Angel (3 page)

“Madam's garnets would suit Angel,” Aunt Lottie had once said, adding, “I'd rather garnets than rubies any day.”

“I think emeralds are more Angel's stone,” said Mrs Deverell. Angel went over this argument often afterwards. Some days she chose the emeralds, to match her eyes; this evening the garnets, to illuminate her skin.

At Paradise House there was another Angelica, Madam's daughter, whose name was never shortened. Aunt Lottie, in admiration of her mistress and all that she did, had had this name waiting for Angel when she was born. A boy's name was never contemplated, for Madam had no sons. Until Angel went to school and learnt better, they always spelt the name with two ‘l's.

The Angelica whose name had been copied was a month or two older than Angel; but not so tall, Aunt Lottie said. An opinionated little madam, she was described as plump; and pink-and-white. The garnets would be wasted on her. A string of seed-pearls was what
she
merited, with her insipid looks and her hands rough as boys': too much horse-riding and dog-washing, Aunt Lottie thought. Angel, resenting that other girl whom she had never seen but knew so well, turned her hands complacently, considering their shape, and their pallor.

She could hear the shop door-bell ringing below as customers came and went. So many women saved their shopping for the evening and a gossip while their husbands went to the Garibaldi or the Volunteer. In the cosy shop such confidences went on while Mrs Deverell weighed broken biscuits or drew the wire neatly through the cheese. “Not that I'd like it to go any further.” Mrs Deverell had usually heard before.
She
had asked for it, she would say, or
he
had asked for it; who could expect other—in a world where marriages were not made by Mrs Deverell—than that they should turn out as they did, with wives pretending their bruised eyes were got from bumping into the wardrobe, or that they would pay a little off next week, then running to the pawn-shop with the flat-iron every Tuesday and fetching it under their cloaks the following Monday.

Mrs Deverell's own married life had been short and flawless in retrospect. Her husband had coughed his way through only a year and a half of married bliss. His photograph was all Angel knew of him. The memory of him had faded more than the photograph, which showed a wax-work of a man with a curly beard and ill-fitting clothes. Angel disowned him. Her brisk, brave, vivacious mother had long ago forgotten him. She had her sister and her neighbours and Angel to boast about to them. ‘That Angel', the girl was called in consequence. She was solitary without knowing.

Lax and torpid, she dreamed through the lonely evenings, closing her eyes to create the darkness where Paradise House could take shape, embellished and enlarged day after day—with colonnades and cupolas, archways and flights of steps—beyond anything her aunt had ever suggested. Acquisitively, from photographs and drawings in history-books, she added one detail after another. That will do for Paradise House, was an obsessive formula which became a daily habit. The white peacocks would do; and there were portraits in the Municipal Art Gallery which would do; as would the cedar trees at school. As the house spread, those in it grew more shadowy. Angel herself took over Madam's jewel-box and Madam's bed and husband. Only that other Angelica balked her imagination, a maddening obstacle, with her fair looks and all her dogs and horses. Again and again, as Angel wandered in the galleries and gardens, the vision of that girl, who had no place in her dreams, rose up and impeded her. The dream itself, which was no idle matter, but a severe strain on her powers of concentration, would dissolve. Then she would open her eyes and stare down at her hands, spreading her fingers, turning her wrists.

At other times she was menaced by intimations of the truth. Her heart would be alarmed, as if by a sudden roll of drums, and she would spring to her feet, beset by the reality of the room, her own face—not beautiful, she saw—in the looking-glass and the commonplace sounds in the shop below. She would know then that she was in her own setting and had no reason for ever finding herself elsewhere; know moreover that she was bereft of the power to rescue herself, the brains or the beauty by which other young women made their escape. Her panic-stricken face would be reflected back at her as she struggled to deny her identity, slowly cosseting herself away from the truth. She was learning to triumph over reality, and the truth was beginning to leave her in peace.

This evening passed without any sense of time going by. She was roaming through moonlit rose-gardens when she heard her mother shutting up the shop, rattling the chains across the door, then slowly climbing the stairs.

Angel was like a tableau of a girl fallen gracefully asleep over her sewing, the cat sleeping, too, at her feet. The fire had sunk low, just when Mrs Deverell was ready to hold up her skirts and warm her ankles for a moment or two.

“Oh, I dropped off,” said Angel, yawning languorously.

“You always do. You'd do better to get off to bed.” Mrs Deverell rattled the poker in the bars of the grate and took up the bellows.

“Miss Little came in for some soda. She was telling me that poor old Mrs Turner passed away last night with dropsy.”

“How disgusting!” Angel said, yawning until tears fell. The first yawn had been affected. Now she could not stop.

Her mother put a little saucepan of milk on the hob and some cups and saucers on a tray. It did not occur to Angel to stir herself to help.

The next morning Gwen and Polly were not waiting at the gate as usual, and Angel, hesitating there, saw their mother watching her in the darkness beyond the lace curtains. As Angel looked towards her she stepped back from the window. The dark stuff of her dress merged with the shadowy room: only her colourless face could be discerned.

Angel gave a push to the iron gate. At the sound of it grating on its hinges, the woman came quickly to the window and rapped on it with her knuckles and shook her head. Her face looked pinched with suspicion and disdain, and Angel, going on down the road, wondered why she was feeling that she had been made despicable. She worried a little, hurrying lest she should be late, until she saw other girls dawdling in front of her.

She had never had any especial friends and most people seemed unreal to her. Her aloofness and her reputation for being vain made her unpopular, yet there were times when she longed desperately, because of some uneasiness, to establish herself; to make her mark; to talk, as she thought of it, on equal terms: but since she had never thought of herself as being on equal terms with anyone, she stumbled from condescension to appeasement, making what the other girls called ‘personal remarks' and offending with off-hand flattery.

Conversation would be dropped when she approached, as it was this morning between Ellie and Beattie, two girls of her own age. When she reached them, she came upon the sort of stubborn silence which meant that they hoped she would hurry on.

“Are we late?” she asked, with an affected breathlessness.

“We didn't think so,” Ellie said.

“But if you fancy
you
are, do go on,” said Beattie.

She slowed down to their pace and walked beside them. She began to talk about school, with no response from either of them. It was a less interesting subject than the one they had just dropped.

When Ellie stopped by the railings to tie a bootlace, Angel stood by and praised the smallness of her feet.

“They're no smaller than yours,” Ellie said roughly.

Angel glanced down at her own, and seemed surprised to find that this was so.

“I suppose you mean you think they're small for
me,”
said Ellie, and Beattie laughed suddenly.

After a long silence Beattie remarked thoughtfully: “So she decided on the cream merino, then?”

She implied that Angel's presence made no difference to the conversation she had interrupted, and they both continued it, with mysterious references, so that Angel could not join in. They had indeed been discussing Ellie's sister's wedding, but with more intimate conjectures than those concerned with her trousseau.

“You know I was telling you what Cyril said about the grey pelisse. . . .”

“Yes.”

“Well. . .” She lowered her voice and both girls laughed. Angel tried to appear unaffected by the conversation. She despised their animation about such a home-made trousseau; could imagine the deplorably coy behaviour of the bride and those around her; the wedding at the hideous Congregational Church, and the little house crowded with boorish relations afterwards. Although Ellie and Beattie were from better-off homes than her own, she had other standards to judge them by.

Ellie and Beattie had drifted pleasurably on to imagining their own wedding-dresses and to wondering whether they should go to Folkestone or to the Lake District for their honeymoons. To be married women as soon as possible seemed the sum of their ambition, to get what they wanted from life very early in it and then to ask nothing more, to remain in that state for the rest of their days.

“So exciting! Don't
you
think so, Angel?” Beattie asked slyly.

“What is exciting?”

“Why, getting married, of course.”

“It depends who to,” said Angel.

“You are always in trouble for ending sentences with prepositions,” Beattie said.

“I shall begin and end my sentences as I please.” She had stopped propitiating them. “And how can you or anyone be excited about getting married to someone you can't even give a name to?”

“Don't worry!” Ellie said crossly. “I don't suppose we shall have to wait long.” To separate themselves from Angel, she and Beattie linked arms, which was against the school rules.

“If you fall in love,” said Angel, “what do weddings matter? What have all these clothes and cakes and presents to do with that?”

She had begun this argument to belittle their enthusiasm and to revenge herself, but she was warming to it for its own sake. Until now she had thought of love with bleak distaste. She wanted to dominate the world, not one person.

“Oh, you're very clever,” said Ellie. She almost gasped the words: her fury made her breathless. She pushed through the school gate in front of Angel. Her head was high and the colour bright in her cheeks. She had the contemptuous look Angel was often to meet in women, who, feeling their calm threatened by the unconventional, from fear of inadequacy fall back on rage; and Ellie's anger came suddenly in a great gust, so that she longed to spin round and hit Angel's pale face. “You would,” she cried. “Of course,
you
would think such things. Who would expect
you
to believe in Holy Matrimony? Why, it would be very strange if you did.”

She hurried on towards the school building and Beattie, looking rather frightened, hurried after her.

Angel could see Gwen and Polly scurrying ahead, too; like mice they darted into the cloakroom when they noticed her. She remembered the expression on their mother's face when she had come to the window that morning, and she felt menaced and bewildered. She pondered Ellie's words, turning them over and over in her mind, walking towards the cloakroom slowly, although the other girls had gone indoors. She was the last, and a bell began to ring for prayers.

The day went sluggishly by. An oil-stove was lit in the classroom, but the girls who sat by the window still shivered, chafing their chilblains. They stayed in their desks as one dull lesson followed another, except that sometimes they were told to stand and do a few feeble exercises, clapping their hands above their heads and swinging their arms. Hour after hour, they were made to learn lessons by heart, French vocabularies, psalms, history dates and the names of rivers, until their heads were so tightly crammed with facts that thoughts had no room to move in them. When the lists were learned they droned them in unison. For their drawing-lesson some tattered prints were handed round for them to copy. There were never any new ones and Angel had drawn the same windmill a dozen times. In needlework, they made chain-stitch patterns on pieces of unbleached linen which smelt of glue.

At midday, some of the girls remained. They stayed in the classroom and unpacked their sandwiches. No one spoke to Angel, who sat at her desk, unwrapped her lunch and ate it hungrily, staring out of the window.

By afternoon, a white fog began to blot out the great layered branches of the cedar trees; then the sky discoloured; by four o'clock it was the colour of snuff. The day had seemed endless.

Angel went dreamily home. Gwen and Polly were not waiting at the gate and she had no one to talk to, no one to take to Paradise House, so the only real part of her day was missing. She walked slowly through the foggy streets and when she reached home went straight upstairs to the living-room. Her mother was sitting by the fire, making toast, as usual, but she did not look round or speak when Angel came in. She waited until the bread was golden, turned it on the fork, and then said smartly, to conceal her trembling: “I want to talk to you, my lady.”

“Well?” said Angel warily. She prepared to insulate herself against some shock. Although she could not guess what was going to happen, all day long she had felt threatened, felt that she was being drawn nearer each moment to some experience which might be utterly disastrous to her. She watched her mother taking the toast off the fork and spreading the butter carefully, frowning as if she were groping for a way to begin her complaint. Finding none, she pitched into the story somewhere past its beginning, so that at first she was unintelligible to Angel.

“You can picture what I felt like. . . . I never had a turn like that since your father died. ‘I just don't know what to say, Mrs Watts,' I said. Stuffing her Gwen and Polly's head with such a conglomeration of lies I couldn't credit. Saying wicked things of your own mother. Married beneath me, did I? Just let me tell you this, my girl, if your father hadn't of built up this business like he did, we'd have been in the gutter by this time. So good he was, too, that I'm glad he was spared what I've been through today.”