Lady Rice was busy. Ventura Lady Cowarth had a bad back – she’d had a fall from her horse and, though to be hopelessly drunk is meant to protect a rider from injury, had disabled herself badly. She could barely wash, though she got herself hoisted on to horseback to follow the Hunt and managed that. ‘I can’t fuck,’ she told Lady Rice, ‘but I can still hunt.’
Lord Cowarth was upset and knocking away again at his teeth, such few as were left, and they were mostly at the back so he had to open his mouth wide to do it.
Lady Rice was up at Cowarth Castle four or five times a week, nursing, shopping, answering the phone, parrying Milord’s insults and oddities, preparing for the visit of the twins, back from the Caribbean for business reasons but unaccountably laggardly in visiting their ancestral home. If only I had a baby thought Lady Rice, I’d be allowed to focus my family responsibilities in my own home. I wouldn’t be so tired. But too late for that now. These days Edwin said he didn’t want children. He didn’t want the family insanity passed on.
Rosamund Plaidy was no help: she declined, these days, or so it was said, to give anyone Prozac. In fact she was giving up medicine altogether, the better to look after her children.
Rosamund, Lambert told anyone who would listen, was on a masochistic binge; she was doing it on purpose to mortify him, but he declined to be mortified. He was living at home again, but Rosamund refused to speak to him, other than when entirely necessary. She encouraged the children in the same behaviour. He was, she said, only a temporary kind of husband and father, there today, gone tomorrow, best not to get too close to him, if only because closeness was what drove him away. He was emotionally immature, she said, as if definition somehow improved matters. Lambert claimed to like the surrounding silence: it allowed him to get on with his work. Oddly, they all seemed to enjoy their lives together and when a social researcher, enquiring into the domestic lives of doctors, asked them to rate their ‘happiness’, all replied ‘good’.
‘Let’s ask Susan and Clive to dinner one night,’ said Edwin. ‘We never get to see them these days. Let’s try and get the social scene round here going again. It’s up to us. Noblesse oblige.’
He’d been reclusive lately, and had put on weight. He stayed in bed till late in the morning, and went to bed later than Angelica. He snapped at her and found fault. But now suddenly he had his arms round her, and seemed full of resolution and she was happy. She remembered what times past had been like, and saw they could be good again. Skies could cloud so gradually you hardly noticed as bright turned to overcast, until suddenly there was the sun again.
‘We’ll upset quite a lot of people if we do,’ said Angelica, and they counted them up between them: those to whom the social acceptance or otherwise of disturbed and disturbing, shifting and changing couples mattered.
Humphrey.
Rosamund, Lambert and their two children Matty and Pierre.
Natalie, and little Jane and little Jonathan.
Roland, who missed Humphrey, and little Serena, into whom the spirit of Rosamund’s aborted baby had entered, or so some said.
X, the name given by Angelica to Susan’s miscarried baby.
‘You can’t really lay all the responsibility at Susan’s door,’ said Edwin.
‘I do,’ said Angelica.
‘Then what a woman she is,’ said Edwin. ‘The femme fatale of Barley: the Great Adulteress.’
Clive and Susan were asked to dinner, at Edwin’s request. Another mistake, to believe a social circle could be revived.
‘Darling Angelica,’ said Susan. ‘I thought you’d never ask. Everyone’s been so unsociable lately. Shall we just all start over? Ask Rosamund, Natalie, Lambert, everyone? Shall I bring a chocolate mousse? Why don’t you ask that new man at the church, the Rev Hossle? We could have a civilised dinner and a service of reconciliation over coffee. People do it all the time back home. Everyone’s got so horrid to everyone, and we all used to be such friends!’
Lady Rice rang round and did indeed invite other guests; neutrals, semi-strangers, but not Rosamund, Lambert or Natalie. Not yet.
Lady Rice was serving the lobster bisque when there came a ring at the great front door, not the humble side one. Unusual. Mrs MacArthur let Natalie into the house, into the dining hall. Natalie was dressed in black: hollow eyes stared from a gaunt face. Once she’d been plump, lively and smiling. It was generally felt that she liked to make the most of her misfortunes: it was even suspected that she used eye makeup to enhance the hollow-eyed look.
‘Wives don’t own husbands,’ Barley society said. ‘These days men and women stay together because they want to. If one of the couple no longer wants to stay, that’s it. Goodbye. No obligation! And the children settle down soon enough.’
But those who spoke thus were on the whole people who hadn’t married, had never joined names or property, had never been spun around in some great resultant whirlwind of sexual jealousy until their wits were gone; wholly disintegrated.
And here Natalie now was, bent apparently on justifying the suspicions of her critics, advancing upon Edwin’s and Angelica’s dinner table. Now she swept the very spoon out of Susan’s hand. A splodge of hot lobster soup landed on Susan’s brow. Edwin was on his feet at once, restraining a struggling Natalie.
‘Bitch, bitch!’ yelled Natalie.
Now Clive tried to rescue Natalie from Edwin’s clasp.
‘Leave her alone, you philandering bastard,’ shouted Clive at Edwin.
Susan’s eyes were wild with outrage, white gleamed on either side of the pupils, her cheeks grew pink, her chin thrust forward.
‘You have burnt my skin,’ she snarled at Natalie, and slapped Edwin, whereupon Clive slapped Susan back, Edwin let Natalie go and Natalie sat down in Susan’s chair.
‘Itemised telephone bills,’ said Natalie calmly to Clive, ‘continue to be a boon to domestic understanding. When you take Roland and Serena, Lambert’s children – though who is to be sure about Roland? – to school and nursery, Susan’s on the phone to guess who? Her first husband, Alan Adliss. She meets him once a week, on Tuesday afternoons at Roystead Station car park. Intimacy then takes place in the back of the car. Alan Adliss has a major retrospective coming at the Tate Gallery. You just do, Clive, while the Great Adulteress waits for Mr Next. I am sorry for the current Mrs Alan Adliss. What misery do you have planned for her? Perhaps she’s pregnant, and you’d rather she wasn’t.’
‘Hell hath no fury, Natalie,’ said Susan, but her words lacked gravitas, since she had nowhere to sit down. ‘And everyone scorns you and laughs at you. The lies you tell! Roystead car park!’
Natalie put photographs on the table. There, in a car park setting, a car. There on the front seat Susan’s head of blonde hair, buried in the famous artist’s lap: he with an expression of mesmerised distraction on his face.
‘Clive,’ said Natalie to her ex-husband, ‘please will you take me home?’
Without a further look at Susan, Clive took Natalie away. Tears came to Susan’s eyes, but whether of grief, shock or outrage, who was to say? Edwin put his arm round Susan: he at any rate assumed she needed comforting. Lady Rice caught just a glimpse of a look from Susan before she buried her head in Edwin’s shoulder, as Susan made sure that Lady Rice understood she was defeated, in a way she’d never known existed.
‘Take me home now,’ said Susan to Edwin, and Edwin excused himself to his wife, and guests, and did so.
‘This is a divorcing matter,’ said Jelly.
‘It isn’t,’ said Lady Rice. ‘Edwin is behaving as any host would.’
And she served roast lamb and rosemary purée to her depleted table. Still Edwin did not return.
All left in due course with cries of ‘lovely evening, darling: nothing like a little real life drama! Give our love to Edwin when (by inference “if”) he gets back’, and so on, and Lady Rice became aware almost for the first time that envy and resentment interwove others’ liking for her. Lady Rice was too pretty, too young, too favoured by fortune, too (once upon a time) successful and rich, too happy with Edwin – or was that in the past, she could hardly remember: how did the present become the past: at what juncture? – to enjoy the unadulterated support of others. They were happy when she was cast down.
Lady Rice wept and Mrs MacArthur helped her to bed. For once, Lady Rice was grateful for her presence. ‘I told you she was trouble,’ said Mrs MacArthur. ‘You young women are such fools. Some women are born marriage-breakers. They ought to be stoned to death.’
‘But everyone likes Susan,’ moaned Lady Rice. ‘Everyone likes to be in Susan’s company. Why is Edwin taking so long?’
‘Because I expect he likes to be in her company, too,’ said Mrs MacArthur tartly. ‘She comes round here too often for my liking. Especially when you’re out.’
Edwin returned home just after three in the morning. ‘I had to calm her down,’ he said. ‘But she’s very angry with you, Angelica.’
‘Angry with me?’ Angelica was astonished.
‘Presumably you told Natalie Susan was coming to Rice Court. You set the whole thing up.’
‘I did no such thing,’ said Angelica. ‘Have you gone mad? I didn’t set anything up. Susan asked me to invite Natalie. I was doing what you wanted.’
‘Don’t hide behind me,’ said Edwin. ‘Someone certainly told Natalie. You’ve had it in for Susan for a long time. You’ve even suspected me of sleeping with her. That hurts her very much. It certainly insults me. You’ve done untold damage to Susan and her children. What are we going to do with you, Angelica?’
Edwin undressed and slipped into bed beside his wife. His body, which should have been cold from the journey home, was warm. He lay still for a moment and then pulled her out of bed roughly, and stood her against a wall, and possessed her as if she was some girl he’d met in a pub and the master bedroom of Rice Court was an alleyway. She was too surprised to protest.
‘You give yourself freely enough to other men,’ he said. ‘Why be so standoffish with me?’
She was too surprised to say anything: too hurt, too proud, and too alarmed to discover she had enjoyed it to the point of orgasm. She got back into bed; he lay at the far side of it without touching.
‘God, you’re a bitch,’ he said, and then he fell asleep. To her own surprise, so did she.
Lady Rice called Susan the next day. Jelly White told her to.
‘Susan, what’s the matter?’ she said. ‘We’re friends. It’s ridiculous to suggest I set you up. I trust you; why can’t you trust me? I don’t even object if Edwin takes you home mid-dinner party and doesn’t come home till three. What have I ever done to you, except be supportive, speak up for you, take your side – surely, after everything –’
‘I don’t know what “everything” you’re talking about,’ Susan said, apparently both bored and puzzled. ‘I’ve never needed your support. But we have both changed. We all have to pick and choose in life, don’t we? And some friends suit for a time, and then don’t. So we have to discard them. I hope you don’t think I’m being brutal. But that was no favour you did me last night.’
‘So long as you discard Edwin as well,’ said Angelica, ‘not just me.’
‘There you go again, Angelica,’ said Susan. ‘This is exactly what I mean. You have turned into a jealous and suspicious person. As for Edwin, men and women can be very close friends without any particularly sexual implication. But you don’t seem to understand that. And these days people don’t have to have friends in couples. Edwin’s my friend, not you. Shall we leave it at that? We can smile and talk if we meet in a social situation, naturally, but that’s the limit of it.’ And Susan put down the phone.
Lady Rice wondered if she could get a posse together to go round and burn Susan alive in Railway Cottage as a witch. Or perhaps they could stone her to death as an adulteress. She said as much to Edwin, who looked at his wife askance and asked her not to cause more trouble than she had already.
And the day after that, when Lady Rice was doing the filing in the Rice Court office, still trembling with shock, confusion and upset, and Edwin was off for the day somewhere with Robert Jellico, Anthea came in without knocking. She was looking, she said, for Edwin.
‘He said he’d be up at Wellesley Hall at ten,’ said Anthea. She seemed annoyed. She brought in a flurry of wind and weather with her: outdoors had suddenly taken over from indoors. Anthea was wearing green wellies, a blackish anorak, and a horsey headscarf damp with rain. Her hair fell over her eyes. She carried a riding crop, from force of habit. ‘Edwin’s too bad. He was meant to be looking over Henry Cabot, with a view to purchase.’
‘Henry Cabot?’ Angelica was bewildered.
‘A horse, darling, for the new stables.’
‘The new stables?’
‘Darling,’ said Anthea kindly, ‘he says you don’t notice very much, and you don’t seem to. What is all this secretarial stuff?’
She drew Angelica away from the files, the computer, the fax; she led her, protesting, into the drawing room, flinging aside the ropes that kept the visitors confined to the established pathways through the house, snatching up labels and throwing them to the ground as she went. She called for Mrs MacArthur and told her to light the fire – always laid but never lit – which Mrs MacArthur meekly did.
‘You’re meant to be Lady Rice, not some office factotum,’ Anthea said. ‘And it’s pissing Edwin off. I thought I should warn you. And what are these village creeps you keep mixing with? Very sordid things are happening, by all accounts. You and Edwin should stick to your own kind. Well, Edwin’s kind. You started off fine, exotic and eccentric; we can do with wild cards to liven up the blood stock, but you’ve turned into some kind of dozy housewife and what’s more you haven’t even bred. So what’s the point of you? That’s what Edwin’s beginning to wonder.’
Anthea had her boots and her anorak off; she lay back in a leather armchair, unbooted feet stuck towards the fire. Her sweater was ancient and thin. Her figure, Angelica realised, was remarkably good. Her face was too thin and dried up with outdoors and lack of face creams, but it was mobile and lively.
‘And, darling,’ said Anthea, ‘infidelity runs in the Rice blood. A capacity to chew women up and spit them out. Women of all classes, including their own. You served your other purpose: you were basically respectable, lower-middle class; got Edwin back on the straight and narrow okay. But that’s done and here you are, demoting yourself to domestic/secretarial, and he’s taken the Great Barley Adulteress for his mistress while he works out who to marry next. And I’d better warn you, from a straw or two in the wind, I think he’s got me in mind. He can see a future in joining my stables with Rice Court land. I’m telling you this because I like you. You’re hopelessly out of your depth, but it’s not your fault. You’re the choirmaster’s daughter, and an amateur choir at that.’
‘You’ve been drinking,’ said Angelica. ‘God, how you lot drink.’
And indeed Anthea was helping herself to whisky even as she spoke, delivered her bombshell.
‘You haven’t even decanted this stuff, Angelica,’ complained Anthea, and winced at a smeary glass. Since her hands were covered with mud and some kind of rural slime, Angelica did not take this seriously.
Lady Rice pointed out politely that since Edwin was married to her, he could hardly marry Anthea; that she, Lady Rice, knew well enough how to run her own life, and that the matter of the artist-mistress – if Anthea was referring to Susan – was nothing but mischievous rumour; that she, Lady Rice, trusted Edwin with her life; that she had to get back to her work, and retype out all the labels Anthea had destroyed, and would Anthea please leave and come back when she was sober.
Anthea said, ‘My God, Edwin’s right. You simply do not know how to behave. This is the end.’
Anthea left, but not before saying at least Edwin didn’t intend to father children outside the family. He had taken the Adulteress to be aborted at the time she’d had domestic trouble and was staying up at Rice Court. Just as well because stray babies could lead to nasty wars of succession.
Lady Rice went back to the office and wept into her computer. Still Edwin did not return.
‘I hope you weren’t rude to her,’ said Mrs MacArthur. ‘It isn’t wise to queer your pitch with people like that. They’re the ones with the real power.’
Lady Rice got in her little car – a runabout fit for country roads: Edwin kept the Mercedes and the Range Rover for himself – and went down to Railway Cottage. It seemed empty. The door, usually wide open and inviting, was locked. Angelica looked in the windows and saw that everything was neat, tidy and, as usual, prettily arranged. But there were no flowers in the vases. They stood drained, polished and upside down on the sill.
Lady Rice stood indecisively in the pretty English country garden. Andrew Nellor, the retired evangelist who lived in the cottage next door to Susan, in neurotic twitchiness and rumbling disapproval of everything and everyone, came up Susan’s path. He was weeping. His trousers were old, and, as were Lambert’s from time to time, held up with string. His little wife looked anxiously out from the top window. She was well-kept and pretty, like Susan’s garden.
‘She’s gone,’ said Andrew Nellor, ‘Susan’s gone. She kissed me and said she loved me, she wouldn’t forget me, and she left. I always loved her. God forgive me, I lusted after her. It was her body I wanted. She had no soul. I prayed, my wife prayed, but the lust wouldn’t go away. Such a strong, vibrant person. She had no shame: she was proud of her body. She didn’t mind what I saw, what my wife saw. She’d undress with the light on, she’d lie sunbathing naked in the garden. She saw nothing wrong with nudity. She wanted to give me pleasure. I think in her heart she loved me, wanted me. I painted her, secretly. My wife didn’t understand. She’d cut her dead in the street. I’m sure that’s what drove Susan away. I try to forgive my wife, but I can’t. I shall hang the painting in my study, I don’t care what she says.’
‘Who exactly did Susan leave with?’ asked Lady Rice. ‘I’m sure she didn’t leave alone.’
‘With the painter Alan Adliss,’ said Andrew Nellor.
‘Susan loved me but I had nothing to offer her. He’s rich and famous. But nobody understood her as I did.’
‘And little Roland?’ asked Angelica. ‘And little Serena? Did they go too?’
‘She took Serena but said she was taking Roland to his father. She said a boy needed its father.’
Lady Rice went down to the surgery, which Rosamund Plaidy now opened twice a week for four hours only. It was out-of-hours: the surgery was closed: when was it ever not? Lambert and little Roland sat upon the stone wall opposite. Little Roland was snivelling, ‘I want my mummy,’ he sing-sang. He was not an appealing child. The wail betokened petulance, not major grief, but what did Lady Rice know? She had no children of her own.
‘Just be glad,’ said Jelly White, ‘that the bitch has left town. And not with Edwin. Sooner or later you’ve got to wake up to this matter of Edwin and Susan.’
‘Bitch yourself,’ said Lady Rice. ‘Go away.’
‘Rosamund’s thrown me out,’ observed Lambert. ‘She went away with the kids and locked the door when Roland turned up. And Roland’s wet his pants and is smelling.’
‘Then break the door down,’ said Lady Rice.
‘I don’t feel like doing that,’ said Lambert. He was in no fit state to be left with a child. He, like Andrew Nellor, was unwashed and unshaven. ‘I haven’t been feeling too good lately,’ Lambert said. ‘I’ve kept to my bed a lot. I don’t blame Rosamund, I blame myself. You just don’t know, do you,’ he said, ‘when first you fuck your neighbour’s wife, the kind of thing that can happen. She took Serena round to Clive’s and Natalie’s. She says he’s Serena’s father.’
Lady Rice took Lambert and Roland home, since there seemed nowhere else for them to go. Edwin was still out. That was something.
Lady Rice put both Lambert and Roland to bed in the spare room at the top of the house and then slipped in beside them. She did this to keep them warm, no more, and provide them, and indeed herself, with some human comfort. Roland dived down to the bottom of the bed, to be further from these suddenly and unaccountably close adults. Lady Rice was fully clothed. So was Lambert. The night was cold; the spare room was at the top of the house, the one the chimney had fallen through in better days, where the heating, even though newly replaced, never quite reached.
‘Where’s Edwin?’ asked Lambert, shivering beneath the bedclothes, only vaguely aware of his surroundings, but trying to be polite. His face was flushed and unhealthy against white linen: yellow beard springing amongst pimples. Upset made him spotty, as if he were an adolescent.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lady Rice, ‘but at least Susan is with Alan Adliss. Sometimes I worry about Edwin and Susan.’
‘Susan never could get Edwin,’ said Lambert. ‘She tried, but she failed. She got all the men in the neighbourhood except Edwin; and he was the one she really wanted, because of the title, because of this house, because he stood out against her. She never liked you, Angelica, but she admired you. She didn’t understand the power you had over Edwin.’
‘I love him,’ said Lady Rice, and then heard Edwin clanking and calling about the house. She was too proud to get out of bed, and too tired and cold besides, and when Edwin burst in, kicking and shouting – behaving as if the door was locked when of course it wasn’t: it was just the ancient cross latch worked the way you wouldn’t expect, as he ought to very well know – there she was in bed with Lambert, albeit with so many clothes on, or such was her story, she could not reasonably be supposed to be sexually motivated. But Edwin assumed she was, and Lady Rice was not going to produce little Roland from under the bedclothes as chaperon: why should she, why would she?
‘Whore, bitch, slut,’ shouted Edwin, yanking her out of bed, hitting her, but leaving Lambert alone, as is often the habit of men who discover their wives with other men. They beat the woman but respect their rival.
Lady Rice walked straight out and went to her mother’s. The village took this as evidence of her deceit, her unfitness to be Lady of the Manor: and, besides, they had lost Susan, whom everyone liked, who ran the social scene, whose approval or disapproval counted: if Susan dropped by with a jar of marmalade, you were in; if she didn’t, you failed to exist, and, if you existed or if you didn’t, she took your husband as the tax you owed her.
The story went that Lady Rice, out of spite and jealousy, had driven Susan out. The finger of blame might swing wildly, but it was as if blame and Susan shared similar magnetic poles – they simply could never meet, no matter what. Come within a fraction of an inch, only to veer away.
‘I can’t really blame Angelica,’ said Edwin later to his stepmother Ventura Lady Cowarth, who repeated it to Lady Rice. ‘Her background was such that she could never live up to what is expected of her as mistress of Rice Court, or as wife and woman. And all the time Anthea was under my nose! We are entirely suited, Anthea and myself. My marriage to Angelica was a folly of youth. Somebody ought to have stopped me, really.’
And that was the end of that.