by Weldon, Fay
‘I need them,’ said Angelica crossly. ‘I like them and I’d wear them tomorrow if only you’d put them on.’
‘What these?’ inquired Jelly, picking up a black suede thigh boot jangling with chains, with six-inch platforms. Jelly was sitting on the bed, facing the gold-framed mirror. ‘You’re insane.’
‘You’re so safe and boring,’ sneered Angelica. ‘Mummy’s little small-town girl.’
‘I really like those boots,’ said Angel, finding her voice. ‘I helped Angelica pick them. I’m glad she bought them. If you’d put them on now we could go down to the bar.’
‘You’re ridiculous,’ said Jelly, shutting them off and out, as these days it seemed simpler to do.
‘Give them to charity,’ murmured Lady Rice, who was swimming around in there somehow. ‘Get the alter egos to counselling. You need to find a support group for compulsive shoppers. Thank God it’s nothing to do with me.’
Jelly picked a mound of useless clothes out of the wardrobe and shelves: see-through blouses, metal belts, leather trews, purple velvet leggings, cloche hats with flowers, absurd knickers, crotchless tights, lacy suspender belts – unused, unworn mostly, with the price labels still on them – masses of cheap jewellery, expensive face creams gone sour and caked because they’d been inspected, not used, and the lid left off; cheap and cheerful cosmetics, hair curlers, wigs. She gave them all to the corridor maid, who did not seem particularly grateful.
With these out of the way, and nothing but the sensible skirts, pastel jumpers and warm coats left, she felt more herself.
She had to pay for the junk out of her earnings as Jelly – her mother forwarded credit card accounts – only purchases from the hotel boutique being chargeable to Edwin. She hoped Angelica and Angel would have the grace to be ashamed of themselves, but didn’t stir them to ask them. She investigated Lodestar House further.
She found a mention of the house in a book called Walks in Old Chelsea. ‘1–3 Lodestar Avenue, Lodestar House, is a solidly built house dating from 1874, of what is known as Tuscan-Gothic design, set in a quarter acre of land on the slopes of the River Thames where Belgravia eases into Chelsea.’
On Sundays Jelly would walk down to the Embankment, passing the high grey brick walls of Lodestar House: once even standing on a dustbin to see over into the garden, and later wrote this in her notebook.
‘The city has nudged up around the property and contrived to steal some of its original land so that it now occupies a mere corner site. It’s an ungainly giant of a house, castellated and turreted, Grade One listed, high-walled in dark grey brick, where Lodestar Avenue and Terrace meet. Once you could walk from the back door down the long garden to the river, through orchards. No longer. A main road and an embankment bar the way, though the high walls cut off sound and fumes. All around there are agreeable, well-built Georgian terraces. In return for a strip of land for the embankment, in 1888 Number 3 Lodestar Avenue was demolished by the authorities and that land given back to the freeholders: the Musgrave family.
‘Tuscan-Gothic is, I know, a contradiction in terms, but then so is the house, built to defy and annoy, the subject of interminable legal wrangles, passionately loved and hopelessly hated, a focus of that struggle to keep in balance the world of emotion and the world of financial and practical representation of that emotion, the spiritual and the material. 1–3 Lodestar Avenue is a brilliantly reflecting yet blighted planet which any sensible traveller would do well to avoid.’
Reading it later, she thought that perhaps Lady Rice, with her obsession with the scales of justice, had had a hand in the writing.
12
Edwin’s Offer
Edwin writes to Brian Moss that he feels his wife Angelica is entitled to nothing at all. She betrayed him, insulted him, humiliated him in front of his friends, turned out to be a different person than the one he married – couldn’t he seek an annulment rather than a divorce, on this account? And then strip her of her apparent right to keep a title she had obtained by deception? Her use of the title shows her contempt for all things decent. And shouldn’t she be compelled to disclose her whereabouts?
Brian Moss writes back to say that the Courts are not likely to allow Angelica to go completely unmaintained. If he offers her a small apartment and £1,000 a month, as a starting offer, it is likely that his wife will withdraw her counter-petition, and his divorce can go quietly ahead and he can anticipate being married to Anthea before the year is out.
Jelly puts an extra zero on the £1,000, changes ‘small apartment’ to ‘substantial house on the Rice Estate’; prints out the letter, wipes out the changes on the computer and re-enters the original. When Edwin writes back saying that he will offer her half that sum and that he does not want his ex-wife living anywhere near him, she destroys the letter and substitutes for it one requesting Brian Moss offer his wife £5,000 a month, signs it, and gives it to Brian Moss to read. She changes Brian’s reply, omitting his expressions of surprise, but suggesting that if he doesn’t want Lady Rice living close by he should perhaps offer her, in final settlement, a semi-derelict house in Lodestar Avenue, presently coming back, upon expiry of leasehold, into the Rice Estate: Brian Moss has reason to believe Lady Angelica is prepared to withdraw her counter-petition if this is done.
At this point, Jelly allows the natural correspondence to flow untampered with. Any inconsistencies she can iron out as she goes along. She is good at Edwin’s signature, has Rice Estate letterheads to hand: she keeps in her desk drawer sheets hand-signed by Brian Moss a-plenty. The important thing is that she is not late, or ill, so that Brian Moss doesn’t get to open his own mail.
Jelly speaks by telephone to Barney Evans, refraining from saying that if she had taken his advice and declined to counter-petition, she would not now be in so strong a position, and asks him to write to Brian Moss saying the financial offer made is ludicrously small, considering the length of the marriage, and Sir Edwin’s conduct; how about £7,500 a month. Brian Moss passes the message back to Sir Edwin.
Jelly kisses the back of the envelope before dropping it into the letter box. She is not sure why she does it. Perhaps Lady Rice surfaced again, stirred up by this almost-contact with Edwin? Jelly fears it may be because the entity still loves Edwin, rather than that the several personae have this one thing in common, the need for money and comfort; but can’t be sure. Jelly doesn’t think for long about matters like that, so it was as well it was she, not Angelica or Angel, who did the posting. Or the letter would have stayed in the back of a drawer while she made up her mind. Or thus she persuades herself. She is quite a Polyanna.
All is looking well for Jelly until a letter arrives from Edwin asking Brian Moss to hurry the whole thing up, get everything settled, he wants to marry Anthea, they want to have babies.
Jelly, opening this bombshell first thing in the morning, begins to cry. She cries and cries and has to tell Brian Moss when he comes in that she’s allergic to the poppies on her desk. He flings open the window and tosses poppies, vase and all out, in a gesture which reminds her of Edwin, so she cries some more. Brian Moss clasps her and tells her tears in a woman always affect him: he’d like to make love to her there and then.
Jelly pushes him away, and says certainly not, this is appalling sexual harassment. He says that weeping is its own form of harassment, but goes into his office and sulks for the rest of the day. Lady Rice is back in control: much weeping always revives her. Jelly has to go into hiding, keep the company of Angelica and Angel. With Jelly there to control her, at least Angelica doesn’t spend so much time in the shops, and money is saved. And Angel is cheered up: Lady Rice gives Angel some opportunity to take over from time to time.
One of the first things Lady Rice does is to reinstate Ram’s morning journeys to work. They stop off in the car park, but Lady Rice is nervous, afraid of being seen, worrying that her husband might find out, and Ram puts an end to the relationship. Lady Rice is relieved, and Ram says to his friends he doesn’t underst
and women one bit: they lack consistency.
13
Lady Rice On Her Alter Egos
It is not that I dislike Jelly: she just doesn’t inspire me. It’s she who makes me the boring company I think I sometimes am. Edwin certainly thought so, or he wouldn’t have preferred Anthea to me.
Jelly is the kind of woman who has few friends: who gets up in the morning, enjoys a solitary breakfast, feels the satisfaction of a good day’s work, buys the cat food and goes home on public transport. She is not a compulsive telephone talker: she does not like sharing and caring with just anyone; she enjoys a flirtation because she can see that sooner or later she will need to get married and have children, and anyone likes to be admired and to be in control. But Jelly does not particularly need or enjoy the running commentary on life that friends require and provide: the oohs and ahs and guess what she said, and he didn’t, did he, the bastard; how could she, the bitch! that others seem to enjoy: she is not, frankly, interested in very much or curious about others. She likes to look neat and sweet, and she is certainly not above spying and prying because this too gives her power: she likes to have secrets, she is secretive; she likes to know secrets, to have them in her possession but not pass them on.
But she has learned her lesson about friends. They can and will betray you, and though you offer loyalty, loyalty is not necessarily offered in return. Judas Iscariot didn’t care about the money: he just wanted Jesus up there on the cross. The closer you nurture the worm to your bosom, the more likely it is to bite.
Seek solitude, thinks Jelly. Jelly doesn’t feel all that much: she prefers to think.
Angelica had friends. When she became Lady Rice, she gathered around her all the bohemians in the area; such writers, painters, sculptors, weavers, cookery experts, TV directors there were to be found. All she needed, after her years as a pop star amongst people whose favourite phrase was ‘Know what I mean’ – because passion and puzzlement so outstripped their command of the language – was a dinner table. Over eleven years these bohemians became her old friends. Edwin found the conversation of the non-gentry around his dinner table interesting, and would come home saying ‘Who’s coming to dinner tonight? Well? Well?’ rather than just ‘What’s for dinner?’ The talk would be about books, films, reviews, politics, the world of the imagination: not horses, dogs, weather and crops, and required more keeping up with, but Edwin did not complain. Edwin read books, he read poems – though he found his legs too long for theatre seats, and his knees twitched at the cinema.
Edwin was to revert later, of course, to type, to his original state; was to put the Jaguar behind him to go back to the Range Rover: to the wuff-wuffing insolence of the hunt, the tearing to pieces of hungry beasts: the pop-popping of shotguns, the bringing of the soaring spirit dead or dying back to earth, if only to show who’s who round here. We, the hunting/shooting/landowning gentry.
Imagination hurt: that was why sensible people discouraged it. Speculation unsettled: certainty helped you sleep at night. If you shot wild creatures, you were less likely to shoot your wife, less likely to lose her in the first place. For these changes in Edwin, this regression, Lady Rice blamed Susan and Lambert almost more than she blamed Anthea: Anthea at least acknowledged herself as an enemy; Susan posed as a friend.
Angelica had only by accident been a pop star, Edwin would explain to everyone, trustingly, in the warm bright days when others were still to be trusted. A teenage girl of wit and temperament which far exceeded that of her parents, a rarity, a talent; her father dying, herself led astray (not sexually, of course; she wasn’t like that): discrimination was Angelica’s middle name. ‘Discrimination is Angie’s middle name,’ he’d say, and Susan would nod her ever so slightly patronising head, with its bell of heavy blonde hair: or turn her bright bird eyes on Angelica and smile sweetly and say, ‘Oh me, I’m hopeless; anything at all makes me happy’ and all the men around would wish they’d be the anyone to make her happy, their things the anything; and sometimes Angelica wondered if Edwin should be included in ‘all the men’, but surely not, Susan was her best friend. Best friends were not like that.
Lady Rice, in The Claremont, refrained from calling room service to say her club sandwich was horrid, would they take it away and replace the smoked bacon with unsmoked, but controlled herself and Angelica slipped back into limbo.
14
A Curse From The Past
‘Verbal assault,’ Edwin had claimed. That she had verbally assaulted him. What can he have meant? Lady Rice thought and thought. She was, truth to tell, no longer so much concerned with the matter of alimony as she had been. For all her fine words, for all the apparent finality of her opinions on the subject – as if she had reached some mountain peak of truth and there was no going down again; you were obliged to spin for ever around your conclusions – the subject had ceased to be obsessional. She would leave all that legal stuff for Jelly to get on with: she would leave Angelica with the burden of looking up old friends, and the attempt to restore the integrity of the self before marriage – a silly slip of a girl in a leather jacket with rings in her nose – and get on with the task of considering her guilt, her possible contribution to the break-up of the marriage: not that she believes she can have had any part in that: no, it is just that remorse, or the appearance of remorse, might win her husband back – not that she wants that either, no, never –
In the Velcro Club, where the hearts and souls of those sundered or about to be put asunder, are understood, it is well known that obsessions are as changeable as the weather: and that the change is as painful as if the Velcro were alive, a million nerve endings twanging, and the shift from one obsession to the next hurts terribly as the stuff goes skew-whiff, and a screaming fills the air, too high-pitched to be quite heard, but there, there –
Verbal assault. Was she ever rude to Edwin? Did she ever berate him, insult him? Surely not.
‘Flop and wobble,’ she’d once said to him, and he’d taken that amiss. Flop and wobble.
‘Flop and wobble,’ Angelica’s mother would say, surveying the jellies her little daughter loved so much. Mrs White, nee Lamb, would often make such a hopeless dessert, incompetently if devotedly, for Saturday tea –alternately soft red, acid green. ‘Flop and wobble,’ she’d complain. ‘How does it happen?’ A rhetorical question her little daughter saw fit to answer one day:
‘You don’t put enough of the packet in,’ Angelica said. ‘It’s obvious, silly.’
She was her father’s little girl and had his casual habit of diminishing her mother: not that she ever seemed to mind.
‘I follow the instructions exactly,’ said her mother. ‘It would be a wicked waste to do otherwise. One half packet to one pint of water – as I am instructed, so I do.’
Stephen White, coming back from choir practice, would survey the shaky structure of the family dessert and say, ‘Flop and wobble again, my dear,’ in kind affection and jump up and down to shake the room and make the confection collapse totally. Of such detail, it seemed to Angelica, good marriages were made. Those were the days when Angelica was called Jelly, her given name proving too long a word for easy saying. But even blessings can turn out to be curses; landmines laid in a long-forgotten war.
‘Flop and wobble,’ said Lady Rice aloud one early morning as she lay in her marriage bed beside Sir Edwin Rice. ‘Flop and wobble,’ and indeed she was thinking of nothing but family tea and happy times, pre-adolescence, but Edwin took it as a slight, turned abruptly away from her, removed his enfolding arm, lay with his back to her for a little and then climbed out of bed and dressed. They had been married for ten years: the days of misunderstandings and makings-up were long past. Lady Rice could not think why he chose to take offence. Later she realised her husband was at this time ‘seeing’ his cousin Anthea.
Unfaithful husbands divide into two kinds: the one who feels guilty, brings flowers, baths babies, tries not to hurt: though later spoils things by confessing all. The other who feels guilty bu
t looks for justification in his wife’s behaviour: see, everyone, how she fails to look after me properly, has grown fat, or undermines my self esteem, whatever, wherever her weakness lies: but when the affair has ended – should it ever end – he keeps the secret to himself: refrains from burdening his wife with it: she has paid in advance, as it were, for his blow against the marriage politic.
This particular morning Lady Rice did what she could to explain: ‘flop and wobble’, she pleaded, was not a slur upon her husband’s prowess. How could he think such a thing? But indeed he had not lately been as moved by his wife as once he was, but Lady Rice supposed that to be a normal fluctuation in his sexual energies. Worries at work, perhaps. But Edwin would have none of her excuses, though Angelica prattled on. Edwin, usually so easily entertained, so happy to hear tales of his wife’s childhood, remained for once obdurate, unfascinated, profoundly offended.
‘It’s no use,’ said Edwin, when finally he spoke, ‘trying to deny your own words. What is spoken is what is meant, consciously or not. What you were doing is wishing impotence upon me. You’re trying to undermine my confidence again.’
‘You just want to take offence,’ she had wept. ‘Why are we having this dreadful time? What is the matter with you?’
He gave her no clue. And being, as Edwin would have it, unobservant, or, as she would say, innocent, Lady Rice failed to connect her husband’s claim to martyrdom at her hands with his guilt. She was to be blamed for the crime against her. To put it bluntly, Edwin had fallen out of love with his wife and was inclined to blame her for this loss. He felt it, oddly enough, keenly, and the more keenly he felt it, the more he blamed her. What a mess!
Flop and wobble, verbal assault. Lady Rice could see what Edwin meant. No such thing as an accident; no unmeant, casual remark, however unconscious the impulse to deride.
