– spent a lot of time trying to get pregnant. That is to say, now in bed with Edwin only some twelve hours out of every twenty-four, she failed to take contraceptive precautions. She could see it would be nice to be two people enclosed in one and carry that one around inside her: the thought made her dozy and warm. If there was a baby, the twelve waking, walking hours would flow easily and naturally: unedgily, undriven. The warm, milky smell and soft feel of babies, the slippery, honey scent of Johnson’s Baby Oil would drift the days together, make day like night, summer like winter, bed and waking hours the same: she would be universally approved: her mother would think of her, not of Gerald Haverley and The Divorce: The Tatler would come and take photographs of her and Edwin together and a baby in a long, white Christening robe in her arms – Angelica herself had never been christened: her name had always been some kind of variable. With her baby’s christening, she would find herself shriven and finally named herself.
‘Very nice,’ said Edwin, ‘but the camera would get dust in it. The photos wouldn’t come out. Everything’s crumbling.’ Edwin, they agreed, tended to look on the gloomy side of things; to expect very little of the material world. If he was disappointed before he began, then failure could be interpreted as success in at least one thing – that he had been right all along. But Angelica encouraged him in good cheer.
Edwin began cautiously to take up his axe, to chop down a rotten tree or so on the Estate; to tear away the odd beam made flaky by woodworm before it actually fell, whether on to the dining room table or the bed; he learned to trace the tap-tap-tap of the deathwatch beetle, to pare away wood and reach the devouring little insect family, remove them carefully to one of the stables where they would do less harm. Such was her power over him, at the beginning. Angelica, who was tender-hearted towards all living creatures, though they demolish her house, eat away at her inheritance.
Every month with the moon, Angelica bled. Dr Bleasdale said it took a long time for marihuana to clear itself out of the system, and the drug, even though they scarcely used it now, impaired fertility.
‘It’s not a drug,’ said Edwin, ‘it’s a leaf. And I don’t believe him.’
After a year, the doctor went further and attributed Angelica’s inability to conceive to Edwin’s sperm count, lowered, he claimed, by drug-taking in the past. Edwin refused a test and Angelica did not blame him. The process involved sounded disgusting to both of them.
‘Jealous of a simple jar!’ said Edwin. ‘Fancy you!’
‘Yes,’ said Angelica. ‘I am. Fancy me!’
They started going to the younger, female partner at the surgery, a Dr Rosamund Plaidy, who said there was lots of time. Babies came when parents were ready for them. That felt better. Angelica became less sure that she was ready to be a parent. The convictions of youth diminished; the doubts of maturity strengthened.
These days Lady Rice would follow her husband out into the fields to watch him sawing branches, lighting bonfires. Edwin was developing muscles: a broad shoulder, a strong back. She hadn’t wanted a baby desperately, Angelica told Boffy Dee; it had been a mood, that was all. She would wait until she was older. If she had a baby now, Mrs MacArthur would just take it away on the pretence of looking after it. One day Lady Rice, Angelica confided in Boffy Dee, would do without Mrs MacArthur: it was just that in the meantime she had Rice Court to look after; she didn’t want her white hands to become rough, in case Edwin would not love them any more, would not suck her fingers one by one, as he did now, as if he’d been dealt a handful of lollipops by the Great Gambler in the sky, and wanted to show his appreciation and gratitude. Things were pretty good, thought Angelica, and, if she did nothing in particular, would stay that way.
Robert Jellico reported back to Lord Cowarth, at Cowarth Castle, five miles up the road, that his youngest son was showing signs of reformation; that, surprisingly, the marriage was holding. Angelica’s money had now been taken by the official Receivers of Rice Estate Fungi (Continental) – which had served as the year’s most effective tax loss for Rice Estates. Jellico took some credit for the unexpected durability of the youngest son’s marriage. Women without funds made better wives than women with funds, being more dependent.
Robert Jellico had started a steady relationship with one Andy Pack, a jockey, and these days was prepared to exchange a non-acrimonious word with Angelica, and an un-neurotic one with Edwin. He even, in a flush of generosity, inflation-indexed the young couple’s allowance. The Estate paid staff wages and household bills; Edwin and Angelica had to pay only for food and entertainment, and since their entertainment was by and large each other, they could even make savings on what came in. Angelica saw fit to send her mother fifty pounds a week: Gerald Haverley was retired now and it was difficult for the couple to pay so much as their heating bills.
‘Don’t you have each other to keep each other warm?’ Angelica asked when her mother complained, but clearly everyone’s habits were different. The younger generation kept to its bed, if it possibly could: the older you got the easier you felt out of it, until old age set in, when there you’d be, under the covers again.
Robert Jellico felt it was unreasonable that Rice Estate money should go to Edwin’s mother-in-law, whose husband’s duty it surely was to provide for her, and said as much to Edwin. And Edwin said to Angelica words to this effect – ‘The fifty pounds a week you give your mother would be better spent on the fabric of this house, on Rentokil and rat catchers. The medieval drains are collapsing, and you don’t even seem to notice.’
‘You should never have let that archaeologist in,’ said Angelica. ‘I knew he’d be trouble.’
A representative from the University of Birmingham’s Department of Medieval Studies had turned up to photograph the brick sewer system and, though asked to touch nothing, had removed for study some critical piece of figured brickwork and thereby started a general collapse of a system which otherwise would have lasted another couple of hundred years. If Lord Cowarth fired shotguns at all comers, whether vagrants, gypsies, academics or social workers, Edwin began to understand why.
‘There you go again,’ said Edwin, ‘trying to blame me for a failing in yourself. Your heart’s too kind.’
‘But my mother needs the money,’ said Angelica. ‘She’ll be cold and hungry without it,’ and Edwin, after complaining that she overstated her case, fretted and frowned and put it to his wife that surely she saw the importance of the present. That surely it was time she put her old life behind her: why should Angelica help Gerald Haverley, the betrayer of Angelica’s one-time best friend Mary’s mother, out of a fix? Why not? enquired Angelica. The difference caused a slight coldness between them: a frisson, perhaps, of differences to come, like wind tinged with ice because it’s passed over the snow of a mountain range, chilling the slumbering foothills.
‘And think of all that money I gave the Rice Estate,’ said Angelica. ‘Surely something’s due to me from that?’ But one of the rules of the Rice Estate was that money swallowed was money swallowed, buried in earth, as hillsides were moved at Lord Cowarth’s direction; roads were driven; river courses changed; estates developed and others torn down to make way for artificial grouse moors or ski slopes: mud everywhere, and gaping holes all around, grand canyons, yawning to receive the gift of other people’s money: endless diversification, from mushroom farms (bind, bind, the crumbling soil with rhizomorphs) to sewage purification plants (drink, drink and profit us, it’s good for you!). In exchange for all this frantic, destructive energy, the Rice organism spewed out money neatly and in deliberate fashion, all but unobserved, to interested parties in whom it did not include a youngest son’s first wife. The Rice Estate knew when to waste, and when to save. Robert Jellico saw to all that: saw to it that the Estate sucked up millions, shat out tidy, tax-resistant cash pellets. The more that trust was put in Robert Jellico, the more smoothly the operation would run: that was the general understanding.
‘I don’t even have a receipt,’ Angelica would worry sometimes. ‘And work hasn’t even started here; what happened to the money?’
And she wondered why it was that water still drained from the hand basin before she even had time to wash her hands, so badly had it cracked; why there was so little comfort in her daily life. Mrs MacArthur, who enjoyed the threadbare character of her job, who liked nothing better than a domestic emergency, who loved making do and mending, just said, ‘Four inches of water is more than enough for anyone to wash their hands in, my girl. The crack starts four and a quarter inches up. Don’t be so greedy.’
‘This place is a disaster area,’ said Angelica to Edwin one day. ‘Couldn’t we move out of it?’
‘You don’t love me any more,’ said Edwin. ‘You never used to notice,’ so she gave up mentioning it. Money gone is money gone, like water.
They were lying in the sun on a grassy mound where Cromwell the Protector was reputed to have single-handedly chopped down a maypole. Lord Cowarth’s ancestor, Cromwell’s friend, had been of an ascetic nature and grudging temperament, and had welcomed the coming of Roundhead politics; his descendants since had specialised in debauchery, excess and dramatics, as if to make up for the sheer meanness of the man who had founded their fortune by personally shaving the ringlets off Royalist neighbours and seizing their estates.
Even as Sir Edwin and Lady Rice lay on the grass hand in hand, bodies touching, they watched a bird alight gracefully on a chimney. They saw the high brick erection crumble and fall through the tiled roof, heard the debris rumble down through the attic floor, the bedroom floor, to the library below, whence a puff of dust blew out through open latticed windows and dispersed. Of such events are the memories of marriage made.
Ashes to dust.
Lord Cowarth’s disposition had improved over the previous three years. Infections had given him abscesses under his remaining teeth – six left from a once full set, mostly towards the back – and pain had finally driven him to the doctor. He had been given Prozac, a new anti-depressant, still undergoing clinical trials, by Dr Rosamund Plaidy. He had even signed the consent forms, in a sudden rush to the head of social spiritedness. Lord Cowarth had married, within six weeks of the first dose, a blonde and leather-booted woman in her mid-fifties, Ventura, Lady Cowarth. The wife of a mere youngest son and the wife of a full-blooded, propertied Earl are accorded the same title, so Mrs White, now Mrs Haverley, told her daughter: ‘Lady’ covers all degrees of honour, saving only ‘Princess’, ‘Countess’, ‘Duchess’ and ‘Queen’. Ventura drank a great deal of whisky, but was kind, buxom and efficient, and liked Angelica, with whom she shared a common taste for leather; though Lady Rice, little by little, was taking to jeans and sweaters, neat skirts, little collars and long sleeves buttoned at the wrist.
‘She may be a bit “other ranks”’, said Ventura to her husband, ‘but at least she’s a local and at least she’s on hand!’ Unlike, by inference, Edwin’s elder brothers, the twins who had simply run out on the whole caboodle.
Lord Cowarth had lately found the tie to his dressing gown. If it did still occasionally fall apart, it was to reveal skinny parts more robust than heretofore, and fleshy parts less hideous.
‘Rice Court does need money spent on it, dear,’ Ventura said to her husband, ‘in fact as well as theory: brick by brick, not just a business plan!’ and her husband had a word with Robert Jellico, who released half a million pounds to that end. The falling of the chimney had impressed everyone. A further half million, it was inferred, would follow when Angelica produced a child.
‘I had no idea,’ said Angelica, distressed, as Edwin made constant efforts, night and day, to impregnate her, she by now having completely gone off the idea of babies, ‘that there were families left who behaved like this. Your father’s worse sane than he was mad.’
‘There is no such thing,’ said Edwin, his great, consoling bulk heaving over her, ‘as a free title,’ and Angelica laughed, but she was hurt. Edwin would do this for money, but not for love? For Rice Court, not for her?
If Edwin wanted a baby for his family’s sake, not for hers, not as a celebration of their love, she would rather not have one at all, or at any rate not yet. Better to live in a rose-covered cottage, however humble, abrim with domestic love, to have children as an outcome of that love, clustering around the knee, than to live in a mansion, have nannies, and be expected to breed for the sake of a line, in the interests of a family who thought themselves better than others for no good reason, especially since, so far as Angelica could see, that line was now more connected to commerce than to the land. And supposing the baby inherited its grandfather’s madness? Its grandmother’s alcoholism, its father’s idleness? She loved Edwin dearly, but without a doubt he was idle. And had not the early Rice forbears been robber barons, the criminals of the Middle Ages? The more she thought about it, the worse it seemed. Her side of the family might be mildly eccentric, but surely dwelt within the bounds of decent ordinariness: what could truly be said of the humble was that they tried to be good, if only from lack of energy to be otherwise. The Rice family had no problem being bad.
If Edwin showed signs of wanting a baby for his wife’s sake or, better still, saw a baby as the natural outcome of a great and enduring love, no doubt these worries would be quickly swept away in a wave of wanting – but until this happened, until Edwin grew up a bit, stopped trying to placate and gratify his awful family, she would not risk the change in status that the having of a baby entailed. Better and safer to be the wife Edwin insanely loved, than the mother of a Rice child. Through history they’d found themselves driven to drink, or pushed downstairs, or walled up, or just left at home and thoroughly neglected, once their purpose was served. They’d been allowed to dress up in their tiaras and produced at coronations, or state funerals, or victory parades to keep them quiet, but that was all. She dug out forgotten family portraits from the cellars and brought down monographs from the attic: restored, dusted, framed them all, and found in the family history more than enough proof for her suppositions.
And so to everyone’s surprise Angelica didn’t get pregnant. In fact, she had prudently asked at the surgery, before it was too late, for a contraceptive implant, one of a new kind which lasted for a whole five years, and young Dr Rosamund Plaidy had obliged, tucked it under the skin of Angelica’s buttocks with a deft incision of knife and needle. Gently, day by day, the implant leaked oestrogen into her system, keeping her rounded and placid and gentle. The more fertile she looked, the less fertile she was, and no giveaway card of pills either, hanging around to be found.
Dr Rosamund Plaidy was thirty-four, wholesome, pleasant and well-informed, and was married to Lambert Plaidy, the writer. She had had her own first child at twenty-six and naturally believed that to be the optimum age for such activity. Angelica, at twenty-one, had lots of time. Angelica agreed.