Don’t get this wrong. Angelica, Jelly and Angel are not three split-off parts of Lady Rice. Each can and should be held responsible legally, fiscally and spiritually for the other. There is no question here of the one hand not knowing what the other is doing; one personality dominant, controlling lesser ones, capable of taking the others by surprise. In classic cases of split personality, respectable A will wake in the morning and discover herself, say, bruised and smeared with honey, be puzzled and distressed, and have no notion at all of what her other persona B was up to during the night, or where B went, or what she did – indeed that B even exists. But B does exist and, what is more, exists alongside, quite probably, C, D and occasionally emerging others, E, F and G; who will either know all about the others, or know nothing about the others, or have some degree of knowledge, depending on whether they are, as it were, on A’s or B’s team, and to what degree trusted by their controllers. The main split, the A/B split, lies between the steady, the good, the nice and the cautious, and the licentious, delinquent, spiteful and spontaneous.
In the case of Lady Rice, the split is better described as a perforation: not yet complete: a rather extreme case of voices in the head. Only if torn will the actual split occur, as when you tear your round Road Tax disc from its embracing square. As it is, if Angelica murders someone, Jelly and Angel cannot be excused: they ought to have controlled her, and had the capacity so to do. If Jelly develops repetitive strain injury at Catterwall & Moss, Angelica and Angel can hardly complain: it was their own fingers they overworked, in excessive zeal. If Angel gets herpes, or AIDS, Angelica and Jelly can hardly be surprised: they should not have colluded: the truth is that they, too, were sexually tempted. The three must, and should, take their place together, as one, in the eyes of the world, if not themselves: perforated, not split, merely holding endless speculative conversations amongst themselves. A phenomenon not yet clinical, and with any luck never to be clinical. Each knows everything about the other and individual parts continue to make up a recognisable whole. The square still contains the circle. So far.
Now the conglomerate persona that consists of Angelica, Jelly and Angel, which on marriage formed itself into Lady Rice, received nothing but affection and kindness – so far as any parent is capable of wholly admirable and pure behaviour – from her parents Prue and Stephen White. Evil, psychosis, trauma, do not necessarily fit the equation; they are not necessary to the creation of a perforated personality. Split is clinical and distressing, morbid: perforation is a far more common occurrence. Many of us suffer from mild perforation, a vague feeling of disassociation, the gentle murmuring of voices in the head. Poor me, poor me, with variations: for example, I don’t know what came over me! It happens to the most sensitive, not those most oppressed by worldly misfortune.
To be thus divided into three is what many women report. When they stare at themselves in mirrors, twirl on delicate toes, they are Angelica: when they go to work, industriously, impersonally, they are Jelly: when they go to the bad, take another drink, smoke an illicit joint, leave the child un-babysat, leap at the genitals of another sex, why then they are Angel. They sign their letters Lady Rice with a kind of conjoined formality.
When a woman says ‘if only I could find myself’, all three personae speak at once: they feel over-Jellyfied, Angelicised, or Angelated, and don’t like it: they search for a balance.
When she says ‘I must fulfil myself’, it is the Jelly in her speaking, (looking up from her work, wondering what the matter is, deciding it’s lack of babies), trying to leave Angelica behind and get Angel out of her system somehow.
When women keep husbands as pets to fetch their handbags, won’t have sex with them and affect a general air of moral superiority, then Angelica predominates. It is Angelica who says all men are rapists at heart and are nasty, messy, aggressive creatures in general. Animals!
When a woman runs off with her best friend’s husband and says this thing is bigger than me, or all I have to do is snap my fingers and I’ll have your boyfriend, why that’s Angel, and she probably will have him. Beware. Her heart is kind, but her passions are great and her morals few.
Lady Rice has ‘trouble coming to terms with her situation’, as the newspaper therapists calmly put it; that is to say giant stars in her psyche implode and black holes yawn: reeling, she takes refuge in Angelica, Jelly, Angel.
But times are worsening. Trauma approaches. Where and how will rescue come? The union soul is under attack; the confederation falters; the flag is torn – poor Lady Rice can’t tell good from bad, nothing seems real, nothing can be trusted, her past has become meaningless, her future is obscured; even friends are no longer friends. The very plates from which she is accustomed to eat are apparently not hers at all, but Rice family heirlooms, or so Sir Edwin writes to Brian Moss. Lady Rice has no access to her satin sheets, neatly folded in the master bedroom press; worse, her rival Anthea leans up against piles of healthy, folded, natural fabric in the second floor linen room to be pleasured by her husband. She has a vision of it happening. She is telepathic in her anguish.
Poor Lady Rice. See how now she goes through her life stunned, flickering out of one persona, into another, as men and women do when they discover that concepts of love, of home, of permanence, are not placed on rock, but on shifting sand. When the Velcro splits and tears and the trousers and the knickers fall down and everyone laughs, even those who live in hotels can be pitied.
No wonder people put their trust in Jesus. Jesus never fails. Upon this rock this Church is built, if only you can overlook a little historical evidence, a South Sea Scroll or two. South Sea Scroll, that phrase being the melding of South Sea Bubble, that great financial scandal, and the Dead Sea – that arid waste, that bitter pond. South Sea Scroll, article of lost faith.
Alimony is the rock, in Lady Rice’s eyes, on which such future as she can have will be founded; Angelica planning, Jelly working and Angel fucking.