and give nothing back. If China invaded they wouldn’t object to being defended, I can tell you that.’
Felicity slammed the door as she got out of the car. But Joy lowered the window.
‘Scarcely a pureblooded Pequot left,’ she shouted after us. ‘They’ve all intermarried with the blacks anyway. Now they run their casinos tax-free on Reservation land. They rake in millions and are let off taxes, just because their ancestors had a hard time. Poor Mr Trump, they say he’s having a real bad time in Atlantic City, because of Indians.’
‘Hush!’ begged Felicity.
‘You’re so English, Felicity! If the old can’t speak the truth who can?’ Calm, quiet people turned to stare at Joy. Her white-powdered, hollow-eyed face stared out of the darkness of the car, her chin resting on the ledge of the lowered window, which I thought was rather dangerous. Supposing it suddenly shot up? I couldn’t think who she reminded me of and then I realized it was Boris Karloff in The Mummy. Some people, as they get older, simply lose their gender.
‘I’ve nothing against them personally,’ she shrieked. ‘But if I was one of them I wouldn’t want to be called a Native American. The way I was brought up, a native is a savage.’ Felicity and I, realizing there was no other way of silencing her, simply gave up our exploration of the town and got back into the car. Joy smiled in triumph.
We saw a couple of what were called congregated communities, but they were built around golf courses. Those who lived there looked as if they had stepped straight out of the advertisements: the strong, well-polished, smiling elderly, their hair wet-combed if they still had any—and there were some amazing heads of hair, not necessarily natural, to be seen, in both sexes. The men wore bright polo shirts, the women shell suits. They made Felicity feel frail. By mistake we saw an assisted living home where the old sat together with their zimmer frames, backs to the wall, glaring at anyone who dared to come into their space. The sense of quiet depression was such I could have been back in my own country. The smell of cheap air freshener got into my lungs. Felicity looked shocked. Joy wouldn’t step inside the room they showed us, so proudly.
‘I’d rather die,’ she shrieked. ‘Why don’t they just polish themselves off?’ If the inhabitants heard they did not stir. Management did, and showed us hastily out, but not before giving us their list of charges.
I relented. Nothing we saw looked at all suitable for my grandmother’s dash into the future. I told Felicity if she wanted to come back to London I’d do what I could for her: find her somewhere near me, even with me. I declared myself prepared to move house to live somewhere without stairs, into the one-floor living that seemed to be a requisite for anyone over sixty. I spoke coolly and my reluctance by-passed my brain and settled itself in my stomach in the form of a bad pain: appendix, maybe.
‘She’ll drive you crazy,’ shouted Joy. ‘You’ll regret it.’
Felicity persisted that she did not want to return to London, even to be near me. (The pain at once subsided.) I was too busy, too taken up with my own life. She would just feel the lonelier because she’d never get to see me, and I would just feel the guiltier for the same reason. Besides, she was used to the US.
Life in England was too cramped, too divorced from its own history, the young had no interest in the old, the IRA left bombs around, the plumbing was dreadful and she was too old to make new friends. And we certainly could not live together. Joy was right, I would kill her, or she me. I did not argue. We went home in depressed silence.
‘You just have to be patient,’ said Joy, softer again. ‘Don’t sell to this stupid client of Vanessa’s. Anyone who wants to move in within the month is bound to be a bad neighbour. You do owe a little consideration to the rest of us.’
She took the wheel of the car and bumped off in a way that never happened when I drove. It was scarcely more than a year old, and fitted with every possible kind of gadget to ensure a smooth ride. I don’t know how she managed it.
When we got back to the serenity of Passmore we found that a brochure had been pushed through the letterbox. It was from an establishment called The Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement. Felicity examined it over toasted cinnamon bagels spread with Cream Cheese Favorite Lite. ‘This Golden Bowl place,’ said Felicity, ‘doesn’t sound too bad at all. They have a Nobel Prize winner in residence, and a Doctor of Philosophy. Fancy being able to have a conversation with someone other than Joy. And what synchronicity that it should arrive today!’
It would have been even more synchronicitous if it had arrived in the morning rather than the afternoon, so we could have visited it when in the area, but I held my tongue. The Golden Bowl charged at least double the fees of any other institution we’d seen, and they went up ten per cent each year. Which when you worked it out meant that in ten years’ time you would be paying double. But by then Miss Felicity would be well into her nineties. It might not be so bad a deal. It was a gamble who would end up making money out of whom.
I hoped her liking for the place wasn’t because it was the most expensive on offer. Reared in penury as she had been, Felicity now had an almost innocent faith in the power of money: she believed that the more you spent the better value you would get. She always bought the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu. She’d choose caviar not because she liked it but because of what it cost.
The Golden Bowl, according to its brochure, was an establishment run on therapeutic lines. Golden Bowlers (ouch! but never mind) were encouraged to live life to the full. Age need not be a barrier to the exploration of the self, or the exercise of the mind. Golden Bowlers were not offered the consolations of religious belief, which came with difficulty to the highly educated: but rather in some vague, Jungian notion of ‘adjustment to the archetype’ in which all staff were trained, and could bring joy and relief through the concluding years. Reading between the lines, those who ran the Golden Bowl held no truck with reincarnation; death was death, and that was that. What they were after was reconciliation with what had gone before since nothing much was to come. And they mentioned the word death, which nobody else had done.
It was persuasive, and Felicity and I were persuaded. I should have spoken out more firmly against a Residential Home for the Aged where the residents were known as Golden Bowlers. I should have realized that the connection with Ecclesiastes, which I assumed, was minimal. It wasn’t mentioned in the brochure.
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth,
while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain:
How did it go after that? My mother Angel would teach me chunks of the Bible. It was her lasting gift to me, along with life itself, of course.
…and desire shall fail:
because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken at the fountain, …then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
Felicity would never acknowledge that the Golden Bowl, whatever that was meant to represent, was cracked. A day would never dawn when she took no pleasure at all in it. There was bound to be trouble. ‘Vanity of vanities,’ saith the preacher, ‘all is vanity.’ But we were blithe: we put our trust in synchronicity.
The next morning Felicity consulted the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Oracles with the Foreword by Jung himself, to see what that had to say about the Golden Bowl. She had been in her fifties in the midsixties, when I was born, when the I Ching was all the rage.
She had just found her pencil and got round