– gave dinner parties. Lady Rice had made a circle of friends. Rice Court was open to the public again, and the Great Hall and bedrooms had been roped and annotated – here Oliver Cromwell dined; on this spot the first Lord Cowarth fell, poisoned; here the bed in which he recovered, alas; see here the priest-hole in which the priest was walled-up alive and died; this the Chinese vase presented by Queen Victoria; here the love couch on which Edward sat entwined with Mrs Simpson, and so forth – but the back of the house, which faced south in any case and caught the last light, could be run as the more ordinary but still splendid home of a comparatively ordinary young couple. Ceilings and chimneys no longer collapsed, doors fitted, windows opened: in the kitchens ancient iron pots had been replaced with stainless steel saucepans; ceramic hobs now ran on electricity rather than hotplates on coal and coke. Mrs MacArthur seemed ten years younger than once she had. Her hair had been permed, and ringed her dour face in girlish fashion. Mr MacArthur had been made redundant from his work as a bodywork welder up at the auto factory. His wife was now the family breadwinner and there was no hope of Angelica firing her. But she allowed her employer her head when it came to running the visitor trade.
It was acknowledged, even by Lord Cowarth, that Lady Rice was efficient when she put her mind to it: had a gift for knowing what took the visitors’ fancy, why they would prefer cream to butter on their scones, why they would buy fudge but not mints, why they gawped at Mrs Simpson’s love seat but didn’t care for Lord Cowarth’s collection of arrowheads.
And after the last visitor had gone, when the money had been accounted for and sent off to swell the Rice Estate coffers, and she had earned the approval of Robert Jellico, what could be more pleasant than to have friends round? To prepare meals, using the cookery books brought home by Edwin, who shared the cooking with her, trying out dishes from everywhere, from Afghanistan to Georgia to Iran – places at that time not so riven by violence, cruelty and war as to make their very food suspect, too potentially full of grief for enjoyment.
Edwin and Angelica, Rosamund and Lambert, Susan and Humphrey, were the central couples: others around, espoused or as singles, performed a dance of delicate social balance; creating their own precise etiquette. Friends, acquaintances, colleagues flitted in and out of focus round the table; each knowing their place; smiling faces breaking bread, providing advice, entertainment, common cause. Edwin and Angelica offered the most eccentric yet the grandest table of the group. Though the power and prestige Rice Court represented was now seen as fit only for tourists, even peasant food tasted good on a refectory table large enough to seat twelve and with lots of elbow room.
Rosamund, the doctor, responsible, kindly and steady, and Lambert her husband, a writer, wild-eyed, wild-haired, made up in skills and talent for anything they lacked in style: a double act and a crowded table in a book-lined room, down the corridor from the kitchen. Susan, the potter from Minnesota, rosy, exotic and sexy, with her bubbling enthusiasms, her fair shiny hair, her attractive naivety, a basket-full of English garden flowers or chutneys, Easter gifts or winter comforts somehow always on her arm, for ever bearing gifts, her adoring, plump, good, mournful, clumsy husband Humphrey, the architect, served food Japanese fashion, on the carpeted floor, amongst cushions.
Rosamund had two children, Susan had one, Angelica had none. Edwin still took that amiss.
‘Perhaps I should have had a sperm count,’ said Edwin one night at Susan’s. ‘What do men do when they’re not fathers?’
And everyone laughed.
‘Love their wives,’ said Angelica, and realised with alarm to what degree she counted on Rosamund not to tell about the implant. Too late to tell Edwin herself: why had she not when first Rosamund tucked it under her skin? She could hardly remember. Time enough, time enough, as Rosamund averred. A five per cent increase in visitors this season: there was so much for Angelica to do, and Edwin too if he wanted, but he didn’t. Edwin merely seemed to potter and brood; he began to have a puzzled look, as did Humphrey, whose architectural practice was failing. It is a terrible thing to have to look for occupation. Lambert, too, was in financial difficulty. His publishers dropped him from their list; his agent was too busy to speak to him. He was misunderstood. He spent more time with the children, leaving Rosamund free to do night duty; indeed obliged to do so, if bills were to be met.
Angelica, the youngest in the group, saw her task as learning, and learn she did; over the dinner table. She could talk now about abstract matters: what justice was, and injustice; understood better when to confide, when to stay quiet; had opinions about what art was, who really ran the country and so on. Whether agents provocateurs let off bombs, or terrorists.
From Susan she learned a kind of sophisticated feminine response; things her mother had never taught her. She learned that flowers need to be arranged, not just plonked in a vase; that their leaves had to be stripped, stems crushed. Sensual pleasures, Susan implied, were the same. The more you postponed, the more you enjoyed. This apparently went for sex, too, and suited Angelica very well. Or, as Susan said, ‘Gosh, your English men are so bad at important things like wooing. This is certainly no red rose culture you have over here!’ Though, heaven knew, Humphrey circled Susan with bouquets, took her for romantic weekends to Vienna, had her portrait painted, personally manicured her strong potter’s hands in a manner most un-English.
Susan took it as her due. She had previously been married to Alan Adliss, the now famous landscape painter. She’d run off with Humphrey, taking him away from Helen, his fat, faithless and insensitive wife – or so everyone described her, taking Susan’s word for it. No one in the circle had actually ever met Helen, of course, nor wished to – she belonged to some other world layered behind this one, its sufferings incomprehensible, irrelevant: whining voices on answerphones demanding consideration, remembrance, the money second wives saw as their due. Unloved women, those in the past, should simply fade away, as should widowed mothers. At least there was no one like this in Edwin’s past: she was his first wife, his only wife. These emotional and marital difficulties were for others, not for Angelica. She was conceited.
The voices in Angelica’s head had not yet powered-up, splitting and dividing her, offering alternatives on the path to heaven or hell. As it was, she assumed she was the nicest person in the world: there was not even any internal discussion about the possibility of this not necessarily being the case. How could there be? She was the heroine of her own life. Her lack of response to her father’s death puzzled her. The event had scarcely marked her otherwise. Why? It was as if he had been some kind of prop, not a person at all. Surely this must be a failing in him, not in her? All the same, she could see her non-grief at his death as being some kind of time bomb somewhere in her persona, as the oestrogen implant was a time bomb in her body, antipathetical to the very origins of life.
Sometimes these days Angelica turned away from Edwin in bed; fastidiousness could tire you out: sleep could become the greater desire. Or was it that the potential of pregnancy, framing sex with light, was what kept sex interesting, as the sun behind a dark cloud will frill it with brilliance? She could almost believe now, in any case, that the implant was imaginary. The Rosamund she’d met for the first time in the surgery had been a stranger: now she was a friend. Everything was different, why not this too? Better not to enquire. Perhaps anyway such implants had been proved not to work: how could anything keep working for so long; and who was to say whether it was actually this pellet of artificially deposited hormone which kept Edwin’s and her destined child out of the world, or an act of God? Perhaps she was infertile anyway? If Rosamund had made no mention of the implant the first time Edwin had said over dinner, ‘We’re not too hot in the fertility stakes, Angelica and I’, or however he’d put it, in his offhand, English way, perhaps it was because there was indeed nothing to mention. Years drifted by and the events of one year were lost in the dramas of the next.
She wished Edwin was more like Humphrey; more adoring, more romantic, less companionable.
She made herself go and sit by her father’s grave: the Rice Estate was digging up the churchyard cemetery overflow, where her father’s body lay, to build an extension to a new sports centre. She knew if she didn’t visit now she never could, and even this sense of his corporeal, albeit disintegrating reality, be lost to her. But still she could not bring Stephen White properly to mind: he had been too elderly, too amiable, too vague to be quite real. Someone who had failed to elicit strong passions in her, who had lived in the past, but whose time had overlapped hers; whose enthusiasms had been alien to hers, making her feel a changeling.
She felt dull. Edwin’s former clubbing friends would turn up at the new, improved Rice Court from time to time, or from the ex-hunting and shooting, now property-developing, junk-bonding set, observe just how very, very dull country life could be, and depart. Angelica’s ex-music-biz friends would arrive to gaze at the country moon under the influence of one substance or another, deplore what marriage and maturity could do to a girl, even leaving babies out of it, and depart.
Sometimes Anthea came to dinner, and Edwin would yawn and say, ‘She thinks of nothing but horses: keep her away from me, though she is my cousin. Do you realise, if I’d been a girl and she’d been a boy, she’d have had my title.’
Or Boffy Dee would turn up for a heart to heart and a glass of gin. She was marrying a racing driver who’d had so many knocks to the head he couldn’t speak without slurring, but Boffy Dee did not see brain damage as an impediment to marital happiness. On the contrary.