by Weldon, Fay
Ashes to dust.
Lord Cowarth’s disposition had improved over the previous three years. Infections had given him abscesses under his remaining teeth – six left from a once full set, mostly towards the back – and pain had finally driven him to the doctor. He had been given Prozac, a new anti-depressant, still undergoing clinical trials, by Dr Rosamund Plaidy. He had even signed the consent forms, in a sudden rush to the head of social spiritedness. Lord Cowarth had married, within six weeks of the first dose, a blonde and leather-booted woman in her mid-fifties, Ventura, Lady Cowarth. The wife of a mere youngest son and the wife of a full-blooded, propertied Earl are accorded the same title, so Mrs White, now Mrs Haverley, told her daughter: ‘Lady’ covers all degrees of honour, saving only ‘Princess’, ‘Countess’, ‘Duchess’ and ‘Queen’. Ventura drank a great deal of whisky, but was kind, buxom and efficient, and liked Angelica, with whom she shared a common taste for leather; though Lady Rice, little by little, was taking to jeans and sweaters, neat skirts, little collars and long sleeves buttoned at the wrist.
‘She may be a bit “other ranks”’, said Ventura to her husband, ‘but at least she’s a local and at least she’s on hand!’ Unlike, by inference, Edwin’s elder brothers, the twins who had simply run out on the whole caboodle.
Lord Cowarth had lately found the tie to his dressing gown. If it did still occasionally fall apart, it was to reveal skinny parts more robust than heretofore, and fleshy parts less hideous.
‘Rice Court does need money spent on it, dear,’ Ventura said to her husband, ‘in fact as well as theory: brick by brick, not just a business plan!’ and her husband had a word with Robert Jellico, who released half a million pounds to that end. The falling of the chimney had impressed everyone. A further half million, it was inferred, would follow when Angelica produced a child.
‘I had no idea,’ said Angelica, distressed, as Edwin made constant efforts, night and day, to impregnate her, she by now having completely gone off the idea of babies, ‘that there were families left who behaved like this. Your father’s worse sane than he was mad.’
‘There is no such thing,’ said Edwin, his great, consoling bulk heaving over her, ‘as a free title,’ and Angelica laughed, but she was hurt. Edwin would do this for money, but not for love? For Rice Court, not for her?
If Edwin wanted a baby for his family’s sake, not for hers, not as a celebration of their love, she would rather not have one at all, or at any rate not yet. Better to live in a rose-covered cottage, however humble, abrim with domestic love, to have children as an outcome of that love, clustering around the knee, than to live in a mansion, have nannies, and be expected to breed for the sake of a line, in the interests of a family who thought themselves better than others for no good reason, especially since, so far as Angelica could see, that line was now more connected to commerce than to the land. And supposing the baby inherited its grandfather’s madness? Its grandmother’s alcoholism, its father’s idleness? She loved Edwin dearly, but without a doubt he was idle. And had not the early Rice forbears been robber barons, the criminals of the Middle Ages? The more she thought about it, the worse it seemed. Her side of the family might be mildly eccentric, but surely dwelt within the bounds of decent ordinariness: what could truly be said of the humble was that they tried to be good, if only from lack of energy to be otherwise. The Rice family had no problem being bad.
If Edwin showed signs of wanting a baby for his wife’s sake or, better still, saw a baby as the natural outcome of a great and enduring love, no doubt these worries would be quickly swept away in a wave of wanting – but until this happened, until Edwin grew up a bit, stopped trying to placate and gratify his awful family, she would not risk the change in status that the having of a baby entailed. Better and safer to be the wife Edwin insanely loved, than the mother of a Rice child. Through history they’d found themselves driven to drink, or pushed downstairs, or walled up, or just left at home and thoroughly neglected, once their purpose was served. They’d been allowed to dress up in their tiaras and produced at coronations, or state funerals, or victory parades to keep them quiet, but that was all. She dug out forgotten family portraits from the cellars and brought down monographs from the attic: restored, dusted, framed them all, and found in the family history more than enough proof for her suppositions.
And so to everyone’s surprise Angelica didn’t get pregnant. In fact, she had prudently asked at the surgery, before it was too late, for a contraceptive implant, one of a new kind which lasted for a whole five years, and young Dr Rosamund Plaidy had obliged, tucked it under the skin of Angelica’s buttocks with a deft incision of knife and needle. Gently, day by day, the implant leaked oestrogen into her system, keeping her rounded and placid and gentle. The more fertile she looked, the less fertile she was, and no giveaway card of pills either, hanging around to be found.
Dr Rosamund Plaidy was thirty-four, wholesome, pleasant and well-informed, and was married to Lambert Plaidy, the writer. She had had her own first child at twenty-six and naturally believed that to be the optimum age for such activity. Angelica, at twenty-one, had lots of time. Angelica agreed.
6
Lady Rice, Eight Years Into Her Marriage
– gave dinner parties. Lady Rice had made a circle of friends. Rice Court was open to the public again, and the Great Hall and bedrooms had been roped and annotated – here Oliver Cromwell dined; on this spot the first Lord Cowarth fell, poisoned; here the bed in which he recovered, alas; see here the priest-hole in which the priest was walled-up alive and died; this the Chinese vase presented by Queen Victoria; here the love couch on which Edward sat entwined with Mrs Simpson, and so forth – but the back of the house, which faced south in any case and caught the last light, could be run as the more ordinary but still splendid home of a comparatively ordinary young couple. Ceilings and chimneys no longer collapsed, doors fitted, windows opened: in the kitchens ancient iron pots had been replaced with stainless steel saucepans; ceramic hobs now ran on electricity rather than hotplates on coal and coke. Mrs MacArthur seemed ten years younger than once she had. Her hair had been permed, and ringed her dour face in girlish fashion. Mr MacArthur had been made redundant from his work as a bodywork welder up at the auto factory. His wife was now the family breadwinner and there was no hope of Angelica firing her. But she allowed her employer her head when it came to running the visitor trade.
It was acknowledged, even by Lord Cowarth, that Lady Rice was efficient when she put her mind to it: had a gift for knowing what took the visitors’ fancy, why they would prefer cream to butter on their scones, why they would buy fudge but not mints, why they gawped at Mrs Simpson’s love seat but didn’t care for Lord Cowarth’s collection of arrowheads.
And after the last visitor had gone, when the money had been accounted for and sent off to swell the Rice Estate coffers, and she had earned the approval of Robert Jellico, what could be more pleasant than to have friends round? To prepare meals, using the cookery books brought home by Edwin, who shared the cooking with her, trying out dishes from everywhere, from Afghanistan to Georgia to Iran – places at that time not so riven by violence, cruelty and war as to make their very food suspect, too potentially full of grief for enjoyment.
Edwin and Angelica, Rosamund and Lambert, Susan and Humphrey, were the central couples: others around, espoused or as singles, performed a dance of delicate social balance; creating their own precise etiquette. Friends, acquaintances, colleagues flitted in and out of focus round the table; each knowing their place; smiling faces breaking bread, providing advice, entertainment, common cause. Edwin and Angelica offered the most eccentric yet the grandest table of the group. Though the power and prestige Rice Court represented was now seen as fit only for tourists, even peasant food tasted good on a refectory table large enough to seat twelve and with lots of elbow room.
Rosamund, the doctor, responsible, kindly and steady, and Lambert her husband, a writer, wild-eyed, wild-haired, made up in skills and tal
ent for anything they lacked in style: a double act and a crowded table in a book-lined room, down the corridor from the kitchen. Susan, the potter from Minnesota, rosy, exotic and sexy, with her bubbling enthusiasms, her fair shiny hair, her attractive naivety, a basket-full of English garden flowers or chutneys, Easter gifts or winter comforts somehow always on her arm, for ever bearing gifts, her adoring, plump, good, mournful, clumsy husband Humphrey, the architect, served food Japanese fashion, on the carpeted floor, amongst cushions.
Rosamund had two children, Susan had one, Angelica had none. Edwin still took that amiss.
‘Perhaps I should have had a sperm count,’ said Edwin one night at Susan’s. ‘What do men do when they’re not fathers?’
And everyone laughed.
‘Love their wives,’ said Angelica, and realised with alarm to what degree she counted on Rosamund not to tell about the implant. Too late to tell Edwin herself: why had she not when first Rosamund tucked it under her skin? She could hardly remember. Time enough, time enough, as Rosamund averred. A five per cent increase in visitors this season: there was so much for Angelica to do, and Edwin too if he wanted, but he didn’t. Edwin merely seemed to potter and brood; he began to have a puzzled look, as did Humphrey, whose architectural practice was failing. It is a terrible thing to have to look for occupation. Lambert, too, was in financial difficulty. His publishers dropped him from their list; his agent was too busy to speak to him. He was misunderstood. He spent more time with the children, leaving Rosamund free to do night duty; indeed obliged to do so, if bills were to be met.
Angelica, the youngest in the group, saw her task as learning, and learn she did; over the dinner table. She could talk now about abstract matters: what justice was, and injustice; understood better when to confide, when to stay quiet; had opinions about what art was, who really ran the country and so on. Whether agents provocateurs let off bombs, or terrorists.
From Susan she learned a kind of sophisticated feminine response; things her mother had never taught her. She learned that flowers need to be arranged, not just plonked in a vase; that their leaves had to be stripped, stems crushed. Sensual pleasures, Susan implied, were the same. The more you postponed, the more you enjoyed. This apparently went for sex, too, and suited Angelica very well. Or, as Susan said, ‘Gosh, your English men are so bad at important things like wooing. This is certainly no red rose culture you have over here!’ Though, heaven knew, Humphrey circled Susan with bouquets, took her for romantic weekends to Vienna, had her portrait painted, personally manicured her strong potter’s hands in a manner most un-English.
Susan took it as her due. She had previously been married to Alan Adliss, the now famous landscape painter. She’d run off with Humphrey, taking him away from Helen, his fat, faithless and insensitive wife – or so everyone described her, taking Susan’s word for it. No one in the circle had actually ever met Helen, of course, nor wished to – she belonged to some other world layered behind this one, its sufferings incomprehensible, irrelevant: whining voices on answerphones demanding consideration, remembrance, the money second wives saw as their due. Unloved women, those in the past, should simply fade away, as should widowed mothers. At least there was no one like this in Edwin’s past: she was his first wife, his only wife. These emotional and marital difficulties were for others, not for Angelica. She was conceited.
The voices in Angelica’s head had not yet powered-up, splitting and dividing her, offering alternatives on the path to heaven or hell. As it was, she assumed she was the nicest person in the world: there was not even any internal discussion about the possibility of this not necessarily being the case. How could there be? She was the heroine of her own life. Her lack of response to her father’s death puzzled her. The event had scarcely marked her otherwise. Why? It was as if he had been some kind of prop, not a person at all. Surely this must be a failing in him, not in her? All the same, she could see her non-grief at his death as being some kind of time bomb somewhere in her persona, as the oestrogen implant was a time bomb in her body, antipathetical to the very origins of life.
Sometimes these days Angelica turned away from Edwin in bed; fastidiousness could tire you out: sleep could become the greater desire. Or was it that the potential of pregnancy, framing sex with light, was what kept sex interesting, as the sun behind a dark cloud will frill it with brilliance? She could almost believe now, in any case, that the implant was imaginary. The Rosamund she’d met for the first time in the surgery had been a stranger: now she was a friend. Everything was different, why not this too? Better not to enquire. Perhaps anyway such implants had been proved not to work: how could anything keep working for so long; and who was to say whether it was actually this pellet of artificially deposited hormone which kept Edwin’s and her destined child out of the world, or an act of God? Perhaps she was infertile anyway? If Rosamund had made no mention of the implant the first time Edwin had said over dinner, ‘We’re not too hot in the fertility stakes, Angelica and I’, or however he’d put it, in his offhand, English way, perhaps it was because there was indeed nothing to mention. Years drifted by and the events of one year were lost in the dramas of the next.
She wished Edwin was more like Humphrey; more adoring, more romantic, less companionable.
She made herself go and sit by her father’s grave: the Rice Estate was digging up the churchyard cemetery overflow, where her father’s body lay, to build an extension to a new sports centre. She knew if she didn’t visit now she never could, and even this sense of his corporeal, albeit disintegrating reality, be lost to her. But still she could not bring Stephen White properly to mind: he had been too elderly, too amiable, too vague to be quite real. Someone who had failed to elicit strong passions in her, who had lived in the past, but whose time had overlapped hers; whose enthusiasms had been alien to hers, making her feel a changeling.
She felt dull. Edwin’s former clubbing friends would turn up at the new, improved Rice Court from time to time, or from the ex-hunting and shooting, now property-developing, junk-bonding set, observe just how very, very dull country life could be, and depart. Angelica’s ex-music-biz friends would arrive to gaze at the country moon under the influence of one substance or another, deplore what marriage and maturity could do to a girl, even leaving babies out of it, and depart.
Sometimes Anthea came to dinner, and Edwin would yawn and say, ‘She thinks of nothing but horses: keep her away from me, though she is my cousin. Do you realise, if I’d been a girl and she’d been a boy, she’d have had my title.’
Or Boffy Dee would turn up for a heart to heart and a glass of gin. She was marrying a racing driver who’d had so many knocks to the head he couldn’t speak without slurring, but Boffy Dee did not see brain damage as an impediment to marital happiness. On the contrary.
7
Trouble In The Group
Rosamund called Angelica one evening and said, ‘Angelica, this is terrible: we have to do something. I think Susan is having an affair with Clive Rappaport. I keep seeing his car and hers parked in strange places when I’m out on my calls, and nobody in either of them.’ It was summer and the grass was green.
Clive Rappaport was a solicitor, one of the outer circle of friends: quiet, serious, romantic; very much married to Natalie, plump, dark, effervescent.
‘That’s completely out of the question,’ said Angelica.
‘Why?’ demanded Rosamund. And Angelica reminded her that only a couple of weeks back, at a picnic on the old railway track – Susan and Humphrey lived in a charmingly converted railway station – Natalie had confided, half-joking, half-serious, as women will amongst friends, that Clive had gone off her, lost sexual interest.
‘What do I do?’ Natalie had asked. ‘We’ve never had trouble like this before.’
‘Wear black lingerie,’ Susan had replied. ‘Lace and garters, high heels. Parade up and down. That always works.’ And everyone had laughed, a little awkwardly. Because it had seemed a strange thing to say, in a group so dedicated
to the notion that sex was to do with love, not lust.
‘If Susan was having an affair with Clive,’ said Angelica to Rosamund now, ‘she couldn’t possibly have said a thing like that.’
Which just showed, in retrospect, how little Angelica knew about anything.
‘Oh yes she could,’ said Rosamund, ‘if she was secure enough, conceited enough, knew absolutely certainly that no amount of black underwear could ever get Clive happy in bed with Natalie again and was trying to cover her tracks.’
‘She’s not like that,’ said Angelica, shocked. ‘Not Susan.’
At least until now she had supposed not. It was true men became animated when Susan came into a room: with her bony, slightly gawky figure, the thick bell of blonde hair swinging; but then so did women: it was obvious Humphrey adored Susan, Susan adored Humphrey. Angelica gave the matter minimal thought and put it out of her mind. Rosamund was overworked: mildly paranoid. She was having a hard time with Lambert, who would put her down in company, lament the minimal size of her breasts, her concern for everyone in the world but him, and Rosamund responded, no doubt, by seeing trouble everywhere but at home. She reported to Edwin what Rosamund had said and Edwin replied, ‘What on earth would Susan see in Clive Rappaport: he’s dull as ditch water,’ which was not quite the response Angelica would have expected, but then more and more things these days were unexpected.
Unexpected, too, when the next week Lambert, Rosamund’s husband, came to Angelica and said, ‘Angelica, I think Susan and Edwin are having an affair,’ and Angelica said, ‘Lambert, you are absurd, and what would it have to do with you if they were, anyway, which they aren’t? Are you having a breakdown? Why do you look so dreadful?’ Lambert did: he wore tracksuit bottoms, an old army shirt untucked in, and had not had a shave for a week or a haircut for three months.
