Sara, on another mission of mercy and self-interest both, arrived at Lodestar House to find Congo and Wendy dead. Tinkerbell finally got the old woman with her sparkler: that is to say a blood vessel had burst in Wendy’s brain. The executioner had apparently put away guillotine, blade and rope and decreed that Congo should die simply of a heart attack. Which one of the couple had gone first the coroner could not tell, but clearly the end of one had precipitated the end of the other. In such cases it is assumed that the older of the two dies first, which can affect the inheritance.
Tully was on the phone to Brian Moss immediately after the inquest. He’d had a word with the Coroner but it hadn’t worked. Wendy had left all her property to Congo, who had in turn left everything to his niece. As a result, Lodestar House would end up in the hands of the middle-aged, female manager of a tennis club in West London: a lesbian of the old school; a woman who kept Alsatian dogs, wore a cravat and was reputed to drink whisky from the bottle. Tully swore he would do murder rather than let this happen, and was inclined to sue Brian Moss for negligence.
‘Negligent? Negligent about what?’ asked Brian.
‘Not murdering the poor old lady before her natural time,’ said Jelly, removing his member from her mouth. ‘For allowing Lodestar House to slip away, like the life of its occupants. We must do this less often. It’s beginning to take up too much of your time.’
‘I have to remain faithful to my wife, I have to!’ moaned Brian Moss. ‘If I am not careful, I will become involved with you, and what kind of man falls in love with his secretary? I despise men who do it.’
Anxiety made his erection falter and Jelly was sent to search for Wendy’s will amongst dusty files. She came back to say she had just happened to come across further documents in the files relating to Lodestar House, and here they were. Brian Moss perused them, and declared that since the property had already reverted to Wendy’s daughter Una, the problem was solved. He rubbed his hands together and said, ‘Thank God the place won’t go either to Tully or to Congo’s niece. With any luck it will simply be held in probate till the end of time: no one’s heard of Una for decades.’
‘Shall I put an ad in The Times?’ asked Jelly, ‘asking Una to be in touch; saying she will hear something to her advantage if she contacts us?’
‘You’re just looking for trouble,’ complained Brian Moss. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you these days.’
‘You have,’ said Jelly, once again on her knees before Brian Moss. The three had capitulated to his advances, not without calculation. It suited them all. The girls afforded him the simple pleasure of fellatio at whatever office hour Brian Moss fancied – both parties seeing this as pleasant sexual gratification without profound personal obligation.
‘And we won’t be betraying his wife, poor woman,’ said Angelica. ‘Blow jobs don’t really count. It’s all give and no take.’
‘Better than no sex at all,’ said Angel. ‘I like it. Put cinnamon in his coffee, if it’s the taste that worries you.’
‘I like to see him out of control,’ said Jelly. ‘It’s about the only power I have. And I shall ask him for a rise.’
‘That won’t do any good,’ said Lady Rice.
She was right.
‘It would be sordid,’ said Brian Moss, with the pomposity with which this normally unpompous man approached financial matters. ‘Sleazy, even, to raise your wages in the light of this new relationship of ours. To do so would be to reduce you to the status of a whore. Presumably you’ll want to get married one day, Jelly: I’m sure you wouldn’t want to have any such blot upon your reputation. It’s always such a bore to have to live with secrets from the past; time bombs waiting to explode. I have one or two myself. No, better no secrets at all. Sex must never be exchanged for money: it reflects badly upon all involved. I’ll keep it to our lunch hour, if you like, so there’s no suggestion of office harassment. Presumably this activity of ours gives you as much pleasure as it does me or you wouldn’t be doing it.’
To which in their joint heart Angel replied, ‘Of course,’ Angelica replied ‘Presume away; I take leave to doubt it –’ and Jelly replied with some vehemence, ‘This is no more than bullying and harassment,’ but fortunately, their mouth being by this time occupied with Brian Moss’s engorged and twitching member, which mention of money always cheered up, they were not expected to respond. Jelly had lately developed quite a stutter. Brian Moss liked to believe it was his doing, that the girl’s mouth had become better adjusted to sex than to speech, and the three were content to let him believe this to be the case. Better that Brian Moss did not become aware that warring personalities battled for possession of his secretary’s mouth. Jobs were hard to find: should Rice v. Rice come to court and alimony not be granted, Lady Rice would need employment. These days jobs went to the ordinary, the reliable and the sane, not to the perforated and split.
‘Faster and further down,’ instructed Brian Moss. ‘Come along! Do you think I have all day to spare?’
He was impatient: she was at first inexperienced. He enjoyed his own masterfulness. ‘Not like that! For God’s sake! I have a client waiting.’
If Tully Toffener paced in the anteroom, annoyed by every wasted minute, why then all things would combine to please Brian Moss the more. But he would not take cinnamon in his coffee: he was nervous that the office cleaner would deduce his activities from his habits.
‘But what are you so nervous of?’ Angel would ask with Jelly’s mouth.
‘I love my wife. She would be so upset. I have to look after her,’ said Brian Moss, but the more he said it the more his penis twitched and required satisfaction, and seemed to have little connection with the man himself. ‘You’ve put a spell on me.’
‘Where are you going?’ Brian Moss would ask, adjusting his clothes when her task was done.
‘To the powder room,’ Jelly would say. ‘To wash my mouth.’
‘There isn’t time for any of that,’ Brian Moss would say. ‘Stay here and take notes.’ And she would, without further protest.
‘The relationship between male employer and female employee,’ Ajax once wrote in his notes, ‘contains a sexual element at the best of times: he controls, she submits: he makes the running, she follows after. He is dominant, she is submissive. Should the veiled eroticism become actual, it is only natural for the relationship to drift easily into her masochism. His power can only be her pleasure. If he forbids her to use the powder room when she wants to wash the scent and feel of him away, that’s that. She puts up with it. She stole his power, illegitimately: now she wants him to have it back.’
Lady Rice spent these office days in bed at The Claremont, sleeping, weeping, rocking in her sea of sorrow, or so it seemed to her: though any pursuing photographers could have tracked her physical being to Catterwall & Moss and snapped her well enough, and used the photograph as evidence of her bad character in a divorce case.
Lady Rice was interested enough to hear what Angel/Angelica/Jelly had to say about their day when they returned; they would talk her through it, but still she felt it was none of it very much to do with her. So long as they brought the body back safe and well, whatever else they did was nothing to do with her. It disappointed them, but there it was.
Angel said to Lady Rice, ‘I worry about you. You’re so disconnected. Not even sex can bring you back.’
To which Lady Rice replied, plaintively, dreamily, ‘For me sex is to do with love. Anything else is abhorrent to me. Try to grasp that I’m a domestic kind of creature; my aim is to be gracious. You are nothing to do with me. As for you, Angel, you are some kind of changeling, and I just wish you’d go away.’
Angelica complained to Lady Rice, taking her aside, ‘I wish you’d put a little effort into being in charge. You let Angel get away with everything. She has Jelly and me on our knees there in front of Brian Moss any time of the office day he chooses, and he’s a married man. Brian is right: supposing we get found out? I don’t want to make poor Oriole Moss miserable. Surely it’s possible to incorporate and control Angel?’
‘Angelica, I am prepared to recognise,’ replied Lady Rice. ‘I see you as myself before I married: active, picky, bright, kind, full of certainties. I take no real exception to you, except I find you hopelessly shallow. But Angel is no part of me. No. My best plan is just hang around and look the other way, so Angel gets bored and goes back to the internal whorehouse she comes from. It was lonelier before you girls appeared, but at least I knew who I was, even though it was me sleepwalking.’
Jelly said, ‘Hang on a minute, it’s only thanks to Angel that we’re in this relationship with Brian Moss at all. He’d have fired me long ago if I hadn’t obliged. And I gave up Ram the chauffeur on your say-so. His name is Rameses, by the way. He was conceived on a trip up the Nile. The poor guy’s broken-hearted, but at least drives me here and there free of charge. I know you don’t like me much, Lady Rice; you think I’m vulgar, common and greedy, lower-middle class, but you need me. I’m the one who earns the money and fills in the cheque stubs. None of you others would bother. And I think you should be in there as well when we service Brian Moss, not opting out, leaving the whole thing to us. And another thing, I don’t want too much said against Angel. Angel’s got guts, skill and experience, and giving blow jobs requires all three.’
‘Skill!’ jeered Lady Rice, but Jelly explained to her how the mouth could get tired, the neck could get cricked, the tongue get chafed if a girl wasn’t careful: how you had to keep your teeth out of the way, masked by the lips, but not forgotten; their existence providing an edge of danger and drama.
‘I think you should think about these things,’ said Jelly.
Lady Rice said she would rather not.
Angel said, ‘Talk, talk, talk, the lot of you. And you’re nuts, Jelly. Blow jobs don’t take skill, they just take instinct. And it’s a Below Job, anyway: Pidgin English; it’s what whores do; money the only reason they bother to do it. I’m getting bored with this hotel, with doing nothing. Brian Moss doesn’t count: I want some real action. Wait and see where I take you next.’
‘Where?’ Lady Rice, Jelly and Angelica asked nervously, but Angel just laughed and fastened her net stockings to the little bobbles which hung from the thongs of her lacy suspender belt.
‘I like the grip of the fabric round my waist,’ she said, ‘and the stretch of elastic down my thighs. I can’t stand the way you girls wear tights, just because they’re practical.’
Angelica and Jelly fell silent, allowing their wilful and drastic other self her head. Later, instead of sleeping, they all, including Lady Rice, accompanied Angel down to the bar and allowed her a triple gin, and a wink or two at an Italian couple who, being on holiday, seemed anxious for a third to join them in the bed. Angel had the knack of knowing who to wink at, and whose smiles best to respond to.
Lady Rice was so furious and miserable the next day that Angel promised to be good, on pain of Lady Rice taking an overdose of sleeping pills and putting an end to the lot of them. Jelly had to take a day off to recover from the excesses of the night, which also sobered Angel; as did Angelica’s complaint that the world of forbidden sex was too full of euphemism to be safe. ‘Joining a couple in bed,’ sounded cosy, white-sheeted, yawny and warm, but in fact turned out to be cold, unhygienic, and a matter of strippings, whips and manacles as the wife took her symbolic revenge on the husband’s notional mistresses over a decade and the husband reasserted his right to have them as, when and how he chose.