Splitting (5 page)

It was acknowledged, even by Lord Cowarth, that Lady Rice was efficient when she put her mind to it: had a gift for knowing what took the visitors’ fancy, why they would prefer cream to butter on their scones, why they would buy fudge but not mints, why they gawped at Mrs. Simpson’s love seat but didn’t care for Lord Cowarth’s collection of arrowheads.

And after the last visitor had gone, when the money had been accounted for and sent off to swell the Rice Estate coffers, and she had earned the approval of Robert Jellico, what could be more pleasant than to have friends round? To prepare meals, using the cookery books brought home by Edwin, who shared the cooking with her, trying out dishes from everywhere, from Afghanistan to Georgia to Iran—places at that time not so riven by violence, cruelty and war as to make their very food suspect, too potentially full of grief for enjoyment.

Edwin and Angelica, Rosamund and Lambert, Susan and Humphrey, were the central couples: others around, espoused or as singles, performed a dance of delicate social balance; creating their own precise etiquette. Friends, acquaintances, colleagues flitted in and out of focus round the table; each knowing their place; smiling faces breaking bread, providing advice, entertainment, common cause. Edwin and Angelica offered the most eccentric yet the grandest table of the group. Though the power and prestige Rice Court represented was now seen as fit only for tourists, even peasant food tasted good on a refectory table large enough to seat twelve and with lots of elbow room. Rosamund, the doctor, responsible, kindly and steady, and Lambert her husband, a writer, wild-eyed, wild-haired, made up in skills and talent for anything they lacked in style: a double act and a crowded table in a book-lined room, down the corridor from the kitchen. Susan, the potter from Minnesota, rosy, exotic and sexy, with her bubbling enthusiasms, her fair shiny hair, her attractive naiveté, a basket-full of English garden flowers or chutneys, Easter gifts or winter comforts somehow always on her arm, forever bearing gifts, her adoring, plump, good, mournful, clumsy husband Humphrey, the architect, served food Japanese fashion, on the carpeted floor, amongst cushions. Rosamund had two children, Susan had one, Angelica had none. Edwin still took that amiss.

“Perhaps I should have had a sperm count,” said Edwin one night at Susan’s. “What do men
do
when they’re not fathers?” And everyone laughed.

“Love their wives,” said Angelica, and realized with alarm to what degree she counted on Rosamund not to tell about the implant. Too late to tell Edwin herself: why had she not when first Rosamund tucked it under her skin? She could hardly remember. Time enough, time enough, as Rosamund averred. A 5 percent increase in visitors this season: there was so much for Angelica to do, and Edwin too if he wanted, but he didn’t. Edwin merely seemed to potter and brood; he began to have a puzzled look, as did Humphrey, whose architectural practice was failing. It is a terrible thing to have to search for occupation. Lambert, too, was in financial difficulty. His publishers dropped him from their list; his agent was too busy to speak to him. He was misunderstood. He spent more time with the children, leaving Rosamund free to do night duty; indeed obliged to do so, if bills were to be met.

Angelica, the youngest in the group, saw her task as learning, and learn she did; over the dinner table. She could talk now about abstract matters: what justice was, and injustice; understood better when to confide, when to stay quiet; had opinions about what art was, who really ran the country and so on. Whether agents-provocateurs let off bombs, or terrorists.

From Susan she learned a kind of sophisticated feminine response; things her mother had never taught her. She learned that flowers need to be arranged, not just plonked in a vase; that their leaves had to be stripped, stems crushed. Sensual pleasures, Susan implied, were the same; The more you postponed, the more you enjoyed. This apparently went for sex, too, and suited Angelica very well. Or, as Susan said, “Gosh, your English men are so bad at, like, wooing. This is certainly no red-rose culture you have over here!” Though, heaven knew, Humphrey circled Susan with bouquets, took her for romantic weekends to Vienna, had her portrait painted, personally manicured her strong potter’s hands in a manner most un-English.

Susan took it as her due. She had previously been married to Alan Adliss, the now famous landscape painter. She’d run off with Humphrey, taking him away from Helen, his fat, faithless and insensitive wife—or so everyone described her, taking Susan’s word for it. No one of the circle had actually ever met Helen, of course, nor wished to—she belonged to some other world layered behind this one, its sufferings incomprehensible, irrelevant: whining voices on answer-phones demanding consideration, remembrance, the money second wives saw as their due. Unloved women, those in the past, should simply fade away, as should widowed mothers. At least there was no one like this in Edwin’s past: she was his first wife, his only wife. These emotional and marital difficulties were for others, not for Angelica. Yes, she was conceited, and foolish.

Angelica assumed she was the nicest person in the world: there was not even any internal discussion about the possibility of this not necessarily being the case. How could there be? She was the heroine of her own life. Her lack of response to her father’s death puzzled her. The event had scarcely marked her. Why? It was as if he had been some kind of prop, not a person at all. Surely this must be a failing in him, not in her? All the same, she could see her non-grief at his death as being some kind of time-bomb somewhere in her persona, as the oestrogen implant was a time-bomb in her body, antipathetical to the very origins of life.

Back in the Sixties, Lavender Lamb, aged seventeen, married Stephen White, aged fifty-two, and gave birth soon thereafter to a little girl they named Angelica, who was both dutiful and ambitious, cute and swift. Sometimes they called her Jelly, for short—in affection and dismissal, “Oh, Jelly, you are being a pain; what husband will put up with you?”—and occasionally they called her Angel, as in “Angel, dearest, fetch me this; Angel, dearest, fetch me that. Angel, dearest, put pennies on your poor dead father’s eyes. He, too, is an angel now. If only you hadn’t chosen to sing that rock-and-roll stuff, if only you’d stuck to Handel’s
Messiah,
you could have risen to soprano lead and your father might not have got so upset and died. Not that I’m blaming you, my Angel, both our Angel, indeed you were your father’s Angel, with a voice that carolled like a lark, in whatever mode you chose, and at least he didn’t live to have to listen to ‘Kinky Virgin.’ At least you preserved your virginity, for his sake, until he croaked, pegged it, passed over, fell off the perch. It was only to be expected, he being thirty-five years older than me, but I can tell you expecting makes no difference. It’s still an outrage to be left without a husband.”

Larks and lambs, and pure white rice: add a soupcon of barley; all good things. Why do they go wrong? Nothing’s ever over, that’s the answer, not even the giving of names. They should have called her Jane: it is a name scarcely open to division, perforating, or outright splitting. Angelica was just asking for trouble.

More and more Angelica turned away from Edwin in bed; fastidiousness could tire you out: sleep could become the greater desire. Or was it that the potential of pregnancy, framing sex with light, was what kept sex interesting, as the sun behind a dark cloud will frill it with brilliance? She could almost believe now, in any case, that the implant was imaginary. The Rosamund she’d met for the first time in the surgery had been a stranger: now she was a friend. Everything was different, why not this too? Better not to enquire. Perhaps anyway such implants had been proved not to work: how could anything keep working for so long; and who was to say whether it was actually this pellet of artificially deposited hormone which kept

Edwin’s and her destined child out of the world, or an act of God? If Rosamund had made no mention of the implant the first time Edwin had said over dinner, “We’re not too hot in the fertility stakes, Angelica and I,”, or however he’d put it, in his offhand, English way, perhaps it was because there was indeed nothing to mention. Years drifted by and the events of one year were lost in the dramas of the next.

She wished Edwin were more like Humphrey; more adoring, more romantic, less companionable.

She made herself go and sit by her father’s grave: the Rice Estate was digging up the churchyard cemetery overflow, where her father’s body lay, to build an extension to a new sports center. She knew if she didn’t visit now she never could, and even this sense of his corporeal, albeit disintegrating reality, be lost to her. But still she could not bring Stephen White properly to mind: he had been too elderly, too amiable, too vague to be quite real. Someone who had failed to elicit strong passions in her, who had lived in the past, but whose time had overlapped hers; whose enthusiasms had been alien to hers, making her feel a changeling.

She felt dull. Edwin’s former clubbing friends would turn up at the new, improved Rice Court from time to time, or friends from the ex-hunting and shooting, now property-developing, junk-bonding set, observe just how very, very dull country life could be, and depart. Angelica’s ex-music-biz friends would arrive to gaze at the country moon under the influence of one substance or another, deplore what marriage and maturity could do to a girl, even leaving babies out of it, and depart.

Sometimes Anthea came to dinner, and Edwin would yawn and say, “She thinks of nothing but horses: keep her away from me, though she is my cousin. Do you realize, if I’d been a girl and she’d been a boy, she’d have had my title!”

Or Boffy Dee would turn up for a heart to heart and a glass of gin. She was marrying a racing driver who’d had so many knocks to the head he couldn’t speak without slurring, but Boffy Dee did not see brain damage as an impediment to marital happiness. On the contrary.

R
OSAMUND CALLED ANGELICA ONE
evening and said, “Angelica, this is terrible: we have to
do
something. I think Susan is having an affair with Clive Rappaport. I keep seeing his car and hers parked in strange places when I’m out on my calls, and nobody in either of them.” It was summer and the grass was green.

Clive Rappaport was a solicitor, one of the outer circle of friends: quiet, serious, romantic; very much married to Natalie, plump, dark, effervescent.

“That’s completely out of the question,” said Angelica. “Why?” demanded Rosamund. And Angelica reminded her that only a couple of weeks back, at a picnic on the old railway track—Susan and Humphrey lived in a charmingly converted railway station—Natalie had confided, half-joking, half-serious, as women will amongst friends, that Clive had gone off her, lost sexual interest.

“What do I do?” Natalie had asked. “We’ve never had trouble like this before.”

“Wear black lingerie,” Susan had replied. “Lace and garters, high heels. Parade up and down. That always works.” And everyone had laughed, a little awkwardly. Because it had seemed a strange thing to say, in a group so dedicated to the notion that sex was to do with love, not lust.

“If Susan was having an affair with Clive,” said Angelica to Rosamund now, “she couldn’t possibly have said a thing like that.”

Which just showed, in retrospect, how little Angelica knew about anything.

“Oh yes she could,” said Rosamund, “if she was secure enough, conceited enough, knew absolutely certainly that no amount of black underwear could ever get Clive happy in bed with Natalie again and was trying to cover her tracks.”

“She’s not like that,” said Angelica, shocked. “Not Susan.”

At least until now she had supposed not. It was true men became animated when Susan came into a room: with her bony, slightly gawky figure, the thick bell of blonde hair swinging; but so did women: it was obvious Humphrey adored Susan, Susan adored Humphrey. Angelica gave the matter minimal thought and put it out of her mind. Rosamund was overworked: mildly paranoid. She was having a hard time with Lambert, who would put her down in company, lament the minimal size of her breasts, her concern for everyone in the world but him, and Rosamund responded, no doubt, by seeing trouble everywhere but at home. She reported to Edwin what Rosamund had said and Edwin replied, “What on earth would Susan see in Clive Rappaport: he’s dull as ditch water,” which was not quite the response Angelica would have expected, but then more and more things these days were unexpected.

Unexpected, too, when the next week Lambert, Rosamund’s husband, came to Angelica and said, “Angelica, I think Susan and Edwin are having an affair,” and Angelica said, “Lambert, you are absurd, and what would it have to do with you if they were, anyway, which they aren’t? Are you having a breakdown? Why do you look so dreadful?” Lambert did: he wore track suit bottoms, an old array shirt untucked in, and had not had a shave for a week or a haircut for three months.

“You should never have had that contraceptive implant,” said Lambert. “Rosamund told you so at the time but you wouldn’t listen. Look at the trouble it got everyone into. You’re Edwin’s wife. You should have given him a baby.”

“What?” enquired Angelica. “What? Who said I wouldn’t give Edwin a baby?”

“It’s in your file at the surgery,” said Lambert, and declined to say more. Angelica’s concerns were none of his. But if Lambert told Susan, and Susan told Edwin—no, it was beyond belief. Lambert was, in any case, out of his mind.

“Rosamund,” said Angelica, going round after surgery, finding

Rosamund rubber-gloved amongst blood samples and card indices, busy with the tragedies of others, “Rosamund, what are we to do about Lambert?”

“We?” enquired Rosamund. Her hair was curlier than ever with sweat and exhaustion. Her honest, bright face was pale: her freckles stood out. She was loveable, Angelica realized, and admirable, but she was worthy, and would never be glamorous.

“Friends,” said Angelica. “We’re all friends,” and Angelica gave