Jelly was not unhappy. The more files she brought home to The Claremont, the more concentration she applied to them, the quieter Angelica, Angel and Lady Rice remained. She found herself without personal history or active sexuality; a woman without sorrow, recreated every day. Sometimes in the evenings she had a headache, which she suspected was created by her other selves, hammering away for head-time, airtime, but she denied it to them. She needed a rest. Besides, she was a moral entity – it seemed to her the others were not.
She became studiedly virtuous: she could see that Angel was the worst threat. She no longer employed Ram to take her to the office. She would see the Volvo hovering, but would shake her head and walk briskly, head held high, to Bond Street Underground, while he attempted to follow her, against the flow of the traffic. She slapped Brian Moss down: literally, aiming a blow at his well-suited crotch, which quietened him considerably. If Lady Rice rocked nightly in her sea of sorrow, if Angelica went to Fenwicks on Saturdays or for late-night shopping, Jelly at least did not know about it.
Nightly Jelly filled her notebooks: scraps of fact, fiction, essay. She kept them hidden at the back of the clothes cupboard, amongst her shoes. The number of pairs, she noticed, were increasing: shoes and boots she would never, as Jelly, wear: platform-soled, absurdly pointed or brutishly squared – nothing at all to do with convenience or the shape of the human foot.
She summoned Angelica to reproach her.
‘Why do you do this?’ Jelly demanded. ‘Why do you waste so much time, energy and money buying absurd things you never need and don’t wear?’
‘I need them,’ said Angelica crossly. ‘I like them and I’d wear them tomorrow if only you’d put them on.’
‘What these?’ inquired Jelly, picking up a black suede thigh boot jangling with chains, with six-inch platforms. Jelly was sitting on the bed, facing the gold-framed mirror. ‘You’re insane.’
‘You’re so safe and boring,’ sneered Angelica. ‘Mummy’s little small-town girl.’
‘I really like those boots,’ said Angel, finding her voice. ‘I helped Angelica pick them. I’m glad she bought them. If you’d put them on now we could go down to the bar.’
‘You’re ridiculous,’ said Jelly, shutting them off and out, as these days it seemed simpler to do.
‘Give them to charity,’ murmured Lady Rice, who was swimming around in there somehow. ‘Get the alter egos to counselling. You need to find a support group for compulsive shoppers. Thank God it’s nothing to do with me.’
Jelly picked a mound of useless clothes out of the wardrobe and shelves: see-through blouses, metal belts, leather trews, purple velvet leggings, cloche hats with flowers, absurd knickers, crotchless tights, lacy suspender belts – unused, unworn mostly, with the price labels still on them – masses of cheap jewellery, expensive face creams gone sour and caked because they’d been inspected, not used, and the lid left off; cheap and cheerful cosmetics, hair curlers, wigs. She gave them all to the corridor maid, who did not seem particularly grateful.
With these out of the way, and nothing but the sensible skirts, pastel jumpers and warm coats left, she felt more herself.
She had to pay for the junk out of her earnings as Jelly – her mother forwarded credit card accounts – only purchases from the hotel boutique being chargeable to Edwin. She hoped Angelica and Angel would have the grace to be ashamed of themselves, but didn’t stir them to ask them. She investigated Lodestar House further.
She found a mention of the house in a book called Walks in Old Chelsea. ‘1–3 Lodestar Avenue, Lodestar House, is a solidly built house dating from 1874, of what is known as Tuscan-Gothic design, set in a quarter acre of land on the slopes of the River Thames where Belgravia eases into Chelsea.’
On Sundays Jelly would walk down to the Embankment, passing the high grey brick walls of Lodestar House: once even standing on a dustbin to see over into the garden, and later wrote this in her notebook.
‘The city has nudged up around the property and contrived to steal some of its original land so that it now occupies a mere corner site. It’s an ungainly giant of a house, castellated and turreted, Grade One listed, high-walled in dark grey brick, where Lodestar Avenue and Terrace meet. Once you could walk from the back door down the long garden to the river, through orchards. No longer. A main road and an embankment bar the way, though the high walls cut off sound and fumes. All around there are agreeable, well-built Georgian terraces. In return for a strip of land for the embankment, in 1888 Number 3 Lodestar Avenue was demolished by the authorities and that land given back to the freeholders: the Musgrave family.
‘Tuscan-Gothic is, I know, a contradiction in terms, but then so is the house, built to defy and annoy, the subject of interminable legal wrangles, passionately loved and hopelessly hated, a focus of that struggle to keep in balance the world of emotion and the world of financial and practical representation of that emotion, the spiritual and the material. 1–3 Lodestar Avenue is a brilliantly reflecting yet blighted planet which any sensible traveller would do well to avoid.’
Reading it later, she thought that perhaps Lady Rice, with her obsession with the scales of justice, had had a hand in the writing.