‘It would be okay if Felicity would do as she’s told, but she won’t,’ roared Joy later, by way of explanation. I agreed that it was difficult to get Felicity to do as she was told.
‘Now that that bullying bastard of a husband has died and left her in peace poor Felicity deserves something for herself.’
I had met Exon (like the oil disaster, minus the extra ‘x’) and he had never struck me as a bullying bastard, just a rather dull nice pompous man, a Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut, who had died four years back, and who had had a lot to put up with from Felicity. I said as much to Joy. It was unwise. She slammed her feet down on both brake and accelerator together and when the bump and stop came—Volvos can do a lot but cannot mind read—insisted on turning off the headlights to save the battery and going right into the forest with her torch, clambering up banks and down gullies in search of a deer she was convinced she had winged. This time I refused to go with her. I had remembered Lyme’s disease, the nasty lingering flu-like illness which you could catch from the deer tick, a creature the size of a pin’s head which jumps around in these particular woods. They leap on to human flesh, dig themselves in and bite. All is well if you bother to do a body search and your eyesight is good and you pluck them off with tweezers within twenty-four hours: but overlook just one and they bed in and you can be off work for months. I was safer in the Volvo with the doors and windows closed. I did not know how high the ticks could jump. The next thing would be—if this were a comedy film—Joy would break her ankle, and the volume of her distress would be awesome. Even as I thought these uncharitable thoughts there was a rumble and a rising roar and an eighteen-wheel truck swerved past us, the breath of its passing shadowing the windows, missing me and the Volvo by inches. It went blazing and blaring off into the dark. I simply blanked my mind, as I do during the commercials on TV, waiting for real life to start again. I was in shock.
‘These truck drivers should be prosecuted,’ she yelled when she got back into the driving seat seconds later. ‘They should remember there might be cars parked out here, with their lights off to save the batteries.’
‘Of course they should,’ I said. ‘Though we weren’t exactly parked.’ Her veined hands tightened on the wheel.
‘I can see you have a lot of Felicity in you,’ she said. She’d quieted considerably. ‘You English can be so sarcastic. This car could have been a write-off and you’re so cool about it.’
I refrained from comment. We drove the rest of the way in silence. She seemed chastened. There were no more animal stops and she peered ahead into the dappled dark and tried to pay attention. There was something very sweet about her.
One way and another, what with travel, terror, amazement, and the effort of not saying what I thought, by the time I got to Felicity’s I was exhausted. Felicity had waited up, playing Sibelius very loud, the privilege of those who live a fair distance from their neighbours. Lights were low and seductive, the furniture minimalist. She reclined on a sofa, wrapped in a Chinese silk gown of exquisite beauty, which fell aside to show her long graceful legs. Not a sign of a varicose vein, but she was, I noticed, wearing opaque tights, where once she would have been proud to show the smooth whiteness of bare unblemished skin. The central heating was turned up so high she could not have been feeling the cold. She looked frailer than when I last saw her, which disconcerted me. She had always been light and thin and pale, and fine-featured, but now she looked as if someone should slap a red fragile sticker on her. Her hair, so like mine in colour and texture, had faded and thinned, but there was still enough of it to make a show. Her eyes were bright enough, and her mind sharp as ever. She looked younger, in fact, than her friend Joy. She had one arm in a sling and a bandaged ankle, which she kept prominently on display, just in case I decided she could look after herself. I was family, and she was claiming me.
‘How was Joy’s driving?’ Felicity was kind enough to ask me, having been the one to inflict her on me. ‘I hope she wasn’t too noisy.’
Crazed by weariness I replied by singing A Tombstone Every Mile at the top of my voice, a trucker’s song about the notorious stretch of wooded road which had claimed more truckers’ lives than anywhere else in the entire US and had been the title song of a pale Convoy imitation I’d once worked on. I could see that if someone like Joy had been travelling the road by night for the last fifty years a myth of haunting might well arise. I tried to explain my thinking to Felicity but my head fell in sleep into my hot cholesterol-lowered, pasteurized, fat-free, sugar-free Milk and Choco Lite Drink.
Oddly enough, what most exhausted me was the recurring vision of Director Krassner’s locks of unkempt hair creeping out between my duvet and my pillow back home. I was in flight, I could see that. Perhaps I had come not so much to rescue Felicity as to escape emotional entanglement. Felicity woke me up sufficiently to lead me to the spare room, where she took off my coat and my boots and stretched me out with a pillow under my head. She seemed to have become more maternal with the passing of the years. I felt I was at home. She could claim me if she wanted me.
The minute proper sleep was possible it eluded me. I wondered whether to call the cutting room in the morning and decided not. Just as social workers have to harden their hearts against empathy with their clients, and nurses must learn not to grieve when patients die, so film editors must steel themselves against too much involvement with their projects. A gig is a gig. You must forget and move on. But this was a big film. It was hard. The PR budget was about three-quarters again on top of the actual shooting budget: the studio had put a lot behind it. It would move into the group consciousness of nations. It would take up oceans of column inches. The editor, that is to say me, the one on whom the success or otherwise of the film depended—forget script, forget stars, everything depends upon the cut—would of course hardly get a mention. Writers complain of being overlooked, but their fate is as nothing compared to that of the editor. The sense of martyrdom is quite pleasant, though, and feeling sorry for yourself nurturing through the lonely nights.
The bed creaked. Like so much else it was wooden. Everything echoes in these new-old houses: the wood forever shifts and complains: the timber is twenty years old, not the two hundred it pretends to be. Raccoons and squirrels scamper in the lofts. Sexual activity between humans could not happen without everyone else in the house knowing. Giant freezers and massive washing machines, enviable to British minds, root the house in one place, where it seems determined to dance free in another. In the morning I looked out over a damp November landscape which seemed determined to keep nature at bay. The land had been cleared of native trees and laid down in grass; low stone walls separated well-maintained properties: there were no fences or hedges to provide privacy, as there would have been in England: distance alone was enough. Lots of space for everyone for those with nothing to hide and a good income. How could Felicity have lived alone here for four years? I asked her over breakfast the next morning—Waffles-Go-Liteley and sugar-free maple syrup and caffeine-rich coffee, thank God.
‘I was trying to oblige time to pass slowly,’ she said. ‘Someone has to do it. Time is divided out amongst the human race: the more of them there are the less of it there is to go round.’ I wondered what poor dead Exon would have made of this statement. Taken her to task and demanded a fuller explanation, probably. He had always been part charmed, part infuriated by what he called Felicity’s Fancies. During the twelve-year course of her marriage to him, at least in my presence, the fancies had dwindled away to almost nothing. Now it seemed the wayward imaginative tendency was reasserting itself, bouncing back. This is what I had always objected to about marriage: the way partners whittle themselves down to the level of the other without even noticing.
