by Weldon, Fay
‘So long as you discard Edwin as well,’ said Angelica, ‘not just me.’
‘There you go again, Angelica,’ said Susan. ‘This is exactly what I mean. You have turned into a jealous and suspicious person. As for Edwin, men and women can be very close friends without any particularly sexual implication. But you don’t seem to understand that. And these days people don’t have to have friends in couples. Edwin’s my friend, not you. Shall we leave it at that? We can smile and talk if we meet in a social situation, naturally, but that’s the limit of it.’ And Susan put down the phone.
Lady Rice wondered if she could get a posse together to go round and burn Susan alive in Railway Cottage as a witch. Or perhaps they could stone her to death as an adulteress. She said as much to Edwin, who looked at his wife askance and asked her not to cause more trouble than she had already.
And the day after that, when Lady Rice was doing the filing in the Rice Court office, still trembling with shock, confusion and upset, and Edwin was off for the day somewhere with Robert Jellico, Anthea came in without knocking. She was looking, she said, for Edwin.
‘He said he’d be up at Wellesley Hall at ten,’ said Anthea. She seemed annoyed. She brought in a flurry of wind and weather with her: outdoors had suddenly taken over from indoors. Anthea was wearing green wellies, a blackish anorak, and a horsey headscarf damp with rain. Her hair fell over her eyes. She carried a riding crop, from force of habit. ‘Edwin’s too bad. He was meant to be looking over Henry Cabot, with a view to purchase.’
‘Henry Cabot?’ Angelica was bewildered.
‘A horse, darling, for the new stables.’
‘The new stables?’
‘Darling,’ said Anthea kindly, ‘he says you don’t notice very much, and you don’t seem to. What is all this secretarial stuff?’
She drew Angelica away from the files, the computer, the fax; she led her, protesting, into the drawing room, flinging aside the ropes that kept the visitors confined to the established pathways through the house, snatching up labels and throwing them to the ground as she went. She called for Mrs MacArthur and told her to light the fire – always laid but never lit – which Mrs MacArthur meekly did.
‘You’re meant to be Lady Rice, not some office factotum,’ Anthea said. ‘And it’s pissing Edwin off. I thought I should warn you. And what are these village creeps you keep mixing with? Very sordid things are happening, by all accounts. You and Edwin should stick to your own kind. Well, Edwin’s kind. You started off fine, exotic and eccentric; we can do with wild cards to liven up the blood stock, but you’ve turned into some kind of dozy housewife and what’s more you haven’t even bred. So what’s the point of you? That’s what Edwin’s beginning to wonder.’
Anthea had her boots and her anorak off; she lay back in a leather armchair, unbooted feet stuck towards the fire. Her sweater was ancient and thin. Her figure, Angelica realised, was remarkably good. Her face was too thin and dried up with outdoors and lack of face creams, but it was mobile and lively.
‘And, darling,’ said Anthea, ‘infidelity runs in the Rice blood. A capacity to chew women up and spit them out. Women of all classes, including their own. You served your other purpose: you were basically respectable, lower-middle class; got Edwin back on the straight and narrow okay. But that’s done and here you are, demoting yourself to domestic/secretarial, and he’s taken the Great Barley Adulteress for his mistress while he works out who to marry next. And I’d better warn you, from a straw or two in the wind, I think he’s got me in mind. He can see a future in joining my stables with Rice Court land. I’m telling you this because I like you. You’re hopelessly out of your depth, but it’s not your fault. You’re the choirmaster’s daughter, and an amateur choir at that.’
‘You’ve been drinking,’ said Angelica. ‘God, how you lot drink.’
And indeed Anthea was helping herself to whisky even as she spoke, delivered her bombshell.
‘You haven’t even decanted this stuff, Angelica,’ complained Anthea, and winced at a smeary glass. Since her hands were covered with mud and some kind of rural slime, Angelica did not take this seriously.
Lady Rice pointed out politely that since Edwin was married to her, he could hardly marry Anthea; that she, Lady Rice, knew well enough how to run her own life, and that the matter of the artist-mistress – if Anthea was referring to Susan – was nothing but mischievous rumour; that she, Lady Rice, trusted Edwin with her life; that she had to get back to her work, and retype out all the labels Anthea had destroyed, and would Anthea please leave and come back when she was sober.
Anthea said, ‘My God, Edwin’s right. You simply do not know how to behave. This is the end.’
Anthea left, but not before saying at least Edwin didn’t intend to father children outside the family. He had taken the Adulteress to be aborted at the time she’d had domestic trouble and was staying up at Rice Court. Just as well because stray babies could lead to nasty wars of succession.
Lady Rice went back to the office and wept into her computer. Still Edwin did not return.
‘I hope you weren’t rude to her,’ said Mrs MacArthur. ‘It isn’t wise to queer your pitch with people like that. They’re the ones with the real power.’
Lady Rice got in her little car – a runabout fit for country roads: Edwin kept the Mercedes and the Range Rover for himself – and went down to Railway Cottage. It seemed empty. The door, usually wide open and inviting, was locked. Angelica looked in the windows and saw that everything was neat, tidy and, as usual, prettily arranged. But there were no flowers in the vases. They stood drained, polished and upside down on the sill.
Lady Rice stood indecisively in the pretty English country garden. Andrew Nellor, the retired evangelist who lived in the cottage next door to Susan, in neurotic twitchiness and rumbling disapproval of everything and everyone, came up Susan’s path. He was weeping. His trousers were old, and, as were Lambert’s from time to time, held up with string. His little wife looked anxiously out from the top window. She was well-kept and pretty, like Susan’s garden.
‘She’s gone,’ said Andrew Nellor, ‘Susan’s gone. She kissed me and said she loved me, she wouldn’t forget me, and she left. I always loved her. God forgive me, I lusted after her. It was her body I wanted. She had no soul. I prayed, my wife prayed, but the lust wouldn’t go away. Such a strong, vibrant person. She had no shame: she was proud of her body. She didn’t mind what I saw, what my wife saw. She’d undress with the light on, she’d lie sunbathing naked in the garden. She saw nothing wrong with nudity. She wanted to give me pleasure. I think in her heart she loved me, wanted me. I painted her, secretly. My wife didn’t understand. She’d cut her dead in the street. I’m sure that’s what drove Susan away. I try to forgive my wife, but I can’t. I shall hang the painting in my study, I don’t care what she says.’
‘Who exactly did Susan leave with?’ asked Lady Rice. ‘I’m sure she didn’t leave alone.’
‘With the painter Alan Adliss,’ said Andrew Nellor.
‘Susan loved me but I had nothing to offer her. He’s rich and famous. But nobody understood her as I did.’
‘And little Roland?’ asked Angelica. ‘And little Serena? Did they go too?’
‘She took Serena but said she was taking Roland to his father. She said a boy needed its father.’
Lady Rice went down to the surgery, which Rosamund Plaidy now opened twice a week for four hours only. It was out-of-hours: the surgery was closed: when was it ever not? Lambert and little Roland sat upon the stone wall opposite. Little Roland was snivelling, ‘I want my mummy,’ he sing-sang. He was not an appealing child. The wail betokened petulance, not major grief, but what did Lady Rice know? She had no children of her own.
‘Just be glad,’ said Jelly White, ‘that the bitch has left town. And not with Edwin. Sooner or later you’ve got to wake up to this matter of Edwin and Susan.’
‘Bitch yourself,’ said Lady Rice. ‘Go away.’
‘Rosamund’s t
hrown me out,’ observed Lambert. ‘She went away with the kids and locked the door when Roland turned up. And Roland’s wet his pants and is smelling.’
‘Then break the door down,’ said Lady Rice.
‘I don’t feel like doing that,’ said Lambert. He was in no fit state to be left with a child. He, like Andrew Nellor, was unwashed and unshaven. ‘I haven’t been feeling too good lately,’ Lambert said. ‘I’ve kept to my bed a lot. I don’t blame Rosamund, I blame myself. You just don’t know, do you,’ he said, ‘when first you fuck your neighbour’s wife, the kind of thing that can happen. She took Serena round to Clive’s and Natalie’s. She says he’s Serena’s father.’
Lady Rice took Lambert and Roland home, since there seemed nowhere else for them to go. Edwin was still out. That was something.
Lady Rice put both Lambert and Roland to bed in the spare room at the top of the house and then slipped in beside them. She did this to keep them warm, no more, and provide them, and indeed herself, with some human comfort. Roland dived down to the bottom of the bed, to be further from these suddenly and unaccountably close adults. Lady Rice was fully clothed. So was Lambert. The night was cold; the spare room was at the top of the house, the one the chimney had fallen through in better days, where the heating, even though newly replaced, never quite reached.
‘Where’s Edwin?’ asked Lambert, shivering beneath the bedclothes, only vaguely aware of his surroundings, but trying to be polite. His face was flushed and unhealthy against white linen: yellow beard springing amongst pimples. Upset made him spotty, as if he were an adolescent.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lady Rice, ‘but at least Susan is with Alan Adliss. Sometimes I worry about Edwin and Susan.’
‘Susan never could get Edwin,’ said Lambert. ‘She tried, but she failed. She got all the men in the neighbourhood except Edwin; and he was the one she really wanted, because of the title, because of this house, because he stood out against her. She never liked you, Angelica, but she admired you. She didn’t understand the power you had over Edwin.’
‘I love him,’ said Lady Rice, and then heard Edwin clanking and calling about the house. She was too proud to get out of bed, and too tired and cold besides, and when Edwin burst in, kicking and shouting – behaving as if the door was locked when of course it wasn’t: it was just the ancient cross latch worked the way you wouldn’t expect, as he ought to very well know – there she was in bed with Lambert, albeit with so many clothes on, or such was her story, she could not reasonably be supposed to be sexually motivated. But Edwin assumed she was, and Lady Rice was not going to produce little Roland from under the bedclothes as chaperon: why should she, why would she?
‘Whore, bitch, slut,’ shouted Edwin, yanking her out of bed, hitting her, but leaving Lambert alone, as is often the habit of men who discover their wives with other men. They beat the woman but respect their rival.
Lady Rice walked straight out and went to her mother’s. The village took this as evidence of her deceit, her unfitness to be Lady of the Manor: and, besides, they had lost Susan, whom everyone liked, who ran the social scene, whose approval or disapproval counted: if Susan dropped by with a jar of marmalade, you were in; if she didn’t, you failed to exist, and, if you existed or if you didn’t, she took your husband as the tax you owed her.
The story went that Lady Rice, out of spite and jealousy, had driven Susan out. The finger of blame might swing wildly, but it was as if blame and Susan shared similar magnetic poles – they simply could never meet, no matter what. Come within a fraction of an inch, only to veer away.
‘I can’t really blame Angelica,’ said Edwin later to his stepmother Ventura Lady Cowarth, who repeated it to Lady Rice. ‘Her background was such that she could never live up to what is expected of her as mistress of Rice Court, or as wife and woman. And all the time Anthea was under my nose! We are entirely suited, Anthea and myself. My marriage to Angelica was a folly of youth. Somebody ought to have stopped me, really.’
And that was the end of that.
10
Morituri Te Salutant
And that was the end of that. The novel ended.
Those who are about to die salute thee. I, Ajax, have done my part. I have faced the past as Lady Rice could not, she being too busy with her disassociated personalities. Now I can retire again, my affidavit presented. I am a fine and competent fellow, and my misery it is to be thus confined in a female body. I could do all kinds of things to Lady Rice, if I chose. I could make her crow and strut about a bit; I could make her put on a collar and tie and be a lesbian; I could send her to seduce, shall we say, Anthea, or Susan – that would certainly work – but for that I’d have to elbow the harlot Angel out of the way, and I am nothing if not a gentleman; so I’ll allow the harlot to have her own way for a time. Lady Rice can be all angel and no Ajax.
The differing aspects of the self, the different times at which they live, begin to gather together. The places where they co-exist discover their significance.
Lodestar House stood empty for a time. Congo’s ghosts swept in and got him: one night they simply dived under his broomstick defences and nabbed him. Garotted by pirates, guillotined by revolutionaries, starved by communards, betrayed by his own heart, what difference does it make? Humiliation and pain accompanies death or does not; to try to guarantee the manner of one’s end is barely worth living this kind of life or that. Play safe as a wage slave, play fast and loose as a criminal, death ignores the justice of the matter. The wage slave can burn to death horribly on the motorway and be forgotten within the week; the evil man come to an easy end in his sleep, tucked up in bed with his wife, and the obituaries drift on and flatter, for since nothing is deserved in life, why should it be any different in death?
Part 4
Houses Disinhabited
1
Tensions
Sara, on another mission of mercy and self-interest both, arrived at Lodestar House to find Congo and Wendy dead. Tinkerbell finally got the old woman with her sparkler: that is to say a blood vessel had burst in Wendy’s brain. The executioner had apparently put away guillotine, blade and rope and decreed that Congo should die simply of a heart attack. Which one of the couple had gone first the coroner could not tell, but clearly the end of one had precipitated the end of the other. In such cases it is assumed that the older of the two dies first, which can affect the inheritance.
Tully was on the phone to Brian Moss immediately after the inquest. He’d had a word with the Coroner but it hadn’t worked. Wendy had left all her property to Congo, who had in turn left everything to his niece. As a result, Lodestar House would end up in the hands of the middle-aged, female manager of a tennis club in West London: a lesbian of the old school; a woman who kept Alsatian dogs, wore a cravat and was reputed to drink whisky from the bottle. Tully swore he would do murder rather than let this happen, and was inclined to sue Brian Moss for negligence.
‘Negligent? Negligent about what?’ asked Brian.
‘Not murdering the poor old lady before her natural time,’ said Jelly, removing his member from her mouth. ‘For allowing Lodestar House to slip away, like the life of its occupants. We must do this less often. It’s beginning to take up too much of your time.’
‘I have to remain faithful to my wife, I have to!’ moaned Brian Moss. ‘If I am not careful, I will become involved with you, and what kind of man falls in love with his secretary? I despise men who do it.’
Anxiety made his erection falter and Jelly was sent to search for Wendy’s will amongst dusty files. She came back to say she had just happened to come across further documents in the files relating to Lodestar House, and here they were. Brian Moss perused them, and declared that since the property had already reverted to Wendy’s daughter Una, the problem was solved. He rubbed his hands together and said, ‘Thank God the place won’t go either to Tully or to Congo’s niece. With any luck it will simply be held in probate till the end of time: no one’s heard of Una for decades.’
‘You’re just looking for trouble,’ complained Brian Moss. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you these days.’
‘You have,’ said Jelly, once again on her knees before Brian Moss. The three had capitulated to his advances, not without calculation. It suited them all. The girls afforded him the simple pleasure of fellatio at whatever office hour Brian Moss fancied – both parties seeing this as pleasant sexual gratification without profound personal obligation.
‘And we won’t be betraying his wife, poor woman,’ said Angelica. ‘Blow jobs don’t really count. It’s all give and no take.’
‘Better than no sex at all,’ said Angel. ‘I like it. Put cinnamon in his coffee, if it’s the taste that worries you.’
‘I like to see him out of control,’ said Jelly. ‘It’s about the only power I have. And I shall ask him for a rise.’
‘That won’t do any good,’ said Lady Rice.
She was right.
‘It would be sordid,’ said Brian Moss, with the pomposity with which this normally unpompous man approached financial matters. ‘Sleazy, even, to raise your wages in the light of this new relationship of ours. To do so would be to reduce you to the status of a whore. Presumably you’ll want to get married one day, Jelly: I’m sure you wouldn’t want to have any such blot upon your reputation. It’s always such a bore to have to live with secrets from the past; time bombs waiting to explode. I have one or two myself. No, better no secrets at all. Sex must never be exchanged for money: it reflects badly upon all involved. I’ll keep it to our lunch hour, if you like, so there’s no suggestion of office harassment. Presumably this activity of ours gives you as much pleasure as it does me or you wouldn’t be doing it.’
