‘We’re going to get married,’ said Edwin to Lord Cowarth, his father. His mother had drunk herself to death long ago. Edwin was the youngest son so no one took much notice of him. He was allowed to live in Rice Court to keep the damp and moths away.
Lord Cowarth looked Angelica up and down. At Edwin’s request, she was wearing a white sweater and a black wool skirt. Her hair was dyed brown, and she had removed the rings from her nose. The scars were healing, the holes filling in. She looked thoroughly conventional and easily shocked and spoke with the slapdash incoherence of her generation. Lord Cowarth wore a dressing gown thin with age which fell apart to show skinny shanks and a tiny member.
‘Has she got any money?’ he asked. He carried a cleaver wherever he went. He was short, rubicund and savage; thin in parts, fat in others.
‘A few hundred thousand,’ said Edwin proudly.
Lord Cowarth grunted.
‘I always thought you had your eye on that bint Anthea,’ he said. ‘Plain as a pikestaff but just right for you, the fat boy of the form. Can’t abide a fat child,’ he said, and Angelica thought she saw Edwin wince. Mostly Edwin kept his face friendly and still, accustomed as he was to parental rebuffs and insults. ‘Most of my children were thin. Perhaps you’re not my child at all. When I think of that tart of a woman I married –’ Lord Cowarth’s eyes narrowed – ‘it wouldn’t surprise me.’ He spun Angelica round with fingers which clawed into her neck. ‘What’s your game?’ he asked. ‘What are you after? A title, a house, or an education for your children?’
Angelica took hold of Edwin’s hand, but her fiancé seemed incapable of helping her get free. All the strength had drained from him. So much old stags can always do to such progeny as rashly stay around.
Lord Cowarth balanced the cleaver in his hand, letting go of Angelica the better to do so. The cleaver was made of rusty old iron, solid old wood.
‘I think he likes you,’ said Edwin softly.
‘What are you whispering about? What are you plotting?’ The old man had a front tooth missing. He struck the blunt back of the hasp against his lips. Presently the next tooth would go. There would be blood in his mouth next time he opened it. A useful trick. When he went to the House of Lords, for a Coronation or the investment of a relative, he would dress in finery: otherwise he kept to his dressing gown, and liked to have a bloody mouth. He seldom left his apartments: he could run the Rice Estate well enough from there.
‘I love him,’ said Angelica. ‘That’s what I’m saying. Sweet nothings, you know?’
That silenced him.
At least he did not forbid the wedding. Edwin could not have stood out against his father, and Angelica would not have expected him to. But now she had a chance to save him, build up his self-confidence, help him recognise and accept himself; she was brimming with good intentions.
‘Will your brothers come to the wedding?’ asked Angelica.
‘Doubt it,’ said Edwin, stoically. He and she would marry quietly. She wanted to make him happy. She had not understood how anxious family life could make a man, riddling him with the expectation of rejection, of failure. His elder brothers, twins, twenty years older than he, now lived in warmer climes, in the Southern Seas; they had beautiful brown wives. One twin kept a restaurant; the other a marina. The Rice Estate kept both businesses in efficient managers: fish swam up, the yachts slid in: money flowed: titles entranced everyone. The languid tones of the English upper class travel well, though these days they grate upon the domestic ear.
The Kinky Virgin band would, of course, have none of Edwin: of his tweed jacket and knotted scarf, so Angelica would now have none of them.
‘I’m giving music up,’ she said. ‘All that was only a flash in the pan. I haven’t any real talent.’
Now she’d seen her mother in a miniskirt, she’d lost her appetite for excess. Now she’d perceived the depths of Edwin’s woes, the sorrow and the exhilaration of the rock stadium seemed distasteful. Besides, her father had died and who was there left to shock? Her mother had become unshockable; family friends had come to appreciate her, since she put their own young into a better light.
Angelica’s arms were so skinny Edwin could close his hand right round where her biceps would be, were she to body-build. He liked that. Who these days could win a virgin bride? He felt marrying such a one would make the crops grow, and the dry rot recede: his breaking of the hymen, his staining of the marriage sheets, would bring good fortune and sanity to a land ruled by that mad old man, his father.
Someone had to be responsible: his twin brothers had left him behind to be just that; had run out on him. He had seen his life as a sacrifice: terrible girls had wooed him in spite of his looks, in spite of the veil of fat which protected him in his early years, making his penis seem tiny, his sufferings absurd; they had wooed him and bedded him for the sake of his title, his landed state, his patrician accents, forget he would never properly inherit wealth, only a fearful responsibility and rejection: would, like as not, inherit madness from his father, but without his father’s power. Little by little Lord Cowarth had devolved that power to Robert Jellico, his Land Agent, and Robert Jellico, as well as being unerringly competent, was a powerful, sensible man, not given to evident emotion or the recognition of the financial duty that kinship imposes. Edwin complained Robert Jellico looked at him strangely.
‘He’s gay,’ said Angelica innocently. ‘That’s all. That’s why he looks at you the way he does. He’s going to hate me. He’s a man who rises at seven and doesn’t understand the way you stay in bed till noon.’
Edwin loved Angelica because she reduced terrible and complex things to such simple and graceful components, and seemed threatened by no one, except her mother, who could make her cry. But those tears were the tears of the child, confident of love and the eventual pleasures of consolation.