Free Fay Weldon - Novel 23 by Rhode Island Blues (v1.1) Page B

skin bruised
easily. The blue marks were apparent for days. I felt terrible. I think that
was at a time before my father left me alone with her: he simply didn’t
understand mental illness. He felt she was wilful and difficult and was doing
everything she could to upset and destroy him, while doting on me. I tried to
tell him she was crazy but he didn’t believe me. I expect believing it meant he
would have to take responsibility for me, and he wasn’t the kind of man to do
that. He was an artist of the old school. Children were the mother’s business.
Anyway he left, sending money for a time. I was alone with her for six months
before Felicity turned up to look after us. I’d found her phone number in my
mother’s address book and called her. We’d run out of money and there was no
food in the cupboard and my mother wasn’t doing anything about it. My
grandmother stayed until my mother was hospitalized, and I was in a boarding
school, and then went back to her rich old husband in Savannah , the one who left her the Utrillo. She
couldn’t stand any of it. Well, it was hard to stand. Visit my mother in her
hospital ward, in a spirit of love, and find her white-faced with wild glazed
eyes, tied down, shrieking hate at you. They didn’t have the drugs then they do
now, and made no effort to keep the children away. I told them at school I was
visiting my mother in hospital, but I didn’t tell them what kind of hospital.
In those days to have an insane relative was a shame and a disgrace and a
terrible secret thing in a family. No sooner had Felicity flown out than my
mother simply died. I like to think she knew what she was doing, that it was
the only way out for all of us. She managed to suffocate herself in a
straitjacket. ‘Throw the coins and throw the pattern of the times,’ Angel would
say cheerfully, in the good times, and she’d quote Jung’s Foreword, which she
knew by heart, relieving me of the duty of believing what she believed.
                 ‘To one person the spirit of the I Ching
appears as clear as day, to another, shadowy as twilight, to a third, dark as
night. He who is not pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is
against it does not have to find it true.'
                As if that settled
everything. I try to keep my mind on the good times, but you can see why
I like to live in films rather than in reality, if it can possibly be done. I
wondered what Krassner’s hang-up was. I thought I probably didn’t want to know,
it was an impertinence to inquire. Art is art, forget what motivates it. What
business of anyone else’s is why?
                 Felicity
walked with me to the limo, her step still light, her head held high: age sat
on her uncomfortably: it didn’t belong to her: I wanted to cry.
                 ‘Thank
you for coming all this way,’ she said. ‘I do appreciate it. It’s made things
easier. That place is okay, isn’t it? Of course I’d rather live with family,
but one doesn’t want to be a burden.’
                ‘That place is a hoot,’ I said.
‘I’d give it a go. If you don’t like it I’ll come over and we’ll try again.’
                I sank into the squashy real-leather
seat.
                 ‘Of
course you’re not my only family,’ said Felicity. ‘There was Alison. Though I
daresay they changed her name.’
                 Charlie
was looking at his watch. But I was truly startled. I kept the limo door open.
We couldn’t leave until I shut it.
                 ‘Alison?’
                 ‘I
had Alison before I had your mother,’ said my grandmother. ‘On
my fifteenth birthday. That was in London , back in the thirties. I wasn’t married.
That made me a bad girl. They made me keep the baby for six weeks, and
breastfeed, then they took her away, put her out for adoption.’
                 ‘How
could they be so cruel?’ I stood