Back in the Sixties, Prue Lamb, aged seventeen, married Stephen White, aged fifty-two, and gave birth soon thereafter to a little girl they named Angelica, who was both dutiful and ambitious, cute and swift. Sometimes they called her Jelly, for short – in affection and dismissal, ‘Oh, Jelly, you are being a pain; what husband will put up with you?’ – and occasionally they called her Angel, as in ‘Angel, dearest, fetch me this; Angel, dearest, fetch me that. Angel, dearest, put pennies on your poor dead father’s eyes. He, too, is an angel now. If only you hadn’t chosen to sing that rock and roll stuff, if only you’d stuck to Handel’s Messiah, you could have risen to soprano lead and your father might not have got so upset and died. Not that I’m blaming you, my Angel, both our Angel, indeed you were your father’s Angel, with a voice that carolled like a lark, in whatever mode you chose, and at least he didn’t live to have to listen to “Kinky Virgin”. At least you preserved your virginity, for his sake, until he’d croaked, pegged it, passed over, fell off the perch. It was only to be expected, he being thirty-five years older than me, but I can tell you expecting makes no difference. It’s still an outrage to be left without a husband.’
Larks and lambs, and pure white rice: add a soupçon of barley; all good things. Why do they go wrong? Nothing’s ever over, that’s the answer, not even the giving of names. They should have called her Jane: it is a name scarcely open to division, perforating, or outright splitting. Angelica was just asking for trouble.