‘Verbal assault,’ Edwin had claimed. That she had verbally assaulted him. What can he have meant? Lady Rice thought and thought. She was, truth to tell, no longer so much concerned with the matter of alimony as she had been. For all her fine words, for all the apparent finality of her opinions on the subject – as if she had reached some mountain peak of truth and there was no going down again; you were obliged to spin for ever around your conclusions – the subject had ceased to be obsessional. She would leave all that legal stuff for Jelly to get on with: she would leave Angelica with the burden of looking up old friends, and the attempt to restore the integrity of the self before marriage – a silly slip of a girl in a leather jacket with rings in her nose – and get on with the task of considering her guilt, her possible contribution to the break-up of the marriage: not that she believes she can have had any part in that: no, it is just that remorse, or the appearance of remorse, might win her husband back – not that she wants that either, no, never –
In the Velcro Club, where the hearts and souls of those sundered or about to be put asunder, are understood, it is well known that obsessions are as changeable as the weather: and that the change is as painful as if the Velcro were alive, a million nerve endings twanging, and the shift from one obsession to the next hurts terribly as the stuff goes skew-whiff, and a screaming fills the air, too high-pitched to be quite heard, but there, there –
Verbal assault. Was she ever rude to Edwin? Did she ever berate him, insult him? Surely not.
‘Flop and wobble,’ she’d once said to him, and he’d taken that amiss. Flop and wobble.
‘Flop and wobble,’ Angelica’s mother would say, surveying the jellies her little daughter loved so much. Mrs White, nee Lamb, would often make such a hopeless dessert, incompetently if devotedly, for Saturday tea –alternately soft red, acid green. ‘Flop and wobble,’ she’d complain. ‘How does it happen?’ A rhetorical question her little daughter saw fit to answer one day:
‘You don’t put enough of the packet in,’ Angelica said. ‘It’s obvious, silly.’
She was her father’s little girl and had his casual habit of diminishing her mother: not that she ever seemed to mind.
‘I follow the instructions exactly,’ said her mother. ‘It would be a wicked waste to do otherwise. One half packet to one pint of water – as I am instructed, so I do.’
Stephen White, coming back from choir practice, would survey the shaky structure of the family dessert and say, ‘Flop and wobble again, my dear,’ in kind affection and jump up and down to shake the room and make the confection collapse totally. Of such detail, it seemed to Angelica, good marriages were made. Those were the days when Angelica was called Jelly, her given name proving too long a word for easy saying. But even blessings can turn out to be curses; landmines laid in a long-forgotten war.
‘Flop and wobble,’ said Lady Rice aloud one early morning as she lay in her marriage bed beside Sir Edwin Rice. ‘Flop and wobble,’ and indeed she was thinking of nothing but family tea and happy times, pre-adolescence, but Edwin took it as a slight, turned abruptly away from her, removed his enfolding arm, lay with his back to her for a little and then climbed out of bed and dressed. They had been married for ten years: the days of misunderstandings and makings-up were long past. Lady Rice could not think why he chose to take offence. Later she realised her husband was at this time ‘seeing’ his cousin Anthea.
Unfaithful husbands divide into two kinds: the one who feels guilty, brings flowers, baths babies, tries not to hurt: though later spoils things by confessing all. The other who feels guilty but looks for justification in his wife’s behaviour: see, everyone, how she fails to look after me properly, has grown fat, or undermines my self esteem, whatever, wherever her weakness lies: but when the affair has ended – should it ever end – he keeps the secret to himself: refrains from burdening his wife with it: she has paid in advance, as it were, for his blow against the marriage politic.
This particular morning Lady Rice did what she could to explain: ‘flop and wobble’, she pleaded, was not a slur upon her husband’s prowess. How could he think such a thing? But indeed he had not lately been as moved by his wife as once he was, but Lady Rice supposed that to be a normal fluctuation in his sexual energies. Worries at work, perhaps. But Edwin would have none of her excuses, though Angelica prattled on. Edwin, usually so easily entertained, so happy to hear tales of his wife’s childhood, remained for once obdurate, unfascinated, profoundly offended.
‘It’s no use,’ said Edwin, when finally he spoke, ‘trying to deny your own words. What is spoken is what is meant, consciously or not. What you were doing is wishing impotence upon me. You’re trying to undermine my confidence again.’
‘You just want to take offence,’ she had wept. ‘Why are we having this dreadful time? What is the matter with you?’
He gave her no clue. And being, as Edwin would have it, unobservant, or, as she would say, innocent, Lady Rice failed to connect her husband’s claim to martyrdom at her hands with his guilt. She was to be blamed for the crime against her. To put it bluntly, Edwin had fallen out of love with his wife and was inclined to blame her for this loss. He felt it, oddly enough, keenly, and the more keenly he felt it, the more he blamed her. What a mess!
Flop and wobble, verbal assault. Lady Rice could see what Edwin meant. No such thing as an accident; no unmeant, casual remark, however unconscious the impulse to deride.