by Fay Weldon
Lady Rice. Angelica feels polluted and disgraced, but can see that if she could accept the male part of herself she would be a fuller, rounder, more effective person. The man has a good appetite: Angelica finds herself devouring hamburgers and chips, sausages and mashed potato. He orders beer. Angelica has bought some weights on the way home from work. She stands in front of the mirror and body-builds. Swing, lift, lower; swing, lift, lower.
“Stop it!” shrieks Angel. “I don’t want muscles. That’s the last thing a girl needs.”
“I’m too tired,” moans Lady Rice, “for all this.”
“Keep us healthy,” Jelly concedes. “We don’t get enough exercise.”
“Sex is the best exercise there is!” says Angel. “We get plenty. What, do you want more? I’m easy!”
Three times a week they go with Ram to the car-park. He picks them up three-quarters of an hour early so they’re not late for Brian Moss. On the other mornings he’s booked for other regulars—though none, he assures them, that involve his sexual services. They all begin to like him really quite a lot.
Swing, lift, lower; swing, lift, lower: there’s no stopping Angelica. She waits till the others are asleep. Listens.
“Hi,” she says. “Who are you?”
“An A, a J, an A, add X, the unknown factor.”
“Ajax,” she says.
“Ah-ha!” he says. “So what’s your problem?” and is gone.
Angelica thinks about her problem and comes up with an answer. It’s this: “Call my problem X and solve it. Too many Xs for a simple equation: quadruple equation either. X = ex.
“Ex-virgin, ex-pop star, ex-wife, ex-socialite, ex-convent girl, ex-everything, ex-everyone, that’s me: primarily ex-daughter of a radio ham. When Daddy wasn’t running the Barley school choir he was up in the small back study, where Lavender never went, surrounded by banks of electronic equipment, tangled in wires, deafened by headphones, in touch with others everywhere just like him, who’d rather say ‘hi’ to a perfect stranger, and ‘well, have a nice day’ to a ship’s telegrapher, than kiss his wife or cuddle his child. Daddy, Daddy, speak to me! I can’t my darling, my angel, I’m saving ships at sea. What ships, Daddy, what sea? I don’t know, my darling, my angel, but sooner or later, if I search the airwaves long enough, I’ll rescue someone, somewhere, and you’ll be proud of me. In the meantime, sweetheart, just leave Daddy in peace.
“Are you Daddy’s darling or Mother’s little helper? God knows.
“My problem is I feel as Zeus, must have before Athena burst out of the top of his head. The pressure on me is tremendous: the others sleep, I cannot; I am an insomniac; guilt and anxiety stop me sleeping: velociraptors, velcro-raptors prowl within my head, as well as my sisters’. A black band as if the head itself were a hat, begins to confine and tighten. The whole bulging swarm of identities is getting a terrible headache and I’m the one who feels it. Something has to give.
“I repeat: I can’t live for ever in an hotel room, no matter how grand and marble-lined, so pinkly frilled, so golden brown its furniture and exquisite its fitments, so profoundly desired its address, so lordly my fellow guests. I can’t just live here under a false name, growing alternative personalities as if they were pot plants, feeding them, nurturing them for lack of anything else to do, while I wait and wait for my life to resolve itself, for the legal profession to catch up with itself; all because it suits Edwin to claim I committed adultery with my erstwhile best friend Susan’s lover Lambert. Lies, all lies! What really happened is that Edwin wanted to marry Anthea, and organized my exit from his life. Edwin was tired of me, that was all. What I thought was marriage, would endure for all our life because apart we were nothing but together we were something, oh yes, something, was just Edwin’s way of growing up. I hate Edwin now for what he did to me, for the loss of my faith in the goodness of people; he has stolen my capacity for love, and doesn’t care enough for me, doesn’t remember me clearly enough, even to discuss the matter with me. Used and abused, that’s me, but, worse still, forgotten.
“Or look at it another way: I am the twisted cord of a telephone wire: dangle it and watch the rapidity with which it untwists itself; so rapidly indeed that it then twists the other way, almost as badly, and who then has the patience to wait for it to settle? Not me, whoever I may be. I’d rather wrench the whole thing from the wall and go cordless. But how can I shake off these others, who travel with me wherever I go?
“Too much unravelling, that is my problem. Too many exes, and too much unravelling. Of course I have a headache.”
Still there was no response from Ajax.
Angelica thinks that perhaps a bath may soothe her. The baths at The Claremont are deep, wide and made of marble. They are also, she notices, difficult to clean. She takes the scouring powder from the cupboard beneath the basin, and with the help of a damp facecloth, stretches to reach the section the maid has failed to clean and, when she straightens up, catches her head on the shower fitment.
She staggers to the bed. She lies down. Her headache is much, much, much worse.
(13)
The Perforated Personality
“I’VE BEEN OBSERVING THE phenomena,” said Ajax, in cultured tones over Angelica’s breakfast. “And I have some observations to make. Angelica, Jelly and Angel are not three split-off parts of Lady Rice, as she supposes. No. All are equals. Each can and should be held responsible legally, fiscally and spiritually for the others. There is no question here of the one hand not knowing what the other is doing; one personality dominant, controlling lesser ones, capable of taking the others by surprise. In classic cases of split personality, respectable A will wake in the morning and discover herself, say, bruised and smeared with honey, or in strange clothes and with sums of money in her pocket, be puzzled and distressed, and have no notion at all of what her other persona B was up to during the night, or where B went, or what she did—indeed have no idea that B even exists. But B does exist and, what is more, exists alongside, quite probably, C, D and occasionally emerging others, E, F and G; who will either know all about the others, or know nothing, about the others, or have some degree of knowledge, depending on whether they are, as it were, on A or B’s team, and to what degree trusted by their controllers. The main split, the A/B split, lies between the steady, the good, the nice and the cautious, and the licentious, delinquent, spiteful and spontaneous.
“In the case of Lady Rice, the split is better described as a perforation: not yet complete: a rather extreme case of voices in the head. Only if torn will the actual split occur, as when you tear your round Road Tax disc from its embracing square. As it is, if Angelica murders someone, Jelly and Angel cannot be excused: they ought to have controlled her, and had the capacity so to do. If Jelly develops repetitive strain injury at Catterwall & Moss, Angelica and Angel can hardly complain: it was their own fingers they overworked, in excessive zeal. If Angel gets herpes, or AIDS, Angelica and Jelly can hardly be surprised: they should not have colluded: the truth is that they, too, were sexually tempted. The three must, and should, take their place together, as one, in the eyes of the world even if, among themselves, they continue to hold endless speculative conversations. A phenomenon not yet clinical, and with any luck never to be clinical. Each knows everything about the other and individual parts continue to make up a recognizable whole. The square still contains the circle. So far. “Now the conglomerate persona that consists of Angelica, Jelly and Angel, which on marriage formed itself into Lady Rice, received nothing but affection and kindness—so far as any parent is capable of wholly admirable and pure behavior—from her parents Lavender and Stephen White. Evil, psychosis, trauma, do not necessarily fit the equation; they are not necessary to the creation of a perforated personality. Split is clinical and distressing, morbid: perforation is a far more common occurrence. Many of us suffer from mild perforation, a vague feeling of disassociation, the gentle murmuring of voices in the head. Poor me, poor me, with variations: for example, I don
’t know what came over me! It happens to the most sensitive, not those most oppressed by worldly misfortune.
“To be thus divided into three is what many women report. When they stare at themselves in mirrors, twirl on delicate toes, they are Angelica: when they go to work, industriously, impersonally, they are Jelly: when they go to the bad, take another drink, smoke an illicit joint, leave the child un-babysat, leap at the genitals of another sex, why then they are Angel. They sign their letters ‘Lady Rice’ with a kind of conjoined formality.
“When a woman says, ‘If only I could find myself,’ all three. personae speak at once: they feel over-Jellyfied, Angelicized, or Angelated, and don’t like it: they search for a balance. “When she says, ‘I must fulfill myself,’ it is the Jelly in her speaking (looking up from her work, wondering what the matter is, deciding it’s lack of babies), trying to leave Angelica behind and get Angel out of her system somehow. “When women keep husbands as pets to fetch their handbags, won’t have sex with them and affect a general air of moral superiority, then Angelica predominates. It is Angelica who says all men are rapists at heart and are nasty, messy, aggressive creatures in general. Animals!”
“When a woman runs off with her best friend’s husband and says this thing is bigger than me, or all I have to do is snap my fingers and I’ll have your boyfriend, why that’s Angel, and she probably will have him. Beware. Her heart is kind, but her passions are great and her morals few.
“Lady Rice has ‘trouble coming to terms with her situation,’ as the newspaper therapists calmly put it; that is to say giant stars in her psyche implode and black holes yawn: reeling, she takes refuge in Angelica, Jelly, Angel.
“You will notice,” says Ajax, “that I leave myself out of the equation. The three of you make one. But I am male, separate and indivisible. And I am in charge round here.” There is a stunned silence from the women. “Angelica,” says Jelly, “put that man away at once.”
“I’ll try,” says Angelica.
“It isn’t decent having a man in here anyway,” says Lady Rice. “It makes me feel very peculiar.”
“I like it,” says Angel. “He makes me feel ever so sexy. You don’t have to listen to what he says. He’s only a man.”
But Ajax has gone anyway. Angelica tries to locate him. Somewhere she hears shouts and bellows, and the creak of ships’ timbers, and the call of sea birds, and the sound of sword upon shield comes to her ears, and the crashing of wave upon rock, as if Ajax the Hero, Ulysses’ friend and compatriot, was taking over from Ajax the expert on Multiple Personality. More fun, perhaps: a more active and satisfactory life for a brawny, full-blooded man than trying to share a head with three women, and lecturing them on their condition.
Jelly does not go to work that day. Angelica is too fretful to get Lady Rice out of bed. Ram waits fruitlessly at the hotel entrance. Even Angel can’t be bothered with thrills. The whole personality shudders and shakes; it has been more upset than it knew by the sudden eruption of Ajax out of Angelica, and by his clinical definition of their state. Everything was easier when it was undefined.
“Trust a man,” weeps Lady Rice. “I need Edwin to look after me and he isn’t here to do it any more. I’m on my own!”
The others don’t even have the energy to explain yet again that she is not.
But it is true that times are worsening. Trauma approaches. And from whence and how will rescue come? The union soul is under attack; the confederation falters; the flag is torn—poor Lady Rice can’t tell good from bad, nothing seems real, nothing can be trusted, her past has become meaningless, her future is obscured; even friends are no longer friends. The very plates from which she was accustomed to eat are apparently not hers at all, but Rice family heirlooms, or so Sir Edwin writes to Brian Moss. Lady Rice has no access to her satin sheets, neatly folded in the master bedroom press; worse, her rival Anthea leans up against piles of healthy, folded, natural fabric in the second floor linen room to be pleasured by her husband. If the linen room is now reckoned to be haunted, and Mrs. MacArthur will not now go into it unaccompanied, because of a chilly feeling in the air and prickles up her spine, it is not surprising. Anthea and Edwin notice nothing: the warmth of their passion overwhelms everything.
Poor Lady Rice. See how now she goes through her life stunned, flickering out of one persona, into another, as men and women do when they discover that concepts of love, of home, of permanence, are not placed on rock, but on shifting sand. When the Velcro splits and tears and the trousers and the knickers fall down and everyone laughs, even those who live in luxurious hotels can be pitied.
No wonder people put their trust in Jesus. Jesus never fails. Upon this rock this Church is built, if only you can overlook a little historical evidence, a South Sea scroll or two. South Sea Scroll, that phrase being the melding of South Sea Bubble, that great financial scandal, and the Dead Sea—that arid waste, that bitter pond. South Sea Scroll, article of lost faith.
Alimony is the rock, in Lady Rice’s eyes, on which such future as she can have will be founded; Angelica planning, Jelly working, Angel fucking, Ajax irritating.
(14)
Breaking Out
LADY RICE, THAT PERFORATED, split personality, that collection of identities loosely bound in the one body, sat in The Claremont in her silk wrap, bought from the hotel boutique, paid for on Sir Edwin’s credit card, looked in her mirror, felt lonely, wept and could no longer contain herself. “I can’t stand it!” she cried, and indeed she could not. Most people say they can’t stand it, and lie: they do stand it, having no choice. But the spasms of emotional pain that overwhelmed Lady Rice were so intense that she was driven not out of herself but into more of her selves. Perforations deepened.
“Pull yourself together, for God’s sake,” Jelly said to Lady Rice, out of the mirror. But she added, more kindly, “It’s been a long, hard day.”
“In future,” said Angelica, “we’ll go home by bus, not Underground. It’s easier on the nerves. And do stop crying, before our eyes get red and puffy. Jesus! What a sight!”
“Let’s go downstairs to the bar,” said Angel, “and make out with some rich businessman. Have a fun night out, some sex—good or bad; I grant you that’s a risk. We’ll score if we can and make ourselves some money.”
“Score?” asked Lady Rice. “Drugs,” said Angel. Lady Rice uttered a little scream.
Lady Rice found herself looking out her best lingerie and trying it on, while Jelly agitated.
“You’ll do no such thing,” said Jelly. “You need a good night’s sleep. You have to go to work in the morning,” at which Angel pinched Jelly’s arm and left a nasty little bruise, so Jelly shut up, while Angelica just looked on in horror, and Lady Rice screamed again and collapsed altogether into her separate parts and there seemed nothing left of her at all.
She lay down on the bed and left it to the others to get on with the night.
(15)
Angel’s Outing
THE BARTENDER SMILED AT Angel. He was young and Greek; he had soft brown eyes, a snowy white shirt and tight trousers; he leapt about from one end of the bar to the other at the behest of his slow-moving customers. Angel, considering his small, muscular buttocks, actually licked her lips. She allowed the edge of her small pink tongue to show, running around her carmined mouth.
Angelica seldom wore make-up; Jelly went in for soft shadings and a discreetly artificial look; Angel just liked lots and lots of everything. Her skirt was up at her thighs, her silver shoes high-heeled; her midriff showed: black leather jacket fastened with an enamelled rose, the kind of thing a sheik might buy at Aspreys for a very lucky girl.
The barman nodded to an empty table in the panelled corner softly lit. The bar was done out in tasteful pinks and greys. Angelica loathed it, Jelly loved it, Angel didn’t notice, excited even by the feel of her own tongue on her own lips. Who cared now about Edwin, marriage, injustice, alimony, law: all that was another world:
“I’m supposed to di
scourage single ladies,” said the barman, “but business is so bad you could only do it some good.”
Jelly began to say that this was outrageous—an affront to her principles, if not single women then why single men?—but Angelica and Angel made her hold her tongue. Angel sat down with her drink, and casually slid her skirt even further up her legs, stretching them to show them to advantage. The elderly, well-coupled rich who this evening, more’s the pity, frequented the bar, looked, and looked away, and the wives looked at the barman for help, but he had his back to them, and a couple of the husbands sneaked a speculative after-glance or so.
“Oh God,” said Jelly, “this is so crude and shameful.”
“What do you expect?” asked Angelica, bitterly. “Angel’s a very crude person.”
“She’ll be sorry in the morning,” said Jelly. “That’s all I can say. We all will.”
“Just shut up, the pair of you,” said Angel, hitching open her leather jacket so that more swelling bosom was revealed. “I certainly won’t be sorry.”
“I don’t believe this,” said Jelly. “Angelica, this is intolerable.
Shall we go?” and Angelica made an effort and stood up, but the stiff drink had weakened her legs—Lady Rice rarely drank anything stronger than tonic water—so she had to sit down again quickly.
At last two possible prospects, two on-the-face-of-it heterosexual men without women, came into the bar: they were in, she supposed, their late forties, solid, red-faced, probably American; not the suave, moneyed, boardroom types on better days to be found in the bar, nor the eloquent, quick-moving, dangerous Arabs who moved in groups, liked a big-breasted girl and possessed her in order of precedence, status: no, these were, say, engineers: they’d have started out as practical men, good with their hands, and ended up on the executive floor; steak-and-chips men, not the caviar kind; prone to simple human affections, to weeping not beating; they’d have solid, plain wives whom they loved; they shuffled and grinned foolishly, more at home in the bar than the nightclub. Angel sighed.
