Splitting (23 page)

The next day Jelly, anxious to prove Angelica wrong, asked Brian Moss for a rise.

“It would be sordid,” said Brian Moss, with that pomposity which so often accompanies financial discussions. “Sleazy, even, to raise your wages in the light of this new relationship of ours. It could only reduce you to the status of a whore. Presumably you’ll want to get married one day, Jelly: I’m sure you wouldn’t want to have any such blot upon your reputation. Such a bore living with secrets from the past; time bombs waiting to explode. I have one or two myself. No, better no secrets at all. Sex must never be exchanged for money: it reflects badly upon all involved. I’ll keep it to our lunch hour, if you like, so there’s no suggestion of sexual harassment in the office. You are working by the hour, after all. And presumably these intimacies of ours give you as much pleasure as they do me or you wouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

“He must be joking,” said Angel. “Blow-jobs are all take and no give, ask any woman.”

“Well, I like it,” said Jelly. “That is to say I don’t want to stop it. Office life can get boring.”

“Next thing,” said Angelica, “it won’t be no rise because you’re doing it, it will be do it or I’ll fire you. And then you’ll have to do it, because upon this job depends our future prosperity, in more ways than anyone could imagine. You’ll have no choice.”

“Then I’ll do it,” says Jelly, her mouth being by this time again occupied with Brian Moss’s engorged and twitching member, which mention of money always cheered up. “I don’t care. No problem.”

“She is a heroine,” says Lady Rice. “She really is.”

Brian Moss stopped mid-blow and bore Jelly down upon the sofa and lifted her skirt; desire finally overcame guilt. “I’m so tired of second best,” he says.

“He loves me!” cries Lady Rice.

“Oh, oh, oh,” cries Angel in ecstasy, entwining her legs round the small of Brian Moss’s back; there is no sealing her lips or steadying her breath: the others give in and think of alimony.

A
NGEL REMONSTRATED WITH LADY
Rice. If they all submitted thus to Brian Moss, why was she being stand-offish with Ram? She, Angel, had really enjoyed the rides to work. Even in the back seat of a Volvo in a car-park Ram had been a better lover than Brian, who was okay but not really connecting. He was worrying too much about his betrayal of Oriole, or whether the forever locked office door would attract comment, to be open to much real passion. It was all lust, no love, and lacked aspiration. Time and privacy might well improve her boss’s performance, but when was that ever going to be available?

“He shouldn’t worry about discretion,” said Jelly. “It’s too late. The whole office is buzzing. Nothing like this has happened, so Holly in Accounts told me, who’s ninety if she’s a day, since old Gerald Catterwall got off with Una Musgrave before she disappeared.”

“We can’t possibly go with Ram now,” said Lady Rice, “even if it was a possibility before. Surely one can only have one man at a time?”

Angel hooted with laughter, and Lady Rice sulked. “Holly in Accounts can’t see a thing, thank God,” said Angelica. “That’s why The Claremont’s bills get paid. Supposing she gets new glasses? What then?” Embracing Brian Moss so totally had set all her anxieties off again. She was biting their fingernails. Angel took offense. “Well, I’m going with Ram tomorrow,” said Angel. “I’m going to ask him to drive down to the car-park, and none of you can stop me. Jelly, what do you say?”

“I say,” said Jelly, “let’s do it. A girl can get quite an appetite for this kind of thing: I feel so lively and peculiar and restless. I wish Brian and I had had a proper bed, not an office sofa; he didn’t really have a chance. But I don’t want to be hurt; I don’t want too many eggs in one basket; yes, let’s take Ram down to the car-park. Let’s spread the load. Angelica?” Angelica said, “Okay. I feel bad about biting my nails. Perhaps it’ll make me feel less anxious.”

Lady Rice said, “No, no, no. It isn’t right. Sex with a chauffeur! It’s humiliating. If anyone finds out, they’ll say I’m promiscuous. All those years of virtue for nothing! I can’t give in now.” But Angel said, “Sorry, Lady Rice, that’s three against one. You lose. I really can’t stand another evening cooped up in this fucking hotel: I’m going out and you lot are coming with me.”

“Where?” Lady Rice, Jelly and Angelica asked nervously, but Angel just laughed and fastened her net stockings to the little bobbles which hung from the thongs of her lacy suspender belt.

“I like the grip of the fabric round my waist,” she said, “and the stretch of elastic down my thighs. I can’t stand the way you girls wear tights, just because they’re practical.”

Angelica and Jelly fell silent; they had no option but to let their wilful and drastic other self her head. There was no holding her: she, Angel, had taken over the senses: it was she who moved the limbs, used the mouth, turned the eyes. They were intimidated. Later, instead of sleeping or watching television, they all, including Lady Rice, accompanied Angel down to the bar and allowed her a triple gin, and a wink or two at an Italian couple, man and wife, glossy and worldly, who, being on holiday, seemed anxious for a third to join them in the bed. Angel had the knack of knowing whom to wink at, and whose smiles best to respond to. Angel responded in the manner the couple hoped, and they paid her two hundred pounds in cash, in advance.

“I’m a realist,” said Angel to the others by way of apology, accepting the notes.

“We’re on our own. We can’t go on in Brian Moss’s office for ever. He’s going to find out sooner or later. We’ll be fired. Then what? We have to have another career up our sleeve.”

“Slut, whore, bitch!” ranted the others, but Angel took no notice. And they feared she never would again. They were finished. The “cash on completion” was not, as it happened, forthcoming. Angel was lucky to get out of it alive.

There was hell to pay the next day. Lady Rice was so furious, miserable and suicidal that Angel, subdued and pathetic, declared she would never do such a thing again, on pain of Lady Rice taking an overdose of sleeping pills and putting an end to the lot of them. She had learned her lesson. She would never mix sex and money again. Then Jelly had to take a day off to recover from the excesses of the night, so they didn’t get to the car-park with Ram: she felt too shaken to call Brian Moss to say she would not be in that day. He’d think she’d walked out on him: Angelica claimed he wouldn’t be sorry, and Jelly accused her of gross cynicism, but not for long: she was too depleted.

By evening they felt better. Angelica observed that the world of forbidden sex was too full of euphemisms to be safe. You could get killed, suffocated, or whipped to death, and then be disposed of, and who would know? “Joining a couple in bed,” sounded cosy, white-sheeted, yawny and warm, but in fact turned out to be cold, unhygienic, and a matter of strippings, whips and manacles as the wife took her symbolic revenge on a decade of the husband’s mistresses, with his consent, and the husband reasserted his right to have them as, when and how he chose. There was a kind of masochistic pleasure, she could see, in being a victim and without choice, but there was a difference between being a Bad Girl and a Whore, and in the end, if they survived at all, whores lost their heart of gold, coming up as they did all the time against too much evil and despair; they ended up with hard, cold eyes, and a hard false smile which frightened children. She’d go along with Angel as a Bad Girl but not as a whore. People got altogether too romantic about the latter.

“Okay, okay, okay,” said Angel. “I get the message.”

“I was so frightened,” said Angelica.

“So was I,” said Angel, “actually,” and began to cry, and they all cried softly together.

“I have to have a holiday,” said Angelica, when the pillow was thoroughly wet with tears. “I simply have to. I want out.”

“So do I,” said Lady Rice.

“And me,” said Angel.

“Oh no, you’re not, Angel,” said Jelly. “If I have to hold the fort here, if I’m to keep Brian Moss happy, if I’m to have a good time with Ram, if I’m going to keep an eye on our divorce, I need you, Angel.”

“Ram!” said Angel, perking up. “I’d forgotten about Ram.”

U
NA MUSGRAVE ANSWERED THE
advertisement in the
Times.
Like an answer to Tully Toffener’s prayer, like the wild gust of chilly wind which accompanies the gods on their travels, she appeared in Catterwall & Moss’s downstairs reception. Jelly just happened to be sitting behind the desk: she was helping Lois out. Lois, a born again Christian, had handed in her notice: she was going at the end of the week, to, everyone said, an office where there was less scandal and intrigue. Though Brian Moss had said to Jelly, “The problem is she’s in love with me. She’s jealous of you. Remember once when I thought I’d locked the door but I hadn’t, and she pushed the door open—?”

To which Jelly replied, “Oh phooey, she’s underpaid and overworked, like the rest of us—”

He had not taken offense. Nothing seemed to make him take offense, just as nothing would make him pay her more. He liked her to be tart, anyway. The sharper her tongue the more pleasure there was in silencing it, the more intimate its flavor. They had reverted from full intercourse to its lesser form: Oriole had won in her absence. Everyone knew blow-jobs didn’t count.

But here was Una Musgrave, sitting on Jelly’s desk, looking at her hard and speculatively, as if she knew very well what went on behind the scenes. Jelly felt that she had met her fate, her comeuppance; that her soul was known. She was in her mid-sixties, Jelly supposed: one of those women who is born unstoppable and impossible; a face handsome from good cosmetic surgery, hair thin from bleaching but glossy from care, a figure skinny from Pritikin, large kittenish eyes, high silicone breasts, long polished nails on liver-spotted, always moving, energetic hands. Jelly thought—or was it Angel?—no matter how liver-spotted the long sharp scarlet talons: a danger and a challenge to the cosseted dick. And Angel thought—or was it Jelly?—yes, but he’d have to pay for it somehow. Lots.

“You have something for me to hear to my advantage,” said Una Musgrave. “I read it in the
Times,
so it must be true.” And Jelly stood up, pale and demure with a triple set of pearls from Fenwicks and a nice pale pink cashmere sweater, half-price because of a single pulled thread which Lady Rice came out of retirement to attend to, a red pleated skirt, shoes a trifle battered but well polished (The Claremont’s overnight service) and sturdy tights; hair neat, an exceptionally clear complexion (Brian Moss swore that was his doing) and a buttery little mouth, and led Una Musgrave to Brian Moss’s outer office. She was very conscious of Una’s eyes upon her.

“What does she want?” asked Angel. “Our heart, or our body or both? For herself, or for the White Slave traffic?”

“Don’t be so absurd and old fashioned,” said Jelly. “She’s just come for her inheritance.”

Una Musgrave wore shiny black leather boots up to her thighs, short red skirt, white sweater and a wide patent belt with a buckle which looked like solid silver to Jelly. Brian Moss came out of his office, blinked, and asked her in. Jelly felt displaced and unable to compete, and even Angel blenched.

Once a week the management of The Claremont provided a bowl of complimentary fruit, each apple so perfect and red, each pear so well-formed and greenly glossy, each plum so unblemished and free from wasp invasion, as to make the contrast to the fruit from the

Rice Court orchards more remarkable. The Rice Court fruit trees were ancient, gnarled and beautiful: the fruit they produced was meager and misshapen by commercial standards, but full of flavor so long as you could find a pest-free scrap, and were prepared to bite and trust.

The hotel fruit—and the bowl had been refilled that day—was without flavor: all perfection and irradiation. Jelly found herself crying; she had thought tears were Lady Rice’s province, but no. She too could be brought down by the misery of remembrance. She missed the orchard: brilliant white and pink with blossom in early spring: she missed the annual vain endeavor to keep the birds away from the cherries: see, see, Edwin! They’ve taken every one. It can’t be true!—but always was. She missed the bleak winter branches of the trellised plums against the Elizabethan wall; she missed the walled vegetable garden, and the ancient asparagus beds which should have been replaced and never were, and the way thistle would disguise itself as artichoke: in her mind she could place everything exactly: move in her head between the gooseberry and the black currant bushes, knowing how much to the inch she had to spare, frowning at nettles, smiling encouragement at bold plump orange pumpkins, reclusive dark green courgettes. All this she had lost; all this had been stolen: the human part of the loss was possible to forget. But all this garden history Anthea had robbed her of: Anthea and Edwin, together, had deprived her not just of future, and present, but of the past. She hoped the rose bushes she had pruned over the years would prick, and wound, and make anyone who dared touch the blooms bleed to death. She was getting a headache.

“Take an aspirin,” said Angel. “It isn’t that kind of headache,” said Jelly. “You’re missing the others,” said Angel. “They’re better at coping with misery than you. And it’s mad to be jealous of Una

Musgrave. Good God, she must be sixty-five if she’s a day. Brian Moss won’t look at her for a moment. And she’s a client. He wouldn’t be so stupid.”

“I’m staff,” said Jelly, “and that’s pretty stupid, too.”

“Anyway, there’s always Ram,” said Angel. “Good old Ram. Did you know his name was Rameses? His parents were cruising down the Nile when his mother went into labor, five weeks early.”

Angel was trying to distract Jelly. She didn’t like the way Jelly was staring at the fruit knife which went with The Claremont’s fruit bowl.