It is not that I dislike Jelly: she just doesn’t inspire me. It’s she who makes me the boring company I think I sometimes am. Edwin certainly thought so, or he wouldn’t have preferred Anthea to me.
Jelly is the kind of woman who has few friends: who gets up in the morning, enjoys a solitary breakfast, feels the satisfaction of a good day’s work, buys the cat food and goes home on public transport. She is not a compulsive telephone talker: she does not like sharing and caring with just anyone; she enjoys a flirtation because she can see that sooner or later she will need to get married and have children, and anyone likes to be admired and to be in control. But Jelly does not particularly need or enjoy the running commentary on life that friends require and provide: the oohs and ahs and guess what she said, and he didn’t, did he, the bastard; how could she, the bitch! that others seem to enjoy: she is not, frankly, interested in very much or curious about others. She likes to look neat and sweet, and she is certainly not above spying and prying because this too gives her power: she likes to have secrets, she is secretive; she likes to know secrets, to have them in her possession but not pass them on.
But she has learned her lesson about friends. They can and will betray you, and though you offer loyalty, loyalty is not necessarily offered in return. Judas Iscariot didn’t care about the money: he just wanted Jesus up there on the cross. The closer you nurture the worm to your bosom, the more likely it is to bite.
Seek solitude, thinks Jelly. Jelly doesn’t feel all that much: she prefers to think.
Angelica had friends. When she became Lady Rice, she gathered around her all the bohemians in the area; such writers, painters, sculptors, weavers, cookery experts, TV directors there were to be found. All she needed, after her years as a pop star amongst people whose favourite phrase was ‘Know what I mean’ – because passion and puzzlement so outstripped their command of the language – was a dinner table. Over eleven years these bohemians became her old friends. Edwin found the conversation of the non-gentry around his dinner table interesting, and would come home saying ‘Who’s coming to dinner tonight? Well? Well?’ rather than just ‘What’s for dinner?’ The talk would be about books, films, reviews, politics, the world of the imagination: not horses, dogs, weather and crops, and required more keeping up with, but Edwin did not complain. Edwin read books, he read poems – though he found his legs too long for theatre seats, and his knees twitched at the cinema.
Edwin was to revert later, of course, to type, to his original state; was to put the Jaguar behind him to go back to the Range Rover: to the wuff-wuffing insolence of the hunt, the tearing to pieces of hungry beasts: the pop-popping of shotguns, the bringing of the soaring spirit dead or dying back to earth, if only to show who’s who round here. We, the hunting/shooting/landowning gentry.
Imagination hurt: that was why sensible people discouraged it. Speculation unsettled: certainty helped you sleep at night. If you shot wild creatures, you were less likely to shoot your wife, less likely to lose her in the first place. For these changes in Edwin, this regression, Lady Rice blamed Susan and Lambert almost more than she blamed Anthea: Anthea at least acknowledged herself as an enemy; Susan posed as a friend.
Angelica had only by accident been a pop star, Edwin would explain to everyone, trustingly, in the warm bright days when others were still to be trusted. A teenage girl of wit and temperament which far exceeded that of her parents, a rarity, a talent; her father dying, herself led astray (not sexually, of course; she wasn’t like that): discrimination was Angelica’s middle name. ‘Discrimination is Angie’s middle name,’ he’d say, and Susan would nod her ever so slightly patronising head, with its bell of heavy blonde hair: or turn her bright bird eyes on Angelica and smile sweetly and say, ‘Oh me, I’m hopeless; anything at all makes me happy’ and all the men around would wish they’d be the anyone to make her happy, their things the anything; and sometimes Angelica wondered if Edwin should be included in ‘all the men’, but surely not, Susan was her best friend. Best friends were not like that.
Lady Rice, in The Claremont, refrained from calling room service to say her club sandwich was horrid, would they take it away and replace the smoked bacon with unsmoked, but controlled herself and Angelica slipped back into limbo.