that this day she would really make her mark upon the world. Felicity had the grace to hastily hide the coins under a sheet of paper. And then we all set off in high spirits to inspect the Golden Bowl, Felicity, Joy and me, in Joy’s Mercedes. Once again I drove. It was fun, all of a sudden.
‘This place is going to be just as terrible as the others,’ Joy assured us, quite softly. She was wearing her hearing aid and it was a bright morning so no doubt the world was less misty than usual. ‘But it’s nice to be driven.’ This morning she had a flask of vodka with her and lifted it to her lips from time to time as she sat in the back seat. I could see her in the mirror. She had apparently decided I was to be trusted.
‘I didn’t have time to read the coins,’ Felicity confided in me on the way. ‘But I threw Duration leading to Biting Through. Thirty-two leading to twenty-one: lots of changing lines, which means we’re in a volatile situation.’ I hadn’t heard talk like this since I was a little girl, when my mother would scarcely buy groceries without consulting the Chinese Book of Wisdom.
‘Oh yes,’ I remarked. ‘Is that good or bad?’
‘Duration.’ She quoted from memory. ‘Success. No blame.
Perseverance furthers. It furthers one to have somewhere to go.’
‘Like the Golden Bowl?’
‘I should think that’s what it meant, wouldn’t you?’ I concentrated on the road. Over the hills I could catch a glimpse of the sea, a thin edge of blue melting into a hazy sky. It was a good day for November: there had been a sharp, hard wind during the night but it had dropped, and the sky was left watery bright. Maybe on just such a day the sails of the Viking longships had caught the sun as they approached the coast. On such a day perhaps the captain of an English privateer had stumbled on deck and said, ‘Beautiful morning for November,’ while wondering if he would live to see the evening. To wonder about death was more commonplace once than it is now, and the present must have seemed the more glorious. Inland the trees, heretofore muzzy with wet leaves, had become stark and bare and beautiful overnight.
‘Poor Joy,’ said Felicity loudly, to anyone who cared to hear. ‘She has such a drink problem.’ Joy had turned off her hearing aid.
Nurse Dawn looked out of the French windows of the Atlantic Suite which Dr Rosebloom had so recently and suddenly vacated, and averted her eyes. She did not like the woods, which were allowed to creep so near to the portals of the property. It was too gentle and crowded and coy a landscape for her. She felt circumscribed and somehow on hold, as if her life had not properly begun.
The sky seemed too small. It was too quiet. If you listened you could hear the tiresome swish of ocean as a background to birdsong. There was somewhere to go and everyone else knew where except her.
A group of guests passed in the corridor on the other side of the door, their voices drifting. They were chanting, which was gratifying, but not gratifying enough, on their way from an Ascension meeting in the Library, still brimming with cheerful animation, summoned up somehow from within their feeble beings.
‘What do Golden Bowlers do?
We live life to the full.’
Self-hypnosis could do so much: in the end, whatever Dr Grepalli had to say on the subject, joie de vivre failed in the face of bad knees, and dimming eyes. Silence fell again. There seemed today some dulling barrier between Nurse Dawn and the enjoyment of life. Everything became a source of irritation. People raved about the wondrous colours of the trees in these parts after the first few sharp frosts of autumn, but to her the trees in their autumn dress looked garish, like colours from a child’s painting set. And now in November there was no splendour in their absence of dress, their dank nakedness. She wanted to be back home to the wheat plains and a great expanse of sky, where the roads were straight and dusty and yellow, and dry, even at this time of year; and the sound of wind, not sea, was the background to everyday life; and twisters came like the sudden vengeance of God, reminding one of sin, and with sin, salvation. But it could not be. This was where the money was, where she had managed to carve her niche. There were as many old people back there as here, of course, and as much work to be done for them, but they were a grittier, suspicious lot. They would be embarrassed rather than charmed by Dr Grepalli’s methods, and far less easy about parting with their money. They thought more about their relatives and what good their small savings could do when they were gone than about their own comfort and state of mind. And coming out of a rural community as they did, they tended to lose heart as they reached their gnarled and wrinkled end: what was the point of you if your back was bad or your legs wouldn’t work. Here at the prosperous edges of the sea, oldsters seemed to keep going longer and in better shape. Certainly they’d acquired more money in their lifetimes, doing less.
Nurse Dawn had a profit-share in the Golden Bowl: she had persuaded Dr Grepalli that this was only just and fair. She hadn’t exactly asked him to marry her and he hadn’t exactly declined: she hadn’t exactly threatened to inform the Golden Years Welfare Board (originally appointed by Dr Homer Grepalli, Joseph’s father) that she and he enjoyed a sexual relationship, and he hadn’t exactly asked her not to.
‘Dawn,’ he’d remarked once, as her head nuzzled beneath the bedclothes, ‘I hope you’re doing this because you want to, not because you think it will help you control me. You are something of a control-freak, as you must realize. Which suits me: and suits our guests; as we get older we feel relieved if there is someone around telling us what to do, even if we don’t care to do it. But I do want you to be aware I’m not open to blackmail.’
‘The Board wouldn’t like it,’ she had surfaced to say, shocked. ‘The Board wouldn’t mind in the least,’ Dr Grepalli said. ‘They’re all free-love civil libertarians: pre-Aids thinkers, existentialists, older than we are—not a single one below sixty, and far less censorious than our generation. Nevertheless I can see the justice of giving you a twenty per cent share of my own annual profit-related bonus, since you do so much for my morale and the wellbeing of the guests, who all adore you. As I do.’
Dr Grepalli was too self-aware and ironically minded ever to do as he really wanted—or rather have done to him—which would be to be tied up by a ferocious woman in a nurse’s uniform, who would insult him and walk all over him in high-heeled shoes, and brandish a whip, but Nurse Dawn seemed a heaven-sent compromise, and it suited him to pay her, and added an agreeable complexity to their relationship. It was part of the unspoken deal. Both knew it.
Nurse Dawn had worked the twenty per cent share out as a good $700 a week on top of her existing salary, and rising. Guests paid not a decreasing but an increasing sum—year by year—for their stay. This was only reasonable. They needed more care. More trays of food had to be fetched and carried, more medication provided and more eccentricities and forgetfulness coped with. Relatives and lawyers sometimes protested at the Golden Bowl’s charging arrangements, seeing, annually, an exponential loss of expected family inheritance, but soon came to see the sense of it. The older anyone’s relatives were, after all, the less likely was anyone to want to take them home again.
‘The longer you Stay,
The more you Pay, Lucky Golden Bowler!’
The unspoken benefit, of course, was that guests were conscious that management had an incentive to keep them alive as long as possible. Let your room fall empty, as Dr Rosebloom had, and the newcomer entered at the lower rate. Golden Bowlers were encouraged to see the Golden Bowl as home, and their fellow guests as family: it was hoped that little by little they would loosen close ties with their birth families. It was easier for everyone that way, as it was seen to be for nuns and monks. And after eighty that was more or less what guests amounted