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

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.
     

6
                 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