by Weldon, Fay
‘You should never have had that contraceptive implant,’ said Lambert. ‘Rosamund told you so at the time but you wouldn’t listen. Look at the trouble it got everyone into. You’re Edwin’s wife. You should have given him a baby.’
‘What?’ enquired Angelica. ‘What? Who said I wouldn’t give Edwin a baby?’
‘It’s in your file at the surgery,’ said Lambert, and declined to say more. Angelica’s concerns were none of his. But if Lambert told Susan, and Susan told Edwin –no, it was beyond belief. Lambert was, in any case, out of his mind.
‘Rosamund,’ said Angelica, going round after surgery, finding Rosamund rubber-gloved amongst blood samples and card indices, busy with the tragedies of others, ‘Rosamund, what are we to do about Lambert?’
‘We?’ enquired Rosamund. Her hair was curlier than ever with sweat and exhaustion. Her honest, bright face was pale: her freckles stood out. She was loveable, Angelica realised, and admirable, but she was worthy, and would never be glamorous.
‘Friends,’ said Angelica. ‘We’re all friends,’ and Angelica gave Rosamund the gist of Lambert’s lament, as one would relate the tale of a madman to those most concerned with his welfare.
‘There is all kind of stuff here,’ said Angelica, ‘that could really upset people. Doesn’t Lambert realise that?’
‘Angelica,’ said Rosamund, ‘of course he does. It is naive of you to suppose that people will avoid doing harm if they understand what harm is. Some people like doing harm.’
‘But not Lambert,’ said Angelica. ‘Not anyone we know.’ Rosamund raised her eyebrows and busied herself emptying test tubes down the sink.
‘Isn’t there anyone else to do that?’ asked Angelica.
‘If I pay them,’ said Rosamund, shortly.
‘Rosamund,’ said Angelica, ‘this is important.’
‘It’s not life and death,’ said Rosamund. ‘Mrs Anna Wesley has too much protein in her urine. That’s important. Lambert has told me that Susan’s little Roland is his child, that Humphrey isn’t the father. I’ve looked in their files. The blood types correlate. Humphrey has a really low sperm count, as it happens.’
‘Lambert’s insane,’ said Angelica.
‘Lambert’s been in love with Susan for years, apparently,’ said Rosamund. ‘He stayed with me for the children’s sake – not mine, he tells me: I don’t somehow enter into the equation. Poor Susan. Poor Humphrey. Poor Lambert. Me, I just do the work round here and earn the living. And now Susan says she’s pregnant, so Lambert’s convinced it’s Edwin’s.’
‘But why?’
‘Because you won’t give Edwin a baby, and Susan’s so kind and soft-hearted,’ said Rosamund, adding, with savagery, ‘fucking little slut.’
Angelica stared.
‘You can’t keep implants secret,’ said Rosamund. ‘Lambert looks through the files for material for his stories. Everyone knows, except you. You did know but you seem to have forgotten. You’re very peculiar, Angelica. Sometimes I think you sleepwalk through your life. I’d never suggest Prozac for you: you’re enough of a Pollyanna as it is, rising cheerful and positive to each day.’
‘I don’t believe any of this,’ said Angelica. But when she thought about it, it was true that Lambert and Roland had the same wide-spaced, prominent, wild blue eyes: now the thought was in the head, the evidence was there. Just as the understanding that the continents have drifted apart, over the aeons, from the one original land mass, became evident and obvious to anyone who looked at a globe after 1926, when the notion was first floated, but simply didn’t occur to the generations before.
‘I don’t believe Lambert’s in love with Susan,’ said Angelica, hopelessly. ‘You two are too good together. You go together. Why should Lambert love Susan when he’s got you?’
‘Because I’m boring,’ observed Rosamund calmly, ‘and Susan’s not. I only speak when I’ve something to say and Susan babbles ceaselessly on. I work regular hours and wear myself out toiling for humanity, while Susan is full of artistic sensibility. Lambert’s a writer, Susan’s a potter. Creative, you know? They need the likes of Humphrey and myself to earn their livings, but we’re not exactly sources of powerful emotion, are we? We can’t expect to stay the course.’
‘And if Susan’s having an affair with anyone,’ said Angelica, ‘it’s Clive Rappaport, not Edwin. You said so yourself. And Susan would never do a thing like that to me. I’m her best friend. Lambert must stop saying these things. He’s insane.’
‘I’d rather it was Edwin than Clive,’ said Rosamund. ‘Because if it’s Clive, poor Natalie will have to get to know, and poor Humphrey as well –’
‘Well, thank you very much,’ said Angelica. ‘You don’t think it matters about poor me?’
‘Oh, Angelica,’ said Rosamund in dismissal, ‘you’re like me, you can look after yourself,’ which surprised Angelica very much. It had never been her intention to turn out sensible, good-natured and enduring: the kind of woman who would put up with a husband’s infidelities for the sake of the greater good.
‘And, anyway,’ Rosamund added, ‘you don’t have any children so it’s hardly important.’ Which made Angelica see why Lambert might well have set his face against Rosamund, might well prefer Susan. Angelica was almost convinced, but not quite. As for Edwin fathering some putative child of Susan’s, that was simply not possible. Edwin was too responsible, too serious, ever to take Susan seriously. They liked her, but she was lightweight.
Angelica rang up Susan to say perhaps she’d better come round and talk a few things over: Humphrey picked up the telephone; someone tried to snatch it away. All kinds of noises came from the other end of the line: bangings, batterings, little Roland crying, then finally screaming; an unknown voice saying, ‘Humphrey, don’t speak to anyone. I forbid it. See a solicitor first.’ More breathings, and then Humphrey was in charge of the instrument.
Humphrey said, with unwonted passion, ‘Is that you, Angelica? You bitch! You’ve been conniving with Susan; you knew all about it; she took her lead from you; she’s told me about you and Lambert.’ And Humphrey put the phone down.
Angelica laughed. She could not help it. Edwin came into the room.
‘What’s funny?’ asked Edwin.
‘Susan’s having an affair with (a) Clive Rappaport, (b) Lambert, (c) you. I’m having an affair with Lambert: you and/or Clive Rappaport are fathering Susan’s baby.’
‘I don’t think that’s funny,’ said Edwin, but he seemed unsurprised. ‘Why do you laugh at other people’s troubles?’
‘Well,’ said Angelica, ‘if it was true, it would be my trouble, too.’
‘So you’re denying it?’ asked Edwin. ‘Susan says it’s true.’
Angelica cannot believe it of Susan, that she should tell such lies to get out of trouble, as if everyone were back at school. A clear sky is suddenly swept by clouds: black ones, layering, level upon level, and a different storm swells up between each layer, each feeding upon its fellows. Lightning cracks the sky: thunder blasts; the tempest pours. Angelica no longer stands pure, untroubled, shone upon by the sun of love and good fortune. The ground she stands upon trembles. The best she can hope for now is not to be utterly cast down. It is all too sudden.
Edwin turns on the television as if nothing is happening. ‘Edwin,’ says Angelica to her husband, ‘something extraordinary is going on at Railway Cottage. Aren’t you interested?’
‘No,’ says Edwin, ‘it really has very little to do with us.’ He has found a documentary on Northern Ireland. He does not take his eyes from the screen.
‘I think it has,’ says Angelica.
‘I knew you’d try to make a meal of it,’ said Edwin. ‘It’s not a good idea to turn private matters into public gossip.’
‘But Susan is my friend,’ says Angelica. ‘She’s in trouble –’
‘You have hardly behaved like a friend to her,’ says Edwin.
‘If she’s telling lies about Rosamund’s husband and myself –’ say
s Angelica.
‘I think she worries about your plans for her own husband, forget Rosamund’s.’
‘This is bizarre,’ says Angelica.
She would shake her husband, except he has turned into a stranger, and a hostile one at that.
‘Do you have no loyalty to me?’ asks Angelica. ‘You’ll listen to any old gossip.’
‘You’re the one who asked it into the house,’ remarks Edwin. ‘You’re the one who wanted a social life. Susan rang me yesterday. She wanted my advice.’
And he told Angelica that Susan had been on the phone to Clive, discussing some work project. Natalie had picked up the extension, listened in, misunderstood and become hysterical.
‘Though Natalie’s own conduct,’ says Edwin, ‘scarcely gives her leave to object to whatever Clive chooses or does not choose to do, but when were women ever reasonable? Their idea of justice is very one-sided. Susan was afraid Natalie might cause trouble by calling Humphrey, so she rang me. That’s all.’
‘Why you?’ asks Angelica.
‘I suppose,’ says Edwin, ‘because I’m her friend and the only one she can rely on not to gossip or make a drama and a meal of something so important. Could all this wait till the programme has ended?’
‘I think not,’ says Angelica, and switches the TV off. Edwin sighs.
‘I do not believe Susan has ever had the slightest suspicion about me and Humphrey,’ says Angelica. ‘Humphrey is old enough to be my father. Shouldn’t we investigate this? Perhaps it’s Humphrey’s fantasy? That I’m after him?’
‘I expect Susan is over-sensitive,’ says Edwin. ‘She worries so about growing old. I told her she was being silly.’
‘How do you know?’ asks Angelica. ‘How do you know things about Susan I don’t?’
‘When you’re busy with the Heritage Shop,’ says Edwin, ‘Susan and I sometimes go for walks. She’s interested in all kinds of things you aren’t. English wild flowers, for example.’
‘The bitch!’ says Angelica finally.
‘Sometimes I think there’s a lesbian element in your make-up,’ says Edwin. ‘Susan says she senses an erotic element in yours and her relationship. It makes her uneasy.’
Angelica paced, and thought, and thought, and paced, while Edwin stroked and patted the dogs, labradors, one of whom lay on his lap and the other over his feet, large, soothing, fleshy golden creatures. Edwin turned the television back on. The programme on Northern Ireland was finished.
‘What advice did you give Susan?’ Angelica asked, finally. It was as if she were allowed only one question, as in some child’s game, so that question had better be good.
‘I pointed out that Natalie was a vindictive and possessive woman and was almost bound to tell Humphrey her suspicions. Better for Susan to tell Humphrey herself what had happened. She said she would.’
‘Edwin,’ said Angelica, ‘that was very strange advice. What are you trying to do? Blow things apart? The only thing Susan should have done was to deny everything, everything.’
‘My dear,’ said Edwin, ‘she consulted me, not you.’
There was a kind of scraping at the door, a sound halfway between a scrabble and a tap, and Edwin opened the door to Susan, weeping, swollen-faced, shivering with cold and barefooted. There was snow on the ground outside. Her toes were blue. Susan sat in an armchair while Angelica fetched blankets and Edwin took Susan’s feet in his hands and rubbed and patted to restore their blood supply.
‘He threw me out of the house,’ wept Susan. ‘My own husband. My own house. I did everything you told me, Edwin. I confessed to Humphrey. I admitted I’d been silly and stupid over Clive: I told him it meant nothing. I told him Natalie was over-reacting. I told him the last thing on my mind was to hurt Natalie. I explained that he’d had been so caught up lately with business matters, he shouldn’t really be surprised if some other man attracted my attention. I explained that Clive and I have an intellectual and artistic rapport – sex hardly enters into it at all. We just sometimes meet on our own, the way you and I do, Edwin. Edwin and I go on nature walks sometimes, Angelica. I told Humphrey he should learn from this incident and realise his marriage might be in danger so he’d better try harder at it; neglecting me wasn’t going to work. And all he did was turn into a primitive Victorian in front of my eyes. Oh shit! He threw me out of the house without giving me time even to put on my shoes, and locked the door so I couldn’t get back in. I called Clive from the neighbour’s but he said Natalie had just taken an overdose of sleeping pills and he was waiting for the doctor. He called her ‘his wife’ as if it were a kind of magic. She has him totally under her thumb. She is such a bully. She’ll do no matter what to hurt my poor Clive.’ Susan caught Angelica’s arm. ‘This is an appalling time for me! You won’t let me down, will you, Angelica?’
‘Of course not,’ said Angelica.
‘Because you’re civilised and you understand these things. You and Lambert, after all. And Edwin doesn’t make a stupid fuss, let alone lock you out in the snow. Humphrey is not a sane person. And he would never have had the guts to do it if his parents weren’t coming to stay tomorrow so they can look after him.’
Angelica unhooked herself from Susan’s grasp. Edwin went on massaging Susan’s feet. Whether or not he had caught the gist of Susan’s remark regarding Lambert Angelica could not be sure. Perhaps these insane statements just washed over him: he wasn’t even listening.
‘Susan,’ Angelica said, all the same, ‘because you go round having affairs with your best friends’ husbands, does not mean everyone does. I certainly don’t.’
Susan laughed harshly and said that all she ever got from the English were pious platitudes and no understanding at all of love or its imperatives. All the subtlety of her relationship with Clive, all the power, the passion, the throbbing soul of it, reduced to the glibness of Angelica’s phrase – ‘having an affair’.
To which Angelica said, ‘Bet you didn’t say all that “throbbing soul” bit to Humphrey, unless of course you’re sick of Humphrey, which I would understand.’
‘Why?’ enquired Susan rashly, displaying a sudden and mean vulgarity, ‘Because you’d like to get your sticky little fingers on him?’
Angelica laughed.
Edwin said, Susan’s cold foot now pressed against his cheek, ‘Angelica, don’t be nasty to poor Susan. She’s in a terrible state, and she’s pregnant, too. We have to look after her.’
To which Angelica replied, inanely enough, ‘Don’t call me Angelica, call me Lady Rice.’
And having said it, Angelica, that young woman of many parts, fled without warning, as abruptly and rashly as people flee to escape rocket attack, earthquake, forest fire, in the interest of survival itself, leaving Lady Rice behind, to cope as best she could.
Lady Rice, that masochistic, loving, drooping creature, afflicted by a hopeless obsession for justice which could only make her miserable, so little of it is there in the world – one could search for ever to find either a just or a merciful God – now stood alone: like some eighteenth-century face mask, the kind worn at balls, behind which a series of others hid; some blonde, some dark; some young, some old; all deathly still, all terrified –only Jelly, perhaps, craning a little this way or that, just visible, showed flickers of life, of intent. None of the other souls had yet, of course, introduced themselves to Lady Rice. She perceived no difference in herself.
Lady Rice fainted. As she fell into the black and sickly swirl of a consciousness deprived suddenly not just of oxygen but of familiar identity, she thought she heard Edwin say:
‘Poor Susan. But it was the best thing to do.’
Lady Rice had to ease herself to sit against the edge of the sofa, had to scramble to her feet unaided. Edwin was helping poor, shook-up Susan to the one spare bedroom available, at the top of the house. The decorators were in all but this one.
Thus it was that the personality of Lady Rice perforated, allowing Angelica to resign, if only temporarily, from life. Just simply
and suddenly resigned, subject as she was to too much upset. It could happen to everyone. A trauma, a shock, a faint, a bang on the head – who’s to know who you’ll be when you recover?
Lady Rice went to bed, where Edwin presently followed her. He said he hoped she was feeling better but she should try not to steal Susan’s limelight. It had been absurd, pretending to faint like that. Everyone knew she was as strong as a horse.
Haltingly, Lady Rice tried to persuade her husband it was simply not so about herself and Humphrey, not so about her and Lambert, but all Edwin said was do be quiet, what does any of that matter, women always deny everything anyway, you told me that yourself only this evening. Lady Rice thought she’d better be quiet.
‘Poor me, poor me, poor me,’ sighed Susan, now a house guest, through Rice Court. Poor Susan, all echoed. Locked out of her house, separated from her child. Those few in the Humphrey party – his parents, Rosamund, and a handful of comparative strangers: for example, the man in the Post Office who hated all women, the hedger and ditcher who believed in UFOs – urged Humphrey to go to his rival’s house and beat Clive up, but Humphrey, though he raged against women, against Susan, Natalie, Rosamund and Lady Rice, as all in one way or another party to the legitimisation of his wife’s whorishness – they’d encouraged it, sanctioned it – did not ever meet his cuckolder face to face. Even in such circumstances, Rosamund complained, men stick together. The faithless wife gets murdered: her lover is left unharmed.
‘Get that woman out of here,’ said Mrs MacArthur. ‘She’s trouble!’ but the new Lady Rice was somehow vague in her dealings with the world, and forgetful; perhaps she’d bumped her head when she fell, and only imagined the horrors of false accusation. Susan was being sweet, and tearful, and full of confidences; Lady Rice took her to the Rice lawyers – four weeks later Susan was still locked out, still separated from her little Roland, Humphrey still holed up in Railway Cottage; if you tried to get him on the phone you heard this terrible, harsh voice saying ‘Bitch! Cunt!’ over and over. He had taken leave of his senses. He was going through some kind of fugue. It was assumed he would recover. Rosamund said he might if she could keep the psychiatrists off his back. She thought little Roland was in no danger: Humphrey’s parents Molly and Jack were there with their son, sometimes gently removing the receiver from his hand, replacing it, with a ‘Sorry, caller.’
