by Weldon, Fay
15
An Unbelievable Narrator
I know what my problem is. Call my problem X and solve it. Too many Xs for a simple equation: quadruple equation either.
Ex-virgin, ex-pop star, ex-wife, ex-socialite, ex-convent girl, ex-everything, ex-everyone, that’s me: primarily ex-daughter of a radio ham. Daddy, Daddy, speak to me! I can’t, my darling, my angel, I’m saving ships at sea. What ships, Daddy, what sea? I don’t know, my darling, my angel, but sooner or later, if I search the airwaves long enough, I’ll rescue someone, somewhere, and you’ll be proud of me. In the meantime, sweetheart, just leave Daddy in peace.
Are you Daddy’s darling or Mother’s little helper? God knows.
I feel as Zeus must have before Athena burst out of the top of his head. The pressure on poor Lady Rice, trying to contain so many different natures inside her, is tremendous. Velociraptors, velcro-raptors prowl within. A black band as if the head itself were a hat, confines and tightens. The whole bulging swarm of identities is getting a terrible headache. Something has to give.
I repeat: I can’t live for ever in an hotel room, under a false name, growing alternative personalities as if they were pot plants, feeding them, nurturing them for lack of anything else to do, while I wait for my husband to commit my sins to paper: my fantastical adultery with my best friend Susan’s husband Lambert. Lies, all lies!
Or look at it another way: I am the twisted cord of a telephone wire: dangle it and watch the rapidity with which it untwists itself; so rapidly indeed that it then twists the other way, almost as badly, and who then has the patience to wait for it to settle? Not me, whoever I may be. I’d rather wrench the whole thing from the wall and go cordless.
Too much unravelling can’t be good for you. Of course I have a headache.
A bath, I think, may soothe me. The baths at The Claremont are deep, wide and marble. They are also, I notice, difficult to clean. I take the scouring powder from the cupboard beneath the basin, and with the help of a damp face cloth, stretch to reach the section the maid has failed to clean and, when I straighten up, catch my head on the shower fitment.
I stagger to the bed. I lie down. My headache is worse.
16
Ajax Is Born
Lady Rice has a real headache: aspirin won’t touch it: it’s the kind she got before the internal amoeboid first began to split: she had it before the conversations in her head began, before Angelica and Jelly separated out. There is something important going on here, she senses. This time it’s something male, something magnificent: something, someone bursting out perforce, who has to be in charge, to be in control: to take a clear-eyed overview of herself. Some hero who knows everything, and understands what’s going on, who can tell a friend from a foe, and slay the foe. And even as Lady Rice came to this conclusion, gave permission to herself to think such incorrect thoughts, (these chattering women, that noble man), lo! I, myself, Ajax, was born.
The purifier, the scourer of thought; the hero of old; the banisher of the bath-ring of guilt.
Look at it this way: Angelica, Jelly and Angel, as the single Lady Rice unit they still tried to be, were perforated but not quite split. Now, traumatised and persecuted by an attack from within, from the internalised love object himself, Edwin, and sent screaming in all directions – Angelica cheating, spying, lying; Jelly typing, earning, office-serving; Angel fucking, sucking, wailing, howling for all of them – they spawned between them one further personality: one male to three parts female; that’s Lady Rice’s special recipe. Ajax.
Ajax it is who knows everything there is to know about Angelica, Jelly and Angel; by their initials let them be known: AJA. Then add an extra X for maleness. AJAX. Ajax who reports on these perforated-to-the-point-of-split personalities: Ajax, writer, rider, hero of the aether, Lord of all narrative, Lord of all joy, Lord of all grief, and all stages in between. Ajax, not the sleeping sentinel of the past, but the fierce and waking Guardian of the present. I, Ajax the Hero, before his disgrace, before his fall. Ajax is to be the only I round here, from now on.
If the chaos is extreme enough, words form, God forms. If the pressure of black is sufficient. Light dawns: if the tumult in the female head is dire enough, Man is born. Oh, I’m a fine Fellow-ess indeed! I, Ajax. I too shall write a novel.
Part 3
Ajax’s Aga Saga
1. Angelica First Brings Edwin Home
2. How They Told Edwin’s Father
3. The Wedding
4. Lady Rice, One Year Into Her Marriage
5. Lady Rice, Three Years Into Her Marriage
6. Lady Rice, Eight Years Into Her Marriage
7. Trouble In The Group
8. More
9. Dinner Party
10. Morituri Te Salutant
1
Angelica First Brings Edwin Home
‘Mum,’ said Angelica from a phone box, ‘I’ve met this man. I’m bringing him home.’
The phone box was probably the prettiest in the country. Special permission had been obtained by environmentalists to paint it green, avoiding the traditionalist’s scarlet, so that the box did not disturb an eye adjusted to the delights of its surroundings. For home was the village of Barley, on three successive years awarded a prize as the most charming in the country – with its well-tended, cosily-gardened stone cottages, all hollyhocks and buzzing bees in the summer, its white-painted, brown-beamed medieval houses, leaning into one another for support; its central copper-spired church: the village green, the ducking pond, its ancient market, and its coach park just beyond the village limits for the tourists. And even these latter did not disturb too much, for the Parish Council allowed only one souvenir shop, and made few amenities available for the tourists’ convenience, so news got round and the coach parties, on the whole, stayed away.
Angelica’s mother lived with her new husband on a small new estate, discreetly surrounded by trees, a mile or so from the market, Barley’s epicentre, just outside the village proper. Here teachers and social workers lived, and others with good hearts and low incomes. Barley proper was these days noticeably occupied by the wealthy, people who needed to travel to the city only a couple of times a week, if that, for Directors’ meetings, and a few ‘originals’ – the old men who gave local colour in the pub, and applauded the incomers’ dart matches: their wives cleaned others’ houses, or staffed the few village shops. It was a happy village: everyone agreed, and so of course an artists’ colony flourished here, in buildings converted from their original use, since current generations had no need of them. Former schoolhouses, chapels, a dozen barns, the old railway station now gave the space and style required by the creative spirit: writers, potters, weavers, sculptors, architects came to Barley in the hope of encouraging and supporting one another, to have ‘someone to talk to’: that is, as it transpired, to swap spouses, the group eventually to collapse beneath a weight of bitter gossip, spite and envy, and rise again, talent and hope renewed.
For this purpose, for this rebirth, a sacrifice is required: Angelica was to find herself this sacrifice, but that was in the future. This was now. Barley dreamt in the sun: Angelica was bringing Edwin home to meet her mother. And Edwin, by chance, was scion of Barley’s dilapidated great house, Rice Court, five miles away, and its even greater stately home, a further two miles deeper into the Great Park, into the Green Forest, Cowarth Castle, where Lord Cowarth, Edwin’s father, lived. Or perhaps not quite by chance, for how many people do not travel far and wide in search of adventure and distraction to discover that the one they set their hat at, the one who so occupies the erotic imagination, in fact comes from the same town, the next street, the house next door even: escape from one’s origins, it often seems, is out of the question, barred by fate. Like calls to like.
‘You’re too young,’ replied Angelica’s mother, understanding at once the import of the words – ‘I’ve met this man. I’m bringing him home’ – from a daughter she hadn’t seen or heard from in six months, other than
in press cuttings: glad enough to have the girl report in, alarmed by what was going to happen next. Angelica was seventeen. As it happened, Edwin was a mere twenty-one, a stripling, not even in the music scene: this mother was lucky.
‘You don’t trust me,’ said Angelica. ‘You never have. You treat me like a child.’ How easily and quickly the two of them resumed their normal relationship. Angelica had been saying that since she was twelve, when a film company had moved into the village to make Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urberυilles. Nothing had been the same after that.
‘You are a child!’ said Mrs White. ‘For all the rings you have in your nose.’ Angelica at that time had twelve in each ear as well, but Mrs White had got used to that. ‘If it interests you, I’ve met a man, too, just like you.’
‘But Dad’s only been dead a year,’ said Angelica, upset.
Widows are meant to fade away; they should keep a low profile for the sake of their kids. That way everyone knows who’s where.
‘Your father wouldn’t mind,’ said Mrs White, pleasantly. ‘He always wanted me to be happy.’ The man she was meeting was married, the father of Angelica’s school-friend Mary. His name was Gerald Haverley. He’d once been on the PTA with Mr White, now in his grave. They had got on well enough, it was true, during his lifetime, before he had left his wife a widow.
‘I don’t believe this,’ said Angelica. No one likes to be upstaged. Here the daughter was, bringing home what she’d thought was the catch of the season, only to find the mother already sporting with dolphins.
Edwin and Angelica, having warned Mrs White, came on round to see her. They drove up in a red MG; two bright young things. Edwin wore a tweed jacket and a knotted scarf. She wore leather.
‘That’s a nice car,’ said Mrs White.
Mrs White was wearing a red miniskirt. She had been married to a man twenty-seven years her senior for twenty years. Now she was free.
‘It’s a red MG,’ said Edwin defensively. ‘A lot of chaps have them.’
‘Most chaps aren’t as well-built as you,’ Mrs White remarked. Edwin was six-foot-four and weighed two hundred and ten pounds. Angelica’s mother looked him up and down appreciatively.
Angelica nudged Edwin and tried to explain that in their circle ‘everyone’ had Ford Fiestas or got on the bus. Edwin looked puzzled and said he could remember Angelica very well driving a Lamborghini, what was she talking about? Angelica said that was different and Mrs White said she could see they had a stormy relationship, and Edwin said on the contrary. Mrs White said trust Angelica to bring home an argumentative man.
‘Is this all some kind of character test?’ Edwin asked.
‘Yes,’ Mrs White said promptly. ‘If you mean to marry my daughter you’ll have to go through one or two.’
‘I never said I was going to marry her,’ he said, alarmed.
Angelica burst into tears and went and sat in her father’s study, where her mother had never gone. Now her mother followed her in.
‘Don’t embarrass me,’ said Mrs White.
‘But you embarrassed me,’ said Angelica, accustomed to having the moral upper hand in these family matters.
‘And you’re supposed to be so tough,’ said Mrs White, looking her daughter up and down. Angelica wore boots up to her thighs and a fringed leather shirt down to her knees, and her hair was canary yellow. If she couldn’t look after herself by now it was time she did.
‘No one’s said anything about marriage,’ said Angelica. ‘We haven’t even been to bed together.’
Mrs White had been to bed with Gerald Haverley, and his wife was now divorcing him: that was different: they were grown-up people. These two were children: Angelica was having a difficult adolescence; Billy Bunter, the fat schoolboy, still looked out of Sir Edwin’s eyes, and Alice in Wonderland out of Angelica’s, for all she’d earned two thirds of a million pounds from a record called ‘Kinky Virgin’, sensibly put away in a Building Society.
‘Then stay out of it,’ said Mrs White.
‘You don’t think I’m some sort of pervert?’ asked Angelica. ‘I just don’t like the thought of sex. I’d much rather just sing about it.’
‘I’m sure it’s not my fault,’ said Mrs White. ‘I never put that idea into your head. I can’t have.’
Angelica stayed out of Edwin’s bed, and presently he asked her to marry him, on the old-fashioned premise that that was the only way he’d get her into it.
2
How They Told Edwin’s Father
‘We’re going to get married,’ said Edwin to Lord Cowarth, his father. His mother had drunk herself to death long ago. Edwin was the youngest son so no one took much notice of him. He was allowed to live in Rice Court to keep the damp and moths away.
Lord Cowarth looked Angelica up and down. At Edwin’s request, she was wearing a white sweater and a black wool skirt. Her hair was dyed brown, and she had removed the rings from her nose. The scars were healing, the holes filling in. She looked thoroughly conventional and easily shocked and spoke with the slapdash incoherence of her generation. Lord Cowarth wore a dressing gown thin with age which fell apart to show skinny shanks and a tiny member.
‘Has she got any money?’ he asked. He carried a cleaver wherever he went. He was short, rubicund and savage; thin in parts, fat in others.
‘A few hundred thousand,’ said Edwin proudly.
Lord Cowarth grunted.
‘I always thought you had your eye on that bint Anthea,’ he said. ‘Plain as a pikestaff but just right for you, the fat boy of the form. Can’t abide a fat child,’ he said, and Angelica thought she saw Edwin wince. Mostly Edwin kept his face friendly and still, accustomed as he was to parental rebuffs and insults. ‘Most of my children were thin. Perhaps you’re not my child at all. When I think of that tart of a woman I married –’ Lord Cowarth’s eyes narrowed – ‘it wouldn’t surprise me.’ He spun Angelica round with fingers which clawed into her neck. ‘What’s your game?’ he asked. ‘What are you after? A title, a house, or an education for your children?’
Angelica took hold of Edwin’s hand, but her fiancé seemed incapable of helping her get free. All the strength had drained from him. So much old stags can always do to such progeny as rashly stay around.
Lord Cowarth balanced the cleaver in his hand, letting go of Angelica the better to do so. The cleaver was made of rusty old iron, solid old wood.
‘I think he likes you,’ said Edwin softly.
‘What are you whispering about? What are you plotting?’ The old man had a front tooth missing. He struck the blunt back of the hasp against his lips. Presently the next tooth would go. There would be blood in his mouth next time he opened it. A useful trick. When he went to the House of Lords, for a Coronation or the investment of a relative, he would dress in finery: otherwise he kept to his dressing gown, and liked to have a bloody mouth. He seldom left his apartments: he could run the Rice Estate well enough from there.
‘I love him,’ said Angelica. ‘That’s what I’m saying. Sweet nothings, you know?’
That silenced him.
At least he did not forbid the wedding. Edwin could not have stood out against his father, and Angelica would not have expected him to. But now she had a chance to save him, build up his self-confidence, help him recognise and accept himself; she was brimming with good intentions.
‘Will your brothers come to the wedding?’ asked Angelica.
‘Doubt it,’ said Edwin, stoically. He and she would marry quietly. She wanted to make him happy. She had not understood how anxious family life could make a man, riddling him with the expectation of rejection, of failure. His elder brothers, twins, twenty years older than he, now lived in warmer climes, in the Southern Seas; they had beautiful brown wives. One twin kept a restaurant; the other a marina. The Rice Estate kept both businesses in efficient managers: fish swam up, the yachts slid in: money flowed: titles entranced everyone. The languid tones of the English upper class travel well, though these days they grate upon the do
mestic ear.
The Kinky Virgin band would, of course, have none of Edwin: of his tweed jacket and knotted scarf, so Angelica would now have none of them.
‘I’m giving music up,’ she said. ‘All that was only a flash in the pan. I haven’t any real talent.’
Now she’d seen her mother in a miniskirt, she’d lost her appetite for excess. Now she’d perceived the depths of Edwin’s woes, the sorrow and the exhilaration of the rock stadium seemed distasteful. Besides, her father had died and who was there left to shock? Her mother had become unshockable; family friends had come to appreciate her, since she put their own young into a better light.
Angelica’s arms were so skinny Edwin could close his hand right round where her biceps would be, were she to body-build. He liked that. Who these days could win a virgin bride? He felt marrying such a one would make the crops grow, and the dry rot recede: his breaking of the hymen, his staining of the marriage sheets, would bring good fortune and sanity to a land ruled by that mad old man, his father.
Someone had to be responsible: his twin brothers had left him behind to be just that; had run out on him. He had seen his life as a sacrifice: terrible girls had wooed him in spite of his looks, in spite of the veil of fat which protected him in his early years, making his penis seem tiny, his sufferings absurd; they had wooed him and bedded him for the sake of his title, his landed state, his patrician accents, forget he would never properly inherit wealth, only a fearful responsibility and rejection: would, like as not, inherit madness from his father, but without his father’s power. Little by little Lord Cowarth had devolved that power to Robert Jellico, his Land Agent, and Robert Jellico, as well as being unerringly competent, was a powerful, sensible man, not given to evident emotion or the recognition of the financial duty that kinship imposes. Edwin complained Robert Jellico looked at him strangely.
