by Fay Weldon
“The village what?”
“You were seen kissing him down by the old railway track at Susan’s party.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“Don’t then,” said Natalie. “They’ll soon think of something else, anyway. Shall I tell Lambert Susan’s carrying on with Clive again?”
“Yes,” said Jelly White, back again. “Yes, yes, yes: encourage
Natalie to tell Lambert. At least it will stir things up.”
“You are such a trouble-maker,” said Lady Rice to Jelly. “And, anyway, I don’t want Susan on the loose again.”
“How you let yourself be trampled on,” said Jelly. “All you ever do is throw yourself flat on your face in the mud, and say to people, ‘oh, please walk all over me, please.’”
“You mean me falling off the ladder into the rotten plums?” asked Lady Rice. “You did that to me.”
“No, you did!” said Jelly. “You kicked your own ankle,” and the now familiar cacophony of hoots and whistles and jeers began.
“I think you should tell Lambert,” said Lady Rice to Natalie, who was waiting for an answer. “It seems only fair.”
“I’m not interested in fairness,” said Natalie. “I’m interested in causing trouble. Mind you, I can see anyone might need Clive as an antidote to Lambert. Lambert’s got big feet, damp and smelly: he’s fleshy: you’d have this great white belly bumping up and down on you every night. He’s not one, they say, to let an opportunity go by. He quite exhausted Rosamund. Whereas Clive—he’s so neat and contained, and he never smells, and he hardly breathes, and he has this little piston thing, deadly accurate. I loved him: now there’s no one.
Natalie started to cry. Doing without familiar sex, when you’ve been married for years and never thought you’d lose it, can be hard.
Lady Rice obligingly told Edwin, who naturally told Lambert, who then left Susan and went back to Rosamund, leaving a vacancy in
Railway Cottage. This vacancy was filled by Clive, which Natalie had not anticipated.
“If only I had a re-run button for my life,” she mourned to Lady Rice, “I’d wind it back to when I came across Clive weeping in the rose garden. I’d have made him a cup of tea and resisted the drama of throwing him out. Now I’ll have to put up with the kids spending Sundays at Railway Cottage, while Susan bitches at them. I think I’ll die.”
“See what you did?” said Lady Rice to Jelly White. “Sorry,” said Jelly. “Poor Natalie!”
“Better poor Natalie than pauvres nous, ma cherie,” said another voice in a cutesy French accent. “One must rejoice. If it hadn’t been Clive, it might have been Edwin. And not at Railway Cottage, up at Rice Court. Her in, you out!”
“That is just absurd,” said Lady Rice. “You’re insane. And who are you, anyway? How dare you even think things like that!”
“Just call me Angelique,” said the new entity. “I’m what you might have been. I like things just so. Very neat. I can’t abide a mess. Do you remember when we were sent to that educational psychologist, and he diagnosed us as anal obsessive?”
“Everyone agreed that was a mistake,” said Lady Rice, “(a) he hated us and (b) he’d got the wrong file.”
“Ce nest pas vrai,” said Angelique. “He was talking about me, that’s all. Moi. I was the only one he noticed, understandably.”
“Go away, go away, go away,” called out the others. “You’re an offshoot, an upstart. We have a crisis brewing here. You aren’t necessary. Eat shit and die!”
“Yes, you just get the hell out of here,” said Lady Rice, with unusual vigor. “You’ll only depress me.” Angelique said, “Ce va, qa va, but don’t say I didn’t warn you,” and went, and fortunately was never heard of again.
“It wasn’t working out between Lambert and me,” Susan explained to Lady Rice at the chemist’s. “It was becoming a destructive relationship. It’s difficult for two creative artists to live under the same roof; and now his play’s been turned down by the National, Lambert’s been impossible. Jealous, possessive: he even tried to strangle me, just like Humphrey did. Caught me by the throat and squeezed and squeezed. It seems to be my fate to hang out with crazies. If Rosamund can cope with Lambert, she’s welcome; she is his wife; she deserves him. Rosamund really ought to take more responsibility for things. Clive’s moved in, by the way. He’s using Lambert’s study as an office. He’s only the lodger, of course. Nothing else, before the accusations fly. I’m glad to have someone sharing Railway Cottage, especially at night. Sometimes I get the feeling the place is haunted. But I guess I’m just being the over-imaginative artist!”
“I guess,” said Lady Rice.
“Is that Natalie over there?” asked Susan, her bony arm on Lady Rice’s, and Lady Rice looked and said, “No. Just someone who looks rather like her.”
“I keep thinking I see Natalie,” said Susan. “Not that I want to. She hasn’t been much of a friend. What a dance she led poor Clive. People see sex in everything. Clive moving into Railway Cottage isn’t a sex thing. I really hope people realize that. You will tell them?”
“Of course,” said Lady Rice.
Clive, she thought, in and out, in and out, like a piston through the night, blotting out ghosts, blotting out poor Natalie, his wife.
(15)
Dinner Party
LADY RICE WAS SO BUSY! She was glad of it. The busier she was, the fainter the voices. Trauma and leisure both seemed to stir them up. Ventura Lady Cowarth had a bad back—she’d had a fall from her horse and, though to be blind drunk is meant to relax and protect a rider from injury, she had nevertheless disabled herself badly. She could barely wash, though she got herself hoisted on to horseback to follow the Hunt and managed that. “I can’t fuck,” Ventura told Lady Rice, “but at least I can still chase a fox. Always preferred it, anyway, when it came to your father-in-law.”
Lord Cowarth was upset and knocking away again at his teeth, such few as were left, and they were mostly at the back so he had to open his mouth wide to do it. Horrible.
Lady Rice was needed up at Cowarth Castle four or five times a week, nursing, shopping, answering the phone, parrying Milord’s insults and oddities, preparing for the visit of the twins, back from the Caribbean for business reasons but unaccountably laggardly in visiting their ancestral home. Or perhaps they were just exhausted: some fathers just exhaust their children, sapping their strength. If only I had a baby, thought Lady Rice, it would be a proper baby on a proper scale, ordinary and wonderful! I’d be allowed to focus my family responsibilities in my own home. I wouldn’t be so tired. But too late for that now.
These days Edwin said he didn’t want children. He said he didn’t want the family insanity passed on, and he was serious.
“Isn’t there some bill going through the House of Commons,” asked Lady Rice, “which will give women equal rights of land inheritance, and overrule the old charters? So the oldest child inherits, whether boy or girl? Title as well?”
“It’ll never get through,” said Edwin, shortly. “It’s absurd.”
Lady Rice asked Rosamund Plaidy if insanity was inherited, but she was no help. She just said what did she know, she was giving up medicine altogether, the better to look after her children. Bad enough coping with Lambert. He was living at home again.
Rosamund, Lambert told anyone who would listen, was on a masochistic binge; she was doing it on purpose to mortify him, but he declined to be mortified. Apparently Rosamund refused to speak to Lambert, other than when she felt it to be entirely necessary. She encouraged the children, Matty and Sonia, in the same behavior. Rosamund told them Lambert was only a temporary kind of husband and father, there today, gone tomorrow, best not to get too close to him, if only because closeness was what drove him away. He was emotionally immature, Rosamund told Matty and Sonia, as if definition somehow improved matters. The children nodded, trying to understand, being ever-willing, ever-hopeful, ever-forgiving. They loved both parents but obeyed their moth
er. Lambert claimed to like the surrounding silence: it allowed him to get on with his work. Oddly, the family seemed to enjoy their lives together and, when a social researcher, enquiring into the domestic lives of doctors, asked them one by one to rate their “happiness,” all replied “good.”
“Let’s ask Susan and Clive to dinner one night,” said Edwin. “We never get to see them these days. We need to get the social scene round here going again. If we don’t, who will? Noblesse oblige.”
He’d felt reclusive lately, and had put on weight, which depressed him further. He’d stay in bed till late in the morning, as he’d used to at the beginning of the marriage, only now unaccompanied by Angelica. He snapped at her and found fault. But now suddenly, at the prospect of a party, he had his arms round her; he seemed full of resolution and Lady Rice was happy. She remembered what times past had been, and saw they could be good again. Skies could cloud so gradually you hardly noticed when bright turned to overcast; and then suddenly there’d be the sun again, and you realized what you’d been missing.
“But perhaps we shouldn’t ask them,” said Angelica. “It will upset a lot of people if we do.”
And Edwin and she counted them up: those to whom the social acceptance or otherwise of disturbed and disturbing, shifting and changing couples mattered. They listed—
Humphrey.
Rosamund, Lambert, and their two children Matty and Sonia.
Natalie, and little Jane and little Jonathan.
Roland, who missed Humphrey, and little Serena, into whom the spirit of Rosamund’s aborted baby had entered, or so it was said.
X, the name given by Angelica to Susan’s miscarried baby.
“But you can’t lay all the responsibility at Susan’s door,” said Edwin.
“I do,” said Lady Rice, but nevertheless she invited Clive and Susan to dinner, because they were better company than any of those listed. They were accepted back into society, recognized as a couple, as a new nation is recognized, allowed to fly its own flag, its sovereignty acknowledged. But it is a mistake to believe that a social circle, once lapsed, can ever be revived, any more than can a former empire. Once the myth has gone, whether of lasting friendship or of power, that’s it. But people try, ever hopeful. Send out invitations, set warships prowling; gestures only.
Another mistake: Edwin wanted to invite Tully Toffener and his wife, Sara, in the hope, he said, of diluting the social mix.
Tully Toffener and Sara were weekenders. That is to say, they lived in London but, by virtue of their capacity to pull strings and influence others—namely, Robert Jellico—were one of the few families permitted to rent but not live full-time in Barley. They came down at weekends to sun themselves and restore their spirits in the countryside; during the week their cottage, which faced directly on to the village green, remained curtained and blank. The Rice Estate discouraged such parasitical occupancy of Barley: it did not want its award-winning village to be one of those communities which came to life only at weekends. But Tully Toffener was a Junior Minister of the Crown and might be able to pull a financial or political string or two to make the life of the Rice Estate easier. He had unfortunately been moved out of Heritage into the Department of Social Security, almost as soon as the leasehold of Roly Cottage was granted him by special dispensation of Lord Cowarth, but he might one day move back again—it was his ambition—and in the meantime could put in a good word here and there. His age was indeterminate. He had the clear skin of the undersexed and overweight; he was the cartoonist’s dream: his whiny voice made him sound both earnest and honest; his clamping jaw intimidated; he had a full soft lower lip, very bright and pink.
Lady Rice, who disliked so few people, disliked Tully Toffener. She said to Edwin, “I suppose it is wise to ask the Toffeners?”
“Why shouldn’t it be?” he asked. “What’s wrong with them?”
Angelica would have put it to Edwin that Tully’s work didn’t make him exactly likeable, that as spokesperson for; and power behind, the Ministry of Welfare, it was he who recommended, if only by proxy, that little old ladies should pay more for their heating, that the lame should be obliged to limp to the dole office, that the poor should drink the rain from heaven, not water from the taps. Yet at the same time Tully professed to love the old, the lame, the poor. Tully was politically ambitious: he would not want his hypocrisies made public; he did not want his desire to obliterate the lot of them made known publicly, though he was always happy to have it said over the dinner table.
But Angelica had been subsumed into Lady Rice; she had forgotten the idealism of her youth; she had, if only she could come to think of it, almost forgotten her youth altogether, and though she visited Ventura Lady Cowarth often, hardly ever gave her mother a thought, let alone called upon her. It was. as if, in her own regard, she had sprung into life on the day she married Edwin, and was presented with her new name, Lady Rice: she had taken over at the first available trauma. These days she vaguely assumed that the rich deserved to be rich and happy, and that the poor deserved to be miserable. If she cut old school friends dead in the street it was not, as they supposed, that she felt herself too good for them, but that she really could not remember them.
“The Toffeners can only talk about politics and inheritance,” Lady
Rice said, vaguely.
“It’s better than gossip,” said Edwin, and said, “They’ll lighten the mix.
Sara and Tully had no children, but they had each other. They would hold hands as they strolled by the duck pond, and it should have been charming but it wasn’t. Sara was pale and puffy, school-girlish. He and she lived, apparently, in a pleasant enough apartment near Westminster, but it was their on-going ambition to obtain legal possession of a large property in Chelsea, which Sara felt to be hers by right; the place was named, agreeably enough, Lodestar House, and belonged to her grandmother, Lady Wendy Musgrave. The shortcomings of Lady Wendy, the folly of her remarriage to a penniless adventurer at an advanced age, the neglect of Lodestar House, formed the basis of Sara’s conversation; the propensities of one-parent families and the elderly to rob the State that of Tully’s. At least when he had been with the Ministry of Heritage he had talked of the tendency of rooks to drop twigs down ancient chimneys and set castles ablaze, and the disgusting personal habits of gypsies and hippie vagrants, and been diverting: now he was rancorous and noisy.
But, as Edwin said, the Toffeners would lighten the mix.
“Okay,” said Lady Rice.
“Darling Angelica,” said Susan. “I thought you’d never ask. Everyone’s been so unsociable lately. Shall we just all start over? Ask Rosamund, Natalie, Lambert, everyone? Shall I bring a chocolate mousse? Pity about the Toffeners, but one can’t exclude them forever. She’s such a bore, but I do find him quite attractive, in spite of his looks. Why don’t you ask that new man at the church, the Rev. Hossle? We could have a civilized dinner and a service of reconciliation over coffee. People do it all the time back home. Everyone’s got so horrid to everyone, and we all used to be such friends!”
Lady Rice called round and did indeed invite other guests; neutrals, semi-strangers—the Letchworths, the Stephenses, Eric Naggard the TV director—but not Rosamund, Lambert or Natalie. Not yet. It might take a couple of years but she would do it.
Pre-dinner champagne was by the log fire. The dogs looked contented, as if all was well with the world: golden heads between golden paws, huffing and snuffing. Mrs. MacArthur insisted on taking round drinks. Lady Rice felt she would be better employed in the kitchen, but Mrs. MacArthur still did as she wanted. Susan wore a new black shift dress which disguised her boniness. Lady Rice wore pretty much the same, and was outshone. Edwin said, “Lovely dress, Susan!” but made no mention of his wife’s. Clive had on a white shirt and a bright yellow waistcoat—Susan was cleaning him up; she had never quite managed it with Lambert. He had shaved off his moustache. Sara Toffener wore a too-tight bright green dress in a stiff, shiny fabric. Tully Toffener wore a s
triped pink and white shirt which matched his complexion. Sara Toffener entertained everyone with the difficulties she was having with her Filipina servant, who was so frightened of the English countryside and ran away at the sight of cows. Everyone smiled politely, and Lady Rice suddenly said, “Wouldn’t it be more merciful to leave her in London, then?” and Sara replied, “Oh no! She might steal everything and run off.”
“Knew she’d say that,” said Jelly. “That’s why I asked.”
“For God’s sake,” said Lady Rice. “Go away. Not now! Not in the middle of a dinner party.”
“Okay, okay,” said Jelly.
Tully Toffener said fortunately he had the best lawyer in the business to handle the matter of Lodestar House and the challenging of Sara’s grandmother’s will; a legal eagle who looked promising. Brian Moss was his name, at a firm called Catterwall & Moss, and everyone was able to agree that legal firms could have very strange names indeed. Waite & Waite, or Burgle, Havem & Lost, or Gotobed & Snort were mentioned. Edwin revealed that Catterwall & Moss had handled much of the personal side of the Rice Estate for nearly half a century, in a sleepy kind of way, but that young Brian Moss, grandson of the original Moss, was a whizz on matters of divorce, and now, it seemed, inheritance.
“So how come Edwin knows that this Brian Moss handles a good divorce?” asked Jelly.
“Shut up,” said Angelica. “It must be the Boffy Dee connection.” Boffy forever threatened her current husband with divorce, and sometimes went through with it.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Jelly.
“Go away,” said Lady Rice.
Tully Toffener said, well, since it was Robert Jellico who had recommended Brian Moss in the first place, it was not surprising that he and Edwin shared the same solicitor. It was possible, if the lawsuit succeeded, that the Rice Estate would help Tully out with the development of Lodestar into a block of high-rental apartments.