Splitting (12 page)

“You’re easy enough with other men,” he said, “to all accounts. You’re only ever reluctant with me. Why?”

She was too surprised to say anything; too hurt, too proud, and—discovering she had enjoyed this assault on her dignity almost to the point of orgasm—too alarmed to protest. She got back into bed; he lay at the far side of it without touching.

“God, you’re a bitch,” he said, and then he fell asleep. To her own surprise, so did she.

L
ADY RICE, CRAVEN, CALLED
Susan the next day. “Susan, what’s the matter?” she said. “I thought we were friends. It’s ridiculous to suggest to Edwin that I set you up. I trust you; why can’t you trust me? I don’t even object if Edwin takes you home mid-dinner party and doesn’t come home till three. Much. What have I ever done to you, except be supportive, speak up for you, take your side—surely, after everything—”

“I don’t know what ‘everything’ you’re talking about,” Susan said. “I’ve never needed your support. Why should I need speaking up for? But we all have to pick and choose in life, don’t we? And some friends suit for a time, and then don’t. So we have to discard them. I hope you don’t think I’m being brutal. But that was no favor you did me last night. I no longer count you as a friend.”

“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’ve changed. You used to be good fun but you’ve become a jealous and closety sort of person. As for me and Edwin, men and women can be very close friends indeed without sex entering into it at all. But you don’t seem to understand that. And these days surely people aren’t expected to have to have friends in couples. Edwin’s my friend; you aren’t. Shall we leave it at that? We’ll smile and talk if we meet in a social situation, naturally, but that’s the limit of it. Don’t call me again.” 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 horsy headscarf damp with rain. Her hair fell over her eyes. She carried a riding crop, from a 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, to 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 bloodstock, 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.

“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 off drugs and 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. 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 rumor; that she, Lady Rice, trusted Edwin with her life; that she had to get back to her work, and re-print 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.

“I tried to tell you,” said Jelly, wearily. “Now don’t you go to pieces on me.”

“Just as well there was an abortion,” said another voice, consolingly. “Think of it like that.”

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. I’m not rich and famous as he is.

All the same, nobody will ever understand Susan as I did. She would have been happy with me.”

“Fine about the love,” said Angelica. “Pity about the wife. Did she take the kids with her or did she ditch them?”

“She told me she was taking Roland to his father. He needed discipline.”

Lady Rice went down to the surgery, which Rosamund Plaidy now opened only 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, who was in a bad, bad mood, “that the bitch has left town. And with someone else’s husband, not yours. Time you woke up, Lady Rice. You’re beginning to be a bore.”

“Go fuck yourself,” said a voice.

“Chance would be a fine thing,” said Jelly White, and there was a burble of hoots and jeers behind the voice which made Lady Rice’s hair stand on end. Whose were they?

“Rosamund’s thrown me out,” Lambert said to Lady Rice. “She went away with the kids. She locked me out when Susan dumped Roland on me. I haven’t got a key. 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, as if what a man felt like doing and what he did were one and the same thing. 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 neighbor’s wife, the kind of thing that can happen. She took Serena round to Clive and Natalie’s, and left her there. She says Clive’s Serena’s father. I expect Natalie’s hysterical again.”

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. And she was so tired. Little 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, the one the chimney had fallen through in better days, was at the top of the house, 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. I used to worry about Edwin and Susan.”

“No need,” said Lambert. “Susan never could get Edwin. She tried, but she failed. She got all the men in the neighborhood 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, as if this explained everything. Then she 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 which worked the way you wouldn’t expect, as he ought to very well know—and there she was in bed with Lambert, albeit with so many clothes on she could not reasonably be supposed to be sexually motivated. She was just, like Lambert, tired, cold and emotionally strung-out. But if Edwin assumed she was there with erotic intent, 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 Lady Rice 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, who after all has defeated them.

Edwin dragged Lady Rice down the stairs, sometimes by her hair, sometimes by an arm or a leg. She lost some clothing on the way. She hit her hand frequently on step and stone. Mrs. MacArthur stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched, aghast. “Help me,” cried Lady Rice, but Mrs. MacArthur did not. She had been at Rice Court when Angelica came and she sure as hell would be there when Angelica left.

“But I’m Angelica,” Angelica cried to her husband. “Don’t do this to me,” but he wasn’t listening.

Edwin pushed his wife out of the side door and locked it. She saw the little red security lights shining in the ancient stone walls.

“Told you so!” said Jelly. “But you wouldn’t listen.”

“Why didn’t someone tell me what was going on?” wailed

Angelica.

“I did my best,” moaned Lady Rice.

“I’ve lost fucking handfuls of hair,” complained someone else unidentifiable.

Edwin’s wife lay on the ground outside Rice Court and moaned and groaned, but no help came. She thought she might die of cold and exhaustion.

“Get up,” said Jelly.

“What’s the difference if I’m up or down?” said Lady Rice. “I’d rather be dead, anyway.”

“Well, I wouldn’t,” said Angelica. “So get up and start walking.”

“Where do I go?” asked Lady Rice.

“To Mum’s,” said Jelly. “Where else?”