Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon

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.

       5

      By the afternoon Miss Felicity’s plunge into a new life had taken on a certain urgency: Vanessa, one of the part-time real estate wives, called on her mobile phone to say that she had a client she was sure would just adore the house, and who was prepared to take it, furniture and all, and had $900,000 to spend but would want to move in within the month. Miss Felicity, faced with the reality of a situation she had brought upon herself, and too proud to draw back, and moved by my advice (I had woken in the night with a mean and manic fear that now we were getting on so well she would change her mind and want to come and live in London, to be near me) had calmed down and decided she would like to stay in the neighbourhood, and, what was more, had settled in to the idea of ‘congregate living’. She would start looking this very day.

      

      Joy, summoned for coffee, and today dressed in yellow velour and with a pink ribbon in her hair, was alarmed at so much haste. Felicity might make more from her house if she hung on, she shrieked. Joy’s brother-in-law might want to move back into the neighbourhood, and maybe would be interested in the property: these major life decisions should not be taken in a hurry. But Felicity, meantime, unheeding, was unwinding the bandage round her ankle.

      ‘What are you doing?’ demanded Joy.

      ‘Rendering myself fit for congregate living,’ said Felicity. ‘I don’t want to give the impression that I need to be assisted. Let’s see what there is around Mystic.’

      ‘Mystic!’ screamed Joy, teeth bared. Every one of them a dream of the dentist’s art, but you can never do anything about the gums.

      ‘You can’t possibly want to be anywhere near Mystic. Too many tourists.’

      ‘I’ve always just loved the name,’ said Felicity. Joy raised her plucked eyebrows to heaven. What few hairs she allowed to remain, the better to reinforce the pencilled line, were white and spiky and tough.

      ‘I thought the whole point,’ yelled Joy, ‘was that you wanted assistance. Assisted care. Someone to help you take a shower in the mornings.’

      ‘That is definitely going too far,’ said Felicity and left the room, giving a little flirtatious kick backward with one of her heels, while Joy forgot to smile and ground her white teeth. ‘There’s nothing whatsoever the matter with that ankle,’ yelled Joy. ‘She just wanted you over here and she got her own way.’

      

      The seaside town of Mystic (population 3,216) lies a little to the north of where the Quinebourg River splits and meets the Atlantic just before Connecticut turns into Rhode Island. In the summer the place is full of holiday-makers and gawpers: it is less fashionable and expensive than Cape Cod further up, or the tail of Long Island opposite, but it has some good houses, some good wild stretches of beach, and attracts admirers of the old 1860 wooden bridge, which still rises and falls to let the shipping traffic through. Or so the brochures said and so it proved to be. Joy insisted on coming with us on our tour of the area: so we went in her new and so far undented Mercedes—obtained for her by her brother-in-law Jack, a retired car dealer—and I was allowed to drive.

      

      Old people do indeed seem to congregate around the town: the Mystic Office of Commerce handed out brochures a-plenty. I could understand the charm of the name, Mystic, tempting in the hope, so needed as life draws to its inevitable end, that there is more to it than meets the eye. A place close enough to nature to make sunsets and stormy weather a matter of reflection, in which to develop a sense of oneness with the universe, in which to lose, if only temporarily, the pressing consideration of the shortness of our existence here on earth. A more benign and tranquil version of nature than in most other places in the US. No hurricanes, no earthquakes, no wild fluctuations of heat and cold to disturb old bones, only the Lyme tick which no-one took any notice of, in spite of the fact that the illness is serious enough to carry off the aged and delicate. Maybe Mystic’s convenient distance from New York, not so near as to make popping in to see the old relative an everyday affair, not so far as to make a fortnightly visit too difficult, was the greater attraction. Or perhaps homes for the elderly were just these days a fine growth market: this is trading country, as a British admiral once observed, seeing the New England settlers trading with his fleet during the War of Independence. For whatever reason there were more residential homes for the aged up and down these ponds, these woods, these beaches, and these back roads, than I’d have thought possible.

      When I asked what exactly we were looking for, Felicity said, ‘Somewhere with good vibes’, at which Joy snorted and said she thought cleanliness, efficiency, good food and a good deal was more to the point.

      

      Good vibes! I thought Felicity would be lucky to find them anywhere in New England. Although a landscape may look stunningly pleasant and tranquil, the ferocious energies of its past—and few landscapes are innocent—are never quite over. The impulse to exterminate the enemy, to loot and plunder, to gain confidence with false smiles before stabbing in the back, is hard to overcome: if it’s not with us in the present it seeps through from the past. And these are dangerous parts: the first coast of the New World to be colonized, three and a half hundred years back. Bad things have been able to happen here for a long, long time. A massacre here, death by hunger there; an early settlement vanished altogether over winter: no trace left at all when the ships come creeping up the coast with the spring. And who in the world to say what happened? We all await the great debriefing when everything will be made known, the Day of Judgement which will never come.

      Later the plantation owners of the South made this coast their summering place: later still the mob leaders from Chicago: then the Mafia. Of course they did. Like calls to like. The strong colour of old wallpaper had ample time to show through to the new, and they liked it. The edginess of something about to happen, something just happened. Vacations can be so dull.

      

      Good vibes! Maybe it was in Felicity’s nature forever to be moving on, in search of a landscape innocent of earlier crimes. If so she would be better advised to go West than East, where there wasn’t so much history. Joy was by nature a stayer in one place, Felicity a mover on. Felicity would always listen and learn and be enriched, Joy would shut her mind to new truths. Felicity was inquisitive and never averse to a little trouble and discomfiture, Joy never wanted to stir anything up. Therein lay the difference between them, though God knows both ended up in much the same condition in life, living in the same kind of clapboard house, in the same kind of widowhood, albeit Joy today in startling yellow velour, and Miss Felicity in a floating cream and green dress bought at great expense at Bergdorf Goodman, and an embroidered jacket of vaguely ethnic but tasteful origin, cut so as to hide any thickening of the waist or stooping of the shoulders. She held herself erect. From the back she could have been any age: except perhaps her ankles were too thin to belong to a truly youthful person.

      We took the coast road out of Mystic to historic Stonington, the Rhode Island side of the river from Mystic, where there’s a statue of a Pequot Indian with a large stone fish under each arm. Old people tottered around it, relatives holding dependent arms: a group whizzed about it in mechanized wheelchairs, never too old to be a danger to others. They came, in whatever state, to contemplate the past, since there was so little future to contemplate: they invaded the nearby souvenir shops by the busload, while old limbs still had the strength. We all want to think of our nation’s past as wondrous and charming, as we would want to think of our own. But Joy declined to get out of the car.

      ‘I’m