Rhode Island Blues

3

Not far from Mystic, not far from Wakefield, well protected from any traffic noise by woods and hills, just out of Connecticut and into Rhode Island, stood the Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement. Rhode Island is a small dotted oblong on a map, one of the six states that compose New England, the smallest, prettiest, most crowded and (they say) most corrupt state of them all, though who’s to judge a thing like that? It is the indigenous home of a breed of russet feathered hens, the Rhode Island Red, now much appreciated by fanciers the world over. It is crowded in upon, squashed, by Connecticut, Massachusetts and the Atlantic Ocean; it is lush with foliage: birches, poplars and ginkos that turn gold in autumn, and mountain maples and ash, and hickories that turn orange, and red oak and red maple, sassafras and dogwood that turn scarlet. It is sprinkled with wild flowers in spring: ornithological rarities and their watchers spend their summers here. It has sheltered beaches and rocky coves, faded grandeurs, and a brooding, violent history of which an agreeable present makes light. It is the home of the brave, the better dead than red state. In November, of course, it is much like anywhere else, dripping and damp and anonymous. Better to turn the attention inward, not out. So thought Nurse Dawn, executive nursing officer of the Golden Bowl Complex.

The Golden Bowl is constructed much in the fashion of the former Getty Museum outside Los Angeles; that is to say it is an inspired version of a Roman villa, pillared and pooled, lilied and creepered, long and low, and faced with a brilliant white stone which in California looks just fine but under soft Rhode Island skies can startle. The young and unkind might say it glared rather than glowed: the elderly however valued its brightness, and marvelled at the splendour in which they could finish their days, and for this reason the local heritage groups had bitten back protest and allowed its existence.

Even as Sophia travelled to Boston on her sadly delayed visit to her grandmother, Nurse Dawn, together with Dr Joseph Grepalli, specialist in the medical arts and Director of the Golden Bowl, contemplated a bed rendered empty by the sudden death of its previous occupant, Dr Geoffrey Rosebloom. The windows were open, for the decorators were already at work; new white paint was being applied throughout the suite—Dr Rosebloom had been a secret smoker, and the ceilings were uncomfortably yellowed—and an agreeable classic pink-striped wallpaper pasted up over the former mauve and cream flowers. So long as wallpapers are pale they can be put up fresh layer upon old layer, without ever having to strip off the original. The difficulty with strong colours is that if there’s any damp around they tend to seep through to discolour the new. Only after about six layers will the surface begin to bubble and the wall have to be stripped down to its plaster, but that will happen on average only every five years or so. The pink and white was only the second layer since the Golden Bowl had been opened twenty-two years back. The occupant before Dr Rosebloom had been one hundred and two years old, in good health and spirits to the end, and had also died suddenly in the same bed. The mattress had been in good condition and management had not considered it necessary to replace it at the time.

‘Two sudden deaths in the same bed,’ said Dr Grepalli, ‘is too much.’ He was a genial and generous man. ‘This time round the mattress at least must be replaced.’

‘You can hardly blame the bed for the deaths,’ said Nurse Dawn, who pretended to be genial and generous but was not. ‘Dr Rosebloom smoked—look at the state of the ceiling: if he’d had more self-control we wouldn’t be having to repaint—I daresay some respiratory trouble or other triggered the infarction.’

‘Ah, Nurse Dawn,’ said Dr Grepalli, affectionately, ‘you would like everyone to live for ever in perfect health, behaving properly.’ ‘So I would,’ she said. ‘Why would God let some of us live longer than others, if he didn’t want us to learn more in the extra time?’ In her book self-improvement must be continuous, and no respite offered even to the elderly.

The Golden Bowl housed some sixty guests, known to themselves and others as Golden Bowlers. All had had to be over seventy-five at the time they joined the community, and still capable of congregate living. If you were, this augured well for your longevity. The weak had been carried off by now; only the vital and strong remained. The average age of death among Golden Bowlers was a ripe ninety-six, thanks to the particular nature and character of the guests as selected by Nurse Dawn. She had no actuarial training: she worked by instinct. One look was enough. This one would last. Welcome. That one wouldn’t. We are so sorry, we have no spaces.

Death was far from an everyday occurrence at the Golden Bowl, albeit one that was inevitable. Guests moved, within the same building complex, from Congregate Living (when you just didn’t want to be alone) to Assisted Living (when you needed help with your stockings) to Continuing Care (when you needed help with your eating) to Nursing Care (when you took to your bed) to, if you were unlucky, Intensive Care (when you wanted to die but they didn’t let you). Families were encouraged to hand over complete responsibility. Over-loving relatives could be more damaging to an old person’s morale, more detrimental to the Longevity Index, than those who were neglectful. One of Dr Grepalli’s most successful lectures was on this particular subject. Just as a teacher tends to dislike parents, and hold them responsible for the plight of the children, so did Dr Grepalli mistrust relatives and their motives. The doctor was a leading light in the field of senior care administration, appeared on TV from time to time, and wrote articles in The Senior Citizen Monthly which would be syndicated worldwide. Golden Bowlers admired him greatly, and were proud of him. Or so Nurse Dawn assured him.

The longest stay of any Golden Bowler had been twenty-two years: the shortest five days, but that latter was a statistical anomaly, and therefore not used in any averaging out. In its twenty-two years of existence only eight patients had ever moved out before, as it were, moving on. The degree of life satisfaction at the Golden Bowl was high, just inevitably short, though a great deal less short than in similar institutions charging similar prices. Not that there were many around like the Golden Bowl, where you could stay in one place through the increasing stages of your decrepitude. It was customary for the elderly to be wrenched out of familiar places and be moved on to more ‘suitable’ establishments, as the degree of their physical or mental incompetence lurched from one stage to the next, and in the move lost friends, and often possessions, as space itself closed in around them. At the Golden Bowl, whatever your condition, you watched the seasons change in familiar trees and skies, and made your peace with your maker in your own time.

Joseph Grepalli and Nurse Dawn shivered a little in the chilly morning air that dispersed the smell of paint, but were satisfied in their souls. Dr Rosebloom had died suddenly in his sleep at the age of ninety-seven, not a centenarian, but every year over ninety-seven helped ease the average up. He had not done badly, even though he smoked.

The mattress and armchair of the deceased—being perfectly clean—were to be taken to be sold at the used furniture depository: it was remarkable, as Joseph Grepalli remarked, how though a bed could escape the personality of the one who slept in it, an armchair seemed to soak up personality and when its user died, became limp and dismal.

‘Such a romantic,’ said Nurse Dawn. ‘I do so love that about you, Joseph.’ The armchair looked perfectly good to her: it was in her interests to keep spending to a minimum but Joseph had to be kept happy, strong in the knowledge of his own sensitivity and goodness. New furniture, she agreed, would be bought at a discount store that very day.

The Golden Bowl had at its practised fingertips the art of providing Instant Renewal of mind and artifacts to maximize peace of mind and profits too. To this end policy was that no single room, suite, or full apartment should be allowed to stay empty for longer than three days at most. But no sooner, either: it took three days, and even Nurse Dawn agreed on this point, for the spirit of the departed to stop hanging around, keeping the air shivery, bringing bad judgement and bad luck. The waiting list was long; it might take guests a month or so to wind up their affairs and move in, but they would pay from the moment their accommodation fell available, ready and waiting. That way the aura of death, the sense of absence caused by death, would be less likely to endure. As with psychoanalysis, the fact of payment had a healing, restoring function. It reduced the ineffable to the everyday.

The bathroom cabinets had to be replaced; as well: Joseph had a superstition about mirrors: supposing the new occupant looked in the mirror and saw the former occupant looking out? Mirrors could be like that, maintained Joseph Grepalli. They retained memory; they had their own point of view. Aged faces tended to look alike in the end: one tough grey whisker much like another, but their owners did not necessarily see it like this. Joseph allowed himself to be fanciful: he himself was a Doctor of Literature; his father Dr Homer Grepalli, the noted geriatric physician and psychoanalyst, had bequeathed him the place and he had made himself an expert. Nurse Dawn was qualified in geriatric psychiatry, which was all that the authorities required.

‘We have twenty-five people on the waiting list,’ said Nurse Dawn, ‘but none of them truly satisfactory. Drop-down-deaders: overweight or sociopathic: there is a Pulitzer winner, which is always good for business, but she’s a smoker.’

Nurse Dawn slipped between Joseph’s covers of a night: she was a sturdy, strong-jawed woman of forty-two, with a big bosom and a dull-skinned face and small dark bright button eyes. She looked better with clothes off than on. She clip-clopped down the corridors by day on sensible heels, her broad beam closely encased in blue or white linen, exhorting Golden Bowlers to further and deeper self-knowledge.

‘I trust your judgement, Nurse Dawn,’ said Dr Grepalli. For some reason he felt uneasy, as if standing in front of the lobster tank at a fish restaurant, choosing the one to die for his delight.

‘In fact the whole lot of them sound troublesome and unprincipled. Not one’s as easy as they used to be. Even the old have developed an overweening sense of their own importance. They’ve caught it from the young.’ By troublesome she meant picky about their food, or given to criticism of the staff, or arguing about medication, or averse to group therapy, or lacking in get-up-and-go, or worse, having too many relatives who’d died young. All prospective Golden Bowlers had to provide, as well as good credit references and a CV, a family history and personality profile built on a questionnaire devised by Nurse Dawn herself.

Joseph Grepalli was a bearish, amiable, charismatic man, not unlike, as Sophia King was later to discover, Director Krassner. Inside the first Nurse Dawn was the second, a truly skinny woman not even trying to get out, preferring 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 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.