Angel (9 page)

Angel was wishing that she had not bought the drink, and felt almost faint with the pain in her bladder. Each step was difficult. The streets became an imprisoning maze; her serge dress smelled of sweat. I have accomplished nothing, she thought. Her manuscript was still in the office, but even now, perhaps, Mr Gilbright was making a parcel of it, so that it would reach her home almost as soon as she would. She was sure that his excuse that he must consult his partner was simply his way of delaying awkwardness.

She stepped aside as a man in a baize apron carried some gilt baskets of flowers into a house. There was a white awning above the entrance and a red carpet waiting to be unrolled from the top of the steps. These London streets, early on this summer evening, had a peace she had never known in Norley; but the quiet was menacing and nightmarish to her. I might die, she thought. She remembered an old story of her mother's and Aunt Lottie's, of one of their girlhood's friends who had been taken to the Crystal Palace by her fiancé. Such was her sense of delicacy that she would not excuse herself from his company for one moment all day long. Reaching home too late, she had collapsed and died. “Her bladder broke,” said Mrs Deverell. “What about
his
?” Angel had asked, and was told to behave herself. When at last she came to the station she walked more hurriedly. Each jolting step was misery to her. In the Ladies' Waiting Room, she glimpsed herself in a looking-glass. She was an absurd figure: her straw hat was crooked above her pale and glistening face, her hair untidy, and her dress creased. It was not at all her own idea of Angel Deverell.

She bolted herself into the lavatory and began to weep, covering her face with her gloved hands. I wish that I had given in, she thought. I had everything to lose and I have lost it.

Yet she still felt something obdurate in herself, even in her state of frailty and defeat. It was a hard, physical pain in her breast, which might have been indigestion, but was vanity.

“We should not have let her go alone. Someone should have seen her to the station,” said Theo Gilbright. “Is she safe to be wandering about London?”

“Is
London
safe,” asked Willie Brace, “with her wandering about in it? She is surely mad?”

“I don't know. Under that passionate inventiveness and romanticism and ignorance, I thought I sometimes noticed shrewdness and suspicion. She does not find things amusing herself, and she is on the lookout to prevent anyone else doing so—particularly if it is to be at her expense.”

“Which it is bound to be. So we are to risk ‘Irania' as it stands, card-scene and all?”

“It will be nice strong meat for the unsophisticated, and delicious stuff and nonsense for some connoisseurs.” After a moment Theo said: “When I think of her, I dislike myself for saying that. I hope . . .”

“And what do you hope?”

“I hope she is not to be too much laughed at.”

“
I
am hoping that
we
are not.”

Theo picked up one of the tea-cups. “Just as she was going—and I must say she looked at the end of her tether, but still as obstinate as a mule—she took up this cup and examined it carefully and then said ‘Is this Dresden china?'”

“Good God!” said Willie. “What did you say?”

“I just said ‘no'. I couldn't tell her that Miss Hooper bought them for us in Berwick Street. Perhaps it wouldn't have made any difference if I had. She didn't listen to me. I am sure she had decided that they
were
Dresden and that was that. I hope she gets safely home. I think someone should have come to London with her.”

“From what I saw, I think she ought to be locked up. I sat in my office on my own and laughed for half-an-hour. And there is Elspeth at home dying to hear all about her. I am to get back as fast as I can.”

He was halfway down the stairs when Theo came out on to the landing and called to him.

“What is it?”

“Of course, tell Elspeth,” Theo said. “She will know that she must be discreet. . . . But, no one else.”

“A nice little story about her girlhood will be our only hope, as I see it—released a day or two before publication, as only I can arrange it.”

“No,” said Theo. “No little stories.”

“The waif has played on your heartstrings,” said Willie. His expression was puzzled as he looked up the stairs.

“No stories,” Theo repeated. “I beg of you, Willie.” And he turned back towards his office door.

“It is the first time I have tasted wine,” said Angel.

“Does it come up to your expectations?” Theo asked.

“I never had any expectations about it.” She drank it steadily as if she were parched with thirst. Then she said: “I suppose it is very much as one would have imagined it.”

Mrs Gilbright suffered a moment's dismay about her husband's beloved claret, then noticed that Theo himself was smiling.

“My mother would be shocked,” said Angel calmly. “She belongs to a Temperance Society and wears one of those badges in the shape of a bow of ribbon to show that she would never take a drink, not even brandy if she were dying. Of course by temperance they all mean the opposite—total abstinence.”

“I am worried if we have given you anything your mother would disapprove of,” Mrs Gilbright said.

“I am going to live my own life.”

“Yes, I am sure that you are.” Mrs Gilbright managed to give Theo a warning glance as his hand touched the decanter, and he left Angel's glass empty. He said: “You describe the sensations of drunkenness well for one who has never tasted wine.”

“Thank you.”

Before this visit, he had tried to prepare his wife for Angel's abrupt manner, which was so much in contrast to her involved and ornamental style of writing. The evening had been dreaded in consequence. Angel had been asked to stay overnight and Theo had fetched her from Paddington Station in a cab. No other guests were to be invited, and the three of them, Mrs Gilbright thought grimly, must sit out this appalling dinner-party on their own.

Until now, she had sided with Willie Brace, laughing at the passages he had read to her from
The Lady Irania
, and, teasing Theo about his ‘Angel ever bright and fair', had wondered why he should dream of publishing such vulgar nonsense or put himself out to please an unattractive and precocious girl.

“She may become a gold-mine to us,” he had said, but knew that it was with a protective insincerity.

“Shall we wait and ask her to dinner when she
is
a goldmine,” his wife had asked. “And if she
must
come, may not Willie and Elspeth be invited, too; to help us through the ordeal?”

“No, Willie and Elspeth would laugh at her. They would be tempted to draw her out.”

“So might I be tempted.”

“I should be hurt for her sake if you teased her.”

“I think you are being very tiresome about her. And it is very tiresome for me, to have to have her sleep here.”

“We could not let her go back in the train late in the evening.”

“She could come to luncheon.”

“Please, Hermione!”

It was an autumn evening and leaves were in the air and all over the pavements and gardens, when Theo brought Angel to his house in St John's Wood.

I am not nervous of a girl of sixteen, Hermione thought, as she rose to greet her. But she was nervous of her own behaviour to the girl, with Theo watching. She resented his air of vigilance and protectiveness, and knew that she would be wise to hide the resentment. She was ready to offer kindness to the girl for his sake, but Angel ignored her; she treated her as if she were of no account, and rudely kept her head turned towards Theo.

I am not laughing at her any more, Hermione decided. In fact, I am a little frightened of her. And why is she so suspicious about everything she eats? Does she think that I am trying to poison her?

Angel found the food tasteless and unidentifiable: the fish in aspic, the chicken buried in a sauce among a confusion of mushrooms and pieces of hard-boiled egg. She felt disdainful and looked it. She was wearing a crumpled dress of sea-green muslin and her black hair hung down to her waist. Hermione could imagine her sitting under the sea, casting spells, counting the corpses of the drowned. She asked a maid to light more candles, for the room seemed suddenly cheerless: gaiety was quite lacking and she felt chilled.

Angel was disappointed in the house and despised the modern furnishings, the lack of sumptuousness. Instead of gilt and marble there were plain oak and pottery tiles. Branches of copper-beech in an earthenware jar seemed a bleak economy to her when one could see from the drawing-room window the tree from which they had been picked. The dullest etchings framed in ebony were suspended on long cords from the picture-rail, and on the dining-room walls where, in her opinion, family portraits should have hung, was an arrangement of willow-pattern plates and Japanese fans.

After dinner, Theo asked his wife to play the piano, and she was glad to shelter behind the music for a moment and not to have to stumble on with attempts at conversation. She could not blandly sit out the silences as Theo did, and all of her efforts at ending them were like throwing damp twigs on a dying fire. Her remarks were never taken up and her questions—which became almost hysterically impertinent—were answered as abruptly as perhaps they deserved.

She played some Mendelssohn, and Angel began to fidget; dropping her coffee-spoon, she went down on her knees to fetch it from under the sofa. Theo begged her to leave it, and when she would not, he, too, went down on all fours. Their heads bumped together. Hermione peered round the side of the piano and saw them crawling on the floor. Shaking with laughter, she longed for Willie Brace to share this delightful picture.

As soon as she had settled down again, Angel began to look about the room, and Hermione was conscious of her head turning from one object to another. She was plainly not listening to the music and suddenly asked in a loud voice: “Are those real pearls your wife is wearing, Mr Gilbright?”

Hermione, who had been leading up to a crescendo, played the next chord very softly and heard Theo say in a vague, amused voice: “Yes. Yes, I think so.”

Of course,
I
am not
here
, thought Hermione and some of her temper came out in the next few bars. Theo thought it an unusual interpretation, with crescendo becoming diminuendo and forte changing to piano according to Angel's behaviour and his wife's reaction to it. Hermione's tortoiseshell cat was lying on its cushion by the fire, and Angel now put her coffee-cup on the tray, filled the saucer with cream and took it across to the cat, which blinked in surprise before she began to drink.

Hermione stopped playing. “I am afraid she will be sick if she has that,” she said in a clear, high voice of vexation. “She has been fed already. In the kitchen.”

“Oh, it will do him good,” said Angel. “I love cats.”

Hermione dropped her hands in her lap and began to turn the rings on her fingers: a danger-sign, Theo knew. “Do play some more,” he coaxed her. Angel, kneeling by the cat, said: “He loves it, you see. He has nearly finished it.”

“She,” said Hermione distantly.

“Just one more little thing,” urged Theo. “Some Scarlatti.”

“No,” said Hermione. She closed the music-book and stood up. “If Miss Deverell will excuse me for a moment, I must just go and feed my canaries.”

“I don't care for birds,” Angel said.

Just as well, thought Hermione, for there wasn't a canary in the house. She went to the morning-room and sat there in the cold for five minutes. She would tell Elspeth and Willie later that she escaped to stifle her laughter, but really, as Theo knew, she had come away to control her anger.

“There! All gone!” said Angel, taking the saucer away from the cat. “He was hungry, poor old thing. Was your wife ever presented at Court, Mr Gilbright?”

“No, I don't think so.”

She sat down on the sofa again. The cat got up from its cushion, stretched and yawned, then sauntered across the room and sprang on to her lap. It was the first time Theo had seen Angel smile, and it was a prim and unwilling smile, which saddened him. He wondered what Hermione could be doing, but was glad that she had gone. He watched Angel fondling the cat, then he took a deep breath and said in what he hoped was an off-hand voice: “I wish you would tell me about your home. I went through Norley once, but only in a train.”

She stroked the cat until sparks flew from the fur: there was agitation and electricity in the air. She hesitated, then she said: “It is a hideous place. There are miles of ugly streets of poor houses. And the people are all mean and stupid. My mother has a little grocery shop and we live above it. There are three rooms.” She lifted her head and looked up at him defiantly, until she saw his expression of concern and sympathy and her eyes filled with tears. Her first impulse had been to tell some imaginary story, make some mystery about her address, but that reaction, so natural to her, was followed by what she regarded as a temptation to tell the truth. Having succumbed to it she felt exhausted. “I don't want anyone to know anything about me,” she said anxiously. “None of what I told you seems true to me and I know that one day I shall stop believing it.”

“You are a strange girl,” he said. “I think you are brave. I admire you.”

“And why should you admire her?” Hermione asked. “For I am sure that is what I heard you say as I opened the door.”

“I was saying that I think she is brave.”

“Oh, and won't she
have
to be!”

Hermione usually enjoyed this last part of the day when, alone at last, getting ready for bed, they could make unguarded judgments on people they had met or entertained. She had a lively observation, a sharp tongue and enjoyed slashing to shreds a whole roomful of guests, for Theo's amusement. This evening, nothing amused him: his usual tolerance had ebbed away; yet she could not be quiet, as she knew she ought.