by Weldon, Fay
Yes, it was intolerable for Edwin Rice to live with Angelica Rice: his health, his happiness was at risk.
The Petitioner claimed that his spouse had acted in various other ways unacceptable to him: that she had been abusive and violent, pinching him while he brushed his teeth and otherwise molesting him; he alleged that her kissing of the family dogs amounted to bestiality, and her embracing of female guests to lesbianism. He petitioned the Court to let him go free of her.
Brian Moss heard Jelly White take in a breath of outrage between her teeth, and looked at his secretary sharply, but her face remained unmoved and her hand was steady again as it continued to race across the sheet. He went on dictating.
The Petitioner claimed that Lady Angelica made excessive sexual demands on him; that she refused to have children; that she had dirty habits; that she was drunken, and took drugs; that she failed to provide proper food for his guests, thus humiliating him. And that, all in all, her behaviour has been intolerable and unreasonable, and he wanted a divorce. Now.
‘Goodness me!’ said Jelly White, looking up from her shorthand pad. ‘Did you write this for Sir Edwin? Doesn’t it smack of overkill?’
‘How well you put it,’ said Brian Moss. ‘But overkill is our stock-in-trade. It’s our trademark here at Catterwall & Moss. We like to offer the Court offences in all available categories of unreasonable matrimonial behaviour. Offer the minimum, as too many firms do to avoid unnecessary trauma, and you risk the Court’s rejection of the petition. What pretty white fingers you have!’ And his strong brown fingers slid over her pale, slim ones, and Jelly White let them stay. Brian Moss did not, in any case, interfere with her right hand, only with the left, which was not observably making him money.
‘Lady Rice sounds a dreadful wife for any man to have,’ remarked Jelly.
‘The Court will certainly believe so,’ said Brian Moss. ‘As it happened, I did have some trouble finding an example of physical assault. We had to make do with the bottom pinching.’
‘But Sir Edwin was happy enough to allege it?’ enquired Jelly, as if idly.
‘Certainly,’ said Brian Moss. ‘With a little help from the new lady in his life.’
And he told his secretary how once, in the days before her employment, Sir Edwin had brought Lady Anthea Box along to an appointment: not the kind of thing Brian Moss usually approved of but, as it turned out, her presence had been useful. Anthea had spoken for Sir Edwin, who was not as coherent or determined as she. Bestiality, still one of the major and useful categories of matrimonial offence, had been quite a problem until Anthea reminded Sir Edwin how he had never liked the way his wife kissed the dogs.
‘Perhaps he was just nervous of his wife catching something,’ suggested Jelly White. ‘Perhaps the fear was to do with hygiene, not sexual rivalry?’
‘Country men seldom worry about things like that,’ said Brian Moss, brushing the suggestion away. ‘I hope you can get this document in the post today.’
‘Of course,’ said Jelly White, but it was two days before she did, and even then she put the wrong postal code on the envelope, so it was four days before the document reached Barney Evans, solicitor to Lady Rice. In the meantime Lady Rice had presented her own petition. She ‘got in first’, thus giving herself some minor advantage in the game that is divorce. The Rice couple, as Brian Moss observed, were not the kind to wait peaceably for a ‘no fault, no blame’ arrangement. Fault there was, blame there was, and fault and blame they’d have.
Jelly White was, as it happened, Lady Angelica Rice in disguise – or, to be more precise, in her alter ego. It was only lately that Lady Rice had begun to fear that the voices in her head had separate and distinct personalities. Dress up as Jelly White, and Jelly White, to some degree or another, owned her. All Lady Rice could do was whisper in Jelly’s ear. They shared the ear, but Jelly it was who turned the head. It was unnerving.
Lady Rice concluded that she was suffering from a perforated personality: worse, that if any further trauma occurred, she would develop a full-blown split personality: she would become a clinical case. Lady Rice tried to maintain a calm attitude, and not to blow up more storms than were unnecessary, which was why she allowed Jelly to allow Brian Moss to fondle her and made no protest. She preserved herself for worse emergencies, and in any case, she might not be heard. Jelly was a strong and wilful personality.
In her petition for divorce, Lady Angelica Rice alleged adultery between Anthea Box and her husband over a six-month period previous to the date on which she, Lady Rice, had left the matrimonial home.
Lady Rice claimed physical assault, over-frequent and perverted sexual activity; drunkenness, drug-taking and financial irresponsibility; she asserted that her husband’s relationship with his dogs was of a sexual nature. That she had been eased out of her home, Rice Court, to make way for Sir Edwin’s paramour, Lady Anthea Box. Lady Rice, on the other hand, had throughout the marriage been a good and faithful wife.
Sir Edwin had behaved intolerably and she wanted this reflected in any property settlement.
‘An out-of-London court!’ exclaimed Brian Moss, this seeming to be the part of Barney Evans’ letter-plus-enclosures which most affected him. ‘What a nightmare! I have no influence whatsoever in the provinces. A nod in London is simply not as good as a wink anywhere else. How ever are we to get this case settled? And how strange: the wife has claimed almost the same unreasonable behaviour as has the husband.’
‘I expect it’s because they were married so long,’ said Jelly. ‘They can read each other’s minds.’
‘Eleven years isn’t a long marriage,’ said Brian Moss. ‘There was a couple in here the other day in their nineties wanting a divorce by consent. I asked them why they’d left it so long and they said they’d been waiting for the children to die.’
He laughed; a deep, hoarse, unexpected laugh at a pitch which made the many racing prints on the wall rattle, and Jelly laughed too, at his joke. Her tinkly little laugh made nothing rattle, but he pinched the swell of her bosom where it disappeared under her blouse. Just a little pinch: friendly. She had taken off her white woollen sweater. It was a hot day.
Outside the elegant Regency windows, London’s traffic flowed, or tried to flow. Only emergency vehicles seemed able to make progress – police, fire, ambulance. Their sirens approached, passed, faded, with enviable speed.
‘I make a good living,’ observed Brian Moss, ‘out of other people’s need to be in the right; they like to claim the privilege of being the victim. Who’s at fault in the Rice debacle is of no importance. The property is all that matters, and we’ll make sure she doesn’t get her greedy little fingers on too much of that. Clients assume that conduct during marriage will have an effect on a property settlement and veer it in the direction of natural justice, but it’s rash to make any such assumption. Or only in the most extreme cases.’
‘You don’t see the Rice divorce as extreme, then? Merely run-of-the-mill?’ enquired Jelly.
‘Very much run-of-the-mill,’ said Brian Moss, ‘other than that both parties do have to go to considerable lengths to hide their income.’
And he explained that Lady Rice was once a pop star and no doubt had large undisclosed sums put away. And as for Sir Edwin, his accountants had naturally been working overtime, losing their client’s assets in the books – fortunately for Sir Edwin the Rice Estate had books of enormous and wonderful complexity.
‘I imagine they are,’ said Jelly.
‘Otherwise,’ said Brian Moss, ‘it’s just a normal divorce. Both parties vie for the moral high ground, never noticing that a major landslip has already carried the whole mountain away. And both parties enrich me, thank God, by arguing.’
‘You are a very poetic kind of man,’ said Jelly White. Some of her hair had fallen free of her headband. Brian Moss caught up a strand or so between his fingers and tugged, and Jelly White smiled obligingly. Lady Rice sighed.
Thus Lady Angelica Rice had once smiled at Sir Edwin
, her husband. Only now she smiled with measured guile, not an overflow of innocence. Trust and amiability had done Angelica Rice no good at all. She understood now that the transparency of innocence protected no one. She learned fast.
Lady Rice had a problem with lies and cunning. Jelly White had no such problem: they were intrinsic to her persona. Angelica had a story to tell.
2
The Velcro That Is Marriage
I was married to Edwin for eleven years, and the Velcro that’s marriage got well and truly stuck. The stuff is the devil to wrest apart: it can rip and tear if your efforts are too strenuous. The cheap little sticky fibres do their work well. ‘Overuse’, they say, weakens Velcro. If ‘overused’ – a strange concept: should you fasten only so often? – is there some moral implication here? – you can hardly get Velcro to stick at all. But I was not overused in the beginning. On the contrary. When Edwin and I married, when I stopped being Angelica White and became Lady Rice, I was seventeen and a virgin, though no one would have known it. Chastity is not usually associated with leathers, studs, boots, crops, whips and the more extreme edges of the pop scene which I then frequented. But my velcroing capacity to be at one with the man I loved, in spite of appearances, was pristine, firm, ready for service. Velcro hot off the loom. I ‘waited’ for marriage. Extraordinary!
Edwin and I have now been apart for some months: he stayed in the matrimonial home; I left in disgrace and disarray. When it became apparent that I was in danger of having nothing whatsoever to show for my eleven years of marriage – not love, nor property, nor children, not even friends I could endure – I reckoned I had better get as near the legal horse’s mouth as possible, to retrieve what I could of property and reputation; that horse being Brian Moss, and a fine upstanding ungelded beast he is, at that. Barney Evans, my own solicitor, is rather like a pit pony; forever squidging up his poor dim eyes in the sudden glare of his opponent’s intellect. See me, Angelica Rice, as a bareback rider: high-heeled, fishnet-stockinged, wasp-waisted, leaping from saddle to saddle as the two blinkered legal steeds run round and round their circus ring. Jelly White running after with a bucket and spade, shovelling up the shit.
On a good night, tucked up in my high, soft bed at The Claremont, a stone’s throw from Claridges, with its pure white, real linen sheets, I see myself as an avenging angel. Then I laugh aloud at my own audacity and admire myself. Fancy getting a job with your husband’s lawyer’s firm! On a bad night, when the fine fabric of the pillows is so wet with my tears that the down within gets dark, matted and uncomfortable, when I feel tossed about in a sea of dejection, bafflement, loss – a sea that keeps me buoyant, mind you, made extra salty by my own grief – why, then I know I am just any other abandoned and rejected woman, half-mad, worthy of nothing. Then I see that taking a job at Catterwall & Moss, in the heart of the enemy camp, is mere folly, presumption and insanity, and not in the least dashing, or clever or funny. And I worry dreadfully in case I’m found out. My moods are so extreme I feel I am two people. How is it possible to contain both in the same body?
Yet apparently it is. At least three of me look out of my two eyes. Lady Rice, Angelica and Jelly: Lady Rice and Angelica fight it out for ascendency: Jelly is Angelica’s creature.
Lady Rice is a poor, passive creature in my, Angelica’s, opinion. That’s what marriage made of her, once it began to go wrong. She’d lie about in The Claremont suffering all day if I let her. She wouldn’t even bother to answer Barney Evans’ letters. I, Angelica, am the one who has to get her to work each day, dress her up as Jelly White, take her to the gym, keep her on a diet, stop her smoking. I am, I like to think, the original, pre-married persona. Why she maintains she’s the dominant personality round here I can’t imagine. Perhaps it’s because she has a title: perhaps it’s because she can’t face the small-town girl that’s me, which is part of her and always will be.
3
Lady Rice’s Sea Of Sorrow
Each night Lady Rice rocks in a sea of sorrow, half-sleeping, half-dreaming. The sea is so salt with tears she can never sink: see how she is buoyed up by her own grief. Sometimes the sea grows wild and stormy, whipped by winds of anger, hate, violent resentments: how she turns and tosses then. She’s afraid: she will be sucked down into whirlpools; she will drown, in a tempest of her own making. All she can do then is pray; much good it does her. Dear Father, dear God, save me from my enemies. Help me. I will be good, I will be. Let the storm cease. She takes a sleeping pill.
Ghostly barques glide by, in fog; pirates’ swords, the swords of wrath, glinting, slashing, disembowelling, castrating. Steady the mind, steady the hand, in case the sword turns against the one who wields it. Lady Rice is pirate and victim both. She knows it. Lady Rice rocks in her nightly sea of sorrow. In her head it is called the Sea of Alimony. It might be on the moon, for all she knows, like the Sea of Tranquillity; she might be in her mother’s womb. She might be in some drowned church, knocking up against stone walls, as the current pulls her here and there; her father’s church. Certainly she is bruised, body and soul. Dear Father, dear God, forgive me my sins. Let the weight of Thy wrath depart from me.
Sometimes the Sea of Alimony is calm; the rocking sensuous, almost sweet. She is sorry then to surface. She is a mermaid, stunned, beached up upon the white sands of The Claremont’s linen sheets, rolled back by waves into the sea, tossed up again, to surface with the dawn, to wake to the World of Alimony, Brian Moss, work, and the parts of the self still quarrelling: but also to alimony, healing, sustenance. Grief nourishes; it is a drug; she is dependent upon it now, all three of her or is it four? She sleeps as one, she wakes as many. The sea of sorrow sucks her in as one, whirls her down, washes her up fragmented; or is it the telephone which thus shatters her? A man’s voice.
‘Good morning, Lady Rice. It’s seven thirty. This is your wake-up call.’
Lady Rice looks in her morning mirror at a face puffy with restless sleep: last night she did not take off her make-up. She collects cold water in cupped hands: it gushes plentifully from large-mouthed taps, antique or mock antique, who cares? The antique leak lead into the water, the new do not. Lead is good for the complexion, bad for the brain. She splashes her face: she does not use the white face flannels provided in some number. She despises them. They are too small. This morning she will despise anything.
She goes back to bed. But the voices in her head are loud; clear enough for once to distinguish one from another; not pleasing in what they say. She would rather just be in bed and weep: they won’t let her. They are full of reproaches, complaints, eggings on to action, all unwelcome. She is beached, beached. She has tried to incorporate these bickering women, these alter egos, back into herself, but she can’t. She must listen to them, and answer them.
‘It’s too bad,’ moans Jelly. ‘Can’t you even clean our face off at night? This is the quickest way to a bad complexion, and you don’t even care.’
‘I was tired,’ explains Lady Rice feebly. ‘I’ve been so distressed by the divorce, surely I’m allowed to be tired.’
‘You can’t afford to be tired,’ says Angelica. ‘We’ve got to get out of this mess somehow. How are we going to live? We can’t stay in this hotel for ever. Sooner or later they’ll throw us out.’
‘They’d never do that,’ says Lady Rice. ‘I’m a member of the Rice family. Edwin would never let it happen.’
‘Of course he would,’ says Angelica. ‘You have a replacement. You’re old news. What does he care about you? Nothing as ex as an almost ex-wife! The most hated object.’
Lady Rice dissolves in further tears: the grief is harsh, not languorous.
‘Get her up, for God’s sake,’ says Jelly. ‘You have more influence than me. I hate being late for work. You just deliver me and go away. You don’t have to stand around to receive the flack.’
‘I think if I had a fuck,’ says Lady Rice, surprisingly and suddenly, ‘I’d feel better. Brian Moss will do very well. The only cure for one man is another
man.’
‘Don’t use that language,’ says Jelly, shocked.
‘And surely you can do without a man for a month or so? Men are the source of the problem, not the cure.’
‘I don’t know what came over me,’ says Lady Rice, remorseful. ‘But now it’s said, it might be true.’
‘Perhaps Brian Moss is our karma,’ says Angelica cunningly. ‘Shall we just get up and go and meet our destiny?’
And Lady Rice finally drags herself from her bed, just to shut them up, since they won’t leave her alone. She can see they might make good company. She need never be lonely: and loneliness, for all that others speak of aloneness, is what she most fears.
4
Initial Transformations
Angelica rose and dressed. She left for work in black leather jacket, black wig and dark glasses, looking she hoped not at all like Lady Rice – that wronged, tearful, virtuous, needy creature – but like some important guest’s rather ferocious and determined mistress. She carried a holdall in which, neatly folded (by Jelly: Jelly was good at folding: Angelica was not), were Jelly’s working clothes.
Angelica it was who would step into her chauffeur-driven, hired Volvo at exactly seven forty-eight. Nearly every morning the car was there, parked in Davies Street. She would step into the Volvo as Angelica, step out as Jelly. Once in the car, she would take off Angelica’s wig to reveal Jelly’s short, shiny, straight blonde hair: she would take off her leather jacket and put on a pale blue blazer with brass buttons, made in a cheap, uncrushable fabric. She would drag her hair back behind a pale pink satin headband, and hang a long string of artificial pearls round her neck, to fall over her tight, white woollen jumper. She wore a bra which under-played her breasts: the tightness of the sweater was more to do with fashion than sexuality. She would wipe off her more extravagant make-up and put on owl glasses. She would become Jelly White, with Angelica’s knowledge and consent.
