‘Mum,’ said Angelica from a phone box, ‘I’ve met this man. I’m bringing him home.’
The phone box was probably the prettiest in the country. Special permission had been obtained by environmentalists to paint it green, avoiding the traditionalist’s scarlet, so that the box did not disturb an eye adjusted to the delights of its surroundings. For home was the village of Barley, on three successive years awarded a prize as the most charming in the country – with its well-tended, cosily-gardened stone cottages, all hollyhocks and buzzing bees in the summer, its white-painted, brown-beamed medieval houses, leaning into one another for support; its central copper-spired church: the village green, the ducking pond, its ancient market, and its coach park just beyond the village limits for the tourists. And even these latter did not disturb too much, for the Parish Council allowed only one souvenir shop, and made few amenities available for the tourists’ convenience, so news got round and the coach parties, on the whole, stayed away.
Angelica’s mother lived with her new husband on a small new estate, discreetly surrounded by trees, a mile or so from the market, Barley’s epicentre, just outside the village proper. Here teachers and social workers lived, and others with good hearts and low incomes. Barley proper was these days noticeably occupied by the wealthy, people who needed to travel to the city only a couple of times a week, if that, for Directors’ meetings, and a few ‘originals’ – the old men who gave local colour in the pub, and applauded the incomers’ dart matches: their wives cleaned others’ houses, or staffed the few village shops. It was a happy village: everyone agreed, and so of course an artists’ colony flourished here, in buildings converted from their original use, since current generations had no need of them. Former schoolhouses, chapels, a dozen barns, the old railway station now gave the space and style required by the creative spirit: writers, potters, weavers, sculptors, architects came to Barley in the hope of encouraging and supporting one another, to have ‘someone to talk to’: that is, as it transpired, to swap spouses, the group eventually to collapse beneath a weight of bitter gossip, spite and envy, and rise again, talent and hope renewed.
For this purpose, for this rebirth, a sacrifice is required: Angelica was to find herself this sacrifice, but that was in the future. This was now. Barley dreamt in the sun: Angelica was bringing Edwin home to meet her mother. And Edwin, by chance, was scion of Barley’s dilapidated great house, Rice Court, five miles away, and its even greater stately home, a further two miles deeper into the Great Park, into the Green Forest, Cowarth Castle, where Lord Cowarth, Edwin’s father, lived. Or perhaps not quite by chance, for how many people do not travel far and wide in search of adventure and distraction to discover that the one they set their hat at, the one who so occupies the erotic imagination, in fact comes from the same town, the next street, the house next door even: escape from one’s origins, it often seems, is out of the question, barred by fate. Like calls to like.
‘You’re too young,’ replied Angelica’s mother, understanding at once the import of the words – ‘I’ve met this man. I’m bringing him home’ – from a daughter she hadn’t seen or heard from in six months, other than in press cuttings: glad enough to have the girl report in, alarmed by what was going to happen next. Angelica was seventeen. As it happened, Edwin was a mere twenty-one, a stripling, not even in the music scene: this mother was lucky.
‘You don’t trust me,’ said Angelica. ‘You never have. You treat me like a child.’ How easily and quickly the two of them resumed their normal relationship. Angelica had been saying that since she was twelve, when a film company had moved into the village to make Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urberυilles. Nothing had been the same after that.
‘You are a child!’ said Mrs White. ‘For all the rings you have in your nose.’ Angelica at that time had twelve in each ear as well, but Mrs White had got used to that. ‘If it interests you, I’ve met a man, too, just like you.’
‘But Dad’s only been dead a year,’ said Angelica, upset.
Widows are meant to fade away; they should keep a low profile for the sake of their kids. That way everyone knows who’s where.
‘Your father wouldn’t mind,’ said Mrs White, pleasantly. ‘He always wanted me to be happy.’ The man she was meeting was married, the father of Angelica’s school-friend Mary. His name was Gerald Haverley. He’d once been on the PTA with Mr White, now in his grave. They had got on well enough, it was true, during his lifetime, before he had left his wife a widow.
‘I don’t believe this,’ said Angelica. No one likes to be upstaged. Here the daughter was, bringing home what she’d thought was the catch of the season, only to find the mother already sporting with dolphins.
Edwin and Angelica, having warned Mrs White, came on round to see her. They drove up in a red MG; two bright young things. Edwin wore a tweed jacket and a knotted scarf. She wore leather.
‘That’s a nice car,’ said Mrs White.
Mrs White was wearing a red miniskirt. She had been married to a man twenty-seven years her senior for twenty years. Now she was free.
‘It’s a red MG,’ said Edwin defensively. ‘A lot of chaps have them.’
‘Most chaps aren’t as well-built as you,’ Mrs White remarked. Edwin was six-foot-four and weighed two hundred and ten pounds. Angelica’s mother looked him up and down appreciatively.
Angelica nudged Edwin and tried to explain that in their circle ‘everyone’ had Ford Fiestas or got on the bus. Edwin looked puzzled and said he could remember Angelica very well driving a Lamborghini, what was she talking about? Angelica said that was different and Mrs White said she could see they had a stormy relationship, and Edwin said on the contrary. Mrs White said trust Angelica to bring home an argumentative man.
‘Is this all some kind of character test?’ Edwin asked.
‘Yes,’ Mrs White said promptly. ‘If you mean to marry my daughter you’ll have to go through one or two.’
‘I never said I was going to marry her,’ he said, alarmed.
Angelica burst into tears and went and sat in her father’s study, where her mother had never gone. Now her mother followed her in.
‘Don’t embarrass me,’ said Mrs White.
‘But you embarrassed me,’ said Angelica, accustomed to having the moral upper hand in these family matters.
‘And you’re supposed to be so tough,’ said Mrs White, looking her daughter up and down. Angelica wore boots up to her thighs and a fringed leather shirt down to her knees, and her hair was canary yellow. If she couldn’t look after herself by now it was time she did.
‘No one’s said anything about marriage,’ said Angelica. ‘We haven’t even been to bed together.’
Mrs White had been to bed with Gerald Haverley, and his wife was now divorcing him: that was different: they were grown-up people. These two were children: Angelica was having a difficult adolescence; Billy Bunter, the fat schoolboy, still looked out of Sir Edwin’s eyes, and Alice in Wonderland out of Angelica’s, for all she’d earned two thirds of a million pounds from a record called ‘Kinky Virgin’, sensibly put away in a Building Society.
‘Then stay out of it,’ said Mrs White.
‘You don’t think I’m some sort of pervert?’ asked Angelica. ‘I just don’t like the thought of sex. I’d much rather just sing about it.’
‘I’m sure it’s not my fault,’ said Mrs White. ‘I never put that idea into your head. I can’t have.’
Angelica stayed out of Edwin’s bed, and presently he asked her to marry him, on the old-fashioned premise that that was the only way he’d get her into it.