Angelica and Angel were left in partnership, if jobless, feeling lonely but proud; addenda to the self had been stripped away, adjuncts that had mistakenly been seen to be somehow central. Lady Rice, though a person of some ten years’ standing, turned out to have been a mere offshoot of Rice Court, as if the building itself and not Edwin had created her, and then discarded her; had stirred in its derelict slumber one day (woken, perhaps by the sound of its own chimney falling through its own roof), decided to pull itself out of the mire, get its damp-courses mended, its kitchens refurbished, and so on; cast its eye upon Angelica on her grassy mound and decided, well, she’ll do until something better comes along, and made a quasi Lady Rice of her. She had been a bit-part player in Rice Court’s drama – a stand-in. And something better had indeed come along: Anthea; a slave to breed a new line of willing slaves, and Lady Rice, unneeded, had simply melted out of existence, dissolved into her own tears.
And as for Jelly, she’d seen herself as her father’s daughter; she had sprung into existence with the qualities most likely to gratify that most boring man, and, once free of his genesis, and discovering the multiplicity of her fathers, understanding the impossibility of meeting all their requirements, of ever getting it right, had faded away; a little lone voice getting squeakier and smaller until all that was left was a heap of Marks & Spencer clothes and silence.
All this Angelica and Angel agreed upon, marvelling. They had never expected to be left in joint control.
At first the happenstance exhilarated them. Then it made them anxious. Trauma, which created them, might also take them away. Angelica would complain of an empty black hole whirling away inside her: everything had been too sudden for her.
‘I don’t miss the others one bit,’ Angel would say, to comfort her. ‘Nag, nag, nag, night and day. Party poopers. Forget them.’
And Angelica missed Brian Moss and was hurt that he had been able to let her go so easily. She had never exactly enjoyed the intimacies they shared, but had seen them as some common point of reference; a bond between them. She had felt protected. Brian Moss was the kind of man she should have married.
This made Angel whistle with derisive glee. She didn’t miss Brian Moss.
‘It’s your own fault about Brian Moss. You should never have opened the door to Lois. That wasn’t my doing, that was yours. I want you to promise never to do anything like that again. You just don’t know how to handle delicate situations.’
‘I don’t get us into them in the first place,’ said Angelica. ‘It’s a real worry. With four of us we could move to a majority decision. And now it’s just you and me, God knows what will happen next. I wish I could meet some nice man.’
‘Are you crazy?’ said Angel. “‘Some nice man”, in my experience, is just some boring little creep who hangs around to stop you doing what you want. If they go away, what’s the problem with them not being nice? Not-nice men are better in bed. Everyone knows.’
There were practical worries, too; how were they to survive?
‘We can’t go on living off Edwin’s charge accounts,’ said Angelica. ‘Lady Rice could, fairly enough. But what’s Edwin got to do with us any more? So far as I’m concerned, the marriage was entirely accidental; nothing more than an interruption. We’re back to where we began.’
‘But you can pick up such a good class of man at The Claremont,’ protested Angel. ‘And the beds are so soft and comfortable.’
‘We are not going to be a whore,’ said Angelica. ‘And that’s that. We’ve ended up in the wrong level of society. I’m the kind of person who lives modestly and comfortably in a leafy suburb somewhere. I’m sure I am. I have excellent secretarial and management skills; I might even get married again, and stay home and have babies.’
‘What’s marriage but legalised prostitution?’ enquired Angel. ‘What are wives but domestic slaves who work in the house and in the bed for their keep and no money? If I’d been around at the time, I’d never have allowed the marriage to Edwin. All work and no wages. Madness.’
‘At least in marriage you get to choose your master,’ said Angelica. ‘Whoring makes me feel out of control, and really depressed the next morning. You feel yourself getting addicted to chance. Whoever walks through the door, that’s it.’
‘But that’s what I like,’ said Angel. ‘That’s what’s exciting. The absence of choice.’
Angelica preferred to call it masochism. Personally she prided herself on a delicacy of feeling. She saw the desire to pick and choose as entirely healthy, properly female: nature’s way, in fact, of leaving a woman sexually responsive only to a man whose baby she could just about bear to conceive, even though a baby was the last thing on her mind.
‘Crap,’ said Angel. ‘Sex is nothing to do with babies any more.’
But Angelica persisted: she would not consent to a life in which what she saw as a perfectly natural fastidiousness had daily to be defied, overruled. The effort would exhaust her, she said. She would get the debased, dead-eyed look of the whore, and her mother would notice.
‘Crap again,’ said Angel. ‘Research proves there’s no telling who is and who isn’t. And, as for mother, I thought you wanted never to see her again.’
Arguments, differences of opinion, gave them headaches. They were getting through too much paracetamol, too many sleeping pills. Angel was a heavier and longer sleeper than Angelica: guilt and anxiety, emotions felt only dimly by Angel, made Angelica wake first. She used the time to get her own way. One morning she wrote to Barney Evans saying she would put up with Edwin’s modest pensioning off: she would no longer fight her husband. Let him have his divorce. She had lost her appetite for justice. She posted the letter in the foyer box.