Splitting (26 page)

Lady Rice sat shocked, bruised and triumphant in the back of Ram’s car. It is easy to leave a man who wants you, almost impossible to leave a man who doesn’t.

“Where to?” he asked.

“The local superstore, where else?” said Lady Rice bleakly.

And there, in spite of Angel’s protests, she bought cheap shoes, the plainest of underclothes, the least fragile tights available, a striped little skirt and a black sweater.

Ram followed her directions—a right here, a left there—and eventually drove the Volvo down a track into the fastnesses of the Barley woods.

They left the car: he carried the bags of shopping. Lady Rice led Ram down sun-dappled paths, where the pine needles lay thick and reddy-green, and their softness silenced the noise of their steps, to a stream, which fell down rocks and formed a pool before rippling off through the woods, rush-fringed.

“I used to come here when I was a child,” she said. She took off all her clothes piece by piece, looking at them with distaste.

She removed what he now realized was a wig, and hurled it into the bushes. The hair below was fair and cropped.

“Sorry,” she said to him.

“That’s okay,” he said. She looked fine to him. Her body was firm and slender, boyish. He realized he’d seen bits of her naked, never the whole, entire. Just this bit or that bit: this persona or that.

He left her alone, not trying to help her in any way, seeing himself as a permitting presence, nothing more, because it seemed to him she was going through some kind of ritual, and it was better for him not to interfere. She splashed water on the arm where Anthea had bruised the flesh. Then she crouched down and washed her face, rubbing and scrubbing the make-up away, and waited until the water was clear again, free of powdery, pinky, greeny swirls. Then she immersed herself completely; the water was cold: she shivered. “What are you doing?” he asked her. “Are you being re-born?” She nodded.

“Do you know why you’re doing it?”

She shook her head, seeming alarmed by the question, and clambered out of the water. Ram looked around for something to dry her with, and picked up her discarded T-shirt, but she shook her head violently. He realized she saw her old clothes as polluted.

“I feel very faint,” said Angelica. “So cold!”

“I can’t see very well,” said Jelly. “I have water in my eyes.”

“We’ll die of pneumonia,” said Angel. “I feel so strange!”

Ram offered her his folded cotton handkerchief, and she used that to dry herself, though it was soon sodden. She dressed, damply. “You look about ten,” he said. “Now where are we going?”

“To my mother’s,” she said.

“Y
OU’RE LOOKING GOOD,” SAID
Lavender to Lady Rice. “It quite reminds me of when you were little.”

“The trouble is, Mum,” said Lady Rice, “I can’t remember much about myself as a girl.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Mrs. White. “All those drugs, all that drink, and all that sex. I wouldn’t want to remember if it I were you. Until the day you got married and became your husband’s responsibility, you were a nightmare for all of us.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Jelly.

“I didn’t know I was meant to,” said the new Mrs. Hatherley, puzzled. “You seemed happy enough, up there in the Big House, looking down on the rest of us. You never even came to visit me. You were ashamed. Everyone knew it. Shouldn’t you bring that young man in? The one who’s driving the big car?”

“It’s not his place,” said her daughter, grandly, with a flicker of her former style. “He’s the chauffeur. When I need him I’ll bleep him.”

“First and only time you brought Edwin to see us,” said Lavender, “you were in a little MG. He was much too big for it. Pretty stupid, if you ask me. Perhaps you’d better not ask him in. It might be unlucky.”

The second Mrs. Hatherley had moved house. She lived now in the home the first Mrs. Hatherley had created, over twenty-seven years of marriage. The first Mrs. Hatherley, Audrey, had died of a stroke shortly after she had divorced Gerald, but before the property settlement had been made final. The house had passed automatically into Gerald’s possession’. Gerald and Audrey’s daughter, Mary, still unmarried and proud of it, was happy to live where she had always lived, although with a different mother. Friends said there was really very little difference between Audrey and Lavender: why had Gerald gone to all that bother? Mary had given up any thought of protest and now just enjoyed the ex-Mrs. White’s cooking, and the habit she had of ironing and folding clothes before putting them into drawers, which her real mother had seldom done. Audrey would pick up dirty clothes from the floor and wash and dry them, but left them for the family to pick out of the laundry basket. Sometimes they would need washing again before this happened. Dust and damp would get into them.

“Don’t you feel peculiar living here?” Jelly asked her mother. “Using Audrey’s teapot? In Audrey’s bed? Doesn’t she haunt you?” But apparently not.

“It’s really nice living in another woman’s home,” said the new Mrs. Hatherley. “Other people manage to have the light switches in all the right places, and enough sockets to go round. Audrey didn’t stint herself, I must say. Nearly drove poor Gerald to bankruptcy, but what did she care?”

Angelica hurt her teeth on a rock cake that had stayed in the oven for too long.

“Shit!” she said, and her mother raised her eyebrows and said, “If you don’t like them, don’t eat them. A good rock cake’s always hard.”

“Mum,” asked Angelica, “did I talk to myself a lot when I was a child?”

“All the time,” said Mrs. White. “Used to drive your father mad. We’d be woken in the morning by the sound of children playing. Different voices and all. But there’d only ever be you in there.”

“Boys’ voices too?”

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Hatherley. “Boys and girls. All in there together! That was rather a worry.”

Lavender served as good a scone and as bad a jelly as ever. She was an uneven cook. But with her change of name, as it happened, she no longer seemed to Angelica to be her mother at all: Angelica saw herself as orphaned. Mrs. White had transmuted into Mrs. Hatherley, and in the sea-change lost maternal status. She had become just another of the older generation of Barley housewives, varicose-veined and stout-waisted.

“Yes, boys as well,” said Mrs. Hatherley. “Boys and girls all in that little body together. What a marvel!”

“You didn’t say anything to anybody?”

“No. It kept you quiet while we lay in of a morning. You all seemed to get on well enough. Your dad and I would joke about it. ‘No only-child problems for Jelly,’ Stephen would say. And I’d say, ‘But when she gets to teenage, will it be decent? Supposing they get off with one another?’ But by the time teenage came the voices had stopped. There was just the one of you, and not a particularly nice one either, I’m sorry to say.”

“Mum,” asked Lady Rice, “I’m getting the picture. When you talk about all those drugs, all that drink, and all that sex, what do you mean? I can’t remember.”

“That’s what I mean,” said her mother. “You burned your brain right out. I told you you would at the time. All that kinky virgin stuff. That disgusting band of yours. It was practically fornication on stage. And not the kind any of us had ever known about, either. We didn’t know where to put ourselves. I’d sacrificed myself for you, given away my life for yours, and here were you throwing your life away. What price virtue now, I thought.”

“I’m sorry, Mum,” said Angel.

Lavender looked at her quite softly and embraced her.—“I forgive you,” she said. “You’re back sane and sweet, that’s the main thing.”

“That’s all right then,” said Lady Rice to Angelica. “She’s sorry and she forgives me. I’m off. Say good-bye to Ram. Bye, Angel. Bye, Jelly. It was a short life, but I can’t say it was a sweet one. All I ever did was moan and groan.”

Angelica put a hand to her head.

“You haven’t got any proper sandwiches?” she asked her mother. “I’m just so hungry all of a sudden.”

Lavender sent Mary off to make fish paste sandwiches. Mary went unwillingly, as if she was often told what to do, and put up with it, and didn’t like it.

“Mum,” said Jelly, though the word came with difficulty to her lips, “another thing. Put your mind back to when Dad died. How did it happen? What was I like when it did? Because I seem to have forgotten that too.”

“I’d rather not say,” said Mrs. Hatherley, and at that moment Mr. Hatherley let himself cheerfully into the hall and joined them for tea. He ate all the paste sandwiches, leaving none for Jelly. He ate with his right hand, while his left encompassed one of his wife’s sturdy legs. Mary came in and out of the room, sent on this task or that, feeding dogs, tropical fish and guinea pigs, all already more than fat enough. Mary wore a diamond engagement ring. Jelly had vague memories of standing next to Mary at Choral Society concerts. They’d been best friends, or Mary had claimed her as such. Mary always sung off-key.

“Do let me get on, dear,” said Mrs. Hatherley, trapped by the leg, but her new husband felt disinclined so to do, so she stayed where she was.

“Are you engaged, Mary?” asked Jelly, to distract attention from the sight of her mother and her stepfather in this erotic communication, but Mary said no, it was just a ring her father had given her on her thirtieth birthday.

“Be an angel and play us a tune, Jelly,” said Mrs. Hatherley from her imprisonment. “I’ve still got your father’s piano. It takes up a lot of room and I was going to burn it but something stopped me.”

Jelly obliged. She played the opening of “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.” The piano was so out of tune it was funny. Her fingers stumbled dreadfully over the keys but no-one seemed to notice. Whatever she did, these nice people wanted to approve of her. Aspiration bounced up to the ceiling and back down again, deadened. There was no way the notes she played could ever get up and out to join the music of the spheres, which was their natural place. She could see that she had failed in her life. On the other hand it was hardly her fault.

“Your father used to play us such lovely tunes from the
Beggar Prince,”
said Mary, “when we were little.”

“Why don’t you tell your girl the truth about everything, Lavender,” said Gerald Hatherley. Now he had finished his sandwich, his right arm shot out and he trapped his daughter’s legs as well as his wife’s. They all squealed happily.

“Might as well,” said Mrs. Hatherley. “What’s the harm now? Once you stopped being little, Jelly, you seemed to take no notice of your father; whether he was there in the room or not what did you care? He’d got you into the Royal College, but you didn’t go, you cut that record instead. ‘Kinky Virgin.’ He could just about get used to the music but then someone sent him the lyrics. I’m sorry to say he died in minutes, sitting in that very chair, over there.”

“Are you saying I murdered my father?” asked Angel. “Oh no dear,” said her mother, “whoever sent him the lyrics did that. I think it was Gerald’s first wife. She could be so spiteful.”

“I remember now,” said Angel. “I remember you telling me my father was dead and me saying to you but how could you tell the difference?’ and I laughed and you hit me, saying I was a monster. And you were right: I killed him and then I made a joke of it.”

“Well, dear,” said Mrs. Hatherley, “I must admit it wasn’t very nice of you,” and she squealed and laughed as Mr. Hatherley started tickling her up and down her leg and Mary squealed, “Me, me!” and got even closer.

“But then again,” her mother said to Angel, “when I thought about it, I could see what you meant about not telling the difference. After the choir was disbanded—no one wants to hear proper singing any more—your father just sat in that chair for years and stared into space. I was always a lively girl. It wasn’t right for me. I only married him because of you. He was very good to you considering you weren’t his child. I’m sure he’s in heaven smiling down at me and glad for my happiness.”

The girls took a little time to re-group.

“Oh, well,” said Angel. “If he wasn’t my father I don’t have to go round feeling so bad. I’m not a patricide after all. You can get on without me, Jelly. How’s your memory, Angelica?”

“It’s okay,” said Angelica. “Getting better by the moment. I can even remember the lyrics of ‘Kinky Virgin.’ I wish I couldn’t but I can.”

“Then I’m off,” said Angel. “Self-destruct. For God’s sake girls, keep your legs shaved, and never, never, wash your face with soap and water. Sorry I lost you your job, Jelly.”

“That’s okay,” said Jelly, but she was talking to no-one. Angel simply wasn’t there.

“The poor girl’s quite stunned,” said Gerald Hatherley. “She’s gone white as a sheet.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Mary, with some sympathy. “I wouldn’t like to get to our age and find I wasn’t my own father’s daughter.” Jelly remembered why she had liked Mary. Cigarettes behind the bicycle shed, bicycle rides in the woods.

The cottage window opened directly on to the street. Ram drew up the limousine just outside, so he could look directly through to where Jelly stood, and at the family scene within.

“But then you knew that, didn’t you, Jelly?” said Mrs. Hatherley.

“In your heart? You must have!”

“Well, no, I didn’t,” said Jelly, “because nobody told me.”

She shook her head at Ram, and he drove on.

“Are you all right, dear?” asked her mother.

“I think I’ve eaten too much,” said Angelica. “I feel so full! Who was my father, then?” Lavender continued to be evasive.

“I wasn’t the sort to claim Welfare, so I had to marry someone, and Stephen turned up. He was very kind. We weren’t unhappy; don’t think that; but he was a lot older than me. That’s what we’d end up doing in those days: unmarried mothers like us. We’d marry someone much older, to have somewhere to live and bring up baby. Forget the sex. All that sex had ever done, so far as we could see, was get us into trouble. Or so we thought. Of course the world’s a different place now. The State takes the place of the older man when it comes to support.”