by Weldon, Fay
‘Would that count as unreasonable behaviour in a divorce court?’ Jelly asked, and Brian Moss looked quite disconcerted at the thought, and said he and Oriole were Catholics so there was no question of that anyway. But she now understood why he watched her own smooth, quick, certain movements with a kind of longing, a subdued passion for what was effective, efficient and reliable. She was pleased to see it. It was part of herself which had never in the past been properly appreciated.
Jelly worked late; so did Brian Moss: both of them in their separate rooms. The building was darkened. Computer screens gave off a luminous sheen; pot plants seemed to breathe, and to swell and diminish minutely with each breath.
Jelly could feel Angel whispering and nudging her: saying,
‘Look, here’s your chance. Do something! Take off your clothes; but leave on your suspender belt and stockings. Very nice too. And then just walk into Brian Moss’s office.’
‘But why?’ Jelly asked. ‘What would be the point of that?’
‘You’d get a rise,’ said Angel. ‘And you could make him do what you want.’
‘For someone as brazen as Angel,’ said Angelica, ‘she’s extremely naive. You’d just as likely find yourself fired by morning.’
‘You’re not here to earn a salary,’ murmured Lady Rice. ‘You’re here to make sure I get proper alimony from Edwin.’
‘What about revenge?’ asked Angel. ‘Edwin’s having a good time with Anthea. Anthea’s living in our house, sleeping in our bed –’
‘Don’t make me think about it,’ said Jelly, bile rising in her throat.
‘Brian Moss could stop you thinking about it,’ said Angel. ‘He could stop you thinking about it for at least two hours. Think how well Ram did only this morning. If one man fancies you, another man will. Make the most of it.’
‘Brian Moss has a wife at home,’ said Jelly. ‘I don’t do things like that. I don’t go with married men. Because Lady Rice is unhappy, why should Oriole Moss be unhappy, too?’
‘For that very reason,’ gritted Angel, bad Angel, avenging Angel, in Jelly’s ear. ‘If you spread the misery wide, you make it thinner for yourself,’ and Angel bit into the base of Jelly’s thumb so hard there was a mark for days, almost as sore as her breasts where Ram had pecked and nibbled at them.
‘I won’t do any such thing,’ said Jelly. ‘Angelica is right. I’d only get fired. That’s what happens in office romances.’
‘This is not an office romance,’ gritted Angel. ‘It is you fucking your boss in your own best interests.’
‘No,’ said Jelly.
‘But I want to. I mean to,’ yelled Angel in her head, drowning out reason. ‘I want Brian Moss now, you mean old bitch, and I’ll have him.’
‘Shut up,’ said Jelly, biting the other thumb. Lady Rice was humming to herself somewhere else; some sad, melancholy tune. ‘Don’t put this pressure on me. I’m tied to the mast, understand? And I’m not listening to you. I can cope with Lady Rice, I can cope with Angelica, but you – you’re a menace! Get out of my life!’
‘The ingratitude!’ shrieked Angel. ‘After all I did for you! You’d never have had the nerve and you know you loved it!’
‘I’m going home now,’ called out Brian Moss to Jelly White. ‘Must be home to bath the babies.’
‘That’s fine,’ called his secretary in reply. ‘I’ll turn the lights off and set the alarm.’
Brian went home by train. Jelly took the Underground, squashed with a thousand others into a space fit for a hundred, the smell of despair adding humidity to the air she breathed. How do I escape, how do I not do this? How not to be herded, squashed, insulted, abused? See, there’s the hem of my coat caught in the door: it will brush through the soot of ancient tunnels: that woman’s high heel driving between my toes, removing skin: that man’s crotch, that woman’s arse, rubbing against mine. We share the same torment, rebreathe each other’s air, use the strategies of the traumatised to escape all remembrance of the journey: as the slaves were whipped to the pyramids, simply for the fun of it, the pain of it, for a whipped slave works half as well, but a man must know when he’s beaten. So have his masters from the beginning of time insisted on the humiliation of their workforce. These days, through their Lodges and Confederations, they have got together over champagne and devised the public transport they never travel in to whip the workers to work: and are not jobs short and is not the living hard and precarious, and who can argue any more?
Do we not suffer? – the multi-voiced air of the metro rose to heaven, spoke to heaven – ‘Who will save us?’ But there came no reply. Suffering does not necessarily suggest its own relief: because things start does not mean they must end: oppression does not necessitate the rise of the hero, nor sin its saviour. And besides, everyone disliked each other too much to do anything about any of it. White hated black, black hated white, and all stations in between: parent hated child, child hated parent; police hated citizen, citizen hated police, man hated woman, woman hated man, the old hated the young, the young hated the old, and everyone hated the men who cried aloud, ‘Mind the doors, please,’ and sometimes with a strong hand in the middle of some wretch’s back – serve them right! – shoved yet another human unit to judder up against the sighing, sodden, juddering mass inside. In London, in Tokyo, in Moscow, or New York, in Sydney, Johannesburg or Toronto, in Seoul and Samarkand it is the same.
Thus Jelly travelled to Bond Street Station where she alighted. By the time she arrived at The Claremont she imagined she would, as usual, be Lady Angelica Rice again, albeit incognito, albeit with bruised and painful breasts and a sore chin. It had been a long day, starting with Ram, ending with jam. Angel laughed at the thought. She skittered into The Claremont and the doorman looked after her, not recognising her as Lady Rice, and wondering what agency she was from and why he had no commission.
‘You can’t live at The Claremont for ever, paying your bill by false pretences,’ said Jelly to Lady Rice. ‘A girl needs her own house and home, if only to put a red light above the door; write “model” on the wall. You don’t take enough notice of your own predicament.’
But Lady Rice wasn’t listening. She was weeping again.
10
Post Coital
Lady Rice broods on alimony. Lady Rice will not really be deflected by Angel as a source of entertainment, though she appreciates the usages of sex. Lady Rice still wants her pound of flesh, but is grateful to Angel for trying.
To do without unhappiness, Lady Rice explains to her sub-sisters, would be to do without the nourishment she has come to expect. These days she relies on the bread of outrage, well spiced by bitter gall rising to the throat. It is bread buttered and slavered with hatred of Anthea. Unholy, unhealthy emotions all, but satisfactory: knife between the teeth of the embattled warrior; an unchancy weapon, metal against ivory, sharp edge turned outward, but, of course, if you fall, that’s what disembowels you: your own enmity, forget the enemy. Hate, like sex, is an addiction, explains Lady Rice: you feel you can live on it for ever; that you’re born one fix of hatred under par; but of course all the time it’s enticing you, luring you, killing you. And it can kill you quick, if you overdose, as heroin does: you can choke pretty fast on your own bile. It’s the opposite of a quiet death – it’s death by intemperance, spite, righteous anger, the nausea of revulsion. Or else it can kill you slowly; you can retreat howling, as Jelly did in the Volvo, parking in a concrete stall, leaving the field to others, licking obviously fatal wounds, a savage beast holed up in a rancid cave, pitiful but dangerous. If anyone demonstrates kindness, Lady Rice sneers, she who once gave such nice dinner parties; if anyone goes near, the creature will repay that kindness, that approach, by tearing the innocent to bits in its death throes. Beware the howling of the injured. Angel, don’t feel too safe in the body you think you control. You may be out of your depth. Jelly does nothing to annoy; Angelica is almost a friend; but Angel has left Lady Rice with her knicker elastic snapped and Lady Rice may not
like it; let Angel not rely on the gratitude of Lady Rice, divorcee-in-waiting.
11
Alimony As Justice
Barney Evans, represent us as well! Try and understand what we are saying, this complex creature who is your client.
We need alimony! We want nourishment: we are cracking and splitting. We are thin and brittle for lack of love: we have lost two stone in six months. If our husband won’t help us, then society must come to our aid: law courts and lawyers must stand in for a corrupted individual conscience.
We are not motivated by vengeance or greed. On the contrary. No. Our plea is that if the scales of justice are to remain in balance there has to be brought into perpetual existence, recreating itself moment by moment, the proper, decent, material reflection of ‘spiritual good’ (or ‘Goods to the value of’ – as we say, aptly). The lost goods – love, illusion, hope (worse than lost, this latter: stolen!) have an equivalent in money; this equivalent needs to be paid monthly to the end of time. That is to say, ‘in her lifetime’, which for the. individual, of course, is the same thing as ‘the end of time’.
The great wonderful construct which is marriage – a construct made up of a hundred little kindnesses, a thousand little bitings back of spite, tens of thousands of minor actions of good intent – be they the saving of a face, the rescuing of an ant, the plucking of a hair, the laughing at a bad joke, the forgiveness of sins, the overlooking of errors – this cannot, must not, as an institution, be brought down in ruins. Let the props be financial; if this is all that remains, it has to be so.
If we don’t get alimony from Edwin, the whole caboodle will crumble: I can feel it. A lot rests on this. The stars themselves will implode. The scales which balance real against unreal will be shoved so far out of kilter they will tip and topple and the point of our existence, and therefore existence itself, will be gone. We will all vanish like a puff of smoke. Or implode like a collapsing marshmallow man. In the end it is money which keeps us in being, inasmuch as money is the only recognised good which we have.
And of course I may fail. A Court might decide, as Edwin hopes it will and as Barney Evans tells me may happen, that I’m perfectly well equipped to look after myself, and since the doctrine of No Fault prevails in our divorce courts, and the great injustices one human being can render to another are now apparently neither here nor there, the Court may say what the hell, who is this hopeless wife, this ex-pop star who never rode to hounds at her husband’s side, who was found in bed with her best friend’s husband? – who can possibly believe her account of how she got to be there, or how little happened in it? – give her nothing! Yes, they are capable, I hear, of awarding me nothing at all, since even the Matrimonial Home was in the gift of the husband’s family, and the husband is unemployed and, according to his accountants, has no assets whatsoever. Should all my hopes for justice fail, how will any of us live? Why, as the birds do, picking at nothing. We could always take to blackmail. We may yet have to.
‘Blackmail’s out of fashion,’ said my employer Brian Moss to me one day, ‘because no one’s ashamed of anything any more,’ and I nodded and smiled politely, but other people’s imaginations clearly don’t run the way mine do, and these days I have a pocket full of tapes, stolen from the office, the way others have pockets full of rainbows, or claim to. And in my shopping bag I bring home files containing letters and transcripts of bugged conversations, depositions and affidavits from many sources, not just those relating to Rice v. Rice, matrimonial. People do chatter on to their solicitors.
Lady Rice doesn’t react, can’t react: she is too stunned by events to marvel at anything, even her alter ego Jelly’s delinquency, or Angelica’s pickiness, let alone Angel’s whorishness. What she can see is that, when it comes to it, she’s no lady.
12
The Perforated Personality
Don’t get this wrong. Angelica, Jelly and Angel are not three split-off parts of Lady Rice. Each can and should be held responsible legally, fiscally and spiritually for the other. There is no question here of the one hand not knowing what the other is doing; one personality dominant, controlling lesser ones, capable of taking the others by surprise. In classic cases of split personality, respectable A will wake in the morning and discover herself, say, bruised and smeared with honey, be puzzled and distressed, and have no notion at all of what her other persona B was up to during the night, or where B went, or what she did – indeed that B even exists. But B does exist and, what is more, exists alongside, quite probably, C, D and occasionally emerging others, E, F and G; who will either know all about the others, or know nothing about the others, or have some degree of knowledge, depending on whether they are, as it were, on A’s or B’s team, and to what degree trusted by their controllers. The main split, the A/B split, lies between the steady, the good, the nice and the cautious, and the licentious, delinquent, spiteful and spontaneous.
In the case of Lady Rice, the split is better described as a perforation: not yet complete: a rather extreme case of voices in the head. Only if torn will the actual split occur, as when you tear your round Road Tax disc from its embracing square. As it is, if Angelica murders someone, Jelly and Angel cannot be excused: they ought to have controlled her, and had the capacity so to do. If Jelly develops repetitive strain injury at Catterwall & Moss, Angelica and Angel can hardly complain: it was their own fingers they overworked, in excessive zeal. If Angel gets herpes, or AIDS, Angelica and Jelly can hardly be surprised: they should not have colluded: the truth is that they, too, were sexually tempted. The three must, and should, take their place together, as one, in the eyes of the world, if not themselves: perforated, not split, merely holding endless speculative conversations amongst themselves. A phenomenon not yet clinical, and with any luck never to be clinical. Each knows everything about the other and individual parts continue to make up a recognisable whole. The square still contains the circle. So far.
Now the conglomerate persona that consists of Angelica, Jelly and Angel, which on marriage formed itself into Lady Rice, received nothing but affection and kindness – so far as any parent is capable of wholly admirable and pure behaviour – from her parents Prue and Stephen White. Evil, psychosis, trauma, do not necessarily fit the equation; they are not necessary to the creation of a perforated personality. Split is clinical and distressing, morbid: perforation is a far more common occurrence. Many of us suffer from mild perforation, a vague feeling of disassociation, the gentle murmuring of voices in the head. Poor me, poor me, with variations: for example, I don’t know what came over me! It happens to the most sensitive, not those most oppressed by worldly misfortune.
To be thus divided into three is what many women report. When they stare at themselves in mirrors, twirl on delicate toes, they are Angelica: when they go to work, industriously, impersonally, they are Jelly: when they go to the bad, take another drink, smoke an illicit joint, leave the child un-babysat, leap at the genitals of another sex, why then they are Angel. They sign their letters Lady Rice with a kind of conjoined formality.
When a woman says ‘if only I could find myself’, all three personae speak at once: they feel over-Jellyfied, Angelicised, or Angelated, and don’t like it: they search for a balance.
When she says ‘I must fulfil myself’, it is the Jelly in her speaking, (looking up from her work, wondering what the matter is, deciding it’s lack of babies), trying to leave Angelica behind and get Angel out of her system somehow.
When women keep husbands as pets to fetch their handbags, won’t have sex with them and affect a general air of moral superiority, then Angelica predominates. It is Angelica who says all men are rapists at heart and are nasty, messy, aggressive creatures in general. Animals!
When a woman runs off with her best friend’s husband and says this thing is bigger than me, or all I have to do is snap my fingers and I’ll have your boyfriend, why that’s Angel, and she probably will have him. Beware. Her heart is kind, but her passions are great and her morals few.
/> Lady Rice has ‘trouble coming to terms with her situation’, as the newspaper therapists calmly put it; that is to say giant stars in her psyche implode and black holes yawn: reeling, she takes refuge in Angelica, Jelly, Angel.
But times are worsening. Trauma approaches. Where and how will rescue come? The union soul is under attack; the confederation falters; the flag is torn – poor Lady Rice can’t tell good from bad, nothing seems real, nothing can be trusted, her past has become meaningless, her future is obscured; even friends are no longer friends. The very plates from which she is accustomed to eat are apparently not hers at all, but Rice family heirlooms, or so Sir Edwin writes to Brian Moss. Lady Rice has no access to her satin sheets, neatly folded in the master bedroom press; worse, her rival Anthea leans up against piles of healthy, folded, natural fabric in the second floor linen room to be pleasured by her husband. She has a vision of it happening. She is telepathic in her anguish.
Poor Lady Rice. See how now she goes through her life stunned, flickering out of one persona, into another, as men and women do when they discover that concepts of love, of home, of permanence, are not placed on rock, but on shifting sand. When the Velcro splits and tears and the trousers and the knickers fall down and everyone laughs, even those who live in hotels can be pitied.
No wonder people put their trust in Jesus. Jesus never fails. Upon this rock this Church is built, if only you can overlook a little historical evidence, a South Sea Scroll or two. South Sea Scroll, that phrase being the melding of South Sea Bubble, that great financial scandal, and the Dead Sea – that arid waste, that bitter pond. South Sea Scroll, article of lost faith.
