by Fay Weldon
“Because you won’t give Edwin a baby, and Susan’s so kind and soft-hearted,” said Rosamund, adding, with savagery, “fucking little slut.”
Angelica stared.
“You can’t keep implants secret,” said Rosamund. “Lambert looks through the files for material for his stories. Everyone knows, except you. You did know but you seem to have forgotten. You’re very peculiar, Angelica. Sometimes I think you sleepwalk through your life. I’d never suggest Prozac for you: you’re enough of a Pollyanna as it is, rising cheerful and positive to each day.”
“I don’t believe any of this,” said Angelica. But when she thought about it, it was true that Lambert and Roland had the same wide-spaced, prominent, wild brown eyes: now the thought was in the head, the evidence was there. Just as the understanding that the continents have drifted apart, over the aeons, from the one original land mass, became evident and obvious to anyone who looked at a globe post-1926, when the notion was first floated, but simply didn’t occur to the generations before.
“I don’t believe Lambert’s in love with Susan,” said Angelica, hopelessly. “You two are too good together. You go together. Why should Lambert love Susan when he’s got you?”
“Because I’m boring,” observed Rosamund calmly, “and Susan’s not. I only speak when I’ve something to say and Susan babbles ceaselessly on. I work regular hours and wear myself out toiling for humanity, while Susan is full of artistic sensibility. Lambert’s a writer, Susan’s a potter. Creative, you know? They need the likes of Humphrey and myself to earn their livings, but we’re not exactly sources of powerful emotion, are we? We can’t expect to stay the course.”
“And if Susan’s having an affair with anyone,” said Angelica, “it’s Clive Rappaport, not Edwin. You said so yourself. And Susan would never do a thing like that to me. I’m her best friend. Lambert must stop saying these things. He’s insane.”
“I’d rather it was Edwin than Clive,” said Rosamund. “Because if it’s Clive, poor Natalie will have to get to know, and poor Humphrey as well—”
“Well, thank you very much,” said Angelica. “You don’t think it matters about poor me?”
“Oh, Angelica,” said Rosamund in dismissal, “you’re like me, you can look after yourself,” which surprised Angelica very much. It had never been her intention to turn out sensible, good-natured and enduring: the kind of woman who would put up with a husband’s infidelities for the sake of the greater good.
“And, anyway,” Rosamund added, “you don’t have any children so it’s hardly important.” Which made Angelica see why Lambert might well have set his face against Rosamund, might well prefer Susan. Angelica was almost convinced, but not quite. As for Edwin fathering some putative child of Susan’s, that was simply not possible. Edwin was too responsible, too lordly, ever to take Susan seriously. They liked her, but she was lightweight.
Angelica called Susan to say perhaps she’d better come round and talk a few things over. Humphrey picked up the telephone; someone tried to snatch it away. All kinds of noises came from the other end of the line: hangings, batterings, little Roland crying, then finally screaming; an unknown voice saying, “Humphrey, don’t speak to anyone. I forbid it. See a solicitor first.” More breathings, and then Humphrey was in charge of the instrument. Humphrey said, with unwonted passion, “Is that you, Angelica? You bitch! You’ve been conniving with Susan; you knew all about it; she took her lead from you; she’s told me about you and Lambert.” And Humphrey put the phone down.
Angelica laughed. She could not help it. Edwin came into the room.
“What’s funny?” asked Edwin.
“Susan’s having an affair with (a) Clive Rappaport, (b) Lambert, (c) you. I’m having an affair with Lambert: you and/or Clive Rappaport are fathering Susan’s baby. This is village life.”
“I don’t think that’s funny,” said Edwin, but he seemed unsurprised. “Why do you laugh at other people’s troubles?”
“Well,” said Angelica, “if it was true, it would be my trouble, too.”
“So you’re denying it?” asked Edwin.
“Susan says it’s true.”
Angelica cannot believe it of Susan, that she should tell such lies to get out of trouble, as if everyone were back at school. A clear sky is suddenly swept by clouds: black ones, layering, level upon level, and a different storm swells up between each layer, each feeding upon its fellows. Lightning cracks the sky; thunder blasts; the tempest pours. Angelica no longer stands pure, untroubled, shone upon by the sun of love and good fortune. The ground she stands upon trembles. The best she can hope for now is not to be utterly cast down. It is all too sudden. Edwin turns on the television as if nothing was happening.
“Edwin,” says Angelica to her husband, “something extraordinary is going on at Railway Cottage. Aren’t you interested?”
“No,” says Edwin, “it really has very little to do with us.” He has found a documentary on Northern Ireland. He does not take his eyes from the screen. “I think it has,” says Angelica.
“I knew you’d try to make a meal of it,” says Edwin. “It’s not a good idea to turn private matters into public gossip.”
“But Susan is my friend,” says Angelica. “She’s in trouble—”
“You have hardly behaved like a friend to her,” says Edwin. “If she’s telling lies about Rosamund’s husband and myself—,” says Angelica.
“I think she worries about your plans for her own husband, forget Rosamund’s.”
“This is bizarre,” says Angelica.
She would shake her husband, except he has turned into a stranger, and a hostile one at that.
“Do you have no loyalty to me?” asks Angelica. “You’ll listen to any old gossip.”
“You’re the one who asked it into the house,” remarks Edwin. “You’re the one who wanted a social life. Susan called me yesterday. She wanted my advice.”
And he told Angelica that Susan had been on the phone to Clive, discussing some work project. Natalie had picked up the extension, listened in, misunderstood and become hysterical. “Though Natalie’s own conduct,” says Edwin, “scarcely gives her leave to object to whatever Clive chooses or does not choose to do, but when were women ever reasonable? Their idea of justice is very one-sided. Susan was afraid Natalie might cause trouble by calling Humphrey, so she called me. That’s all.”
“Why you?” asks Angelica.
“I suppose,” says Edwin, “because I’m her friend and the only one she can rely on not to gossip or make a drama and a meal of something so important. Could all this wait till the program has ended?”
“How dare he!” says a voice in Angelica’s head. “How dare he!”. Another one says “don’t rock the boat.” another one says “take him upstairs and fuck him,” and Angelica shakes her head to be rid of them, which works.
Angelica switches the TV off. Edwin sighs.
“I do not believe Susan has ever had the slightest suspicion about me and Humphrey,” says Angelica, regaining her composure.
“Humphrey is old enough to be my father. Shouldn’t we investigate this? Perhaps it’s Humphrey’s fantasy? That I’m after him? I’m sorry
I switched off the TV. It was rude of me.”
“That’s all right,” says Edwin, quite cheerfully. “I expect Susan is over-sensitive. She worries so about growing old. I told her she was being silly.”
“How do you know?” asks Angelica. “How do you know things about Susan I don’t? You sound so close to her.”
“When you’re busy with the Heritage Shop,” says Edwin, “Susan and I sometimes go for walks. She’s interested in all kinds of things you aren’t. English wild flowers, for example.”
“The bitch!” says Angelica finally.
“Susan says she. thinks there’s some kind of lesbian element in your attitude to her,” says Edwin. “It makes her uneasy. She thinks you may prefer women to men but can’t face it.”
“And what do you think?” asked An
gelica.
“I don’t know,” said Edwin. “You’re not exactly all over me these days.”
Angelica paced, and thought, and thought, and paced, while Edwin stroked and patted the dogs, Labradors, one of whom lay in his lap and the other over his feet, large, soothing, fleshy golden creatures. Edwin turned the television back on. But the program on Northern Ireland was finished. He sighed again.
“He doesn’t love you anymore,” one of the voices told her. “He’s waiting for you to vanish,” but Angelica dismissed that as malicious scaremongering.
“What advice did you give Susan?” Angelica asked Edwin, finally. It was as if she were allowed only one question, as in some child’s game, so that question had better be good.
“I said that since Natalie was both vindictive and possessive, her first step would be to get in touch with Humphrey. So Susan had better get in first, and tell her husband herself before the balloon went up.
Okay?”
“Edwin,” said Angelica, “that was very strange advice. What are you trying to do? Blow things apart? The only thing Susan should have done was to deny everything, everything.”
“My dear,” said Edwin, “she consulted me, not you.”
“Edwin’s been having an affair with Susan,” said the voice, “and he too has only just now discovered about Susan fucking Clive, and that’s indeed what he wants to do: blow the whole thing apart.”
“Shut up!” shrieked Angelica internally, and the voice said sulkily,
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” and fell silent.
There was a kind of scraping at the door, a sound half way between a scrabble and a tap, and Edwin opened the door to Susan, weeping, swollen-faced, shivering with cold and barefooted. There was snow on the ground outside. Her toes were blue. Susan sat in an armchair while Angelica fetched blankets and Edwin took Susan’s feet in his hands and rubbed and patted to restore their blood supply.
“Humphrey threw me out of the house,” wept Susan. “My own house. I did everything you told me, Edwin. I waited for a good moment and told him how silly and stupid I’d been over Clive: I told him it meant nothing. I told them Natalie was over-reacting. I told them the last thing on my mind was to hurt Natalie: how could I? She’s my friend. I told Humphrey he’d been so caught up lately with business matters, he could hardly be surprised if some other man attracted my attention. I’m younger than him, after all. I told him how Clive and I have this fantastic intellectual and artistic rapport—but sex hardly enters into it at all. We just sometimes meet on our own, the way you and I do, Edwin. Edwin and I go on nature walks sometimes, Angelica. I told Humphrey he should learn from this incident and realize his marriage might be in danger so he’d better work harder at it; neglecting me wasn’t going to work. And all he did was turn into a primitive Victorian in front of my eyes. Oh shit! He threw me out of the house, literally, physically, without giving me time even to put on my shoes, and locked the door so I couldn’t get back in. I went next door and called Clive from there but he was no help at all. He said Natalie had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and he was waiting for the doctor, so he couldn’t talk now. He called her ‘his wife’ as if it was some kind of magic. She mattered and I didn’t. She has him totally under her thumb. She’s such a mean, trouble-making bitch.” Susan caught Angelica’s arm. “This is an appalling time for me! You won’t let me down, will you, Angelica?”
“Of course not,” said Angelica.
“Because you’re my friend and you’re civilized and you understand these things. You and Lambert are very close, aren’t you, and Edwin doesn’t make a stupid fuss, let alone lock you out in the snow.”
Angelica listened for comments from the voices but there were none. She was on her own. She unhooked herself from Susan’s hand. Edwin went to fetch a dry towel for Susan’s feet. Whether or not he had caught the gist of Susan’s remark regarding Lambert Angelica could not be sure. Perhaps these insane statements just washed over him: some men never listened to conversations between women at the best of times; and if the conversations became emotionally loaded men could become suddenly altogether deaf.
“Susan,” Angelica said, all the same, “because you go round having affairs with your best friends’ husbands does not mean everyone does. I certainly don’t. What do you mean, me and Lambert?” Susan laughed harshly and said that all she ever got from the English were pious platitudes and no understanding at all of love or its imperatives. All the subtlety of her relationship with Clive, all the power, the passion, the throbbing soul of it, reduced to the glibness of Angelica’s phrase—“having an affair.”
To which Angelica said, “Bet you didn’t say all that ‘throbbing soul’ bit to Humphrey, unless of course you’re sick of Humphrey, which I would understand.”
“Why?” enquired Susan, displaying a sudden and mean vulgarity.
“Because you’d like to get your sticky little fingers on him?”
Angelica did not think that worth responding to.
Edwin returned. Susan’s cold foot now pressed against his cheek, as he rubbed it with the towel.
“I do so badly need someone to look after me,” said Susan, “especially now.”
“Poor Susan,” said Edwin. “Of course we’ll look after you, won’t we, Angelica?”
“Why especially now?” asked Angelica. “Susan’s pregnant,” said Edwin. “Three months, Angelica,” said Susan.
There was a flurry of voices in Angelica’s head: she tried to make sense of them: they were calling warnings, giggling told-you-so’s; others were swear-wording, fucking and cunting; then out of the cacophony came a silence: then a consensus. “Angelica can’t cope. She’s no use to us. Get rid of her.”
“Angelica, did you hear me?” asked Edwin.
To which Angelica replied, inanely enough, “Don’t call me Angelica any more, call me Lady Rice.”
And having said it, Angelica, that anxious young woman of many parts and an interesting past, fled without warning into the fastnesses of herself, as abruptly and rashly as people flee to escape rocket attack, earthquake, forest fire, in the interest of survival itself, leaving a mere Lady Rice behind, to cope as best she could.
“I’m sorry,” said Lady Rice, the too-sudden transition confusing her as well, “I don’t feel very well.”
Lady Rice was always sorry and seldom well. She was a loving, drooping, companionable creature, but now stood alone, like some eighteenth-century face mask, the kind worn at balls, behind which a series of others hid; some blonde, some dark; some young, some old; all at the moment deathly still, all terrified—only Jelly, perhaps, craning a little this way or that, just visible, showed flickers of life, of intent. None of the other souls had yet, of course, introduced themselves to Lady Rice. She perceived no difference in herself. As did Angelica, she just suffered from voices in the head.
Lady Rice fainted. As she fell into the black and sickly swirl of a consciousness deprived suddenly both of oxygen—for a moment she had stopped breathing—and of familiar identity, she heard Edwin say:
“Poor Susan! But you did the right thing. We all have to try and do the right thing.”
Lady Rice had to ease herself to sit against the edge of the sofa, had to scramble to her feet unaided. Edwin was helping poor, shook-up Susan to the one spare bedroom available, at the top of the house. The decorators were at the time in all but this one.
Thus it was that Angelica’s personality perforated, allowing her to resign, if only temporarily, from life; she was lucky: there was someone pacing about in the wings of her soul, waiting to take over. Angelica could just simply and suddenly resign, subject as she was to too much upset. It could happen in anyone’s head. A trauma, a shock, a faint, a word out of place, evidence of betrayal, a bang on the head, any assault on the identity and who’s to know who you’ll be when you recover? And if you have too many names to begin with, and a title added to confuse others’ views of you, who are you to know who you were in the first place? To
o many internal personae in search of a cohesive identity, and not enough body to go round!
Lady Rice went to bed, where Edwin presently followed her. He said he hoped she was feeling better but she should try not to steal Susan’s limelight. It had been absurd, pretending to faint like that. Everyone knew she was as strong as a horse.
Haltingly, Lady Rice apologized and tried to persuade her husband it was simply not so about herself and Humphrey, not so about herself and Lambert, but all Edwin said was do be quiet, what does any of that matter, women always deny everything anyway, you told me that yourself only this evening. Lady Rice thought she’d better be quiet.
“Poor me, poor me, poor me,” sighed Susan, now a house guest, through Rice Court. Poor Susan, all echoed. Locked out of her house, separated from her child. Those few in the Humphrey party—his parents, Rosamund, and a handful of comparative strangers: for example, the man in the Post Office who hated all women, the hedger and ditcher who believed in UFOs—urged Humphrey to go to his rival’s house and beat Clive up, but Humphrey, though he raged against women, against Susan, Natalie, Rosamund and Lady Rice, as all in one way or another party to the legitimization of his wife’s whorishness—they’d encouraged it, sanctioned it—did not ever meet his cuckolder face to face. Even in such circumstances, Rosamund complained, men stick together. The faithless wife gets murdered; her lover is left unharmed, and often unpunished.
“Get that woman out of here,” Mrs. MacArthur implored. “She’s trouble!” but Lady Rice had become so vague in her dealings with the world, and so forgetful—perhaps she’d bumped her head when she fell?—she could envisage only the horrors consequent upon false accusation and looked warily not trustingly at Mrs. MacArthur thereafter. If Lady Rice and Edwin could help Susan in any way, they would.
Susan was being sweet, and tearful, and full of confidences; Lady Rice took her to the Rice lawyers—four weeks later Susan was still locked out, still separated from her little Roland, Humphrey still holed up in Railway Cottage, and if you tried to get him on the phone you heard this terrible, harsh voice saying “Bitch! Cunt!” over and over. He had taken leave of his senses, everyone agreed. He was going through some kind of fugue. It was assumed he would recover. Rosamund said he might if she could keep the psychiatrists off his back. She thought little Roland was in no danger; his grandparents Molly and Jack had moved in to be with Humphrey, sometimes gently removing the receiver from his hand, replacing it, with a “sorry, caller.”