by Fay Weldon
Jelly conceded that she might, albeit unknowingly, have provoked him, and consented to go back to work.
Brian Moss told Jelly a little about his wife, Oriole, whom he loved but who was so forgetful she would never even remember to comb her hair in the mornings, and would collect his older children by a previous marriage from school in a car into which she’d forgotten to put petrol. She was a danger to them. Once she’d left the iron on so it burned right through a ceiling; it was a regular occurrence for Oriole to let the bath overflow.
“Would that count as unreasonable behavior in a divorce court?” Jelly asked, and Brian Moss looked quite disconcerted at the thought, and said he and Oriole were Catholics so there was no question of that anyway. But she now understood why he watched her own smooth, quick, certain movements with a kind of longing, a subdued passion for what was effective, efficient and reliable. She was pleased to see it. It was part of herself which had never in the past been properly appreciated.
Jelly worked late; so did Brian Moss: both of them in their separate rooms. The building was darkened. Computer screens gave off a luminous sheen; pot plants seemed to breathe, and to swell and diminish minutely with each breath.
Jelly could feel Angel whispering and nudging her: saying, “Look, here’s your chance. Do something! Strip off: just leave on your suspender belt and stockings. Very nice too. And then just walk like that into Brian Moss’s office.”
“But why?” Jelly asked. “What would be the point of that?”
“You’d end up with a rise,” said Angel. “No pun intended. And you could make him do what you want.”
“You are just disgusting, Angel,” said Angelica. “You’re not really here to earn a salary, anyway,” murmured Lady Rice. “Our original plan was to interfere with the natural course of justice, so I get some kind of decent alimony from Edwin.”
“And you’ll as likely find yourself fired by morning,” said Angelica.
“What about revenge?” asked Angel. “Edwin’s having a good time with Anthea. Anthea’s living in our house, sleeping in our bed—aren’t women meant to get their own back?”
“Don’t make me think about it,” said Lady Rice, bile rising in her throat.
“Brian Moss could stop you thinking about it,” said Angel. “He could stop you thinking about it for at least twenty minutes. Think how well Ram did only this morning. If one man fancies you, another man will. Make the most of it.”
“Brian Moss has a wife at home,” said Jelly. “I don’t do things like that. I don’t go with married men. Because Lady Rice is unhappy, why should Oriole Moss be unhappy, too?”
“For that very reason,” gritted Angel, bad Angel, avenging angel, in Jelly’s ear. “If you spread the misery wide, you make it thinner for yourself,” and Angel bit into the base of Jelly’s thumb so hard there was a mark for days, almost as sore as her breasts where Ram had pecked and nibbled at them.
“I won’t do any such thing,” said Jelly. “Angelica is right. I’d only get fired. That’s what happens in office romances.”
“This is not an office romance,” gritted Angel. “It is you fucking your boss in your own best interests.”
“No,” said Jelly.
“But I want to. I mean to,” yelled Angel in her head, drowning out reason. “I want Brian Moss now, you mean old bitch, and I’ll have him.”
“Shut up,” said Jelly, biting the other thumb. Lady Rice was humming to herself somewhere else; some sad, melancholy, typical tune. “Don’t put this pressure on me. I’m tied to the mast, understand? And I’m not listening to you. I can cope with Lady Rice, I can cope with Angelica, but you, Angel, I can tell you’re a menace! Get out of my life!”
“That’s right, blame me!” shrieked Angel. “Hang me up by my thumbs. After all I did for you! You’d never have had the nerve and you know you loved it, all of you.”
“I’m going home now,” called out Brian Moss to Jelly White. “Must be home to bathe the babies.”
“That’s fine,” called his secretary in reply. “I’ll turn the lights off and set the alarm.”
Brian went home by train. Jelly took the subway, squashed with a thousand others into a space fit for a hundred, the smell of despair adding humidity to the air she breathed. How do I escape, how do I not do this? How not to be herded, squashed, insulted, abused? See, there’s the hem of my coat caught in the door: it will brush through the soot of ancient tunnels; that woman’s high heel driving between my toes, removing skin; that man’s crotch, that woman’s arse, rubbing against mine. We share the same torment, rebreathe each other’s air, use the strategies of the traumatized to escape all remembrance of the journey: the slaves were whipped to the pyramids, simply for the fun of it, the pain of it, for a whipped slave works half as well, but a man must know when he’s beaten. So have his masters from the beginning of time insisted on the humiliation of their workforce. These days, through their Lodges and Confederations, they have got together over champagne and devised the public transport they never travel in to whip the workers to work: and are not jobs short and is not the living hard and precarious, and who can argue any more?
Do we not suffer?—the multi-voiced air of the subway rose to heaven, spoke to heaven—Who will save us? But there came no reply. Suffering does not necessarily suggest its own relief: because things start does not mean they must end: oppression does not necessitate the rise of the hero, nor sin its savior. And besides, everyone disliked each other too much to do anything about any of it. White hated black, black hated white, and all stations in between: parent hated child, child hated parent; police hated citizen, citizen hated police, man hated woman, woman hated man, the old hated the young, the young hated the old, and everyone hated the uniformed staff who cried aloud, “Mind the doors, please,” and sometimes with a strong hand in the middle of some wretch’s back—serve them right!—shoved yet another human unit to judder up against the sighing, sodden, juddering mass inside. In London, in Tokyo, in Moscow, or New York, Johannesburg or Toronto, in Seoul and Samarkand in the rush hour it is the same.
Brotherly love comes in off-peak hours.
Thus Jelly traveled to Bond Street Station, where she alighted. By the time she arrived at The Claremont she imagined she would, as usual, be Lady Angelica Rice again, albeit incognito, albeit with bruised and painful breasts and a sore chin and a bitten thumb. It had been a long day, starting with Ram, ending with jam. Angel laughed at the thought. She loved a pun. She skittered into The
Claremont and the doorman looked after her, not recognizing her as Lady Rice, and wondering what agency she was from and why he had no commission for her. His normal introduction fee was 10 percent.
“We can’t live at The Claremont for ever, paying our bill by false pretences,” said Angelica to Lady Rice.
“A girl needs her own house and home, if only to put a red light above the door,” said Angel, “and write ‘model’ by the bell. You can’t do that in a hotel.”
“I want a nice little apartment somewhere,” said Jelly, “which
I can make my own, where I can get my life going again. Why don’t we just accept Edwin’s offer; it would be so much easier than all this? Just give up and start over. I hate living off men anyway.”
But Lady Rice wasn’t listening. She was home and weeping again.
(10)
Postcoital
LADY RICE CONTINUES TO brood on the subject of alimony. Lady Rice will not let herself be deflected by Angel, who is really only a source of entertainment, though Lady Rice at least now appreciates the usages of sex. Lady Rice still wants her pound of flesh, but is grateful to Angel for trying. Nor will she listen to Jelly, who is beginning to say if this divorce drags on and on in uncertainty, her health will begin to suffer. She sees the temptation to cry “enough, enough” and just give in, but she won’t. She is stubborn, and angry.
To do without anger, Lady Rice explains to her subsisters, would be to do without the nourishment sh
e has come to depend upon. These days she relies on the bread of outrage, well spiced by bitter gall rising to the throat. It is bread well-buttered and well-slavered with hatred of Anthea, Unholy, unhealthy emotions all, but satisfactory, better than misery: anger is the knife between the teeth of the embattled warrior; an unchancy weapon, metal against ivory, sharp edge turned outward, but, of course, if you fall, that’s what disembowels you—your own enmity, forget the enemy. Hate, like sex, is an addiction, explains Lady Rice: you feel you can live on it for ever; that you’re born one fix of hatred under par; but of course all the time it’s enticing you, luring you, killing you. And it can kill you quick, if you overdose, as heroin does: you can choke pretty fast on your own bile. It’s the opposite of a quiet death—it’s death by intemperance, spite, righteous anger, the nausea of revulsion. Or else it can kill you slowly; you can retreat howling, as Jelly did in the Volvo, parking in a concrete stall, leaving the field to others, licking obviously fatal wounds, a savage beast holed up in a rancid cave, pitiful, dying but dangerous.
If anyone demonstrates kindness, Lady Rice sneers, she who once gave such nice dinner parties; if anyone goes near, the creature will repay that kindness, that approach, by tearing the innocent to bits in its death throes. Beware the howling of the injured. Angel, don’t feel too safe in the body you think you control. You may be out of your depth. Jelly does nothing to annoy; Angelica is almost a friend; but Angel has left Lady Rice with her knicker elastic snapped and Lady Rice may not like it; let Angel not rely too much on the gratitude of Lady Rice, divorcee-in-waiting. Lady Rice speaks nicely but let even her own sisters beware. Not push her too far. on
(11)
Alimony as Justice
LADY RICE, NOW SHE has the knack of it, sends her spirit out to her lawyer, so that he will believe her and represent her interests better. He sleeps and snores beside his grey-haired wife, who dreams of lovers she has never known. Lady Rice speaks for all of her.
“We need alimony! We want nourishment: we are cracking and splitting. We are thin and brittle for lack of love: we have lost two stone in six months. If our husband won’t recognize our rights, then society must come to our aid: law courts and lawyers must stand in for a corrupted individual conscience. Your duty is great, Barney Evans.
“We are not motivated by vengeance or greed. On the contrary. No. Our plea is that if the scales of justice are to remain in balance there must be brought into existence, recreating itself moment by moment, the proper, decent, material reflection of ‘spiritual good.’ Lost goods—in this case love, illusion, hope (worse than lost, this latter: stolen!) have an equivalent in money; this equivalent needs to be paid monthly to the end of time. That is to say, ‘in her lifetime,’ which for the individual, of course, is the same thing. Alimony!
“The great and complex construct which is marriage—a construct made up of a hundred little kindnesses, a thousand little bitings back of spite, tens of thousands of minor actions of good intent—be they the saving of a face, the interception of an ant, the plucking of a hair, the laughing at a bad joke, the overlooking of errors, the forgiveness of sins—this cannot, must not, as an institution, all be brought down in ruins. Let the props be financial; if this is all that remains, they have to be so.
“If we—by whom I mean myself(Lady Rice), Angelica, Jelly and yes, I fear, Angel—don’t get alimony from Edwin, the whole caboodle will crumble: I can feel it. A lot rests on this. The stars themselves will implode. The scales which balance real against unreal will be shoved so far out of kilter they will tip and topple and the point of our existence, and therefore existence itself, will be gone. We will all vanish like a puff of smoke. Or implode like a collapsing marshmallow man. In the end it is money which keeps us in being, inasmuch as money is the only recognized good we have: being both abstract and real. You cannot live off justice, but you can live off money.”
Barney Evans slept. The beast slouched by outside the windows, its moon-shadow clear. It was real though Lady Rice was not: it had at this moment more corporeal existence than she. Mrs. Evans moaned in her sleep: the good dreams were turning bad.
“I know we can fail,” said the spirit of Lady Rice to the sleeping lawyer. “A Court might decide, as Edwin hopes it will and as you tell me often enough, that we’re perfectly well equipped to look after ourself, and since the doctrine of No Fault prevails in our divorce courts, and the great injustices one human being can render to another are now apparently neither here nor there, the Court may say what the hell, who is this hopeless wife, this ex-pop star who never rode to hounds at her husband’s side, who was found in bed with her best friend’s husband?—who can possibly believe her account of how she got to be there, or how little happened in it?—give the woman nothing! Yes, they are capable, I hear, of awarding the four of us nothing at all. Should all my hopes for justice fail, how will any of us live? Why, as the birds do, do I hear you say?—picking at nothing. We could always take to blackmail. We may yet have to. A word or two in a media ear would have the whole flock of them down like starlings. Do you want that?”
Barney Evans snuffled. Mrs. Evans’ eyes flew open. She woke Barney. “There’s someone in the room,” she said. But of course there was no one. “I have to be in Court tomorrow,” he grumbled and went back to sleep, but before he did they embraced cosily.
“Blackmail’s out of fashion,” Jelly’s employer Brian Moss happened to say to her the next day, “because no one’s ashamed of anything any more,” and she nodded and smiled politely but thought, “what do you know?” Other people’s imaginations clearly didn’t run the way hers did. These days she had a pocket full of floppy discs, stolen from the files, the way others had pockets full of rainbows, or claimed to. She’d take home to The Claremont in her shopping bag files containing letters and transcripts of bugged conversations, depositions and affidavits from many sources, and not just those relating to Rice v. Rice, matrimonial. People do chatter on to their solicitors, and Jelly was beginning to take an interest in someone other than herself, or selves. The great thing about employment, as Lavender White always used to say, is that it takes a girl away from the personal.
As for Lady Rice, she doesn’t react much, can’t react: she is too eaten up with anger to marvel at anything, even her alter ego Jelly’s delinquency, or Angelica’s pickiness, let alone Angel’s whorishness. Lady Rice likes to rant on about justice, and finds some relief in it, but is still not relieved of the burden of sexual jealousy. She makes herself contemplate the reality of her husband in the arms of another, but familiarity with the source of distress, looking it in the” eye, unflinching, does not weaken it as it is meant to. It makes it worse. Still jealousy rages: it gives her a pain in her midriff: it exhausts her.
But what Lady Rice can now see, at least, thanks to Angel, is that when it comes to it she’s no lady.
(12)
An Unbelievable Narrator
THE STRESS OF LIVING at The Claremont on stolen credit cards is telling on Angelica. When the phone goes, she jumps. Supposing it’s the management, telling them they must move on? They will be found out, thrown out, punished, disgraced!
Angelica has always lived in fear of being found out. Never mind how much money she has in the bank, if the telephone behind the grille buzzes while she’s at the counter she thinks the call must relate to her—she’s been discovered as an imposter.
Angel loves to order champagne and endless club sandwiches from room service. Angelica, for no good reason, feels she will be safer if she orders Coke and Danish pastries. Lady Rice can only pick at a steamed lobster. Angel offers to seduce the bellboy who brings these goodies so he forgets to charge them if that makes Angelica feel safer, but Angelica shudders and declines. A great deal of food is ordered, but very little eaten.
Lady Rice signs the account the Hotel Manager proffers weekly, and Jelly waves him away. So far, it seems, the account is accepted and paid without question, however unwillingly, by the Rice Estate. Angelica moans and groan
s about theft and cheating.
But Angelica has been hearing other voices in her head. The one most predominant is male, she’s sure of it. It happens when the others are sleeping. The voice is preoccupied with Robert Jellico’s sins and self. It drones on, creating a rumbling background of aggressive discontent.
“I’d like to ram a red-hot poker up Jellico’s arse,” grumbles the voice. “I’ll do it. I will. I’ll get him. He’ll rue the day he was ever born. The man’s a thief, as well as a criminal; ought to be strung up, crucified. I’m on your side, baby. If anyone gives you a hard time, let me know … I’ll tear his eyes out for you …” and so on. Sometimes the voice becomes brisker and more intelligent, the threats and imprecations more subtle. It is as if the new self—which Angelica fears it is—is looking for some definite, suitable, and lasting identity before making itself properly known.
She does not tell the others. She is ashamed to have a male inside her, part of herself, as Angel turned out to be part of Lady Rice. What will they think? She feels unnatural and debased.
Angelica finds herself trying to mend the gold taps in the marble bathroom, fixing the shower, instead of waiting for Housekeeping to come along and do it. She has wrenched the, fitments unnecessarily hard and broken them. She has kicked the television because by so doing she can make it change stations without need of the remote control.
“What are you doing?” begs Jelly. “You are breaking the place up. Are you losing your wits?”
Angelica laughs hollowly.
“Cheap muck!” complains the voice. “God, this place is a rip-off. You know all this marble is plastic veneer?”
“Who’s that?” asks Lady Rice suspiciously. “Just me in a bad mood,” says Angelica, but she knows it isn’t true. A man is taking shape inside her, as Angel took shape in
