There was trauma in the air.
Sir Edwin Rice has decided to divorce Lady Angelica Rice. Sir Edwin alleges in his affidavit to the Court – a document which the lawyer Brian Moss was now dictating to his secretary Jelly White – that Lady Angelica has behaved intolerably. And would the Court therefore put the couple asunder.
Jelly White’s hand trembled.
Angelica, claimed Sir Edwin, committed adultery with one Lambert Plaidy; being discovered in flagrante delicto by Sir Edwin, and in the Rice family four-poster bed. This behaviour, typical of much similar behaviour on the part of Angelica Rice, was unreasonable and intolerable to Sir Edwin.
Yes, it was intolerable for Edwin Rice to live with Angelica Rice: his health, his happiness was at risk.
The Petitioner claimed that his spouse had acted in various other ways unacceptable to him: that she had been abusive and violent, pinching him while he brushed his teeth and otherwise molesting him; he alleged that her kissing of the family dogs amounted to bestiality, and her embracing of female guests to lesbianism. He petitioned the Court to let him go free of her.
Brian Moss heard Jelly White take in a breath of outrage between her teeth, and looked at his secretary sharply, but her face remained unmoved and her hand was steady again as it continued to race across the sheet. He went on dictating.
The Petitioner claimed that Lady Angelica made excessive sexual demands on him; that she refused to have children; that she had dirty habits; that she was drunken, and took drugs; that she failed to provide proper food for his guests, thus humiliating him. And that, all in all, her behaviour has been intolerable and unreasonable, and he wanted a divorce. Now.
‘Goodness me!’ said Jelly White, looking up from her shorthand pad. ‘Did you write this for Sir Edwin? Doesn’t it smack of overkill?’
‘How well you put it,’ said Brian Moss. ‘But overkill is our stock-in-trade. It’s our trademark here at Catterwall & Moss. We like to offer the Court offences in all available categories of unreasonable matrimonial behaviour. Offer the minimum, as too many firms do to avoid unnecessary trauma, and you risk the Court’s rejection of the petition. What pretty white fingers you have!’ And his strong brown fingers slid over her pale, slim ones, and Jelly White let them stay. Brian Moss did not, in any case, interfere with her right hand, only with the left, which was not observably making him money.
‘Lady Rice sounds a dreadful wife for any man to have,’ remarked Jelly.
‘The Court will certainly believe so,’ said Brian Moss. ‘As it happened, I did have some trouble finding an example of physical assault. We had to make do with the bottom pinching.’
‘But Sir Edwin was happy enough to allege it?’ enquired Jelly, as if idly.
‘Certainly,’ said Brian Moss. ‘With a little help from the new lady in his life.’
And he told his secretary how once, in the days before her employment, Sir Edwin had brought Lady Anthea Box along to an appointment: not the kind of thing Brian Moss usually approved of but, as it turned out, her presence had been useful. Anthea had spoken for Sir Edwin, who was not as coherent or determined as she. Bestiality, still one of the major and useful categories of matrimonial offence, had been quite a problem until Anthea reminded Sir Edwin how he had never liked the way his wife kissed the dogs.
‘Perhaps he was just nervous of his wife catching something,’ suggested Jelly White. ‘Perhaps the fear was to do with hygiene, not sexual rivalry?’
‘Country men seldom worry about things like that,’ said Brian Moss, brushing the suggestion away. ‘I hope you can get this document in the post today.’
‘Of course,’ said Jelly White, but it was two days before she did, and even then she put the wrong postal code on the envelope, so it was four days before the document reached Barney Evans, solicitor to Lady Rice. In the meantime Lady Rice had presented her own petition. She ‘got in first’, thus giving herself some minor advantage in the game that is divorce. The Rice couple, as Brian Moss observed, were not the kind to wait peaceably for a ‘no fault, no blame’ arrangement. Fault there was, blame there was, and fault and blame they’d have.
Jelly White was, as it happened, Lady Angelica Rice in disguise – or, to be more precise, in her alter ego. It was only lately that Lady Rice had begun to fear that the voices in her head had separate and distinct personalities. Dress up as Jelly White, and Jelly White, to some degree or another, owned her. All Lady Rice could do was whisper in Jelly’s ear. They shared the ear, but Jelly it was who turned the head. It was unnerving.
Lady Rice concluded that she was suffering from a perforated personality: worse, that if any further trauma occurred, she would develop a full-blown split personality: she would become a clinical case. Lady Rice tried to maintain a calm attitude, and not to blow up more storms than were unnecessary, which was why she allowed Jelly to allow Brian Moss to fondle her and made no protest. She preserved herself for worse emergencies, and in any case, she might not be heard. Jelly was a strong and wilful personality.
In her petition for divorce, Lady Angelica Rice alleged adultery between Anthea Box and her husband over a six-month period previous to the date on which she, Lady Rice, had left the matrimonial home.
Lady Rice claimed physical assault, over-frequent and perverted sexual activity; drunkenness, drug-taking and financial irresponsibility; she asserted that her husband’s relationship with his dogs was of a sexual nature. That she had been eased out of her home, Rice Court, to make way for Sir Edwin’s paramour, Lady Anthea Box. Lady Rice, on the other hand, had throughout the marriage been a good and faithful wife.
Sir Edwin had behaved intolerably and she wanted this reflected in any property settlement.
‘An out-of-London court!’ exclaimed Brian Moss, this seeming to be the part of Barney Evans’ letter-plus-enclosures which most affected him. ‘What a nightmare! I have no influence whatsoever in the provinces. A nod in London is simply not as good as a wink anywhere else. How ever are we to get this case settled? And how strange: the wife has claimed almost the same unreasonable behaviour as has the husband.’
‘I expect it’s because they were married so long,’ said Jelly. ‘They can read each other’s minds.’
‘Eleven years isn’t a long marriage,’ said Brian Moss. ‘There was a couple in here the other day in their nineties wanting a divorce by consent. I asked them why they’d left it so long and they said they’d been waiting for the children to die.’
He laughed; a deep, hoarse, unexpected laugh at a pitch which made the many racing prints on the wall rattle, and Jelly laughed too, at his joke. Her tinkly little laugh made nothing rattle, but he pinched the swell of her bosom where it disappeared under her blouse. Just a little pinch: friendly. She had taken off her white woollen sweater. It was a hot day.
Outside the elegant Regency windows, London’s traffic flowed, or tried to flow. Only emergency vehicles seemed able to make progress – police, fire, ambulance. Their sirens approached, passed, faded, with enviable speed.
‘I make a good living,’ observed Brian Moss, ‘out of other people’s need to be in the right; they like to claim the privilege of being the victim. Who’s at fault in the Rice debacle is of no importance. The property is all that matters, and we’ll make sure she doesn’t get her greedy little fingers on too much of that. Clients assume that conduct during marriage will have an effect on a property settlement and veer it in the direction of natural justice, but it’s rash to make any such assumption. Or only in the most extreme cases.’
‘You don’t see the Rice divorce as extreme, then? Merely run-of-the-mill?’ enquired Jelly.
‘Very much run-of-the-mill,’ said Brian Moss, ‘other than that both parties do have to go to considerable lengths to hide their income.’
And he explained that Lady Rice was once a pop star and no doubt had large undisclosed sums put away. And as for Sir Edwin, his accountants had naturally been working overtime, losing their client’s assets in the books – fortunately for Sir Edwin the Rice Estate had books of enormous and wonderful complexity.
‘I imagine they are,’ said Jelly.
‘Otherwise,’ said Brian Moss, ‘it’s just a normal divorce. Both parties vie for the moral high ground, never noticing that a major landslip has already carried the whole mountain away. And both parties enrich me, thank God, by arguing.’
‘You are a very poetic kind of man,’ said Jelly White. Some of her hair had fallen free of her headband. Brian Moss caught up a strand or so between his fingers and tugged, and Jelly White smiled obligingly. Lady Rice sighed.
Thus Lady Angelica Rice had once smiled at Sir Edwin, her husband. Only now she smiled with measured guile, not an overflow of innocence. Trust and amiability had done Angelica Rice no good at all. She understood now that the transparency of innocence protected no one. She learned fast.
Lady Rice had a problem with lies and cunning. Jelly White had no such problem: they were intrinsic to her persona. Angelica had a story to tell.