Splitting (4 page)

Disappointment, and it is oddly disappointing to find one does not get pregnant at the first drop of an egg, the next available inrush of sperm, when one had assumed one would, can sharpen the ear to internal voices. They’re always there, muttering away, but complacency is an excellent baffle-board.

T
HESE DAYS LADY RICE
would follow her husband out into the fields to watch him sawing branches, or fencing off public footpaths, or lighting bonfires. Edwin was developing muscles: a broad shoulder, a strong back. Things were pretty good, thought Angelica, and, if she did nothing in particular, would stay that way.

Robert Jellico reported back to Lord Cowarth, at Cowarth Castle, five miles up the road, that his youngest son was showing signs of reformation; that, surprisingly, the marriage was holding. Angelica’s money had now been taken by the official Receivers of Rice Estate Fungi (Continental)—which had served as the year’s most effective tax loss for Rice Estates. Jellico took some credit for the unexpected. stability of the youngest son’s marriage. Women without funds made better wives than women with funds, being more dependent. “Why aren’t they breeding?” asked Lord Cowarth. “What’s the matter with them?”

Lord Cowarth’s disposition had improved over the previous three years. Infections had given him abscesses under his remaining teeth—six left from a once full set, mostly towards the back—and pain had finally driven him to the doctor. He had been given Prozac, a fashionable new anti-depressant, by Dr. Rosamund Plaidy.

Within six weeks of the first dose, Lord Cowarth married a blonde and leather-booted woman in her mid-fifties, now Ventura Lady Cowarth. (The wife of a youngest son and the wife of a full-blooded, propertied Earl are accorded the same title, or so Lavender White, who studied these matters, told her daughter. “Lady” covers all degrees of honor, saving only “Princess,”

“Countess,”

“Duchess” and “Queen.” Angelica had become Lady Angelica Rice, but scraped in; Ventura became Ventura Lady Cowarth and had a whole lot of rank to spare.)

Ventura drank a great deal of whisky, but was kind, buxom and efficient, and liked Angelica, with whom she shared a common taste for leather; though Lady Rice, little by little, was taking to jeans and sweaters, neat skirts, little collars and long sleeves buttoned at the wrist.

“She may be a bit ‘other ranks,’” said Ventura to her husband, “but at least she’s a local and at least she’s on hand!” Unlike, by inference, Edwin’s elder brothers, the twins who had simply run out on the whole Cowarth caboodle.

Lord Cowarth had lately found the tie to his dressing gown. If it did still occasionally fall apart, it was to reveal skinny parts more robust than heretofore, and fleshy parts less hideous.

One day Edwin and Angelica were lying in the sun on a grassy mound where Cromwell the Protector was reputed to have single-handedly chopped down a maypole. Lord Cowarth’s ancestor, Cromwell’s friend, had had an ascetic nature and a grudging temperament, and had welcomed the coming of the Roundheads and the politics of the common man: his descendants since had specialized in debauchery, excess and dramatics, as if to make up for the sheer meanness of the man who had founded their fortune by personally shaving the ringlets off Royalist neighbors and seizing their estates.

Even as Sir Edwin and Lady Rice lay on the grass hand in hand, bodies touching, they watched a bird alight gracefully on a chimney. They saw the high brick erection crumble and fall through the tiled roof, heard the debris rumble down through the attic floor, the bedroom floor, to the library below, whence a puff of dust blew out through open latticed windows and dispersed. Of such events are the memories of marriage made. Ashes to dust.

“Rice Court does need money spent on it, dear,” Ventura said to her husband, “in fact as well as theory: brick by brick, not just a business plan!” and her husband had a word with Robert Jellico, who released half a million pounds to that end. The falling of the chimney had impressed everyone. A further half million, it was inferred, would follow when Angelica produced a child.

“I had no idea,” said Angelica, distressed, as Edwin made constant efforts, night and day, to impregnate her, she by now having completely gone off the idea of babies, “that there were families left who behaved like this. Your father’s worse sane than he was mad.”

“There is no such thing,” said Edwin, his great, consoling bulk heaving over her, “as a free title,” and Angelica laughed, but she was hurt. Edwin would do this for money, but not for love? For Rice Court, not for her?

If Edwin wanted a baby for his family’s sake, not for hers, not as a celebration of their love, that clinched the matter: she would rather not have an heir at all, or at any rate not yet. Better to live in a rose-covered cottage, however humble, abrim with domestic love, to have children as an outcome of that love, clustering around the knee, than to live in a mansion, have nannies, and be expected to breed for the sake of a line, in the interests of a family who thought themselves better than others for no good reason, especially since, so far as Angelica could see, that line was now more connected to commerce than to the land. And supposing the baby inherited its grandfather’s madness? Its. grandmother’s alcoholism, its father’s idleness? She loved Edwin dearly but without a doubt he was idle. And had not the early Rice forebears been robber barons, the organized criminals of the Middle Ages? The more she thought about it, the worse it seemed. Her side of the family might be mildly eccentric, but surely dwelt within the bounds of decent ordinariness: what could truly be said of the humble was that they tried to be good, if only from lack of energy to be otherwise. The Rice family had no problem being bad.

If Edwin showed signs of wanting a baby for his wife’s sake, murmured a voice in Angelica’s head, or, better still, saw a baby as the natural outcome of a great and enduring love, no doubt these worries would be quickly swept away in a wave of wanting—but until this happened, until Edwin grew up a bit, stopped trying to placate and gratify his awful family, Angelica would not risk the change in status that the having of a baby entailed.

“Better and safer to be the wife Edwin insanely loved,” she would wake up thinking, “than the mother of a Rice child.” Through history such mothers found themselves driven to drink, or pushed downstairs, or walled up, or just left at home and thoroughly neglected, once their purpose was served. They’d been allowed to dress up in their tiaras and produced at coronations, or state funerals, or victory parades to keep them quiet, but that was all.

Angelica dug out forgotten family portraits from the cellars and brought down monographs from the attics: restored, dusted, framed them all, and found in the family history more than enough proof for her suppositions. Beautiful girls made miserable mothers. “There!” said the voice. “Right, wasn’t I?”

And so to everyone’s surprise Angelica didn’t get pregnant. In fact, she had prudently asked at the surgery, before it was too late, for a contraceptive implant, one of a new kind which lasted for a whole five years, and young Dr. Rosamund Plaidy had obliged, tucked it under the skin of Angelica’s buttocks with a deft incision of knife and needle. Gently, day by day, the implant leaked oestrogen into her system, keeping her rounded and placid and gentle. The more fertile she looked, the less fertile she was, and no giveaway card of pills either, hanging around to be found.

“You won’t tell anyone about this?” Angelica implored Dr. Rosamund Plaidy, who at once looked both shocked and hurt at the notion that she might. “I wouldn’t want it to get back to my father-in-law.”

“Everything that goes on in here is totally confidential,” said Rosamund Plaidy, as the knowing voice in Angelica’s head had told her she would.

Dr. Rosamund Plaidy was thirty-four, wholesome, pleasant and well-informed, and was married to Lambert Plaidy, the writer. She had had her own first child at twenty-six and naturally believed that to be the optimum age for procreation. She saw nothing wrong or complicated, at least at the time, in standing between Angelica and her putative progeny. It did not occur to her that Angelica had not consulted with her husband before taking the quite drastic contraceptive measures, more suited to women living in the hot remote Sahara or the dank fastnesses of the Rain Forest, than in rural England. Though sometimes Angelica felt, as one verdant day drifted into another, and nothing much happened, she might as well have been living at the ends of the earth, as one hundred miles from London.

R
OBERT JELLICO HAD STARTED
a steady relationship with one Andy Pack, a jockey, and had become positively pleasant. He was prepared to exchange a non-acrimonious word with Angelica, and an un-neurotic one with Edwin. Robert, in a flush of generosity, even inflation-indexed the young couple’s allowance. The Estate paid staff wages and household bills; Edwin and Angelica had to pay only for food and entertainment, and since their entertainment was still by and large each other, they could even make savings on what came in. Angelica saw fit to send her mother £50 a week: Gerald Hatherley was retired now and it was difficult for couple to pay so much as their heating bills. Gerald and Audrey were finally divorced; Gerald and Lavender married. Audrey had most of the savings. Lavender was finally talking to Angelica again, after Angelica suddenly developed flu on the morning of the wedding.

“Don’t you have each other to keep each other warm?” Angelica asked when her mother complained about the heating bills, but clearly everyone’s habits were different. The younger generation kept to its bed, if it possibly could: the older you got the easier you felt out of it, until old age set in, when there you’d be, under the covers again.

Robert Jellico said it was unreasonable that Rice Estate money should go to Edwin’s mother-in-law, whose husband’s duty it surely was to provide for her, and said as much to Edwin. And Edwin said to Angelica words to this effect—“The fifty pounds a week you give your mother out of our housekeeping would be better spent on the fabric of this house, on Rentokil and rat catchers. The medieval drains are collapsing, and you don’t even seem to notice.”

“You should never have let that archaeologist in,” said Angelica, “if you didn’t want them to collapse. I knew he’d be trouble.” The actual restoration of Rice Court had still not begun; slowly, plans went forward. As with a film in its pre-production stage, nothing seems to happen and nothing seems to happen, and no one even gets paid, except the director.

A representative from the University of Birmingham’s Department of Mediaeval Studies had turned up to photograph the brick sewer system and, though asked to touch nothing, had removed for study some critical piece of figured brickwork and thereby started a general collapse of a system which otherwise would have lasted another couple of hundred years. If Lord Cowarth fired shotguns at all comers, whether vagrants, gypsies, academics or social workers, Edwin began to understand why. As he got older, the forces of law and order seemed more and more attractive to him.

“There you go again,” said Edwin, “trying to blame me for a failing in yourself. Your heart’s too kind.”

“But my mother needs the money,” said Angelica. “She’ll be cold and hungry without it,” and Edwin, after complaining that she overstated her case, fretted and frowned and put it to his wife that surely she saw the importance of the present. That surely it was time she put her old life behind her: why should Angelica help Gerald Hatherley, the betrayer of Angelica’s one-time best friend Mary’s mother, out of a fix? Why not? enquired Angelica. The difference caused a slight coldness between them: a frisson, perhaps, of differences to come, like wind tinged with ice because it’s passed over the snow of a mountain range, chilling the slumbering foothills.

Nothing to do with the voices, the internal war between self-help and self-destruct; just a kind of cold wind which happened to be blowing at the time, and affected all kinds of people in Barley. It must have, or what was to happen could never have happened.

“T
HINK OF ALL THAT
money I gave the Rice Estate,” Angelica would say, fretting about being expected not to give her mother money. “Surely something’s due to me from that?” But one of the rules of the Rice Estate was that money swallowed was money swallowed, buried in earth, as hillsides were moved at Robert Jellico’s direction. Roads were driven; river courses changed; estates developed and others torn down to make way for artificial grouse moors or ski slopes: mud everywhere, and gaping holes all around, grand canyons, yawning to receive the gift of other people’s money in exchange for which the Rice organism could spew out money neatly and in deliberate fashion, all but unobserved, to interested parties amongst whom it did not include a youngest son’s first wife. The Rice Estate knew when to waste, and when to save. Robert Jellico saw to all that: saw to it that the Estate sucked up millions, while shitting out tidy, tax-resistant cash pellets. The more that trust was put in Robert Jellico, the more smoothly the operation would run: that was the general understanding.

“I don’t even have a receipt,” Angelica would worry sometimes. “And work hasn’t even started here; what
happened
to the money?” And she wondered why it was that water still drained from the hand basin before she even had time to wash her hands, so badly had it cracked; why there was so little comfort in her daily life. Mrs. MacArthur, who enjoyed threadbareness, who liked the job, who liked nothing better than a domestic emergency, who loved making do and mending, just said, “Four inches of water is more than enough for anyone to wash their hands in, my girl. The crack starts four and a quarter inches up. Don’t be so greedy.”

—G
AVE DINNER PARTIES. LADY
Rice had made a circle of friends. Rice Court was open to the public again, and the great Hall and bedrooms had been roped and annotated—here Oliver Cromwell dined; on this spot the first Lord Cowarth fell, poisoned; here the bed in which he recovered, alas; see here the priest-hole in which the priest was walled up alive and died; this the Chinese vase presented by Queen Victoria; here the love couch on which King Edward VIII sat entwined with Mrs. Simpson; and so forth—but the back of the house, which faced south in any case and caught the last light, could be run as the more ordinary but still splendid home of a comparatively ordinary young couple. Ceilings and chimneys no longer collapsed, doors fitted, windows opened: in the kitchens ancient iron pots had been replaced with stainless steel saucepans; ceramic hobs now ran on electricity rather than hotplates on coal and coke. Mrs. MacArthur seemed ten years younger than once she had. Her hair had been permed, and ringed her dour face in girlish fashion. Mr. MacArthur had been made redundant from his job as a bodywork welder up at the auto factory. His wife was now the family breadwinner and there was no hope of Angelica firing her. But she allowed her employer her head when it came to running the visitor trade.