Splitting (3 page)

“He’s gay,” said Angelica simply. “That’s all. That’s why he looks at you the way he does. He’s going to hate me. He’s a man who rises at seven and doesn’t understand the way you stay in bed till noon.”

Edwin loved Angelica because she reduced terrible and complex things to such simple and graceful components, and seemed threatened by no one, except her mother, the only one who could make her cry. But those tears were the tears of the child, confident of love and the eventual pleasures of reconciliation and consolation.

She had not yet split.

E
VERYONE CAME TO THE WEDDING
, including the ghost of Edwin’s mother. She was seen at the top of the narrow, ugly Jacobean stairs in a white dress, angrily waving a bottle, with a kind of miasmic mist floating from her: it left a damp coating on the bannisters which Mrs. MacArthur, the housekeeper, pretended was mould. Staff scrubbed and rubbed away at it but it kept returning; you couldn’t get a shine on the wood, no matter what.

“Your mother’s not angry with you,” said Angelica to Edwin, “but I expect she’s angry with your father. I’m sure she loved you very much.”

“Why?” he asked, gloomily.

“Because you’re loveable,” she replied, and he looked at her in gratified astonishment, and kissed her chastely. Edwin had got accustomed to doing that. He didn’t quite see how on a marriage night the habit of chastity was meant to change to the habit of uxorious sexuality, but if it had for his forefathers (as Angelica had assured him was the case—they had to marry virgins so as to keep the line of inheritance clear) no doubt it would for him.

“Why should my mother be angry with my father?” he asked. He took his father’s behavior for granted, as sons will; as the father sees the world to be, so it is: daughters are often more critical.

“Your father is a monster,” Angelica explained to Edwin and Edwin seemed quite surprised.

“That’s just how he is,” said Edwin, and only reluctantly conceded what his mother had come to know so clearly: that his father was unpleasant beyond normality, even for the upper classes.

Pippi and Harry, Kinky Virgin’s violinist and drummer, had seen the apparition. “A cloud of fucking sperm,” Pippi complained, “floating down the stairs. This old lady, following behind, waving a bottle. Was that your mother-in-law?”

“I hadn’t even had a smoke,” said Harry, “nor a sniff, nor a jab, and still I saw it. Unfair!”

None of Angelica’s friends wanted her to marry Edwin: snobby twerp, nerd, cunt: from the posh end of yuppiedom, who’d given the band, with its foul-mouthed, intelligent cacophony, a passing popularity and been the more resented for it. And rightly, Sloaning and boning its drugs; drawling through the early hours, slamming car doors in the dawn to wake up the babies of the boring, toiling classes, the drears who worried about mortgages and children who failed exams and how to crawl out of the pit of necessity, the miasma of need, which shortened lives and narrowed hope; the steady, frightened classes who included Kinky Virgin in the things most wrong with the world today. Thus the careless and the crude, the wealthy and the wilfully distressed, joined forces in the clubs, each despising the other, but despising the rest more.

Edwin and Angelica declared their engagement, joined hands across a chasm of custom and class, and nasty phantoms leapt up out of the depths to snap and snarl and make them break apart if they could; but at the time the lovers, or lovers-in-waiting, scarcely noticed their enemies; just felt surprised their match was so unpopular. All the world, which was meant to love a lover, plainly didn’t.

“Is it wise to marry for money, darling?” enquired Boffy Dee of Edwin at the wedding. Boffy Dee had bedded Edwin once or twice, he later found for a dare; she’d reported back to his circle, for reasons best known to herself, that his member was minuscule. He had found himself hurt and humiliated by this: he’d had much comfort from Boffy Dee, in a warmly dark and confident way; he’d believed in her affection, trusted her pleasure and his own. Boffy Dee was wearing a tight orange dress and a cartwheel hat, which made her ugly: he hated her.

“I’m marrying Angelica because I love her,” said Edwin, with a simplicity which opened the way for yet more scorn. He thought it was his bulk which made them all believe he was slow-witted and gave him his reputation for clumsiness.

Rice Court was a mass of small, dark rooms and twisted staircases, which would open out into large, panelled, cold, unliveable-in halls, a few open to the public and therefore not home; everything crumbled and rotted. If you were a large person and moved quickly or impulsively you’d put your foot through the floor or break off some piece of wooden carving which turned out to be historic and valuable, and cause hysterics. The Elizabethan and Jacobean builders of Rice Court had been absurdly fine-boned and small-footed. Edwin had got quite accustomed to moving around with caution, but tales of his clumsiness still got round. Fortunately Angelica had known him only in his later days: she found him graceful enough.

Anthea Box, Edwin’s cousin, was wearing Laura Ashley sprigs which did nothing for her horsy looks, but made him feel affectionate towards her. She was the only one who seemed to have a good word to say for Angelica.

“I expect the holes in her nose will heal up with time,” said Anthea, “now the rings are out.”

Angelica settled down into being one person, un-split. Love is a great sealer-over of seams.

“I
’M NOT INTERESTED IN
money,” said Lady Rice. “I’m not one bit materialistic.” Which was just as well because within weeks of the wedding Robert Jellico suggested she use her funds to buy into the Rice Estate: with the money so released Rice Court could be refurbished.

Lady Angelica Rice gained the title on marriage. She and Edwin lived quietly in Rice Court; they spent a great deal of time entwined in bed; not with great passion, but with considerable affection, secure in each other’s loving commitment. Angelica didn’t see her friends: Edwin didn’t see his. They smoked a great deal of dope. They went into the town for a late lunch, or dinner, often to McDonald’s. Both relived, and recovered from, their childhoods.

They were not disturbed. Rice Court had been closed to the public of late; an ornate plaster ceiling had fallen and injured a visitor. Insurance had paid but everyone had had a nasty shock. Robert Jellico’s perfect shirt had been seen awry and his smooth skin had sweated slightly. Now he worried that money was being lost while the young couple idled and slept.

The only disrupting energy was Mrs. MacArthur, who complained she had to act as nanny. To Edwin and Angelica she seemed merely vengeful, changing the sheets on the fourposter bed once a day, practically shaking them out of it; rattling empty coke tins into black plastic sacks, hoovering up roaches and snipped bits of this and that, broken matches and Rizla papers, throwing out baked beans on plates cracked because Edwin or Angelica had stepped on them by mistake.

“She gets paid, doesn’t she?” said Edwin. “Why does she get in such a state?”

Lady Rice wrote Robert Jellico a check for the amount the cash machine said she had in her current account, minus one thousand pounds: £832,000.

“All that money in your current account!” said Robert Jellico, dazedly. “Not a high interest account, not even a building society? What was your mother thinking about?”

Mrs. White was busy thinking about Gerald Hatherley mostly, and wondering why his wife Audrey was being so difficult, and why Gerald’s daughter Mary, who once was such a good friend of Angelica’s, cut her dead on the street. It seemed strange to Mrs. White, as it did to her daughter, that the world was so full of people who simply didn’t want you to be happy.

“Take the money,” said Angelica grandly to everyone. “Money is of no importance. Invest it in Rice Court, if that’s what you want. The Rice family is my family now, and that includes you, Robert.” And indeed Robert Jellico, with his flat face, his overhanging eyelids, his Cardinal’s mien, his grey eminence, seemed the old-worldly yet contemporary expression of the determined Rice soul. He it was who kept the balls of the whole business juggling in the air. For all his complicated love for Edwin, his evident disparagement of Angelica, they knew Robert Jellico was trustworthy enough. Robert knew money and property must be looked after. If Angelica’s money went into the tenderest, most vulnerable, most simply sacrificed, last-in-first-out enterprises of the Rice Estate, the crumple zone of the commercial juggernaut, then that was the tax Angelica had to pay because she had no presentable family, and no social status; only money and a recent marriage. Robert Jellico made sure Angelica’s money did not go directly towards the rebuilding of Rice Court, in case of future litigation, and any claim that might be made alleging the place to be the matrimonial home. He was not so stupid and she did not notice. Who, lately married, ever anticipates divorce?

The day the money disappeared into Rice Estate coffers, Angelica sat up in bed and said, “Edwin, we have to stop this now. We’ve recovered from the past, which was an illness. I shall smoke no more dope.”

And nor she did, and presently he lost the habit too. They looked around and saw what they had, and it seemed full of promise, and why should Angelica split? She could cope as she was; she needed no allies.

—S
PENT A LOT OF
time trying to get pregnant. That is to say, now in bed with Edwin only some twelve hours out of every twenty-four, she failed to take contraceptive precautions. If you didn’t smoke dope, you had to do something. She could see it would be nice to be two people enclosed in one and carry that one around inside her: the thought made her dozy and warm. If there was a baby, the twelve waking, walking hours would flow easily and naturally: unedgily, undriven. The warm, milky smell and soft feel of babies, the slippery, honey scent of Johnson’s Baby Oil would drift the days together, make day like night, summer like winter, bed and waking hours the same: she would be universally approved; her mother would think of Angelica for a change, not of her lover Gerald Hatherley and the ensuing Nasty Divorce (Audrey was still causing trouble):
Hello
would come and take photographs of Angelica and Edwin leaning into each other and a baby in a long, white christening robe in her arms. Angelica herself had never been christened; her name, she felt, had been the more variable.

“In my time,” she told Edwin, “I’ve been called Jelly, Angel and Angela. People find Angelica too long and peculiar a name for comfort.”

“I love it,” said Edwin. “I’ve always loved it. The pale green strips on the icing of the cake. That’s why I married you.” Edwin always used her full name, carefully and lovingly separating the syllables, the better to appreciate each one. An-gel-i-ca. She liked that. When her own baby was christened, she felt she would come properly into her own name. She would allow no one to shorten it, and, as for the baby, it would have a name impossible to diminish.

“Hello
would be very nice,” said Edwin, “and they’d pay us, because we have titles, but the camera would get dust in it. The photos wouldn’t come out. Everything round here is crumbling.” Edwin, all agreed, tended to look on the gloomy side of things; to expect very little of the material world. From his point of view, if he was disappointed before he began, then failure could be interpreted as success in at least one thing—that he had been right all along. But Angelica encouraged her husband in good cheer, and indeed he was cheering up.

Edwin began cautiously to take up his axe, to chop down a rotten tree or so on the Estate, to tear away the odd beam made flaky by woodworm before it actually fell, whether on to the dining room table or the bed; he learned to trace the tap-tap-tap of the death-watch beetle, to pare away wood and reach the devouring little insect family, remove them carefully, at Angelica’s behest, to one of the stables where they would do less harm. Such was her power over him, at the beginning: Angelica, who was tender-hearted towards all living creatures, though they demolish her house, eat away at her inheritance.

Every month with the moon, Angelica bled. Dr. Bleasdale said it took a long time for marihuana to clear itself out of the system, and the drug, even though Edwin and Angelica insisted they scarcely used it now, did impair fertility.

“It’s not a drug,” said Edwin to Angelica, “it’s a leaf. And it doesn’t impair fertility. That’s just a story put about by the forces of law and order.”

After a year, the doctor went further and attributed Angelica’s inability to conceive to Edwin’s sperm count, lowered, he claimed, by drug-taking in the past. Edwin refused a test and Angelica did not blame him. The process involved sounded disgusting to both of them.

“Jealous of a simple jar!” said Edwin. “Fancy you!”

“Yes,” said Angelica, “I am. Fancy me!”

They started going to the younger, female partner at the surgery, a Dr. Rosamund Plaidy, who said don’t worry, there was lots of time. They were both young. Babies came when parents were ready for them. That felt better, and anyway Angelica became less and less sure that she was ready to be a parent. The convictions of youth diminished; the doubts of maturity deepened. If you weren’t ever going to be able to have a baby, why bother wanting one? Pretend you didn’t want enough, and the pretence would come true: keep the Johnson’s Baby Oil for its proper purpose—sex. “You are still trying, aren’t you?” asked Edwin, noticing that the arrival of her period was no longer cause for tears. “Of course,” said Angelica, but she wasn’t really. “You’re at your most fertile this week,” he’d complain, “and all you do is sleep.”

Angelica loved Edwin as much as ever but sometimes sleep seemed more attractive than sex. Or so a voice in her head would tell her, when she turned over in bed towards Edwin’s caresses: “Do what you want, for God’s sake—not what he wants,” and she’d turn back again, away from him. It was Jelly’s voice, impatient and imperious, but she thought it was her own.