Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon

thick and crinkly in my mother’s mode, and was what had drawn Krassner towards me. I was grateful. If Angel once decided she and I were to be street people on moral grounds what business was that of the social workers? That particular time I’d been taken away from Angel and our cardboard box under the King’s Cross arches (we were North London people), and been put in a foster home for months, until she’d made it up with Rufus and was in a position to reclaim me. The cardboard box had been okay. It was summer: we’d go into the Ritz Hotel and use their washing facilities. Angel always dressed beautifully, stealing the clothes from stores if necessary. We’d eat in posh restaurants and run away. At the foster home they dressed me from the charity shop and fed me on chip sandwiches. And this time when I finally got home the head lice were real, not imaginary. And Rufus had gone again.

      

      One day I’d come home from school to find Angel beating hell out of a pillow, claiming the devil was in it, and feathers floating through the air like the snowflakes in The Snow Queen – and had panicked and phoned Felicity in Savannah. The next day, by which time the feathers had melted and the devil had left, my grandmother swept into our semi-derelict house in a froth of scarves, lamenting and fussing about the place and bringing in psychiatrists and social workers. If I hadn’t made the call I daresay my mother and I would have got by okay. She would have drifted in and out of psychotic episodes, making cakes and barricading the house against the landlord: taking petitions to Downing Street: going into smart restaurants and breaking plates in sympathy with veal calves long before animal rights became fashionable, and I’d have coped. Twenty years on, in fact, and Angel might still be alive, with new drugs keeping her in control, or at any rate more like other people. And I’d still have a mother.

      The last lucid thing Angel had said to me when they declared her to be a danger to herself and others, and had jabbed her full of medication, and I was sitting next to her in the ambulance on the way to the psychiatric unit (from which she was to escape) was that it was all Felicity’s fault. Felicity had destroyed her, and would destroy me too.

      ‘Your grandmother is evil,’ she said. I accepted then that Angel was indeed raving. Felicity was no worse or better than anyone else: she was better than the teachers at the various schools I’d gone to and not gone to: morally better than my father who’d walked out rather than have to do the dirty work of having his wife put away, and simply abandoned me, his child, to cope. She was less use to me than studying, or my passion for cinema, and certainly less use to me than my friends. I’d always had friends and mothers of friends who’d take me in, when times were bad. Children meet with great kindness. In fact Felicity did her best, I knew, within the boundaries of her own nature. But then everyone does. And a mother’s last words are difficult to forget, if only traditionally. You know how it is.

      

      Nor did I want Felicity, thirty years later, to be raising these painful matters at five in the morning. I would rather be lying beside Krassner, making the most of such time as I had with him: me, the person without past, without family, the one who just sometimes walked out of the editing suite and engaged in the real world.

      

      I switched the conversation before I got angry and upset. I gave Felicity the information I was saving like the icing on the lemon drizzle cake my mother would buy in the early days, when we had a nice apartment like other people and my father was selling a painting or two and could pay the rent.