Splitting (9 page)

English country garden flowers are tall: delphiniums, hollyhocks, lilies. Lady Rice simply fell amongst them, breaking blooms and stems. Shorter flowers might have survived better.

“Good God,” said Edwin. “Do you have to spoil all Susan’s flowers as well?”

“As well as what?” asked Lady Rice, reviving, but he did not reply.

And indeed Susan was to blame Lady Rice for that as well: ruining her flower beds! Lady Rice felt so bad about the damage she’d done that she agreed to tell Rosamund that Lambert had left home, having made Susan pregnant. The shock of the fall seemed to have blotted Jelly White out. There was no help there.

“Jelly?” enquired Lady Rice, acknowledging her alter ego’s presence. “Are you there?”

Someone, not Jelly, said, “You are so wet, Lady Rice. No wonder he’s fed up with you.” Then there was radio silence.

“F
OUR HOUSEHOLDS AND SIX
children destroyed,” was what Rosamund said. “Susan is doing well. Natalie and her two, add Humphrey and his one—or so he thought—me and my two, and another on the way. I shan’t go through with this pregnancy. Though I daresay Lambert will want to come back to me when he finds she expects him to change a nappy or put up with a tantrum. Susan is very bad with little children. She tends to smack them when no one’s looking. She’s been reported on a couple of occasions but the consensus is always the same: a false accusation, malicious prattle, forget it. In the meantime, Angelica, I have patients to see. I can’t waste any more time on this.”

The greater the adversity, the brisker she became. “Is it true that Lambert’s got a play on at the National? Is that why he’s in favor?” asked Angelica, as the surgery door closed in her face. !

“It isn’t certain but it looks like it,” said Rosamund. “Now he’s made it, of course he’ll leave me. I’m the sort who see men through the struggling years, then get ditched. Susan’s the sort who gets them in their earning prime and destroys them when the money looks like failing.”

She spoke without bitterness. Doctors tend to melancholy, not bitterness.

Word got round. A few concerned voices were raised. The man in the Post Office refused to sell Susan a stamp and told her she was a marriage-breaking trollop. But Edwin had a word with Robert Jellico and the man in the Post Office, whose name no one could ever remember, lost his job. He was not sufficiently customer-friendly, anyway, to do his job properly. Now so many visitors came to Barley, to admire the church, the old village pump and the quaint country cottages, everyone had to learn to smile and say “Have a nice day.” The Rice Estate flourished: Rice Court Heritage Ltd. was in profit. Fungi (Inc.) was back in business. Eight hundred thousand pounds in cash had held the balance of stately funds at a truly critical time.

Susan came up to Rice Court to visit Lady Rice, as she had so often in the old, happy days.

“Thank God the man in the Post Office has gone,” she said. “I hate it when people are nasty to me. It’s so unfair. The worst I’ve ever done is love not wisely but too well. Aren’t we all meant to look after our own happiness? I can’t be held responsible for other people’s, can I? We all have to look after ourselves. At least that’s what I was taught to do. Where’s Edwin?”

“Out,” said Lady Rice shortly, but it might have been Jelly. Susan’s pregnancy was showing: a swelling beneath autumnal heavy skirt, lichen-dyed, hand-woven. Lady Rice hated the garment, and all such like it.

“It’ll be another little boy,” said Susan. “How can you tell?” asked Lady Rice.

“I’m the kind to breed boys,” said Susan.

“Lambert’s pretty good at girls,” said Angelica.

“Personally,” said Susan, “I doubt that any of Rosamund’s three are Lambert’s. Why are you so hostile towards me, Angelica? You English are so un-up-front! What have I done to you?”

“Go on,” said the voices, “go on, tell her!”

—and when Lady Rice refused to listen to them and said, “Susan, it’s all totally in your head; there’s nothing at all the matter!” they muttered darkly amongst themselves.

On that visit Susan asked Angelica about the English laws of inheritance. She seemed disappointed to learn that Edwin’s children would inherit nothing. Rice Court was a grace-and-favor house, at Lord Cowarth’s discretion. When he died, the older of Edwin’s twin brothers would inherit, but there was some confusion as to who was the elder, and everything was tied up in trusts anyway. “Not even a title?” asked Susan.

“The oldest boy would get a title,” said Angelica, vaguely, “I think.”

“You
think?”
asked Susan, eyeing Lady Rice with incredulity. “Don’t you
know?”

“No,” said Lady Rice. “But I do know, whatever it is, no girl will get it.”

Lady Rice and Susan were in the garden. Lady Rice was picking plums: Robert Jellico was trying to persuade Edwin to spray for pests, and Edwin had nearly been convinced, but Susan, whose horror of insecticides was well-known, had dissuaded him. However, Natalie reported Susan using aphid spray, early in the morning when no one was watching. Natalie knew because once she’d been watching the house, sitting in her car, convinced that Clive was inside with Susan.

“Say something,” said Jelly.

“No, I can’t,” said Lady Rice. “I just can’t. Everything would break and split and disappear.”

“It won’t,” said Jelly. “Everything round here will split and break and disappear if you don’t say something, do something.

Or we’ll have nothing.”

“No,” said Lady Rice.

“Did you say something?” said Susan. “No,” said Lady Rice.

She had taken her left foot off the step-ladder: she supported herself on her right. Now her left foot aimed a deliberate kick at the right.

“Ouch!” cried Lady Rice, and fell off the ladder.

“Are you okay?” asked Susan.

“Just fine,” said Lady Rice from the ground. “I thought I’d seen a wasp, that’s all.”

“You should never move suddenly if there’s a wasp,” said Susan.

“They get frightened and sting and then they get blamed for it.”

Lady Rice’s fingers found themselves going further and further into the soft purple rotten flesh of a wasp-ridden fallen plum.

She picked it up and threw it out of sight, out of thought. It hit

Susan in the left eye. She screamed. Her hand flew to her eye.

There was plum juice all over her, looking agreeably like blood.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” cried Lady Rice. “I was throwing it on the compost heap. But I’m just such a bad shot! Will you ever forgive me? Don’t tell Edwin: he certainly won’t!”

“Got her,” said Jelly, and all the other voices giggled and chortled and cheered. “Well aimed, sir! Good shot!”

“Jesus!” said Lady Rice, with unaccustomed ferocity. “What is this? Will you bloody well shut up!” She did display little snatches of anger every now and then, but they were for the most part directed at herself, not at the outside world.

“Poor Susan,” said Lady Rice. “Come to the house and we’ll clean you up.” But Susan wouldn’t stay. What was the point? Edwin wasn’t there. Enough that her visit would be reported.

Rosamund had an abortion and made no attempt to hide the fact. The village was censorious. Sympathy returned to Susan and Lambert, who now did their marketing together, and returned to Railway Cottage together, and were seen in the mornings by the postman night-clothed, bare-footed and cheerful. Poor Lambert, everyone said. He deserves a little happiness. What a dreadful wife for a man to have. Killing her own baby as an act of revenge! And Susan so charming, so lively, so bright; so much in love. Rosamund had never
loved
Lambert. Career women made bad wives, everyone knew. And mothers bad doctors. They kept having to rush home to their own, instead of tending yours.

Susan gave birth to a little girl, Serena, with the same prominent brown eyes as her brother. Lambert’s eyes. People nodded and smiled and wished them well. A family reunited at last! Roland was fortunately a quiet child, so Lambert, once installed in Railway Cottage, was at first able to write in more peace than he had ever enjoyed in the rooms above the Health Center. But after Serena’s birth, alas, quiet reflective loving times were out of the question. Serena cried, wept, stormed, shivered: her health demanded constant medical attention: the running of sudden high fevers, the swelling of infant eyelids, the clenching of scarlet baby hands made this unavoidable.

Up at Rice Court Edwin would drift out of the room if anyone referred to Serena’s existence, or Susan’s difficult labor, but then what man of his kind ever enjoyed gynaecological or paediatric chit-chat?

According to Natalie, who with Susan happened to share a cleaner—Margaret—the wife of the man who had lost his job at the Post Office, now obliged to go out cleaning—Susan would march into the study (once Humphrey’s) and thrust Serena into Lambert’s paternal arms. “Your baby,” she’d say. “You’re the father, you look after it; you call the doctor; don’t leave everything to me.”

Lambert would do his best, but there was a certain problem getting doctors to call: Rosamund’s colleagues proved more loyal than expected. Nothing for it but for Lambert to abandon his re-writes midsentence and take little Serena to the Emergency hospital twenty miles away. Serena was always well enough when she got there: symptoms of concussion—Roland suffered from sibling rivalry, tending to lash out at his little sister—disappeared, fevers fell and breathing difficulties evaporated at the first smell and sight of a regular medical establishment, a green or white coat, a kindly and enquiring stethoscope. You would almost have thought doctoring ran in the child’s blood, she and the medical profession had some special relationship—yet how could that be? Word got round that

Rosamund’s spirit hovered like an unsatisfied ghost in Railway Cottage, for all that her physical self remained in the Health Center, head high, defying the world’s strictures.

One day Natalie called to see Lady Rice, who was often now at home alone in the evenings. Rice Estate business kept Edwin away: he had been to visit his brothers on tropical islands and had not taken his wife with him—“It’s for the best, my dear. We are too much in each other’s pockets.” Lady Rice could see it might be true. And how would the Rice Court visitors get on without her constant attention? The cream in the cream teas—now a favorite line—might sour; the floors stay unpolished; the accounts un-done; the visitors liked to get a glimpse of anyone titled, upstart or not: just the whirl of a headscarf behind a pillar, the flick of a sensible skirt. No, Lady Rice would not evade her responsibilities. “No such thing,” Edwin would laugh, his favorite joke. “No such thing as a free title!”

Natalie said to Lady Rice on another day, “Isn’t it odd? I used to be a really nice person. Now I’m not. That’s what being betrayed does for you. I hate Susan not because she took Clive from me but because of what she’s done to my nature. I hope you never have to learn, Angelica, and can stay nice for ever. You’re right to be blind; it’s the best way.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lady Rice. She found it remarkable the way her friends would project their own predicament, whatever it was, on to her.

“How do you mean, I’m blind?”

“Never mind,” said Natalie. “I’m quite happy, these days. I have a new hobby; a game called Persecuting Clive. I’m asking for more and more alimony, so I get to see his accounts. I allow him no privacy. He doesn’t deserve any; he’s paying Susan’s mortgage.”

“He’s what?” Lady Rice was startled.

“Humphrey can’t keep her: he’s gone bankrupt; so Clive’s taken over, with money which is ours by rights.”

“But doesn’t Lambert contribute?”

“Lambert?” derided Natalie. “Lambert’s on his way out.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“According to Margaret, the minute Lambert leaves the house in the morning to take Roland to school, Susan’s on the phone to Clive. Lambert gets back at a quarter to nine and at a quarter to nine minus thirty seconds Susan and Clive stop talking.”

“Margaret isn’t a reliable witness. She hates Susan.”

“Why you go on supporting Susan I can’t imagine, Angelica,” said Natalie.

“But Susan and Lambert really love each other,” said Lady Rice, piteously.

“Susan needed a babysitter once Humphrey was gone,” said Natalie, “and Clive was fine as a live-out lover, but as a live-in partner he’d be hopeless. So she went for Lambert instead, because of the play at the National. She thought she’d get to meet interesting people. But according to Margaret the National keeps calling and asking for the re-writes but Lambert never delivers, and never will. I think you should keep away from Lambert, Angelica: the urge to self-destruct is catching. The village says you’re hopelessly in love with him.”

“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.