in much the same way as she
chose numbers for the lottery, willing good fortune to come her way, envisaging
the numbers as they shot up on the screen.

 
          
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 applique 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.