Everyone came to the wedding, including the ghost of Edwin’s mother. She was seen at the top of the narrow, ugly Jacobean stairs in a white dress, angrily waving a bottle, with a kind of miasmic mist floating from her: it left a damp coating on the bannisters which Mrs MacArthur, the housekeeper, said was mould. Staff scrubbed and rubbed away at it but it kept returning; you couldn’t get a shine to it, no matter what.
‘She’s not angry with you,’ said Angelica to Edwin, ‘but I expect she’s angry with your father. I’m sure she loved you very much.’
‘Why?’ he asked, gloomily.
‘Because you’re loveable,’ she replied, and he looked at her in gratified astonishment, and kissed her chastely. He had got accustomed to that. He didn’t quite see how on a marriage night the habit of chastity was meant to change to the habit of uxorious sexuality, but if it had for his forefathers – as Angelica had assured him was the case – no doubt it would for him.
‘Why should my mother be angry with my father?’ he asked. He took his father’s behaviour for granted, as sons will; as the father sees the world to be, so it is: daughters are often more critical.
‘Your father is a monster,’ Angelica explained to Edwin and Edwin seemed quite surprised.
‘That’s just how he is,’ said Edwin, and only reluctantly conceded what his mother had come to know so clearly: that his father was unpleasant beyond normality, even for the upper classes.
Pippi and Harry, Kinky Virgin’s violinist and drummer, had seen the apparition.
‘A cloud of fucking sperm,’ Pippi complained, ‘floating down the stairs. This old lady, following behind, waving a bottle. Was that your mother-in-law?’
None of Angelica’s friends wanted her to marry Edwin: snobby twerp, nerd, cunt: from the posh end of yuppie-dom, who’d given the band, with its foul-mouthed, intelligent cacophony, a passing popularity and been the more resented for it. And rightly, Sloaning and boning its drugs; drawling through the early hours, slamming car doors in the dawn to wake up the babies of the boring, toiling classes, the ones who worried about mortgages and children who failed exams and how to crawl out of the pit of necessity, the miasma of need, which shortened lives and narrowed hope; the steady, frightened classes who included Kinky Virgin in the things most wrong with the world today. Thus the careless and the crude, the wealthy and the wilfully distressed, joined forces in the clubs, each despising the other, but despising the rest more.
Edwin and Angelica married, joined hands across a chasm, and the phantom dogs of hate leapt up out of the depths to snap and snarl and make them break apart if they could, but at the time the lovers, or lovers-in-waiting, scarcely noticed their enemies; just felt surprised their match was so unpopular. All the world, which was meant to love a lover, plainly didn’t.
‘Is it wise to marry for money, darling?’ enquired Boffy Dee of Edwin at the wedding. Boffy Dee had bedded Edwin once or twice, he later found for a dare; she’d reported back to his circle, for reasons best known to herself, that his member was minuscule. He had found himself hurt and humiliated by this: he’d had much comfort from Boffy Dee, in a warmly dark and confident way; he’d believed in her affection, trusted her pleasure and his own. Boffy Dee was wearing a tight orange dress and a cartwheel hat, which made her ugly: he hated her.
‘I’m marrying Angelica because I love her,’ said Edwin, with the simplicity for which he was scorned. It was his bulk made them believe he was slow-witted. Rice Court was a mass of small, dark rooms and twisted staircases, alternating with large, panelled halls, mostly open to the public and therefore not home; if you moved quickly or impulsively you’d break some piece of wooden carving off something, as like as not, and cause hysterics: he’d got quite accustomed to moving around with caution, and what Angelica saw as a kind of grace but others interpreted as nervous obtuseness.
Anthea Box, his cousin, was wearing Laura Ashley sprigs which did nothing for her horsey looks, but made him feel affectionate towards her. She was the only one who seemed to have a good word to say for Angelica.
‘I expect the holes in her nose will heal up with time,’ said Anthea.