Splitting (2 page)

“You’re too young,” said Angelica’s mother at once. But too young for what, she didn’t say. Edwin was twenty-one to Angelica’s seventeen.

“You don’t trust me,” said Angelica. “You never have. You treat me like a child.” She’d been saying that since she was twelve, when a film company had moved into the village to make Hardy’s
Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Nothing had been the same after that.

“You are a child!” said Mrs. Lavender White. “For all the rings you have in your nose.” Angelica at that time had twelve in each ear as well as the two in each nostril, but Mrs. White had got used to those. It was the rings in the nose she worried about: they might result in disfigurement. And where else did her daughter have them? It didn’t bear thinking about. “If it interests you, I’ve met a man, too, just like you.”

“But Dad’s only been dead a year,” said Angelica, upset.

Widows are meant to fade away; they should keep a low profile for the sake of their kids. That way everyone knows who’s where.

“Your father wouldn’t mind,” said Mrs. White, pleasantly. “He always wanted me to be happy.” The man she was living with was married, the father of Angelica’s schoolfriend Mary. His name was Gerald Hatherley. He’d been on the PTA with Mr. White, now in his grave. The two men had got on well enough, Angelica had to concede, during Mr. White’s lifetime, before he had left his wife a widow and in need of looking after.

“I don’t believe this,” said Angelica. No one likes to be upstaged. Here the daughter was bringing home what she’d thought was the catch of the season, only to find the mother already sporting in the water with dolphins.

The public phone box was arguably the prettiest in the whole country. Special permission had been obtained by environmentalists to paint it green, avoiding the traditionalist’s scarlet, so that the box did not disturb an eye adjusted to the delights of its surroundings. For three successive years Barley had won a prize as the most charming village in the country—with its well-tended, cosily gardened stone cottages, all hollyhocks and buzzing bees in the summer, the white-painted, brown-beamed medieval houses which leaned into one another for support; its central copper-spired church: the village green, the ducking pond, the ancient market, and the coach park just beyond the village limits especially for the tourists. And even these latter did not disturb Barley’s serenity too much, for the Parish Council allowed only one souvenir shop, and made few amenities available for the tourists’ convenience, so news got round and the coach parties, on the whole, stayed away from so boring a place.

Edwin and Angelica, having warned Mrs. White, came on round to see her. They drove up in a red MG: two bright young things.

Edwin wore a tweed jacket and a knotted scarf. She wore leather. “That’s a nice car,” said Mrs. White.

“It’s a red MG,” said Edwin defensively. “A lot of chaps have them.”

The humble housing estate where Angelica’s mother lived with her lover was discreetly surrounded by trees, so its existence did not worry the Barleans, as they liked to call themselves. These days Barley proper is occupied by wealthy people who needed to travel to the city only a couple of times a week (if that) for Board Meetings. In the smaller, damper cottages, a few of the original villagers remained—old men who gave local color in the pub and would applaud the incomers’ dart matches in return for a glass of beer; their wives cleaned others’ houses, or staffed the few village shops.

Barley was a happy village: everyone agreed, and so of course an artists’ colony had come to flourish here, in buildings converted from their original use, since current generations had no need of them. Former schoolhouses, chapels, a dozen barns, the old railway station—the rail link had long since gone—now gave the space and style required by the creative spirit.

Writers, potters, weavers, sculptors, architects came to Barley in the hope of encouraging and supporting one another, and having someone to talk to: though what it came to in the end, so typically, was that spouses got betrayed and swapped, and the group eventually collapsed beneath a weight of bitter gossip, spite and envy, only to rise again, talent and hope renewed.

For this purpose, for this rebirth, a sacrifice is normally required: Angelica was to find herself the living sacrifice, but that was in the future. This was now.

“Most chaps who have little MGs aren’t as well-built as you,” Mrs. White remarked. “How do you fit into it?”

Edwin was six four and weighed 210 pounds. Angelica’s mother looked him up and down appreciatively. “Well, everyone has them anyway,” said Edwin vaguely. Angelica nudged Edwin and tried to explain that on the estate everyone had practical Ford Fiestas or got on the bus. Edwin looked puzzled and said he could remember Angelica very well driving a Lamborghini, unlicensed and under-age, what was she talking about? Angelica said that was different and Mrs. White said she could see they had a stormy relationship, and Edwin said on the contrary. Mrs. White said trust Angelica to bring home an argumentative man.

Edwin, by chance, for the young couple had met in London, lived single and unappreciated in Barley’s dilapidated manor house, Rice Court; he was a scion of Barley’s even greater stately home, a further two miles deeper into the Great Park, into the Green Forest, Cowarth Castle. Here Lord Cowarth, Edwin’s father, lived. Though perhaps it should not be said “by chance,” for how many people do not travel far and wide in search of adventure and distraction to discover that the one they set their hat at, the one who so occupies the erotic imagination, in fact comes from the same town, the next street, even the house next door or the apartment down below. Escape from one’s origins, it so often seems, is out of the question, barred by fate.

“At least,” said Mrs. White, “you’re not on illegal drugs like all the rest or you’d be thinner. Or are you the kind who says alcohol is the worst substance of them all?”

“Am I undergoing some kind of character test?” asked Edwin. You could push him so far and no further.

“Yes,” Mrs. White said promptly. “If you mean to marry my daughter you’ll have to go through one or two.”

“I never said I was going to marry her,” he said, alarmed.

Angelica burst into tears and went and sat in her father’s study, where her mother had never gone. But now her mother followed her in. Everything at home had changed. Angelica’s tears grew noisier.

“Don’t embarrass me,” said Mrs. White.

“But you embarrassed me,” said Angelica, accustomed to having the moral upper hand in these family matters.

“And you’re supposed to be so tough,” said Mrs. White, looking her daughter up and down. Angelica was a rock-and-roll star. She wore boots up to her thighs and a fringed leather shirt down to her knees, and her hair was canary yellow. If she couldn’t look after herself by now it was time she did.

“No one’s said anything about marriage,” said Angelica. “We haven’t even been to bed together.”

“Then keep out of it,” said Mrs. White. “That way he’ll stay around.”

Mrs. White had been to bed with Gerald Hatherley, and his wife was now divorcing him. That was different: they were grown-up people. These two were children: Angelica was having a difficult adolescence; an archetypal Billy Bunter, the fat schoolboy, still looked out of Sir Edwin’s eyes. And Alice in Wonderland could still be seen in Angelica’s, for all she’d earned two-thirds of a million pounds from a single entitled “Kinky Virgin”: a sum sensibly put away in a Savings and Loan.

“You don’t think I’m some sort of pervert?” asked Angelica. “I just don’t like the thought of actual sex. It seems rather disgusting to me. I’d much rather just sing about it.”

“I’m sure it’s not my fault,” said Mrs. White. “Sex disgusting? I never put that idea into your head. I can’t have.”

Angelica stayed out of Edwin’s bed, and soon he asked her to marry him, on the old fashioned premise that that was the only way he’d get her into it. That was sixteen years ago, when marriage was still quite popular, and hit singles happened and made millions for innocents.

And that was when Angelica was still one person or at any rate, if you’d asked her, would have said she was. If you have a name like Angelica, it’s asking for trouble. For one thing you have the kind of parents who give you such a name, and for another it’s all too easy to split. Angel, Geli (or Jelly), Angela: she got called them all. Worse, if you know about A, J and A, and add an X for an unknown extra, you end up with Ajax. The strong, stubborn, stupid Hero of Ancient Greece, Ulysses’ friend. All women have a male within their female, a yang within the yin, but seem nervous of encouraging it. Though men seem happy enough searching their psyches for the hidden female part of themselves—no shame for the yin to contain the yang—what woman wants to inspect themselves and discover Ajax? Naturally Angelica eschewed too much introspection. She skated along on the surface of things, as long as she possibly could.

But that comes after. This is now.

“W
E’RE GOING TO GET
married,” said Edwin to Lord Cowarth, his father. His mother had drunk herself to death long ago. Edwin was the youngest son so no-one took much notice of him. He was allowed to live in Rice Court, the crumbling Elizabethan mansion, if only to keep the damp and moth away.

Lord Cowarth looked Angelica up and down. They were in Cowarth Castle, in the Great Library, where a Caxton Bible was kept beneath glass. At Edwin’s request, Angelica was wearing a white sweater and a black wool skirt. Her hair was dyed brown, and she had removed the rings from her nose. The scars were healing, the holes filling in. She looked conventional enough and easily shocked and she spoke with the slapdash incoherence of her generation. Lord Cowarth wore a dressing gown thin with age which fell apart to show skinny shanks and a tiny member.

“Has she got any money?” the father asked. He carried a cleaver wherever he went. He was short, rubicund and savage; thin in parts, fat in others.

“A few hundred thousand,” said Edwin proudly. Lord Cowarth grunted.

“I always thought you had your eye on that bint Anthea,” he said. “Plain as a pikestaff but just right for you, the fat boy of the form. Can’t abide a fat child,” he said, and Angelica thought she saw Edwin wince. Mostly Edwin kept his face friendly and still, accustomed as he was to paternal rebuffs and insults. “Most of my children were thin. Perhaps you’re not my child at all. When I think of that tart of a woman I married”—Lord Cowarth’s eyes narrowed—“it wouldn’t surprise me.” He spun Angelica round with fingers that clawed into her neck.

“What’s your game?” he asked. “What are you after? A title, a house, or an education for your children?”

Angelica took hold of Edwin’s hand, but her fiancé seemed incapable of helping her get free. All the strength had drained from him. So much old stags can always do to such progeny as rashly stay around.

Lord Cowarth balanced the cleaver in his hand, letting go of Angelica the better to do so. The cleaver was made of rusty old iron, solid old wood.

“I think he likes you,” said Edwin softly.

“What are you whispering about? What are you plotting?” The old man had a front tooth missing. He struck the blunt back of the hilt against his lips. Soon another tooth would go. One way or another there would be blood in his mouth next time he opened it. A useful trick. When Lord Cowarth went to the House of Lords, for a Coronation or the investment of a relative, he would dress in finery: otherwise he kept to his dressing gown, and liked to have a bloody mouth. He seldom left his apartments: he could run the Rice Estate well enough from the Castle.

“I love your son,” said Angelica. “That’s what I was whispering. Sweet nothings, you know?” That silenced him.

At least the old man did not forbid the wedding. Edwin could not have stood out against his father, and Angelica would not have expected him to. But now she had a chance to save him, build up his self-confidence, help him recognize and accept himself. She was brimming with good intentions.

“Will your brothers come to the wedding?” asked Angelica.

“Doubt it,” said Edwin, stoically. He and she would marry quietly. She wanted to make him happy. She had not understood how anxious family life could make a man, riddling him with the expectation of rejection, of failure. His elder brothers, twins, twenty years older than he, now lived in warmer climes, in the Southern Seas; they had beautiful brown wives. One twin kept a restaurant; the other a marina. The Rice Estate kept both businesses in efficient managers: fish swam up, the yachts slid in; money flowed, titles entranced everyone. The languid tones of the English upper class travel well, though these days they grate upon the domestic ear.

The Kinky Virgin band would, of course, have none of Edwin: of his tweed jacket and knotted scarf, so Angelica would now have none of them. “I’m giving music up,” she said. “All that was only a flash in the pan. I haven’t any real talent.”

Now she’d seen her mother in a mini skirt, she’d lost her appetite for excess. Now she’d perceived the depths of Edwin’s woes, the exhilarations of the rock stadium seemed distasteful. Besides, her father had died and who was there left to shock? Her mother had become unshockable; family friends had come to appreciate her, inasmuch as she put their own young into a better light. It was time to give up and grow up.

Angelica’s arms’ were so skinny Edwin could close his hand right round where her biceps would be, were she to body-build. He liked that. Who these days could win a virgin bride? He felt marrying such a one would make the crops’ grow, and the dry rot recede: his breaking of the hymen, his staining of the marriage sheets, would bring good fortune and sanity to a land ruled by that mad old man, his father.

Someone had to be responsible: his twin brothers had left him behind to be just that; had run out on him. He had seen his life as a sacrifice: terrible girls had wooed him in spite of his looks, in spite of the veil of fat which protected him in his early years, making his penis seem tiny, his sufferings absurd; they had wooed him and bedded him for the sake of his title, his landed state, his patrician accents, never mind he would never properly inherit wealth, only a fearful responsibility and inevitable rejection: would, like as not, inherit madness from his father, but never have his father’s power. Little by little Lord Cowarth had devolved that power to Robert Jellico, his Land Agent, and Robert Jellico, as well as being unerringly competent, was a powerful, sensible man, not given to evident emotion or the recognition of the financial duty that kinship imposes. Edwin complained that Robert Jellico looked at him strangely.