by Fay Weldon
“Bitch!” hissed Jelly White.
The salesgirl pretended she had not heard: it was that or take on as an antagonist this lanky, limby, foul-mouthed, forceful, unsmiling, unpretty but attractive person, who would doubtless win any engagement.
“Enjoy,” was all the salesgirl said.
As Jelly White, Angelica took a three-day refresher course in computer technology, and brushed up her shorthand skills. She called Catterwall & Moss and determined that the firm who provided their secretarial staff was called the Acme Agency. She contacted them and produced references on Rice Estate headed paper signed by Robert Jellico, and from Rice Court signed by herself. Within weeks she organized herself a temporary post at Catterwall & Moss, and within days of arriving was working exclusively for Brian Moss, and had proper access to all Rice v. Rice files. With her new computer skills she deleted all references to the credit card she retained, other than those which automatically made payments as and when required. It was all perfectly simple.
As Lady Rice said, “At least it keeps me in touch with Edwin. I don’t feel so alone.” Jelly said, “I’m a prudent person. Forget the divorce, a gal needs something to fall back upon, and indeed into. Secretarial skills and Brian Moss’s arms are not to be sneezed at. What a pity he’s a married man!” Angelica said, “Jesus, you are both so wet!”
(2)
Lady Rice’s Petition
IN HER PETITION, LADY Angelica Rice alleged adultery between Anthea Box and her husband over a six-month period previous to the date on which she, Lady Rice, had left the matrimonial home.
Lady Rice claimed physical assault; over-frequent and perverted sexual activity which led to her humiliation; drunkenness, drug-taking and financial irresponsibility on the part of her husband; she asserted that her husband’s relationship with his dogs was of a sexual nature. She claimed she had been eased out of her home, Rice Court, to make way for Sir Edwin’s paramour, Lady Anthea Box. Lady Rice, on the other hand, had throughout the marriage been a good and faithful wife. Sir Edwin had behaved intolerably and she wanted this reflected in any property settlement. And she wanted her £832,000 back.
“An out-of-London court!” exclaimed Brian Moss, this seeming to be the part of Barney Evans’ letter-plus-enclosures which most affected him. “What a nightmare! I have no influence whatsoever in the provinces. A nod in London is simply not as good as a wink anywhere else. How ever are we to get this case settled? And how strange: the wife has claimed almost the same unreasonable behavior as has the husband.”
“I expect it’s because they were married so long,” said Jelly. “They can read each other’s minds.”
“Eleven years isn’t a long marriage,” said Brian Moss. “There was a couple in here the other day in their nineties wanting a divorce by consent. I asked them why they’d left it so long and they said they’d been waiting for the children to die.”
He laughed; a deep, hoarse, unexpected laugh at a pitch which made the many racing prints on the wall rattle, and Jelly laughed too, at his joke. Her tinkly little laugh made nothing rattle, but he pinched the swell of her bosom where it disappeared under her blouse. Just a little pinch; friendly.
“What do you think about the money?” asked Jelly.
“She hasn’t a hope,” said Brian Moss. “It’ll be so far buried in the Rice accounts it would cost her a fortune to get it out. And we’ll get Sir Edwin’s allowance reduced to zero for the nonce, so she can’t claim that either. The woman’s clearly a trollop and a bitch.”
Outside the elegant Regency windows, central London’s traffic flowed, or tried to flow. Only emergency vehicles seemed able to make progress—police, fire, ambulance. Their sirens approached, passed, faded, with enviable speed.
“I make a good living,” observed Brian Moss, “out of other people’s need to be in the right; they like to claim the privilege of being the victim. It helps to call her a trollop and a bitch if I’m doing her down, but who’s at fault in the Rice debacle is of no importance. The property is all that matters, and we’ll make sure she doesn’t get her greedy little fingers on too much of that. Clients assume that conduct during marriage will have an effect on a property settlement and steer it in the direction of natural justice, but it’s rash to make any such assumption. Or only in the most extreme cases.”
“You don’t see the Rice divorce as extreme, then? Merely run of the mill?” enquired Jelly.
“Very much run of the mill,” said Brian Moss, “other than that both parties do have to go to considerable lengths to hide their income.” It was fortunate, he said, for Sir Edwin that the Rice Estate had books of magical complexity. “I imagine it is,” said Jelly White placidly.
He loved her calmness, her interest in his work. If only his wife Oriole had the same. Oriole’s sweaters were covered in baby milk and vomit: she had new twins; she could think of nothing but babies. “Otherwise,” said Brian Moss, “it’s just a normal divorce. Both parties vie for the moral high ground, never noticing that a major landslip has already carried the whole mountain away. And both parties enrich me, thank God.”
“You are a very poetic kind of man,” said Jelly White, and Brian Moss caught up a little of her fair hair between his fingers and tugged, and she smiled obligingly, and Lady Rice sighed.
Thus Lady Angelica Rice had once smiled at Sir Edwin, her husband. Now Jelly smiled with measured guile, not an overflow of innocence. Trust and amiability had done Angelica Rice no good at all.
Lady Rice had a problem with lies and cunning. It was as well that Jelly White did not. Self-interest was intrinsic to her persona, and just as well, or they would all be alone, humiliated and penniless in the world. Someone had to earn the money.
(3)
The Velcro That Is Marriage
IN THE LONG SAD HOURS of her sleepless nights, Lady Rice, still lovesick for Edwin, still distracted by the end of her marriage, came into her own. The others left her. They slept and partly slept. They had to get up and go to work in the morning. Grief and remorse were luxuries. Dimly, they listened to her explanations, the account of herself she gave them.
“I was married to Edwin for eleven years, and the Velcro that’s marriage got well and truly stuck. The stuff is the devil to wrest apart; it can rip and tear if your efforts are too strenuous. The cheap little sticky fibers do their work well. ‘Overuse,’ they say, weakens Velcro. If ‘overused’—a strange concept: should you fasten only so often?—is there some moral implication here?—you can hardly get Velcro to stick at all. But I was not overused in the beginning. On the contrary. When Edwin and I married, when I stopped being Angelica White and became Lady Rice, I was seventeen and a virgin, though no one would have known it. Chastity is not usually associated with leathers, studs, boots, crops, whips and the more extreme edges of the pop scene which I then frequented. But my velcroing capacity to be at one with the man I loved, in spite of appearances, was pristine, firm, ready for service. Velcro hot off the loom. I ‘waited’ for marriage, as my father told me to. Extraordinary, in retrospect. So many opportunities lost! I blame you, Angelica: you were in charge in those days. When you abandoned me you left me with the habit of over-discrimination in sexual matters: as Lady Rice I had neither your appeal nor any sexual appetite. I was indeed a different woman to the one Edwin married, but didn’t realize it.
“On a good night, tucked up in my high, soft bed at The Claremont with its pure white, real cotton sheets, I see myself as an avenging angel. Then I laugh aloud at my own audacity and admire myself. Fancy getting a job with your husband’s lawyer’s firm! I have to thank you for that, Jelly. On a bad night, like this one, when the fine fabric of the pillows is so wet with my tears that the down within gets dark, matted and uncomfortable, when I feel tossed about in a sea of dejection, bafflement, loss—a sea that keeps me buoyant, mind you, made extra salty by my own grief—why, then I know I am just any other abandoned and rejected woman, half mad, worthy of nothing. Then I see that taking a job at Catterwall & Mos
s, in the heart of the enemy camp, is mere folly, presumption and insanity, and not in the least dashing, or clever or funny. And I worry dreadfully in case I’m found out: I don’t, totally trust you, Angelica, or even you, Jelly, to see me through it.”
In the early mornings, while Lady Rice slept from sheer emotional exhaustion, Angelica would in her turn confide in Jelly. “What a poor, passive creature Lady Rice is! This is what marriage has made of her. She’d lie about in The Claremont suffering all day if I let her. She wouldn’t even bother to answer Barney Evans’ letters. I, Angelica, am the one who has to get her to work each day, dress her up as Jelly White, take her to the gym, keep her on a diet, stop her smoking. I am, I like to think, the original, pre-married persona. Why she maintains she’s the dominant personality round here I can’t imagine. Perhaps it’s because she has a title: perhaps it’s because she can’t face the small-town girl that’s me, which is part of her and always will be. What do you think, Jelly?” But Jelly, wisely, was asleep. She actually had to go to work. She couldn’t afford to waste her energy arguing.
(4)
Lady Rice’s Sea of Sorrow
ON A BAD NIGHT LADY Rice rocks in a sea of sorrow, half-sleeping, half-dreaming. The sea is so salt with tears she can never sink: see how she is buoyed up by her own grief. Sometimes the sea grows wild and stormy, whipped by winds of anger, hate, violent resentments: how she turns and tosses then. She’s afraid: she will be sucked down into whirlpools; she will drown, she will drown, in a tempest of her own making. All she can do then is pray; much good it does her. Dear Father, dear God, save me from my enemies. Help me. I will be good, I will be. Let the storm cease. She takes a sleeping pill.
Ghostly barques glide by, in fog; pirates’ swords, the swords of wrath, glinting, slashing, disembowelling, castrating. Steady the mind, steady the hand, in case the sword turns against the one who wields it. Lady Rice is pirate and victim both. She knows it. The sea of sorrow, nevertheless, sustains and nourishes her. In her head it is called the Sea of Alimony. It might be on the moon, for all she knows, like the Sea of Tranquillity; she might be in her mother’s womb. She might be in some drowned church, knocking up against stone walls, as the current pulls her here and there; her father’s church. Certainly she is bruised, body and soul. Dear Father, dear God, forgive me my sins. Let the weight of Thy wrath depart from me.
Sometimes the Sea of Alimony is calm; the rocking sensuous, almost sweet. She is sorry then to surface. She is a mermaid, stunned, beached up upon the white sands of The Claremont’s delicate sheets, rolled back by waves into the sea, tossed up again, to surface with the dawn, to wake to the World of Alimony, Brian Moss, work, and the chafing parts of the self: but also to alimony, healing, sustenance. Grief nourishes; it is a drug; she is dependent upon it now: all three of her; or is it four? She sleeps as one, she wakes as many. The sea of sorrow sucks her in as one, whirls her down, washes her up fragmented—or is it the telephone which thus shatters her? A man’s voice.
“Good morning, Lady Rice. It’s seven thirty. This is your wake-up call.”
Lady Rice looks in her morning mirror at a face puffy with restless sleep: last night she did not take off her make-up. She collects cold water in cupped hands; it gushes plentifully from large-mouthed taps, antique or mock antique, who cares? The antique leak lead into the water, the new do not. Lead is good for the complexion, bad for the brain. She splashes her face; she does not use the white face flannels provided in some number. She despises them. They are too small. This morning she will despise anything. The handle comes away in her hand. Nothing is dependable, nothing is solid. She does not bother to call Housekeeping.
Lady Rice goes back to bed. But the voices in her head are loud again; clear enough to distinguish easily one from another; not pleasing this morning in what they say. She would rather just be in bed and weep: they won’t let her. They are full of reproaches, complaints, eggings on to action, all unwelcome. She is beached, beached. She has tried to incorporate these bickering women, these alter egos, back into herself; now she tries to regain her sense of self, but she can’t. She must listen to them, and answer them.
“It’s too bad,” moans Jelly. “Can’t you even clean our face off at night? This is the quickest way to a bad complexion, and you don’t even care.”
“I was tired,” explains Lady Rice feebly. “I’ve been so distressed by the divorce, surely I’m allowed to be tired.”
“You can’t afford to be tired,” says Angelica. “We’ve got to get out of this mess somehow. How are we going to live? You and your take-over bids. You can’t survive without us. Look what happened at Rice Court! We can’t stay in this hotel for ever. Sooner or later they’ll throw us out.”
“They’d never do that,” says Lady Rice. “I’m a member of the Rice family. Edwin would never let it happen.”
“Of course he would,” says Angelica. “You have a replacement. You’re old news. What does he care about you? Nothing as ex as an almost ex wife! The most hated object.” Lady Rice dissolves in further tears; the grief is harsh, not languorous.
“Get her up, for God’s sake,” says Jelly. “You have more influence than me. I hate being late for work. You just deliver me and go away. You don’t have to stand around to receive the flack.”
“I think if I had a fuck,” says the other voice, out of nowhere, “I’d feel better. Brian Moss will do very well. The only cure for one man is another man.”
“Who is that?” asks Jelly.
“She shouldn’t use that language, whoever she is,” says Angelica, shocked. “And surely we can do without a man for a month or so? Men are the source of the problem, not the cure.”
“I think it was I who said that,” says Lady Rice, remorseful. “I just came out with it. But now it’s said, it might be true.”
“Perhaps Brian Moss is our karma,” says Jelly cunningly. “So shall we just get up and go and meet our destiny?”
And Lady Rice finally drags herself from her bed, just to shut them up, since they won’t leave her alone. She can see they might make good company. She need never be lonely: and loneliness, for all that others speak of aloneness, is what she most fears. Once her feet are on the floor she resigns and Angelica cuts in.
(5)
Initial Transformations
ANGELICA ROSE AND DRESSED. She left for work in black leather jacket, black wig and dark glasses, looking not at all like Lady Rice—that wronged, tearful, virtuous, needy creature—but like the rather ferocious and determined mistress of some important guest at The Claremont. She carried a holdall in which, neatly folded (by Jelly: Jelly was good at folding, Angelica was not), were Jelly’s working clothes.
Angelica it was who would step into her chauffeur-driven, hired Volvo at exactly 7.48. Nearly every morning the car was there, parked in Davis Street. Nearly every morning she stepped in as Angelica, stepped out as Jelly. Once in the car, she would take off Angelica’s wig to reveal Jelly’s short, shiny, straight blonde hair: she would take off her leather jacket and put on a pale blue blazer with brass buttons, made in a cheap, uncrushable fabric. She would drag her hair back behind a pale pink satin headband, and hang a long string of artificial pearls round her neck, to fall over her tight, white woollen jumper. She wore a bra which under-played her breasts: the tightness of the sweater was more to do with fashion than sexuality. She would wipe off her more extravagant make-up and put on owl glasses. She would become Jelly White, with Angelica’s knowledge and consent.
But occasionally the Volvo was not there, not waiting in Davis Street when she left the hotel. The car service was stretched that time of the morning, they would explain. Or they were short of drivers; there was a flu epidemic. Could she wait? Half an hour, perhaps? And she could not, and would have to travel to work by public transport. Then she would make the ego change in a Ladies’ room at the Inns of Court, so boldly entering the passages marked “Private,” passing without shame through doors marked “Staff Only,” to find thi
s safe, high, private, empty, well-disinfected, still slightly odorous place, leaving with so prim and self-righteous a mien that in neither personality was she ever challenged.
But she preferred the back of the Volvo: the darkened windows, the stiff back of the driver the other side of the glass, leather upholstery made sticky by the contact of flesh, albeit her own.
And there she would be as Jelly White, she of the highly developed super-ego, the eye for detail, the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, and the self-righteousness, the priggishness, that goes with it; a clean, tidy, cologne-scented, apparently unambitious young woman with a self image not high, not low, but realistic, well aware of her Own virtues, her own faults; Daddy’s girl, the one who stays safe for his sake, who never ventures far, who marries someone reliable and nice on the right day at the right time, the one in whom incestuous desires are decently repressed, the one in whom deceit runs rampant, the one to whom lies come naturally, and are always justified, the one to whom rank and order of authority matter; Jelly, for this reason, fit to be underpaid and overworked, the one who stays late to get the mail done, who just occasionally pursues the flirtation with the boss, to sue for sexual harassment later. Office bait: a sweet smile, a gentle look, but an eye for the main chance. Daddy never frowned on that. “You get what you can out of it, my girl!”
“Never be the boss; no, use the boss.”
While you’re at the office, incognito, Jelly is the girl to be. No use being Angelica, anyway: life would be one long error, coffee spill and misfiling: one long chafing under instruction: a yearning for freedom, a throwing open of windows to let the air in, and letting wind and rain in instead, to everyone’s dismay.
