Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon

a cup of sweet coffee and a Danish any day.

      

      ‘We must spread the net,’ said Joseph Grepalli. ‘We must trawl deeper.’ The guests called him Stéphane, after Stéphane Grappelli: those who feel helpless always nickname those in charge: even the mildest of mockery helps.

       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