Splitting (27 page)
“You never told me,” said Angelica. “You should have told me.”
“I thought you would have guessed,” said Lavender. “Leave it at that, Angelica dear. You don’t want to know anything more.”
“I do. You must tell me. Who was my real father?”
“At least it wasn’t someone from a sperm bank,” said her mother. “That I would be ashamed of. I was very young. I was quite the tomboy. A football fan. There was a little group of us. Groupies, they call them now. We used to try and have the whole football team. None of us ever managed the lot.”
“You’re telling me you don’t know who my father was?”
“They were all good-looking lads. I don’t know how these things work. Perhaps you got a little bit from all of them?”
“No, Mother, that is not how things work,” said Angelica. “How many?”
“About six, Jelly,” said Lavender. “Don’t call me Jelly,” said Angelica.
“It was your father’s idea to call you Angelica. I never liked it. When you started talking to yourself I said to him, are you surprised? That name could split into a dozen different nicknames. I told him but he always knew best.”
“Don’t call him my father.”
“He was a good man, and a good father to you. Don’t deny him, don’t insult him.”
“What was the football match, Mum?” asked Mary. “My God, Jelly might be anyone’s!”
“Don’t call her your mum; she isn’t,” said Angelica. “She’s mine.”
“Don’t be spiteful, Mary: sometimes you’re so like Audrey,” said Mrs. Hatherley. “You can tell poor Angelica’s upset. I was right not to tell her before. Some things are better left in the closet.”
“Whatever you do is right by me, sweetheart,” said Gerald Hatherley, once prime mover at the PTA, now a man enjoying his prime, his hand moving so far up his wife’s skirt that she squealed and Mary said mildly, “Oh Dad, not so far, you’ll shock poor Jelly. Fancy not knowing who your father is at all!”
Jelly White felt wholly illegitimized, as if someone with no existence at all had worked for Brian Moss, wrapped a wraithful tongue around his member: no, not even that kept her in this world, not even mouthfuls of his seed could keep her nourished; she was going, she was almost gone.
“Good-bye, good-bye,” Jelly called to Angelica, as she felt herself going, “you’ll be okay now, won’t you?” but it was too late,
Angelica could not even hear. Thus Jelly slipped back into Angelica, and was incorporated.
Angelica stood up and looked at herself long and hard in the mirror, and liked what she saw: half a dozen possible fathers but one result, however chancy.
“I’m ever so sleepy,” Angelica said. “So tired!” She lay down on the sofa and her mother covered her with a rug. Angelica slept like a baby.
“That’s what she used to look like,” said her mother, “when she was very little. I wonder if she’s feverish? So much life-news in so short a time!”
She took her daughter’s wrist and placed her finger on the pulse; she thought for a moment it faltered, as if it had decided not to go on. Then it started up again, firm and strong. The mother was reassured, and left her to sleep.
Ram made larger and larger circles as he waited for Angelica to bleep him. The visit had taken longer than anyone had expected. The sun had set; crowds were beginning to leave Rice Court; the main road was busy, the smaller roads unaffected. First the Volvo circled the estate, with its sensible little houses, all more or less new, with their thin, practical walls between inside and out. Then Ram widened the circle, including the village of Barley, with its duck pond, its village green, its English country gardens, its quaint, well-preserved gentility. Here at least the stone walls were thick and solid. Then he included Rice Court in the circle and its theme park, where the new and the old mixed so strangely, and he could just see over the tops of the trees to the ruined castellated tower of Cowarth Castle and thought he would widen the circle further when the phone bleeped. It was Angelica.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Just fine,” she said. “Single-minded.” And he didn’t complete the circle—but reversed, swung the car round, and went back to pick her up.
Angelica waved good-bye to the smiling, loving faces.
“Where to?” asked Ram.
“I suppose the Royal College of Music might have us back,” she said.
“Us?” he enquired.
“You and me,” she said. “Starting over. Let’s get out of here quick.”
“Jesus!” he said, but he accelerated hard and they went.
Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Fay Weldon was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, and returned to the United Kingdom when she was fifteen. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write fulltime. Her first novel,
The Fat Woman’s Joke
, was published in 1967. She was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001, she was named a Commander of the British Empire.
Weldon’s work includes more than twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children’s books, nonfiction books, magazine articles, and a number of plays written for television, radio, and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series
Upstairs Downstairs. She-Devil
, the film adaption of her 1983 novel
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
, starred Meryl Streep in a Golden Globe–winning role.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Alternate American text copyright © 1995 by Fay Weldon
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
978-1-4804-1247-7
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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