Fay Weldon - Novel 23 Read Online Free PDF Page B

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