I was married to Edwin for eleven years, and the Velcro that’s marriage got well and truly stuck. The stuff is the devil to wrest apart: it can rip and tear if your efforts are too strenuous. The cheap little sticky fibres do their work well. ‘Overuse’, they say, weakens Velcro. If ‘overused’ – a strange concept: should you fasten only so often? – is there some moral implication here? – you can hardly get Velcro to stick at all. But I was not overused in the beginning. On the contrary. When Edwin and I married, when I stopped being Angelica White and became Lady Rice, I was seventeen and a virgin, though no one would have known it. Chastity is not usually associated with leathers, studs, boots, crops, whips and the more extreme edges of the pop scene which I then frequented. But my velcroing capacity to be at one with the man I loved, in spite of appearances, was pristine, firm, ready for service. Velcro hot off the loom. I ‘waited’ for marriage. Extraordinary!
Edwin and I have now been apart for some months: he stayed in the matrimonial home; I left in disgrace and disarray. When it became apparent that I was in danger of having nothing whatsoever to show for my eleven years of marriage – not love, nor property, nor children, not even friends I could endure – I reckoned I had better get as near the legal horse’s mouth as possible, to retrieve what I could of property and reputation; that horse being Brian Moss, and a fine upstanding ungelded beast he is, at that. Barney Evans, my own solicitor, is rather like a pit pony; forever squidging up his poor dim eyes in the sudden glare of his opponent’s intellect. See me, Angelica Rice, as a bareback rider: high-heeled, fishnet-stockinged, wasp-waisted, leaping from saddle to saddle as the two blinkered legal steeds run round and round their circus ring. Jelly White running after with a bucket and spade, shovelling up the shit.
On a good night, tucked up in my high, soft bed at The Claremont, a stone’s throw from Claridges, with its pure white, real linen sheets, I see myself as an avenging angel. Then I laugh aloud at my own audacity and admire myself. Fancy getting a job with your husband’s lawyer’s firm! On a bad night, when the fine fabric of the pillows is so wet with my tears that the down within gets dark, matted and uncomfortable, when I feel tossed about in a sea of dejection, bafflement, loss – a sea that keeps me buoyant, mind you, made extra salty by my own grief – why, then I know I am just any other abandoned and rejected woman, half-mad, worthy of nothing. Then I see that taking a job at Catterwall & Moss, in the heart of the enemy camp, is mere folly, presumption and insanity, and not in the least dashing, or clever or funny. And I worry dreadfully in case I’m found out. My moods are so extreme I feel I am two people. How is it possible to contain both in the same body?
Yet apparently it is. At least three of me look out of my two eyes. Lady Rice, Angelica and Jelly: Lady Rice and Angelica fight it out for ascendency: Jelly is Angelica’s creature.
Lady Rice is a poor, passive creature in my, Angelica’s, opinion. That’s what marriage made of her, once it began to go wrong. She’d lie about in The Claremont suffering all day if I let her. She wouldn’t even bother to answer Barney Evans’ letters. I, Angelica, am the one who has to get her to work each day, dress her up as Jelly White, take her to the gym, keep her on a diet, stop her smoking. I am, I like to think, the original, pre-married persona. Why she maintains she’s the dominant personality round here I can’t imagine. Perhaps it’s because she has a title: perhaps it’s because she can’t face the small-town girl that’s me, which is part of her and always will be.