Angel (23 page)

Esmé spent very little time in his studio; he began instead to be absorbed in gardening. All the day, while Angel was shut indoors writing, he was about the grounds, busy in the green-houses or walled garden or clearing the shrubberies. He had found a new way to contentment, and with the help of two boys he began to bring order and beauty to the neglected grounds. He never thought of London. In June, he dressed himself up and went to Epsom to see Durbar II win the Derby: for himself he had rather it had not: then he came home, eager to work again.

They began to entertain a little, although some of the rooms were still shut up from lack of furniture. There were country neighbours who had known the previous owners and who, when they called, declared that the garden had never been so beautiful in all the time they could remember it. Angel was delighted and full of gratitude to Esmé.

There were not to be many happy weeks. In August, war with Germany was declared and by the next spring Esmé had gone to France.

To be at Paradise House was to be cut off from the world where such a war could come about. Sometimes, newspapers remained folded on the hall-table all day. Nora would read them after dinner when she allowed herself what she called ‘a breather'; Angel was too preoccupied and Esmé too indifferent.

The impact of war when it came was all the more overwhelming. Nora had for days made sombre prognostications, but Angel and Esmé were used to her forebodings; they looked on them as part of her martyrdom and they thought that she indulged in them and in her warnings about money, with too much relish. They had learnt to cheat her of satisfaction by ignoring her. Thus, when war came, and she was seen to have been right, they still felt disinclined to take the matter seriously. When they were made to, Esmé was sullen and Angel frenzied. She would not have the war discussed. Embowered in their trees, they were to turn their backs upon the outside world. “More fool he,” she said, when one of the youths who helped Esmé in the garden joined the Army. “If that is where he thinks his loyalty lies, let him shout for his job back when the fighting is over in a month or two.”

“It won't be over for years,” said Nora.

Esmé was thoughtful and uneasy. He walked aimlessly in the garden instead of working there. In October, he said that he was joining up. He made this announcement to Angel curtly and shamefacedly, as if he were saying instead that he was leaving her for another woman. She became so hysterical that this might have been the case, reviling him for deserting her, accusing him of moral cowardice and bloodthirstiness; she pleaded with him, her face distorted with weeping; she threatened him that, like the garden-lad, he would find Paradise House locked against him when he returned. When, for the first time, she saw him in uniform she felt shock and estrangement. Nora never forgot the afternoon that he went away. Angel drove him to the station in the trap. She would not kiss him: she blamed him too much for her distress. As he jumped down from the trap, she remained sitting there, with the reins in her hand, her face averted. “Then, goodbye,” he said hesitantly, feeling foolish and helpless. He had reached the station-barrier when he heard her calling his name. He turned and was about to go back to her when she shouted “Write to me soon. Tonight,” then she jerked the reins and drove away out of the station-yard. He had seen tears running down her cheeks: he felt disconcerted and would not look about him in case other people had seen them, too.

Nora had tea ready, and was watching from the drawing-room window. Angel jumped from the trap and ran up the steps into the hall. She pushed past Nora, who came out to meet her, and stumbled upstairs to her room.

“I never heard anyone carry on like that in all my life,” Edwina told Bessie. “Goodness knows how she'd behave if he was killed.” Angel lay on her bed and wept until she felt as hollow as a shell; until there were only the outer distresses—the throbbing eyes and brow, the stinging, swollen cheeks, the cramped limbs, the exhaustion—but nothing within. She felt that she had cried herself out of existence, and lay all evening inert, light-headed, refusing to stir herself to eat or speak. The next day Esmé returned. He had thought that she would be delighted to see him again. Touched and worried by the excesses of her grief, he was glad when he had at once been given forty-eight hours' leave. She will have got over the first parting, he thought. Next time she will take it more calmly.

She took it calmly, it was true. Throughout the two days, she was hostile or indifferent. She blamed the Army for sending him back to play upon her nerves when she was weakened with grief. At that time, a love-letter would have restored her more than his presence could.

She went back to her novel and filled its last pages with an onslaught against war quite irrelevant to what had gone before. The pacifist beliefs, about which she became more and more bellicose, were frustrating to Nora for whom war might have meant so much. She could imagine Paradise House as a hospital, with the grounds full of wounded Tommies: she thought of them sitting out on the terrace in their blue suits with plenty of cheerful greetings for her as she hurried by, on her way from one job to another, ‘giving out' as Esmé called it. Other women were as busy as could be with bandage-rolling parties and whist-drives in aid of the Red Cross. As far as Nora was concerned, the war had to be outwardly ignored: she studied the newspapers secretly, and if she came upon a name she knew printed in the casualty-lists she was obliged to keep it to herself. Interest could only be morbid, Angel said, and she implied that by forecasting war, Nora was responsible for it.

There was to be no hospital at Paradise House; sewing-parties and whist-drives were out of the question. Angel shut herself up in her room and began to write another novel, an allegory of peace and war entitled ‘Irene'.

Her grief for Esmé was not concerned with his safety. She missed him and thought him guilty of deserting her; but she did not try to imagine the horrors of trench-warfare that day after day he had to endure, the demoralising rain and mud, barbed wire, gunfire, the impossibility of seeing any end to the situation but the single, the personal, solution of death. For her, Esmé had truly gone into a no-man's land, and although they wrote to one another it seemed to her that he had suspended existence, a ghost who once had been alive and who yet might return to living. She skimmed through his letters, with their descriptions of a world she found strange and repellent, until she came to the last few sentences with their messages of love, rather reiterated as they were, letter after letter, a formula after which he was at last able to sign his name.

One day, Lord Norley's carriage came down the drive. Angel kept the old man waiting while she sat at her desk, wondering what he could have to say and how she should react to whatever it might be. Without coming to any conclusions, she went downstairs.

“I am so sorry that Nora is out,” she told him in a condescending voice. “She has taken Bessie out in the trap to pick blackberries, although what use they will be, I can't think. I hear nothing but groans about there being no preserving sugar. Can
you
get plenty of preserving sugar, Lord Norley?”

“I . . . I expect that we are as badly off as anybody else,” he said, “Although I no longer have a very sweet tooth. Don't worry about Nora—I can see her another time. I really came to see you.”

“I was sorry that you couldn't be at our wedding,” she said.

“Yes.”

He looked at her uncertainly. She did not help out the silence.

“I was abroad,” he added.

“So I gathered,” she said carelessly.

“I should have liked to have seen Esmé before he went overseas.”

She thought, so the recalcitrant nephew who must not be lent a penny, who was cast-off and ignored, becomes a hero as soon as he puts on a uniform. What a wonderful thing war is.

“I should like to write to him, if you will give me his address.” She went to a writing-table and took up a goose-quill pen. The scratchy sound it made on the paper went on a long time and he listened to it nervously. She is certainly bearing malice, he thought, and he wished that Nora would walk in.

“The ink is wet,” she said, handing the piece of paper to him at last.

“You must miss him,” he said humbly.

“Yes.”

“If there is anything that I could do. . . .”

“No, there is nothing for anyone to do. I have my work.”

“The thought of your work makes it difficult to say what I have come for. There must be a loss to literature every time we take you from your desk, but by helping us, you could feel that in your own way, you were working alongside Esmé to win the war. I know that many wives are comforted by that.”

She seemed, at first, not to have heard a word of what he had said. Then she alarmed him by saying: “I would not lift a finger to help the war in any way. I don't know what it was you were going to ask me to do, but if it is in that direction I shall refuse. The war has separated me from my husband and was the cause of our first disagreement, and I never allow Nora or anyone else to mention it in my presence.”

Lord Norley felt, as Theo so often had, the kind of exasperation that is stupefying. He did not know which way to turn or where he could begin to explain his disagreement, and he left without making his request and without being offered any tea. Nora and Bessie had not returned and Edwina had left long ago to work in a munitions factory. The house was half shut up and there was nothing to show for Esmé's work on the garden; the lawns were shaggy again and tall grasses grew around the urns and the stone seats on the terrace. Every evening, Nora made excuses for the simplicity of their dinner.

“It does well enough for the two of us,” said Angel. “And you are always wanting us to economise. Vegetable stew or whatever it is seems an excellent way of economising.”

They were certainly spending less. There were fewer temptations, isolated as they were at Paradise House and with Esmé away and so little to buy in the wartime shops; but Nora, who now managed Angel's money-affairs, knew that less and less money was coming in, royalties were dwindling, and ‘A Venetian Summer' had been the first of Angel's failures: an extra grievance she had against the war.

Nora was rather pleased and stimulated by having to economise: it put her, she thought, into the ascendancy; it suited her to face the challenge of making ends meet, although the ways in which she tried to do so were too trivial to be of much assistance when Angel was so liable to sudden extravagances. Nora's blackberry-picking, her ‘husbandry' as Angel rather sarcastically called it—the gathering in of everything from the garden, the seed-collecting and the herb-drying, the boiled nettles for luncheon, the rose-hip and the rowan-berry jelly—could be more than discounted by Angel's reading an advertisement of a silver tea-service for sale, or a sable muff and collection of ostrich feathers, or even, one day, a suit of mediaeval armour. She began to study
The Times,
the
Morning
Post
and the
Westminster Gazette
, not for the war news, but for something nice to buy. Articles came on approval, and even if she did not really approve it was too much trouble to send them back, especially as they were sometimes difficult to re-pack, like the bronze figures of centaurs or the deers' antlers. It was through advertisements that she began to collect her Persian cats. When three had arrived, Nora begged her to stop; for she could not feed them, she said. Twice a week, she went in the trap to fetch horse-meat for Czar: now she would have to go three times. The cats, all males, fought with one another and upset the peacocks.

“They will settle down,” said Angel. “They can have one of the upstairs rooms to themselves.”

“And I can imagine what they will make of it,” Nora said. “The drawing-room is bad enough.”

Angel was fretting about Esmé. Other men had leave; but he did not; his letters were so much less frequent than her own to him; she thought that the War Office confiscated some of them, and others were so dull and guarded that she wondered if they were perhaps written in code. She spent her days writing ‘Irene'. After tea she would take Czar for a walk, one or two cats often following after: there would be an uproar from the peacocks on the terrace as they set out. When she came back, she would wander about the house and look into the conservatory to see if the cactus was still safe, still bearing their initials. In the evenings she sat with Nora in the drawing-room, and when she had finished her letter to Esmé she often sighed and complained that there was nothing to do.

We must be the only women in England who can say that, Nora invariably said to herself, thinking of all the busy fingers.

At night, the three women lay asleep in the great house. Branches sawed and scraped above the roof. The valley seemed stifled with foliage in summer and creaking with frosty timber in winter-time. Sometimes the rain hissed down until the garden steamed like a cauldron: for hours after the sky had cleared, the sound of rain falling from one leaf to another would continue. Esmé did not come or write hopefully of coming.

One morning, Nora had a letter from Theo Gilbright, asking her to see him in London if she were ever there, implying that it would be as well for her to make the effort. “My suggestion is confidential,” he had written.

Nora had an elderly aunt in Kensington, who was greatly surprised to have a letter promising a visit from her niece. She would have been more surprised to hear Nora describing to Angel how dangerously ill Aunt Jessica was and how she had sent for the family, and that Nora for one would not refuse this last request.

“Will she leave you anything?” Angel inquired.

“A trinket or two, perhaps.”

It seemed a long way to go and a lot of trouble to take on the chance of getting a trinket or two, Angel thought. “While you are there, you could go into Gilbright and Brace for me. There are a few things I want looked into. And to Jay's for some glacé ribbon to trim my Leghorn hat.” She kept thinking of commissions—and leaves me no time for the death-bed, Nora thought in amusement.