by Weldon, Fay
‘He’s gay,’ said Angelica innocently. ‘That’s all. That’s why he looks at you the way he does. He’s going to hate me. He’s a man who rises at seven and doesn’t understand the way you stay in bed till noon.’
Edwin loved Angelica because she reduced terrible and complex things to such simple and graceful components, and seemed threatened by no one, except her mother, who could make her cry. But those tears were the tears of the child, confident of love and the eventual pleasures of consolation.
3
The Wedding
Everyone came to the wedding, including the ghost of Edwin’s mother. She was seen at the top of the narrow, ugly Jacobean stairs in a white dress, angrily waving a bottle, with a kind of miasmic mist floating from her: it left a damp coating on the bannisters which Mrs MacArthur, the housekeeper, said was mould. Staff scrubbed and rubbed away at it but it kept returning; you couldn’t get a shine to it, no matter what.
‘She’s not angry with you,’ said Angelica to Edwin, ‘but I expect she’s angry with your father. I’m sure she loved you very much.’
‘Why?’ he asked, gloomily.
‘Because you’re loveable,’ she replied, and he looked at her in gratified astonishment, and kissed her chastely. He had got accustomed to that. He didn’t quite see how on a marriage night the habit of chastity was meant to change to the habit of uxorious sexuality, but if it had for his forefathers – as Angelica had assured him was the case – no doubt it would for him.
‘Why should my mother be angry with my father?’ he asked. He took his father’s behaviour for granted, as sons will; as the father sees the world to be, so it is: daughters are often more critical.
‘Your father is a monster,’ Angelica explained to Edwin and Edwin seemed quite surprised.
‘That’s just how he is,’ said Edwin, and only reluctantly conceded what his mother had come to know so clearly: that his father was unpleasant beyond normality, even for the upper classes.
Pippi and Harry, Kinky Virgin’s violinist and drummer, had seen the apparition.
‘A cloud of fucking sperm,’ Pippi complained, ‘floating down the stairs. This old lady, following behind, waving a bottle. Was that your mother-in-law?’
None of Angelica’s friends wanted her to marry Edwin: snobby twerp, nerd, cunt: from the posh end of yuppie-dom, who’d given the band, with its foul-mouthed, intelligent cacophony, a passing popularity and been the more resented for it. And rightly, Sloaning and boning its drugs; drawling through the early hours, slamming car doors in the dawn to wake up the babies of the boring, toiling classes, the ones who worried about mortgages and children who failed exams and how to crawl out of the pit of necessity, the miasma of need, which shortened lives and narrowed hope; the steady, frightened classes who included Kinky Virgin in the things most wrong with the world today. Thus the careless and the crude, the wealthy and the wilfully distressed, joined forces in the clubs, each despising the other, but despising the rest more.
Edwin and Angelica married, joined hands across a chasm, and the phantom dogs of hate leapt up out of the depths to snap and snarl and make them break apart if they could, but at the time the lovers, or lovers-in-waiting, scarcely noticed their enemies; just felt surprised their match was so unpopular. All the world, which was meant to love a lover, plainly didn’t.
‘Is it wise to marry for money, darling?’ enquired Boffy Dee of Edwin at the wedding. Boffy Dee had bedded Edwin once or twice, he later found for a dare; she’d reported back to his circle, for reasons best known to herself, that his member was minuscule. He had found himself hurt and humiliated by this: he’d had much comfort from Boffy Dee, in a warmly dark and confident way; he’d believed in her affection, trusted her pleasure and his own. Boffy Dee was wearing a tight orange dress and a cartwheel hat, which made her ugly: he hated her.
‘I’m marrying Angelica because I love her,’ said Edwin, with the simplicity for which he was scorned. It was his bulk made them believe he was slow-witted. Rice Court was a mass of small, dark rooms and twisted staircases, alternating with large, panelled halls, mostly open to the public and therefore not home; if you moved quickly or impulsively you’d break some piece of wooden carving off something, as like as not, and cause hysterics: he’d got quite accustomed to moving around with caution, and what Angelica saw as a kind of grace but others interpreted as nervous obtuseness.
Anthea Box, his cousin, was wearing Laura Ashley sprigs which did nothing for her horsey looks, but made him feel affectionate towards her. She was the only one who seemed to have a good word to say for Angelica.
‘I expect the holes in her nose will heal up with time,’ said Anthea.
4
Lady Rice, One Year Into Her Marriage
‘I’m not interested in money,’ said Lady Rice. ‘I’m not one bit materialistic.’
She and Edwin lived quietly in Rice Court; they spent a great deal of time entwined in bed; not with great passion, but with considerable affection, secure in each other’s commitment. She didn’t see her friends: he didn’t see his. They smoked a great deal of dope. They went into the town for lunch and dinner, often to McDonald’s. They relived, and recovered from, their childhood. Within weeks of the wedding, Robert Jellico suggested Angelica use her funds to buy into the Rice Estate: with the money so released, Rice Court could be refurbished. The place had been closed to the public of late: an ornate plaster ceiling had fallen and injured a visitor. Insurance had paid but everyone had had a nasty shock. Robert Jellico’s perfect shirt had been seen awry and his smooth skin had sweated slightly. Money was being lost while the young couple idled and slept. Even Mrs MacArthur, housekeeper, who acted as their nanny, seemed vengeful, changing the sheets on the four-poster bed once a day, practically shaking the couple out of it; rattling empty Coke tins into black plastic sacks, hoovering roaches and snipped bits of this and that, broken matches, throwing out baked beans on plates cracked because Edwin had stepped on them by mistake.
‘She gets paid, doesn’t she?’ said Edwin. ‘Why does she get in such a state?’
Lady Rice wrote Robert Jellico a cheque for the amount the cash machine said she had in her current account, minus one thousand pounds. £234,000.00.
‘That has been in your current account,’ said Robert Jellico, dazedly. ‘Not a high interest account, not even a building society? What was your mother thinking about?’
Mrs White was busy thinking about Gerald Haverley mostly, and wondering why his wife Audrey was being so difficult, and why Mary, who once was such a good friend of Angelica’s, cut her dead on the street. It seemed strange to Mrs White, as it had to her daughter, that the world was so full of people who didn’t want you to be happy.
‘Take the money,’ said Angelica grandly. ‘Money is of no importance. Invest it in Rice Court, if that’s what you want. The Rice family is my family now, and that includes you, Robert.’ And indeed Robert Jellico, with his flat face, his overhanging eyelids, his cardinal’s mien, his grey eminence, seemed the old-worldly yet contemporary expression of the determined Rice soul. He it was who kept the balls of the whole business juggling in the air. For all his complicated love for Edwin, his weary disparagement of Angelica, they knew Robert Jellico was trustworthy enough. He knew money and property must be looked after. If Angelica’s money went into the tenderest, most vulnerable, most simply sacrificed, last-in-first-out enterprises of the Rice Estate, the crumple zone of the juggernaut, then that was the tax Angelica had to pay because she had no presentable family, and no social status; only money and a recent marriage. Robert Jellico made sure Angelica’s money did not go directly towards the rebuilding of Rice Court, in case of future litigation, and any claim that might be made alleging the place to be the matrimonial home. He was not so stupid and she did not notice. Who, lately married, ever anticipates divorce?
The day the money disappeared into Rice Estate coffers, Angelica sat up in bed and said, ‘Edwin, we have to stop this now. We’ve recovered from the pa
st, which was an illness. I shall smoke no more dope.’
And nor did she, and presently he lost the habit too. They looked around and saw what they had, and it seemed full of promise.
5
Lady Rice, Three Years Into Her Marriage
– spent a lot of time trying to get pregnant. That is to say, now in bed with Edwin only some twelve hours out of every twenty-four, she failed to take contraceptive precautions. She could see it would be nice to be two people enclosed in one and carry that one around inside her: the thought made her dozy and warm. If there was a baby, the twelve waking, walking hours would flow easily and naturally: unedgily, undriven. The warm, milky smell and soft feel of babies, the slippery, honey scent of Johnson’s Baby Oil would drift the days together, make day like night, summer like winter, bed and waking hours the same: she would be universally approved: her mother would think of her, not of Gerald Haverley and The Divorce: The Tatler would come and take photographs of her and Edwin together and a baby in a long, white Christening robe in her arms – Angelica herself had never been christened: her name had always been some kind of variable. With her baby’s christening, she would find herself shriven and finally named herself.
‘Very nice,’ said Edwin, ‘but the camera would get dust in it. The photos wouldn’t come out. Everything’s crumbling.’ Edwin, they agreed, tended to look on the gloomy side of things; to expect very little of the material world. If he was disappointed before he began, then failure could be interpreted as success in at least one thing – that he had been right all along. But Angelica encouraged him in good cheer.
Edwin began cautiously to take up his axe, to chop down a rotten tree or so on the Estate; to tear away the odd beam made flaky by woodworm before it actually fell, whether on to the dining room table or the bed; he learned to trace the tap-tap-tap of the deathwatch beetle, to pare away wood and reach the devouring little insect family, remove them carefully to one of the stables where they would do less harm. Such was her power over him, at the beginning. Angelica, who was tender-hearted towards all living creatures, though they demolish her house, eat away at her inheritance.
Every month with the moon, Angelica bled. Dr Bleasdale said it took a long time for marihuana to clear itself out of the system, and the drug, even though they scarcely used it now, impaired fertility.
‘It’s not a drug,’ said Edwin, ‘it’s a leaf. And I don’t believe him.’
After a year, the doctor went further and attributed Angelica’s inability to conceive to Edwin’s sperm count, lowered, he claimed, by drug-taking in the past. Edwin refused a test and Angelica did not blame him. The process involved sounded disgusting to both of them.
‘Jealous of a simple jar!’ said Edwin. ‘Fancy you!’
‘Yes,’ said Angelica. ‘I am. Fancy me!’
They started going to the younger, female partner at the surgery, a Dr Rosamund Plaidy, who said there was lots of time. Babies came when parents were ready for them. That felt better. Angelica became less sure that she was ready to be a parent. The convictions of youth diminished; the doubts of maturity strengthened.
These days Lady Rice would follow her husband out into the fields to watch him sawing branches, lighting bonfires. Edwin was developing muscles: a broad shoulder, a strong back. She hadn’t wanted a baby desperately, Angelica told Boffy Dee; it had been a mood, that was all. She would wait until she was older. If she had a baby now, Mrs MacArthur would just take it away on the pretence of looking after it. One day Lady Rice, Angelica confided in Boffy Dee, would do without Mrs MacArthur: it was just that in the meantime she had Rice Court to look after; she didn’t want her white hands to become rough, in case Edwin would not love them any more, would not suck her fingers one by one, as he did now, as if he’d been dealt a handful of lollipops by the Great Gambler in the sky, and wanted to show his appreciation and gratitude. Things were pretty good, thought Angelica, and, if she did nothing in particular, would stay that way.
Robert Jellico reported back to Lord Cowarth, at Cowarth Castle, five miles up the road, that his youngest son was showing signs of reformation; that, surprisingly, the marriage was holding. Angelica’s money had now been taken by the official Receivers of Rice Estate Fungi (Continental) – which had served as the year’s most effective tax loss for Rice Estates. Jellico took some credit for the unexpected durability of the youngest son’s marriage. Women without funds made better wives than women with funds, being more dependent.
Robert Jellico had started a steady relationship with one Andy Pack, a jockey, and these days was prepared to exchange a non-acrimonious word with Angelica, and an un-neurotic one with Edwin. He even, in a flush of generosity, inflation-indexed the young couple’s allowance. The Estate paid staff wages and household bills; Edwin and Angelica had to pay only for food and entertainment, and since their entertainment was by and large each other, they could even make savings on what came in. Angelica saw fit to send her mother fifty pounds a week: Gerald Haverley was retired now and it was difficult for the couple to pay so much as their heating bills.
‘Don’t you have each other to keep each other warm?’ Angelica asked when her mother complained, but clearly everyone’s habits were different. The younger generation kept to its bed, if it possibly could: the older you got the easier you felt out of it, until old age set in, when there you’d be, under the covers again.
Robert Jellico felt it was unreasonable that Rice Estate money should go to Edwin’s mother-in-law, whose husband’s duty it surely was to provide for her, and said as much to Edwin. And Edwin said to Angelica words to this effect – ‘The fifty pounds a week you give your mother would be better spent on the fabric of this house, on Rentokil and rat catchers. The medieval drains are collapsing, and you don’t even seem to notice.’
‘You should never have let that archaeologist in,’ said Angelica. ‘I knew he’d be trouble.’
A representative from the University of Birmingham’s Department of Medieval Studies had turned up to photograph the brick sewer system and, though asked to touch nothing, had removed for study some critical piece of figured brickwork and thereby started a general collapse of a system which otherwise would have lasted another couple of hundred years. If Lord Cowarth fired shotguns at all comers, whether vagrants, gypsies, academics or social workers, Edwin began to understand why.
‘There you go again,’ said Edwin, ‘trying to blame me for a failing in yourself. Your heart’s too kind.’
‘But my mother needs the money,’ said Angelica. ‘She’ll be cold and hungry without it,’ and Edwin, after complaining that she overstated her case, fretted and frowned and put it to his wife that surely she saw the importance of the present. That surely it was time she put her old life behind her: why should Angelica help Gerald Haverley, the betrayer of Angelica’s one-time best friend Mary’s mother, out of a fix? Why not? enquired Angelica. The difference caused a slight coldness between them: a frisson, perhaps, of differences to come, like wind tinged with ice because it’s passed over the snow of a mountain range, chilling the slumbering foothills.
‘And think of all that money I gave the Rice Estate,’ said Angelica. ‘Surely something’s due to me from that?’ But one of the rules of the Rice Estate was that money swallowed was money swallowed, buried in earth, as hillsides were moved at Lord Cowarth’s direction; roads were driven; river courses changed; estates developed and others torn down to make way for artificial grouse moors or ski slopes: mud everywhere, and gaping holes all around, grand canyons, yawning to receive the gift of other people’s money: endless diversification, from mushroom farms (bind, bind, the crumbling soil with rhizomorphs) to sewage purification plants (drink, drink and profit us, it’s good for you!). In exchange for all this frantic, destructive energy, the Rice organism spewed out money neatly and in deliberate fashion, all but unobserved, to interested parties in whom it did not include a youngest son’s first wife. The Rice Estate knew when to waste, and when to save. Robert Jellico saw to all that: s
aw to it that the Estate sucked up millions, shat out tidy, tax-resistant cash pellets. The more that trust was put in Robert Jellico, the more smoothly the operation would run: that was the general understanding.
‘I don’t even have a receipt,’ Angelica would worry sometimes. ‘And work hasn’t even started here; what happened to the money?’
And she wondered why it was that water still drained from the hand basin before she even had time to wash her hands, so badly had it cracked; why there was so little comfort in her daily life. Mrs MacArthur, who enjoyed the threadbare character of her job, who liked nothing better than a domestic emergency, who loved making do and mending, just said, ‘Four inches of water is more than enough for anyone to wash their hands in, my girl. The crack starts four and a quarter inches up. Don’t be so greedy.’
‘This place is a disaster area,’ said Angelica to Edwin one day. ‘Couldn’t we move out of it?’
‘You don’t love me any more,’ said Edwin. ‘You never used to notice,’ so she gave up mentioning it. Money gone is money gone, like water.
They were lying in the sun on a grassy mound where Cromwell the Protector was reputed to have single-handedly chopped down a maypole. Lord Cowarth’s ancestor, Cromwell’s friend, had been of an ascetic nature and grudging temperament, and had welcomed the coming of Roundhead politics; his descendants since had specialised in debauchery, excess and dramatics, as if to make up for the sheer meanness of the man who had founded their fortune by personally shaving the ringlets off Royalist neighbours and seizing their estates.
Even as Sir Edwin and Lady Rice lay on the grass hand in hand, bodies touching, they watched a bird alight gracefully on a chimney. They saw the high brick erection crumble and fall through the tiled roof, heard the debris rumble down through the attic floor, the bedroom floor, to the library below, whence a puff of dust blew out through open latticed windows and dispersed. Of such events are the memories of marriage made.
