Each night Lady Rice rocks in a sea of sorrow, half-sleeping, half-dreaming. The sea is so salt with tears she can never sink: see how she is buoyed up by her own grief. Sometimes the sea grows wild and stormy, whipped by winds of anger, hate, violent resentments: how she turns and tosses then. She’s afraid: she will be sucked down into whirlpools; she will drown, in a tempest of her own making. All she can do then is pray; much good it does her. Dear Father, dear God, save me from my enemies. Help me. I will be good, I will be. Let the storm cease. She takes a sleeping pill.
Ghostly barques glide by, in fog; pirates’ swords, the swords of wrath, glinting, slashing, disembowelling, castrating. Steady the mind, steady the hand, in case the sword turns against the one who wields it. Lady Rice is pirate and victim both. She knows it. Lady Rice rocks in her nightly sea of sorrow. In her head it is called the Sea of Alimony. It might be on the moon, for all she knows, like the Sea of Tranquillity; she might be in her mother’s womb. She might be in some drowned church, knocking up against stone walls, as the current pulls her here and there; her father’s church. Certainly she is bruised, body and soul. Dear Father, dear God, forgive me my sins. Let the weight of Thy wrath depart from me.
Sometimes the Sea of Alimony is calm; the rocking sensuous, almost sweet. She is sorry then to surface. She is a mermaid, stunned, beached up upon the white sands of The Claremont’s linen sheets, rolled back by waves into the sea, tossed up again, to surface with the dawn, to wake to the World of Alimony, Brian Moss, work, and the parts of the self still quarrelling: but also to alimony, healing, sustenance. Grief nourishes; it is a drug; she is dependent upon it now, all three of her or is it four? She sleeps as one, she wakes as many. The sea of sorrow sucks her in as one, whirls her down, washes her up fragmented; or is it the telephone which thus shatters her? A man’s voice.
‘Good morning, Lady Rice. It’s seven thirty. This is your wake-up call.’
Lady Rice looks in her morning mirror at a face puffy with restless sleep: last night she did not take off her make-up. She collects cold water in cupped hands: it gushes plentifully from large-mouthed taps, antique or mock antique, who cares? The antique leak lead into the water, the new do not. Lead is good for the complexion, bad for the brain. She splashes her face: she does not use the white face flannels provided in some number. She despises them. They are too small. This morning she will despise anything.
She goes back to bed. But the voices in her head are loud; clear enough for once to distinguish one from another; not pleasing in what they say. She would rather just be in bed and weep: they won’t let her. They are full of reproaches, complaints, eggings on to action, all unwelcome. She is beached, beached. She has tried to incorporate these bickering women, these alter egos, back into herself, but she can’t. She must listen to them, and answer them.
‘It’s too bad,’ moans Jelly. ‘Can’t you even clean our face off at night? This is the quickest way to a bad complexion, and you don’t even care.’
‘I was tired,’ explains Lady Rice feebly. ‘I’ve been so distressed by the divorce, surely I’m allowed to be tired.’
‘You can’t afford to be tired,’ says Angelica. ‘We’ve got to get out of this mess somehow. How are we going to live? We can’t stay in this hotel for ever. Sooner or later they’ll throw us out.’
‘They’d never do that,’ says Lady Rice. ‘I’m a member of the Rice family. Edwin would never let it happen.’
‘Of course he would,’ says Angelica. ‘You have a replacement. You’re old news. What does he care about you? Nothing as ex as an almost ex-wife! The most hated object.’
Lady Rice dissolves in further tears: the grief is harsh, not languorous.
‘Get her up, for God’s sake,’ says Jelly. ‘You have more influence than me. I hate being late for work. You just deliver me and go away. You don’t have to stand around to receive the flack.’
‘I think if I had a fuck,’ says Lady Rice, surprisingly and suddenly, ‘I’d feel better. Brian Moss will do very well. The only cure for one man is another man.’
‘Don’t use that language,’ says Jelly, shocked.
‘And surely you can do without a man for a month or so? Men are the source of the problem, not the cure.’
‘I don’t know what came over me,’ says Lady Rice, remorseful. ‘But now it’s said, it might be true.’
‘Perhaps Brian Moss is our karma,’ says Angelica cunningly. ‘Shall we just get up and go and meet our destiny?’
And Lady Rice finally drags herself from her bed, just to shut them up, since they won’t leave her alone. She can see they might make good company. She need never be lonely: and loneliness, for all that others speak of aloneness, is what she most fears.