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

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 he done for them, but
they were a grittier, suspicious lot. They would be embarrassed rather than
charmed by Dr Gre- palli’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