The bartender smiled at Angel. He was young and Greek; he had soft brown eyes, a snowy white shirt and tight trousers; he leapt about from one end of the bar to another at the behest of his slow-moving customers. Angel, considering his small, muscular buttocks, actually licked her lips. She allowed the edge of her small pink tongue to show, running around her carmined mouth.
Angelica seldom wore make-up: Jelly went in for soft shadings and a discreetly artificial look: Angel just liked lots and lots of everything. Her skirt was up at her thighs, her silver shoes high-heeled; her midriff showed: black leather jacket fastened with an enamelled rose, the kind of thing a sheik might buy at Aspreys for a very lucky girl.
The barman nodded to an empty table in the panelled corner, softly lit. The bar was done out in tasteful pinks and greys. Angelica loathed it, Jelly loved it, Angel didn’t notice: excited even by the feel of her own tongue on her own lips. Who cared now about Edwin, marriage, injustice, alimony, law: all that was another world.
‘I’m supposed to discourage single ladies,’ said the barman, ‘but you might do business some good.’
Jelly began to say that this was outrageous – an affront to her principles, if not single women then why single men? – but Angelica and Angel made her hold her tongue. Angel sat down with her drink, and casually slid her skirt even further up her legs, stretching them to show them to advantage. The elderly, well-coupled rich who this evening, more’s the pity, frequented the bar, looked, and looked away, and the wives looked at the barman for help, but he had his back to them, and a couple of the husbands sneaked a speculative after-glance or so.
‘Oh God,’ said Jelly, ‘this is so crude and shameful.’
‘What do you expect?’ asked Angelica, bitterly. ‘Angel’s a very crude person.’
‘She’ll be sorry in the morning,’ said Jelly. ‘That’s all I can say. We all will.’
‘Just shut up, the pair of you,’ said Angel, hitching open her leather jacket so that more swelling bosom was revealed. ‘I certainly won’t be sorry.’
‘I don’t believe this,’ said Jelly. ‘Angelica, this is intolerable. Shall we go?,’ and Angelica made an effort and stood up, but the stiff drink had weakened her legs – Lady Rice rarely drank anything stronger than tonic water – so she had to sit down again quickly.
At last two men without women came into the bar: in their late forties, solid, red-faced, probably American; not the suave, moneyed, boardroom types on better days to be found in the bar, nor the eloquent, quick-moving, dangerous Arabs who moved in groups, liked a big-breasted girl and had her in order of precedence; these two were more like, say, engineers who’d started out as practical men, good with their hands, and ended up on the executive floor, and perhaps had a share in their company’s fortunes; steak-and-chips men, not the caviare kind; more prone to simple human affections, to weeping not beating, who had solid, plain wives whom they loved: more at home in the bar than the nightclub. Angel sighed.
‘Two little lambs who’ve gone astray,’ murmured Angelica, reviving, ‘in unknown pastures, and God knows when they last changed their underpants. Angel, how can you?’
‘Shut up,’ said Angel, so fiercely that Angelica did. ‘If I want to be the reward, their good night out on the town, that’s my privilege.’
A murmur in the barman’s ear: he nodded towards Angel. The two turned to stare at her, speculatively.
‘Hang on a moment, Angel,’ reasoned Jelly. ‘Jesus! I know that kind of barman. He just wants you out of here. You’re bringing down the tone of his bar. He could have fixed you up with anyone. It’s an insult, an outrage. At least settle for a millionaire. For God’s sake, Angel, don’t just throw us away!’
‘Fucking shut up,’ said Angel, and pinched Jelly’s arm again, and had to smile through her own grimace as the two approached, carrying two whiskies for themselves and a double gin for her. ‘At least I give good value for money.’
The punters would, after all, get three of her for the price of one, though no doubt Angelica would be reluctant, and Jelly a wet-blanket; but sex is sex: the moment the body was engaged in its instinctive business the other two shouldn’t prove too much of a problem; might even add a frisson or so to Angel’s own entertainment.
Lady Rice slept. Where did she get her worldly wisdom? She had led an emotionally trying but narrow and sheltered life – enough to make you believe in the group unconscious: delve too deep into it and you find the accumulated wisdom and experience of not just three but all the women in the world; and all the false assumptions and conditioned responses too, and no sense yet made of any of it. She’s no angel: that much you can be sure of. No jelling yet, but that comes later.
Michael, with thick silver hair and the single gold tooth, sat at Angel’s left. David, with thinning red hair and crinkly blue eyes, sat on her right. Glad to make her acquaintance, they said. They were strangers in town. She smiled and said nothing in particular. They were staying, they said, in an hotel down the road. That figured: their suits did not have quite the flat smoothness of the ones usually seen at The Claremont. They had been packed, unpacked, and not made good by a first class valet.
Michael and David pressed more gin upon Angel, intently watching her drink. She told them her name was Angel; that she was a private nurse. That she was employed to look after a stroke victim, an elderly lady currently a guest at The Claremont. It did not do to present herself as either too up-market, or too obvious in her profession. Amateurs did better in this game than professionals.
‘Angel by name,’ they said, ‘Angel by nature.’ They expected she needed something to cheer her up, and she agreed that she did.
Michael laid a well-manicured hand on one arm, David on the other.
‘Ask them if they’re married,’ said Jelly in Angel’s ear.
‘For God’s sake, leave me alone,’ said Angel, aloud.
‘Did you say that to me?’ asked Michael, surprised.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Angel. ‘Sometimes I talk to myself.’
David leant over and squeezed her lips gently together with thumb and forefinger.
‘That’s to stop you,’ he said. ‘Women shouldn’t talk too much. It gets them into trouble.’
She could see the gold wedding band on his third finger: there was no avoiding it. He had a wife.
Angelica said, ‘Don’t you have any respect for anything?’
Jelly said, ‘Oh, give up, Angelica. There’s no stopping her. Let’s just go with the flow,’ and for a time they did.
Michael said to David, concerned, ‘If you hold her lips together, she won’t be able to drink,’ and David took his hand away and Angel beamed happily from one to the other. The barman held the door open for them, and they helped her across the room.
‘I’m so drunk I can hardly stand,’ she confessed to the barman, giving him a little kiss for good measure.
‘Wrong man!’ said David, pulling her away.
‘Isn’t that Lady Angelica Rice?’ asked the doorman of the barman, in the marble foyer, as the three went off down the road, in search of their lesser hotel.
‘Of course that’s not Lady Rice,’ said the barman. ‘That’s some pick-up, using and abusing my bar. I just get them drunk and out as fast as possible.’
‘Lady Rice is here incognito,’ said the doorman, ‘so in theory it’s not our concern. She’ll just have to look after herself.’
On the way down Davies Street, towards Oxford Street, Jelly kept looking over her shoulder.
‘Why are you doing that?’ asked Angelica, annoyed. ‘I need to concentrate. I’m trying to keep her steady on her feet.’
‘It’s all too easy,’ said Jelly. ‘I’m nervous. We’ve been set up. Supposing we’ve been recognised? Supposing Edwin gets to know? Supposing we’re being spied on? Supposing it affects our alimony?’
‘You’re being paranoid,’ said Angelica. ‘Personally, I’m glad of the opportunity to widen the field of my experience.’
‘You’re a hopeless little slut at heart,’ said Jelly, bitterly. ‘No better than Angel.’
Angel tripped and nearly fell, and was buoyed up on either side by Michael and David. Michael had his hand inside her jacket, she noticed, fingering her bosom. She liked that.
‘This goes too far,’ said Angelica, and shut her eyes. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to join Lady Rice.’
‘So am I,’ said Jelly. ‘Angel, you’re on your own.’
Before she retired, Jelly managed to extract one of her high heels from a grating, instead of merely leaving the whole shoe behind as Angel was happy enough to do. Angel was neither prudent nor scrupulous. She enjoyed waste. The shoes were silvery net – an expensive pair Lady Rice had seldom had opportunity to wear: in Rice circles shoes were usually plain and serviceable. Presently Jelly became aware that Lady Rice was lying semi-clothed on a bed, not in The Claremont but in some strange hotel: the less she knew about any of it the better. She just hoped to live. Casual sex was insane. Serial killers, HIV rapists were at the outer edges of the sex-with-strangers experience: further in, nearer home, sadists, bullies, men on power trips, men anxious to humiliate. If Jelly knew this, how come Angel so readily took Lady Rice into danger? Or perhaps Angel thought horror a small price to pay for sex. What did two men want with one woman? Or did one woman merely save the cost of two?
When it came to it, David and Michael seemed more interested in one another’s orifices than in Angel’s. Angel served, as Angelica acidly observed in the morning, safely back in The Claremont, as witness to passion, even love, and as a kind of soft, sweet, fleshly jam spread on harder, crusty, rather stale bread, in the hope that the latter would be made appealing. To which Jelly replied, ‘You are such a mass of euphemisms, Angelica. It was disgusting. Men are beasts. They just wanted somewhere extra for a ramrod to ram, should it run out of places. There was no love in it, none.’ To which Angel murmured but they seemed to love each other: who cared about love, anyway? She, Angel, had a good time and earned herself a hundred pounds cash; and then, as Angelica filled and scented the bath and Jelly folded the clothes and tut-tutted over the scuffed heel, Angel lapsed into exhausted silence and went into hiding.
When she was gone, Jelly said to Angelica, ‘What are we going to do about her? She’ll get us into terrible trouble,’ and Angelica, anointing her sore parts with healing jellies, said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
Over breakfast, Angelica said, ‘I thought I saw that nice barman when Angel came in. I had the feeling he’d been waiting up. It was obvious what we’d been up to. Drunk, unescorted, skirt torn, four in the morning. Supposing he took a photograph?’
Jelly said brusquely, ‘Nonsense. We’d have seen the flash.’
Angelica said, ‘We were in no condition to notice anything.’
Jelly said, brightly, ‘At least we’re “we” again. A good night out can work wonders.’
Angelica said, ‘Speak for yourself. I’m ashamed and humiliated. But I expect it’s no more than I deserve.’
They enjoyed their coffee. It was black and strong. The croissants were fresh, and there was a Danish pastry, well-filled with apple and quite delectable. Sun shone in. ‘Only four hours’ sleep,’ said Lady Rice, herself again, ‘and a full day’s work ahead! God knows what comes over me, sometimes.’
As a day, of course, it was a dead loss. Lady Rice stumbled through it as Jelly, hungover and sleepless, but the speculative pain was muted, the outrage and blind fury that Edwin preferred another woman to her, that that other woman had so easily taken her husband, her property, her home, her very life from under her nose, had somewhat abated. Lady Rice used her alter egos as strategies for survival. What else was she to do?
Jelly forgot to save a file on her computer and lost a whole day’s work, including a letter to Barney Evans which she omitted to mention to Brian Moss. If a letter came in complaining of undue delay, she could lose that one too, when it arrived. She had stopped being in a hurry: there seemed all the time in the world. While she had her freedom, she should enjoy it. Nothing to it. She had to put off Ram by telling him she had a period pain: Angel was exhausted after her night out and had to sleep.