Angel (14 page)

She would have liked to drive on for ever, peacefully, jolting along in the warm air until it grew dark. The great brass lamps would be lit, drawing pale moths out of the blackness, bringing one tree forward after another, shining on closed flowers, on owls sitting on posts and cats' eyes among the tall grasses.

On their right, mist was gathering over a wooded valley. A chalky, rutted lane went off at a sharp angle to the road, descended steeply through the interlacing branches. A signpost, tilted a little downhill, was painted with the words “To Paradise House Only.” Angel turned her head sharply, looked over Theo's shoulder, steadying herself with a hand on the door as she raised herself to see farther—but there was nothing to be seen except the tops of trees; not a glinting window or a chimney-stack. It was all submerged, embowered, like the castle of the Sleeping Beauty. She swayed against Theo and clutched at his arm to save herself falling forward from her seat.

“A lovely view,” he said, turning his head briefly. “Paradise House,” he read. “An enchanting name.”

She said nothing. It was a strange moment for her: the shock of recognition, finding that the house was real, had some location. Before, it had seemed to her like heaven—situated nowhere. She had only half believed in her Aunt's stories of being taken by the carrier the seven miles to Norley: whether the house lay south or north of the town she had never wondered. She would—if she had known—have avoided going in its direction; yet this evening's discovery had done no harm; the evening itself seemed outside time and on the fringe of magic; the house, smothered in leaves, unseen, was safe in her imagination, as it had been since her childhood.

She took off the goggles, loosened her veil and let the cooling air blow softly about her. When they reached home, it was still light, but candles were burning in the drawing-room. They could see the flames all wavering one way in the draught from the open window. Hermione was playing the piano. Aunt Lottie, who had seen claret being decanted for dinner, and had gone off in a huff to her sister's bedroom, where she had spent the evening mending some lace and eating her dinner from a tray, had now come downstairs. Angel—and she was too exhausted from emotion to be annoyed—could see her sitting by the window, nodding her head in time to the music. At the sound of their arrival she had turned to glance at them and then, as if to imply that they, and all motor cars, too, were insignificant, she turned back again to her enjoyment of Schumann.

Theo went round to open Angel's door and hand her down. She swayed a little, as if she had stepped out of a boat and felt the ground unsteady. She smiled, untied the veil and took off her hat, loth to go indoors; then she said again what she had said earlier in the evening: “I feel very happy.”

He thought that at that moment, in this unusual mood of gentleness, she looked lovely; but he remembered Hermione's warnings and was careful not to say so.

“Oh, such an evening!” Hermione whispered when they went to bed. “All day, apparently, the aunt has been concealed here, but as soon as you'd gone, she came out. She is a lady's-maid. I could tell that at once—her lace collar was so good, though darned, so obviously one of her perquisites. Now, Angel is no Angel to
her.
She disapproved of the novels and has a very proper sense of shame about them. The girl has turned out badly and that is all there is to it. And they had such hopes for her, thought how proud of her they would be, she and her sister. ‘I
am
proud of her, Lottie,' Mrs D. said, but in such a trembling and defiant voice. Well, Lottie wouldn't take a penny from her, from Angel. She told me this when Mrs Deverell had gone out of the room to fetch some candles she was too afraid to ring for. I should doubt if a penny had ever been offered, shouldn't you? One of these days she
may
have to take one, because things have gone from bad to worse with her employer—though she can still, it seems, give away her old lace. The poor lady is recently widowed and cannot keep up the place—the glories of its past! You should have heard. There is talk of her going to live with her married daughter at—where was it? Somewhere like Leamington Spa. Yes, I am sure it was Leamington Spa. The question is Will Aunt Lottie be asked to go too? She's been with her Madam since they were both eighteen, she said. She even went on her honeymoon with her, if you please. Madam would never manage to face Leamington Spa without
her
in attendance. But do they realise that? Ah, we've had it all the time you were away, and I have entered into a state of anxiety about it myself. I long to know what happens. As soon as she heard you coming into the drive, she altered. She said: ‘Don't mention any of this to my niece, if you please'.” Suddenly, waspish: “You will never guess the name of Madam's daughter.”

“No?”

“Angelica. As Madam does everything right, naturally the name she chose for her daughter was the best there could be, so it was all settled when Mrs Deverell had a daughter, too. And guess the name of Madam's house! It is so fairy-tale, so unlikely, that Leamington Spa will be a terrible come-down.”

“Camelot Towers,” he suggested, yawning.

“No. Paradise House.”

“How very strange,” he said.

The summer went by and Angel heard nothing of Esmé. Lord Norley was in Scotland, she was told when she telephoned his house, trying to establish some contact, however indirect. Her mood of gentleness ebbed away and she grew morose with frustration. She felt that she dared not hope that she would ever meet him again, and yet there was not a single hour of the day when such hopes did not disturb her. She strove to recreate him for herself, and cursed her memory for keeping no more of their meeting than a few sentences. She went over and over the catalogue of his features, trying, without success, to reassemble them into his likeness. He was rude to me, she would tell herself: I never want to see him again: and then would be filled with cold and bitter longing. If she could have back her moments with him, she thought, she could do better with them; not waste so many, as she had, in looking at other people and listening to them.

Her work failed her. She had reached a desperate, claustrophobic stage of being imprisoned halfway in a novel: there was too much behind her for her to retreat and not a glimmer of light ahead. She sat for hours without writing, staring at the last few words on the page, seeing no significance in them. Her characters fell into frozen poses, speech died on their lips: they had sat at a banquet for weeks and she had not the power to bring them to their feet again.

She made an excuse to go to see Theo simply because she needed to communicate with someone and there was no one else. He was surprised when he read her letter asking if she could come to him for advice about her writing. To make such a request was not in her nature, and he was apprehensive. Advice had always been the last thing she had wanted and the last thing a sensible person would have offered her. Willie Brace had predicted that her fire would burn out as suddenly as it had blazed. “Then we shall have her on our hands; we shall have the trying business of watching her refusing to admit the magic's gone, blaming everybody but herself that she can't any longer cast the spell.” Theo wondered if he was about to be proved right.

Angel got ready for her visit to London in better spirits. There was something vehement about her clothes and her bearing as she climbed the stairs to Theo's office. She was in a more positive frame of mind than she had been for months; the journey and the change of scene had turned her thoughts outwards, away from the frenzied impotency she had suffered so long. But in spite of this, Theo thought that she looked strained, and he remembered his partner's premonition.

At first, she was so pleased to be with him again that she began her usual badgering about her sales and his inadequacy in promoting them. She made him have figures turned up and analysed, and was amazed and indignant that he did not carry them in his head. Then, as he turned to put away some papers, she saw him glance at his watch and at once her hectoring ceased. I cannot go back home without any help from him, she thought. In a panic, she foresaw the end of her journey, her return to the same dreaded state as before. She had not visualised anything beyond her visit to Theo, and now she realised that it must soon come to an end. When he enquired about her new novel, she shook her head despairingly.

“It only drags along,” she said, as if it were some despicable thing whose progress was not her responsibility. A bad attitude, Theo thought gloomily. “The ending seems to have nothing to do with the beginning and there is such dullness in between.”

“Perhaps you need a holiday. You've worked very hard—a novel a year is something formidable to keep up.”

“A holiday wouldn't do any good, or make any difference. I should have to take myself with me.”

“And what is so very wrong in that?” He tried to sound robust, but the change in her disconcerted him.

“It is myself I need a holiday from,” she said.

“Writers often feel that their work is stale, but the mood passes.”

To hear from him what she had perhaps come all the way to London to say herself, alarmed her. The sound of the word “stale” plucked at her nerves; from superstition she denied it.

“No, I am only dissatisfied with myself for doing the same thing over and over again. I want this novel to be very great and quite different from all I have done before, so I feel an extra anxiety, perhaps. I think I shall rewrite it, move it right out of its present-day setting and have it all take place in ancient Greece.”

Theo was startled and horrified at the idea of such a transference; he wondered what she would do without her lords and ladies, could imagine the state of her scholarship and also the fiendish gloating of the critics.

“That is what I came to ask your advice about,” she said. She leaned back in her chair and rearranged her marabout stole about her shoulders.

“Present day society is so much your forte,” Theo said carefully. Heaven knew she made enough mistakes with that. “And can any characters which fit so well into that, be lifted bodily from it and planted down two or three thousand years back?”

“Human nature never changes.”

“In some essentials it may not, but there must be a great deal other than essentials in a novel—customs, fashion, manners, the fabric of day-to-day existence. . . .”

“I can read up what I don't know,” she said. “From other books.”

“It will take a great deal of reading to give you more than a superficial feeling for the times.”

“Then I will do a great deal of reading,” she said calmly.

“But to what purpose?” he asked in dismay. “For what advantage?”

“I see you are quite set against the idea.”

“You asked for my advice and I can only give it. What I say is, take a holiday. Go away somewhere exciting. Forget all about your novel. When you come back, you will feel quite different about it, the staleness will have gone. . . .”

“There
is
no staleness. . . .”

“Well, the dissatisfactions will have dissolved. You will see that it is a very good novel after all.”

She shook her head.

“You were determined about it before you came.”

This was not true. In the train, the vague idea had settled in her mind. She had closed her eyes and imagined a sunlit world of dazzling marble and diaphanous draperies: it was like a picture by Lord Leighton, one of her favourite painters. She saw the Edwardian banquet at which her characters had all gone drowsy with dullness, changed suddenly into a Greek frieze: it became busy again, with slaves pouring out wine, bearing in great baskets of figs, playing lutes. Lord Rawley could be given some such name as Demetrios or Telemachos, and the heroine changed from Emmelina into Persephone. The plot could remain the same, or be improved. Emmelina's scandalous liaison with her father's bailiff made a less powerful situation to her now: to fall in love with a slave would be quite a startling way of losing her reputation. The conifers of Surrey began to change into silvery olive-groves.

The whole idea had been little more than a game she had played in the train and she had quite forgotten it until the moment when she had to try to capture Theo's attention, give him some reason for her visit, and drag him away from the attractions of that word “stale”; for say it and it will become so, she felt, as lonely people do.

“I must warn you that your public won't like the change,” Theo said. He knew that she liked such phrases as ‘your public' and he used them often. “They always want ‘the mixture as before'.”

“They won't know,” said Angel. “I mean to publish the book under another name. Then we shall see what the critics have to say. It will be amusing—when they have finished praising it—to say that it was I who wrote it, the ignoramus they have so long despised, the writer of gibberish and balderdash and all the other complimentary words they have used.”

“I beg of you. . .” Theo began.

“No, I am quite determined on it.”

“I know . . . I have so often seen . . . that tricks are not forgiven. The people who believe in you will lose their confidence and feel themselves fooled. You must be straightforward.”

“I shan't be the first author to have changed her name.”

“I most strongly advise. . .”

She shook her head, smiled in an exasperating way, blew gently on her marabout stole, watching it flutter.

“You are teasing me,” he suggested helplessly.

“I never tease people.”

They sat in silence for a moment or two, then Theo pushed aside a pile of papers with a gesture of impatience. “Do you always have your own way?” he asked her.

She lifted her head and looked at him. Her eyes were full of sadness. “Nearly always,” she said.

“If I can help you. . .” he began desperately.