‘Mum,’ said Jelly to Mrs Haverley, once Mrs White, ‘I can’t remember much about myself as a girl.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Mrs White. ‘All those drugs, all that drink, and all that sex. I wouldn’t want to remember it if I were you. Until the day you got married and became your husband’s responsibility, you were a nightmare.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ asked Jelly.
Mrs White looked startled.
‘I didn’t know I was meant to,’ said Mrs Haverley, puzzled. ‘You seemed happy enough, up there in the Big House, looking down on the rest of us, employing your own school friends as servants. Nose in the air. Never even came to visit me. You were ashamed. Everyone knew it. Shouldn’t you bring that young man in? The one who’s driving the big car?’
‘He can wait,’ said her daughter, grandly. ‘He’s only the chauffeur. He can circle the village if he’s bored.’
Mrs Haverley now lived in the house where the previous Mrs Haverley had lived with her husband Gerald throughout their marriage. The first Mrs Haverley had died of a stroke after the divorce, but before the property settlement had been made final. The house had therefore passed into her ex-husband’s name. Gerald’s daughter Mary, still unmarried and proud of it, now lived with her father and stepmother. She had given up protest and now just enjoyed the ex-Mrs White’s cooking, and the habit she had of ironing and folding clothes before putting them into drawers, which her real mother had never done. The first Mrs Haverley would wash and dry clothes but left them for the family to pick out of the laundry basket. Sometimes they would need washing again before this happened.
‘Don’t you feel peculiar living here?’ Jelly asked her mother. ‘Using her teapot? In her bed? Doesn’t she haunt you?’
But apparently not.
‘It’s really nice living in another woman’s home,’ said the new Mrs Haverley. ‘Other people manage to have the light switches in all the right places, and enough sockets to go round. She didn’t stint herself, I must say. Nearly drove poor Gerald to bankruptcy, but what did she care?’
Angelica hurt her teeth on a rock cake that had stayed in the oven for too long.
‘Shit!’ she said, and her mother raised her eyebrows and said, ‘If you don’t like them, don’t eat them. A good rock cake’s always hard.’
‘Mum,’ asked Angelica,’ did I talk to myself a lot when I was a child?’
‘All the time,’ said Mrs White. ‘Used to drive your father mad. We’d be woken in the morning by the sound of children playing. Different voices and all. But there’d only ever be you in there.’
‘Boys’ voices too?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Haverley. ‘Boys and girls. All in there together!’
She served as good a scone and as bad a jelly as ever. She was an uneven cook. But with her change of name, as it happened, she no longer seemed to Angelica to be her mother at all: Angelica saw herself as orphaned. Mrs White had transmuted into Mrs Haverley, and in the sea-change lost maternal status. She had become just another of the older generation of Barley housewives. Plump and stocky legged, with happily sagging faces and breasts; their eccentricities and individuality, though no doubt there, secrets too well kept for even their owners to perceive them. The women slumped happily into the common mass; doing themselves up for their children’s weddings, for Christmas, for funerals. Only occasionally, when sexual longings, pleasures and disgusts were concerned, when there was a swapping of partners, or a divorce, or tales of incest, did they bother to separate themselves out from others, take up separate attitudes, present their opposing views.
‘Yes, boys as well,’ said Mrs Haverley. ‘Boys and girls all in that little body together. What a marvel!’
‘You didn’t say anything to anybody?’
‘No. It kept you quiet while we lay in of a morning. You all seemed to get on well enough. Your Dad and I would joke about it. “No only-child problems for Jelly,” he’d say. And I’d say, “but when she gets to teenage, will it be decent? Supposing they get off with one another?” But by the time teenage came the voices had stopped. There was just the one of you, and not a particularly nice one either, I’m sorry to say.’
‘Bitch,’ said Angel. ‘God, how I hated the fat, complacent cow. I could have killed her. Can’t we go home now? I can’t stand even to see her.’
‘Not yet,’ said Angelica.
‘Mum,’ said Jelly, though the word came with difficulty to her lips, ‘put your mind back to when Dad died. How did it happen? What was I like when it did? Because I seem to have forgotten.’
‘I’d rather not say,’ said Mrs Haverley, and at that moment Mr Haverley let himself cheerfully into the hall and presently joined them for tea. He ate cheese sandwiches with his right hand, while his left encompassed one of his wife’s sturdy legs. Mary, his daughter, came in and out of the room, feeding dogs, tropical fish and guinea pigs, all already more than fat enough. Mary wore a diamond engagement ring. Jelly had vague memories of standing next to her at Choral Society concerts. She’d always sung off key.
‘Do let me get on, dear,’ said Mrs Haverley, trapped by the leg, but her new husband felt disinclined so to do, so she stayed where she was.
‘Are you engaged, Mary?’ asked Jelly, to distract attention from the sight of her mother and her stepfather in erotic communication, but Mary said no, it was just a ring her father had given her on her thirtieth birthday.
‘Why don’t you tell your girl the truth, dear,’ said Gerald Haverley. Now he had finished his sandwich, his right arm shot out and he trapped his daughter’s legs as well as his wife’s. They all squealed happily.
‘Might as well,’ said Mrs Haverley. ‘Once you stopped being little, Jelly, you seemed to take no notice of your father: whether he was there or not was of little or no mind to you. You were sixteen and you’d just made your name with that dreadful record. He could just about get used to the music but someone sent him the lyrics, and he died in minutes, sitting in his chair. I used to think it was your first wife, dear,’ she said to her husband, ‘who sent him the lyrics. She could be spiteful, and she never liked Jelly. Jelly used to tell Mary about sex at choir practice. She thought she was a bad influence on Mary. But I knew she was wrong. I knew Jelly was a good girl at heart.’
‘I remember now,’ said Jelly. ‘I remember you telling me my father was dead and me saying to you “but how could you tell the difference?” and I laughed and you hit me. I can see you were right to. It was no moment to be a smartarse.’
‘Well, dear,’ said Mrs Haverley, ‘it wasn’t very nice of you,’ and she squealed and laughed as Mr Haverley started tickling up and down the leg and Mary squealed ‘Me, me!’
‘But then again,’ said Jelly’s mother, ‘he wasn’t your real father anyway, was he?’
The cottage window opened directly on to the street. Ram drew up the limousine just outside, so he could look directly through to where Jelly stood, and at the family scene within.
‘But then you knew that, didn’t you?’ said Mr Haverley.
‘Well, no, I didn’t,’ said Jelly.
Mrs Haverley, once Mrs White, said, ‘It seemed to matter a lot once, but it doesn’t any more, does it, dear? If you don’t mind, why should I?’
Jelly White felt illegitimised, as if someone with no existence at all worked for Brian Moss, wrapped a wraithful tongue around his member: no, not even that kept her in this world: not even mouthfuls of his seed could keep her nourished; she was going, she was gone. Goodbye, goodbye, she called to her sisters, but it was too late, they did not hear; she was gone and no trace left behind.
‘Who was my father, then?’ asked Angelica.
‘I had to marry Stephen, dear. I wasn’t the sort to claim Welfare. It wasn’t that Stephen and I weren’t happy together, we were; he was just a lot older than me. That’s what we’d end up doing, unmarried mothers like us. We’d marry someone older, for the house, and the comfort. Forget the sex. All that sex had ever done, so far as we could see, was get us into trouble. Or so we thought. Of course the world’s a different place now.’
‘You never told me.’
‘I thought you would have guessed. Leave it at that, Jelly dear. You don’t want to know anything more.’
‘I do. Tell me about my real father.’
‘Well, Jelly, at least it wasn’t someone from a sperm bank. That I would be ashamed of. I was gangbanged by a football team behind the stands, after a match. I should never have gone. I never liked sport anyway, but I thought Georgie Best was going to be playing. It wasn’t a nice experience, but not as bad as they make out, and that’s all I can tell you, Jelly.’
‘Don’t call me Jelly.’
‘It was your father’s idea to call you Angelica. What did he think would happen? It would split into a dozen different nicknames. I told him but he wouldn’t listen.’
‘Don’t call him my father.’
‘He was a good man, and a good father to you. I’ll call him what I want. Don’t insult him.’
‘What was the match?’ asked Mary. ‘Bet it was something dreary like Norwich v. Tottenham. And second eleven, not first eleven. My God, Jelly might be anyone’s! Why has she always given herself such airs?’
‘Don’t be spiteful, Mary: sometimes you’re so like your mother,’ said Mrs Haverley. ‘You can tell Jelly’s upset. I was right not to tell her, wasn’t I? Some things are better left in the closet, surely.’
‘Whatever you do is right by me, sweetheart,’ said Gerald Haverley, once prime mover at the PTA, now a man enjoying his prime, his hand moving so far up his wife’s skirt that she squealed and Mary said mildly, ‘Oh Dad, you’ll shock Jelly.’
But Jelly was gone. They were talking to no one. Only Angelica and Angel remained.