Splitting by Fay Weldon

Author:Fay Weldon [Weldon, Fay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780871136367
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 1996-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

And Lady Rice finally drags herself from her bed, just to shut them up, since they won’t leave her alone. She can see they might make good company. She need never be lonely: and loneliness, for all that others speak of aloneness, is what she most fears. Once her feet are on the floor she resigns and Angelica cuts in.

(5)

Initial Transformations

ANGELICA ROSE AND DRESSED. She left for work in black leather jacket, black wig and dark glasses, looking not at all like Lady Rice—that wronged, tearful, virtuous, needy creature—but like the rather ferocious and determined mistress of some important guest at The Claremont. She carried a holdall in which, neatly folded (by Jelly: Jelly was good at folding, Angelica was not), were Jelly’s working clothes.

Angelica it was who would step into her chauffeur-driven, hired Volvo at exactly 7.48. Nearly every morning the car was there, parked in Davis Street. Nearly every morning she stepped in as Angelica, stepped out as Jelly. Once in the car, she would take off Angelica’s wig to reveal Jelly’s short, shiny, straight blonde hair: she would take off her leather jacket and put on a pale blue blazer with brass buttons, made in a cheap, uncrushable fabric. She would drag her hair back behind a pale pink satin headband, and hang a long string of artificial pearls round her neck, to fall over her tight, white woollen jumper. She wore a bra which under-played her breasts: the tightness of the sweater was more to do with fashion than sexuality. She would wipe off her more extravagant make-up and put on owl glasses. She would become Jelly White, with Angelica’s knowledge and consent.

But occasionally the Volvo was not there, not waiting in Davis Street when she left the hotel. The car service was stretched that time of the morning, they would explain. Or they were short of drivers; there was a flu epidemic. Could she wait? Half an hour, perhaps? And she could not, and would have to travel to work by public transport. Then she would make the ego change in a Ladies’ room at the Inns of Court, so boldly entering the passages marked “Private,” passing without shame through doors marked “Staff Only,” to find this safe, high, private, empty, well-disinfected, still slightly odorous place, leaving with so prim and self-righteous a mien that in neither personality was she ever challenged.

But she preferred the back of the Volvo: the darkened windows, the stiff back of the driver the other side of the glass, leather upholstery made sticky by the contact of flesh, albeit her own.

And there she would be as Jelly White, she of the highly developed super-ego, the eye for detail, the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, and the self-righteousness, the priggishness, that goes with it; a clean, tidy, cologne-scented, apparently unambitious young woman with a self image not high, not low, but realistic, well aware of her Own virtues, her own faults; Daddy’s girl, the one who stays safe for

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