Fay Weldon - Novel 23 by Rhode Island Blues (v1.1) Read Free Book Online Page B

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,
                he 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 to throwing the coins when Joy appeared
shouting in through the French windows, a vision in orange velvet with a
crimson headband, determined 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