Barney Evans, represent us as well! Try and understand what we are saying, this complex creature who is your client.
We need alimony! We want nourishment: we are cracking and splitting. We are thin and brittle for lack of love: we have lost two stone in six months. If our husband won’t help us, then society must come to our aid: law courts and lawyers must stand in for a corrupted individual conscience.
We are not motivated by vengeance or greed. On the contrary. No. Our plea is that if the scales of justice are to remain in balance there has to be brought into perpetual existence, recreating itself moment by moment, the proper, decent, material reflection of ‘spiritual good’ (or ‘Goods to the value of’ – as we say, aptly). The lost goods – love, illusion, hope (worse than lost, this latter: stolen!) have an equivalent in money; this equivalent needs to be paid monthly to the end of time. That is to say, ‘in her lifetime’, which for the. individual, of course, is the same thing as ‘the end of time’.
The great wonderful construct which is marriage – a construct made up of a hundred little kindnesses, a thousand little bitings back of spite, tens of thousands of minor actions of good intent – be they the saving of a face, the rescuing of an ant, the plucking of a hair, the laughing at a bad joke, the forgiveness of sins, the overlooking of errors – this cannot, must not, as an institution, be brought down in ruins. Let the props be financial; if this is all that remains, it has to be so.
If we don’t get alimony from Edwin, the whole caboodle will crumble: I can feel it. A lot rests on this. The stars themselves will implode. The scales which balance real against unreal will be shoved so far out of kilter they will tip and topple and the point of our existence, and therefore existence itself, will be gone. We will all vanish like a puff of smoke. Or implode like a collapsing marshmallow man. In the end it is money which keeps us in being, inasmuch as money is the only recognised good which we have.
And of course I may fail. A Court might decide, as Edwin hopes it will and as Barney Evans tells me may happen, that I’m perfectly well equipped to look after myself, and since the doctrine of No Fault prevails in our divorce courts, and the great injustices one human being can render to another are now apparently neither here nor there, the Court may say what the hell, who is this hopeless wife, this ex-pop star who never rode to hounds at her husband’s side, who was found in bed with her best friend’s husband? – who can possibly believe her account of how she got to be there, or how little happened in it? – give her nothing! Yes, they are capable, I hear, of awarding me nothing at all, since even the Matrimonial Home was in the gift of the husband’s family, and the husband is unemployed and, according to his accountants, has no assets whatsoever. Should all my hopes for justice fail, how will any of us live? Why, as the birds do, picking at nothing. We could always take to blackmail. We may yet have to.
‘Blackmail’s out of fashion,’ said my employer Brian Moss to me one day, ‘because no one’s ashamed of anything any more,’ and I nodded and smiled politely, but other people’s imaginations clearly don’t run the way mine do, and these days I have a pocket full of tapes, stolen from the office, the way others have pockets full of rainbows, or claim to. And in my shopping bag I bring home files containing letters and transcripts of bugged conversations, depositions and affidavits from many sources, not just those relating to Rice v. Rice, matrimonial. People do chatter on to their solicitors.
Lady Rice doesn’t react, can’t react: she is too stunned by events to marvel at anything, even her alter ego Jelly’s delinquency, or Angelica’s pickiness, let alone Angel’s whorishness. What she can see is that, when it comes to it, she’s no lady.