Splitting (20 page)

The punters would, after all, get three of her for the price of one, though no doubt Angelica would be reluctant, and Jelly a wet-blanket; but sex is sex: the moment the body was engaged in its instinctive business the other two shouldn’t prove too much of a problem; might even add a frisson or so to Angel’s own entertainment.

Lady Rice slept. Where did she get her worldly wisdom? She had led an emotionally-trying but narrow and sheltered life—it was enough to make you believe in the group unconscious. If you delved too deep into it you’d find the accumulated wisdom and experience of not just three but all the women in the world, and all the false assumptions and conditioned responses too. And no sense yet made of any of it. Lady Rice is no angel: that she’s sure of, or she wouldn’t be in this company.

Michael, with thick silver hair and the single gold tooth, sat at Angel’s left. David, with thinning red hair and crinkly blue eyes, sat on her right. Glad to make her acquaintance, they said. They were strangers in town. She smiled and said nothing in particular. They were staying, they said, in a hotel down the road. That figured: their suits did not have quite the flat smoothness of the ones usually seen at The Claremont. They had been first packed, then unpacked, and not seen the services of a first class valet.

Michael and David pressed more gin upon Angel, intently watching her drink. She told them her name was Angel; that she was a private nurse. That she was employed to look after a stroke victim, an elderly lady currently a guest at The Claremont. It did not do to present herself as either too up-market, or too obvious in her profession. Amateurs did better in this game than professionals.

“Angel by name,” they said, “Angel by nature.” They expected she needed something to cheer her up, and she agreed that she did.

Michael laid a well-manicured hand on one arm, David on the other.

“Ask them if they’re married,” said Jelly in Angel’s ear.

“What, to each other?” snapped Angel, aloud. “For God’s sake, leave me alone.”

“Did you say that to me?” asked Michael, surprised.

“I’m sorry,” said Angel. “Sometimes I do talk to myself. You’ll get used to it.”

David leant over and squeezed her lips gently together with thumb and forefinger. “That’s to stop you,” he said. “Women shouldn’t talk too much. It gets them into trouble.” She could see the gold wedding band on his third finger: there was no avoiding it. He had a wife.

Angelica said, “Don’t you have any respect for anything?”

Jelly said, “Oh, give up, Angelica. There’s no stopping her.

Let’s just go with the flow,” and for a time they did.

Michael said to David, concerned, “If you hold her lips together, she won’t be able to drink,” and David took his hand away and Angel beamed happily from one to the other. The barman held the door open for them, and they helped Angel across the room. “I’m so drunk I can hardly stand,” she confessed to the barman, giving him a little kiss for good measure. “Wrong man!” said David, pulling her away. “Isn’t that Lady Angelica Rice?” asked the doorman of the barman, in the marble foyer, as the three went off down the road, in search of their lesser hotel.

“Of course that’s not Lady Rice,” said the barman. “That’s some pick-up, using and abusing my bar. I just get them drunk and out as fast as possible.”

“Lady Rice is here incognito,” said the doorman, “so in theory it’s not our concern. She’ll just have to look after herself.”

On the way down Davis Street, towards Oxford Street, Angelica kept looking over her shoulder,

“Why are you doing that?” asked Jelly, annoyed. “I need to concentrate. I’m trying to keep her steady on her feet.”

“It’s all too easy,” said Angelica. “I’m nervous. We’ve been set up. Supposing we’ve been recognized? Supposing Edwin gets to know? Supposing we’re being spied on? Supposing it affects our alimony?”

“You’re being paranoid,” said Jelly. “Personally, I’m glad of the opportunity to widen the field of my experience.”

“You’re a hopeless little slut at heart,” said Angelica, bitterly. “No better than Angel.”

Angel tripped and nearly fell, and was buoyed up on either side by Michael and David. Michael had his hand inside her jacket, she noticed, fingering her bosom. She liked that. “This goes too far,” said Angelica, and shut her eyes. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to join Lady Rice.”

“So am I,” said Jelly. “Angel, you’re on your own.”

Before she retired, Jelly managed to extract one of her high heels from a grating, instead of merely leaving the whole shoe behind as Angel was happy enough to do. Angel was neither prudent nor scrupulous. She enjoyed waste. The shoes were silvery net—an expensive pair Lady Rice had seldom had opportunity to wear: in Rice circles shoes were usually plain and serviceable. Presently Jelly became aware that Lady Rice was lying semi-clothed on a bed, not in The Claremont but in some strange hotel: the less she knew about any of it the better. She just hoped to live. Casual sex was insane. Serial killers, HIV rapists were at the outer edges of the sex-with-strangers experience: further in, nearer home, sadists, bullies, men on power trips, men anxious to humiliate. If Jelly knew this, how come Angel so readily took Lady Rice into danger? Or perhaps Angel thought horror a small price to pay for sex. What did two men want with one woman? Or did one woman merely save the cost of two?

When it came to it, David and Michael seemed more interested in one another’s orifices than in Angel’s. Angel served, as Angelica acidly observed in the morning, safely back in The Claremont, as witness to passion, even love, and as a kind of soft, sweet, fleshly jam spread on harder, crusty, rather stale bread, in the hope that the latter would be made appealing. To which Jelly replied, “You are such a mass of euphemisms, Angelica. It was disgusting. Men are beasts. They just wanted somewhere extra for a ramrod to ram, should it run out of places. There was no love in it, none.” To which Angel murmured but they seemed to love each other: who cared about love, anyway? She, Angel, had a good time and earned herself a hundred pounds cash; and then, as Angelica filled and scented the bath and Jelly folded the clothes and tut-tutted over the scuffed heel, Angel lapsed into exhausted silence and went into hiding.

When she was gone, Jelly said to Angelica, “What are we going to
do
about her? She’ll get us into terrible trouble,” and Angelica, anointing her sore parts with healing jellies, said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Over breakfast, Angelica said, “I thought I saw that nice barman when Angel came in. I had the feeling he’d been waiting up. It was obvious what we’d been up to. Drunk, unescorted, skirt torn, four in the morning. Supposing he took a photograph?”

Jelly said brusquely, “Nonsense. We’d have seen the flash.” Angelica said, “We were in no condition to notice anything.” Jelly said, brightly, “At least we’re ‘we’ again. A good night out can work wonders.”

Angelica said, “Speak for yourself. I’m ashamed and humiliated. But I expect it’s no more than I deserve.”

They enjoyed their coffee. It was black and strong. The croissants were fresh, and there was a Danish pastry, well filled with apple and quite delectable. Sun shone in.

“Only four hours’ sleep,” said Lady Rice, herself again, “and a full day’s work ahead! God knows what comes over me, sometimes.”

As a day, of course, it was a dead loss. Lady Rice stumbled through it as Jelly, hungover and sleepless, but the speculative pain was muted, the outrage and blind fury that Edwin preferred another woman to her, that that other woman had so easily taken her husband, her property, her home, her very life from under her nose, had somewhat abated. Lady Rice used her alter egos as strategies for survival. What else was she to do?

Jelly forgot to save a file on her computer and lost a whole day’s work, including a letter to Barney Evans, which she omitted to mention to Brian Moss. If a letter came in complaining of undue delay, she could lose that one too, when it arrived. She had stopped being in a hurry. Now she was playing for time. She could see that some kind of healing process had begun. The others agreed.

Not too much damage had been done, as it so happened, by Angel’s delinquency.

“Sex, money and alcohol make a dangerous mixture,” said Jelly primly. Since Angel could not do without the first, and all of them needed the second, they decided never to get drunk again. There were too many divorcees around who relied upon alcohol to get them through the night, and so seldom got through the days.

T
ULLY TOFFENER CALLED BRIAN
Moss. Jelly received the call. She said Brian Moss was at a meeting, though he wasn’t. She said she would ask Brian to return the call, but she didn’t.

“Why don’t we like him?” Angelica asked.

“He was unsympathetic,” said Lady Rice vaguely. “Not quite our sort.”

Memories of the marriage were fading, had only properly been Lady Rice’s anyway, at any rate in the latter days of the marriage. A few vivid incidents stood out: watching the chimney fall through the roof, handing over money to Robert Jellico, nursing Lady Ventura, the dinner when Natalie burned Susan’s cheek with lobster soup. Yes, Tully Toffener had been there that night, but what had he said, what had he done? She remembered Sara Toffener complaining about the servants. But these incidents now floated like star-ships in a kind of space, without beginning, without end. They had nothing much to do with Lady Rice any more. She had not seen or spoken to Edwin for six months, though he had called Brian Moss on a few occasions, and she had put the call through. Edwin had not even recognized her voice. She had seen his scrawled signature on the bottom of letters, and had pressed the writing to her lips for comfort, for all Jelly tried to stop her, crying out in disgust, “My God, talk about women who love too much! The man’s a monster.” Lady Rice had used ruse after ruse to get through to Sir Edwin on the phone, but he had changed his private number. Anthea would answer, or Mrs. MacArthur, and Lady Rice would put the phone down, heart beating and leaping all over the place.

That Anthea now moved about her, Lady Rice’s, kitchen, used her pots and pans, lay in her bed with her husband, seemed to Lady Rice the stuff of nightmare, though to the rest of the world, and indeed to Jelly, Angelica and Angel, it seemed ordinary enough. These days, of course, men and women had serial spouses; who could forever be changing houses, buying new when partners changed? Children, if there were any, required continuity. No sympathetic magic would be allowed to lie in the cutlery or china, the pillows and sideboards, that had accompanied a marriage: it was simply not practical. Did not a new man now sit in Angelica’s father’s armchair, without apparent fear of a haunting? Let the new partner water the old partner’s pot plants, it was all that was required. Lady Rice thanked God now she had no children, to tear her apart, loving and hating them, needing and rejecting them, as she saw the father appear in them. Nor did she believe any longer that if she had had a child it would have made much difference to the marriage. He would have seen his wife in his child, and dismissed the child as well, that was all.

Angelica yawned.

Jelly yawned.

Angel yawned.

“Forget the past,” they said. “What a bore it is.”

Lady Rice tried to explain that it was no longer the past which upset her so, but her increasing and intensifying lack of one.

Edwin looked through her and by her: he was trying to make her feel she did not exist, and had never existed, and he was succeeding. He was vanishing her.

“We’ll sustain you,” said the others. “We live in the here and now; we don’t need a past.”

She was grateful, but felt they did not understand quite how she suffered. Even in her dreams now, sometimes, Edwin’s face would be checkered over by changing squares, as if he were someone on TV who did not wish to be recognized. It hurt her more than anything. He had stolen her home from her, and now he robbed her even of memories of him. He had stolen twelve years. She had no choice, if she were to live at all, but to go back to being the person she was when she married him: like a child too long and too often away from school, how would she ever catch up? She would have to limp along behind everyone else for ever.

Alimony, hate, resentment, these three. Oh, she was having trouble with herself.

T
ULLY TOFFENER FINALLY MANAGED
to get through to Brian. He called from the House of Commons.

“What’s the matter with that secretary of yours?” he asked. “You stuffing her, or what? She hasn’t got her mind on her job.” Brian made excuses on Jelly’s behalf. Tully Toffener wanted to know what his chances were of getting his wife’s grandmother and her husband put in a lunatic asylum and getting himself made executor of their estate. Brian Moss said he thought Tully’s chances were slim, since there was an inheritance involved, and Tully lost his temper. Brian handed the phone to Jelly, to save himself. Jelly listened and remembered why she didn’t like Tully Toffener. “Don’t give me any of that shit,” yelled Tully, “about old people not being paper parcels, and having a will and rights of their own. I get that all the time in this lousy job they’ve sidestepped me into. If I had my way, everyone in this country over eighty would be tied up with string like the parcels they are, and put into a furnace. There’s the division bell. There’s a three-line whip and I have to go and vote with the ayes in the free-fuel-for-pensioners bill. You’re no fucking use to me at all, Moss. And you’re not doing much for my friend Edwin Rice, by all accounts, to save him from that horrid little wife of his. She was a dreadful cook.” And the phone clicked down.

“Being an ex-wife,” said Jelly to her boss, “is like being dead, but no one speaking good of you.”

“How very strange,” said Brian Moss. “That’s exactly what my wife said to me.”