Angel (17 page)

Angel admired such insolence and laughed with delight. “And he?” she asked. “Esmé?”

“He was not at home when I arrived. He had gone to my uncle's, the servant said. So I packed again and I, too, came to my uncle's. Esmé has not been there. After my account of Italy, I think he will never go there.”

“You told your uncle?” Angel asked in astonishment.

“Yes. He is the head of our family, I suppose—the only responsible person I can turn to.”

“But will not that ruin Esmé's chances with him?”

“I have no doubt that it will.”

Angel stared at her. “I have no brother; but if I had, I could never behave to him in such a way.”

“My dear Miss Deverell, we cannot all be as saintly as you, or so blessed with family-feeling.” Angel's glance became suspicious. “I have lost a great deal by championing Esmé and I cannot afford to lose any more. I am also disgusted and ashamed. I want no reminders of him in my life. I should be content to settle down without him from now on.”

“It is a very lonely thing, to have a house to oneself,” Angel said.

“I must try to make something of it, and when it becomes what you say it will, I shall beg of your company for an hour or two.”

“You may come when you wish,” said Angel, and she went to the garden door to let in Sultan who was barking there. “I ask one thing of you: do not cut yourself off entirely from your brother, who may one day need you desperately.”

“It is he who has cut himself off from me.”

“Yes, at the moment that is true. Sit, Sultan! I am afraid his paws are dirty.”

Nora thought that he had been rolling in cow-dung, for he stank abominably. “The darling!” she said, patting his head quickly.

“Yes, he is so affectionate. Your brother, you know, is only like so many other high-spirited young men, a little spoilt by women, because of his romantic looks.” She was sure that she sounded detached and analytical, but there was no one to hear except Nora, who was not deceived.

“Your Lord Chalfont in
The Butterflies
reminds me of Esmé,” she said.

“I think that I can understand such men although I am a woman.”

Nora tried to push Sultan's muddy paw from her knee and he snarled and put back his ears.

“Are you nervous with dogs?” Angel asked coldly. “Come here, Sultan. You are not appreciated.” She seemed not to notice that the dog ignored her. “You should never let an animal know if you are afraid. It is asking for them to be unfriendly. They smell your fear, you know.”

“He is such a beauty, but I didn't want to force my attentions on him. Some dogs hate to be fussed.”

“He loves it.”

Nora decided that it was time to go. “I will remember what you said about Esmé. You are so wise and I—at the moment—so full of indignations and precipitate judgments. Perhaps I shall come to your way of thinking, in time. And, meanwhile, may I come again tomorrow? I want to make myself useful to you, to relieve you of some of your burdens, to serve literature in my humble way.”

“I shall look forward to it.” Angel thought that Nora had expressed herself very properly. They kissed and said goodbye.

The next day Nora returned. She was to stay for more than thirty years and to make herself useful untiringly, relieving Angel of many burdens. Her service to literature was more difficult to assess. She gave up writing her own poetry to devote herself to her friend. The sacrifice helped to lengthen the list of Angel's books. The poetry was lost and the novels were gained, and posterity was as indifferent as it could be about both.

“G
ILBRIGHT & BRACE
, Estate Agents,” Willie Brace said, giving the letter back to his partner.

“Now what is she up to?”

But Theo could not say. He had borne much from Angel in fourteen years and had lost his capacity for wonderment.

“Why us?” asked Willie. “Why not ask Mr Fortnum or Mr Mason who dispatch the caviare, or Monsieur Worth who gives in to her about her hideous clothes? They must make just as much money from her as we do.”

“Why come to London at all?” Theo said unhappily. “I prefer her safely in the country.”

“Who wouldn't? Unless the people who live in the country?”

“Where do we begin?” Theo looked at the letter again.

“Take your hat and go out this instant—she says we are to answer by return of post. Somewhere central. You don't want her near St John's Wood and I don't want her anywhere near Chelsea. I like the idea of Kensington Gore. You should be able to find something commodious and inexpensive. Inexpensive!! I am sure her last half-yearly cheque from us was three thousand pounds.”

“Oh, dear, commodious and inexpensive!”

“Once she gets to London, she may like it and stay for ever. Then she will come and
say
her complaints instead of writing them. I expect she is going to start a ‘salon'. I visualise pilgrims winding across the Park. No, perhaps something more Sibylline—consultations with the oracle of Kensington Gore.”

“She says that she is coming to sit for her portrait,” said Theo, looking at the letter again. Willie did not seem convinced. He went off humming ‘Angels ever bright and fair'. He had been doing so for fourteen years and Theo had never thought it amusing.

In one thing Nora had failed Angel: she had not managed to conjure up her brother. She had been housekeeper, secretary, lady-in-waiting, and had delighted in the daily immolation and her place in the background. Her capacity to serve and adore was deeply exploited: the maternal feelings which sometimes unsettled her were useful in calming Angel's tantrums.

The obsession with Esmé—with someone whom Angel had seen only for an hour—she found difficult to understand. She knew that he was unusually handsome, more attractive to women than was good for him, and that Angel seemed to meet only elderly men and certainly no one who was worthy of her, but the perplexity remained. The long conversations they had about Esmé were tinged with the resentment and jealousy Nora had suffered since they were children and he was the more fussed-over one. The blacker the picture she painted, the more infatuated Angel became, and sometimes, like a child, she would ask for a particular story again.

Esmé, since Italy, remained elusive. The house that he and Nora had shared, their parents' house, was sold. He was abroad at the time, had been in France, his bank-manager could tell Nora, but had moved on again, perhaps to Italy.

“Italy has fatal attractions for him,” Nora was rather pleased to tell Angel. She wished that she would give up the steady concentration on Esmé and face his true and ineradicable nature once and for all. They had continued for years in the absurd pretence that Angel only inquired about him from politeness to his sister and listened to the reminiscences for Nora's part in them. “He won't have me to rescue him this time,” Nora said.

I wish that I could rescue him, thought Angel. I would go to the ends of the earth. I would take the vile girl by her shoulders and shake her till she cried for mercy. The word ‘Italy' had violent associations for her: she thought only of scheming, predatory women—their brief beauty soon to be overlaid by grossness—lying in wait to ensnare such men as Esmé, to captivate then corrupt, to bleed heartlessly and reject.

At last, word came from Lord Norley that Esmé was in London. He had rented a studio in Chelsea; or would do so as soon as his uncle could advance some money. He seemed to take it for granted that his escapade in Italy was forgotten. Whether or not Lord Norley complied Nora could not discover. “He will never ask
me
for money,” she said. “With Mamma's jewellery—all I had to remind me of her—lying there in that shop-window in Florence.”

“It may be sold by now,” Angel said absent-mindedly. She was beginning to fret. She had worked hard and needed a holiday, she said, and she even conceded that Nora had worked hard as well. A card inviting her to a garden-party at Buckingham Palace came at a useful time, and she wrote immediately to her publishers, as she had written to them over the years for all the commissions she could not trouble herself to place elsewhere—reference-books, silks for their wives to run about the shops matching with braid, or pots of Hymettus honey from Soho—to find, for the summer months, commodious, airy and inexpensive furnished apartments, with a park nearby where Sultan might be exercised.

Hermione found the apartments, as she had always found the matching braid. “It is part of my homage,” she told Theo, then added: “I know that they will not do, as the braid never did, even when it matched to the most exact degree. The rooms won't be lofty enough; Lulworth Gardens not a good enough address and the grass plot in the middle too shady for Sultan, or too exposed. She will say that Number Seven is unlucky and will notice at once, as I did, that the caretaker smells of drink and damp is coming through the wallpaper at the top of the stairs.”

But Angel, in her tremulous excitement to move in, noticed nothing. Nora was alarmed to see how hopeful she was, how childishly excited as she went from room to room, examining the furniture and making plans.

“We are so lucky to find anything at all at this time of the year,” she said.

Nora would not have dreamt of saying that it was Hermione who had found the apartments for them. Her astonishment at hearing Angel call herself lucky only added to her apprehensions.

The plane-trees at the edges of the pavement and in the Gardens in the middle of the Square were dark with their summer leaves. From the windows of the first-floor drawing-room their branches were all that could be seen; they kept out the sun and tinged all the gilt furniture with green. Angel loved the shabbiness of the room, its pale colours and faded wallpaper. The yellow satin on the chair-backs had split and frayed, looking-glasses needed to be re-silvered, portraits were blackened and often indistinguishable and she adopted them all as ancestors. The worn elegance was what she had been unable to achieve at Alderhurst, where everything, though costly and comfortable, was new. “I always feel,” Hermione had once told Theo, “that things will still have the prices marked on them. I imagine I am in Harrods, looking rather incuriously about me and wondering all the time ‘How much?'”

Since her mother's death, Angel's fanciful inventions about the past had grown daily more outrageous. There was no one to inhibit her or to remind her of the truth. On the day of Mrs Deverell's funeral she had had her last-but-one glimpse of Aunt Lottie, who returned to the house after the service for long enough to accuse Angel of neglecting her mother and keeping Lottie herself in ignorance of her illness: she added a few frank comments on her niece's disposition and then left.

At first, Nora had believed Angel's stories about her origin, her early days, the mystery surrounding her birth, the hints of foreign, even noble blood; old splendours, romantic deprivations. Then even grander notions followed and contradicted the first, and Nora, with her heart full of love and understanding, saw the lies as a pathetic necessity, an ingredient of genius, a part of the make-believe world from which the novels came. She could not afford to be disillusioned about Angel and she managed not to be. She had given up her home for her, her way of life, her verse-writing; she was staked upon her: the only threat was her own self-criticism. She learnt to sense the outrageous lies before they were spoken, and became tensed ready to deflect them, quickly leaving the room or becoming deaf; or else absorbing them, with compassion and her poet's vision.

Lulworth Gardens was full of new hazards, and some of Angel's stories about her lately-acquired portrait-ancestors were disastrously comic; her sense of period was so vague and her notions of country-life wonderfully sensational. A handsome young man among dogs was going off to shoot his rival in a duel, not pheasants among the autumn foliage; a lady in an Empire gown had been a mistress of Charles the Second. No one dared to question any of it. It isn't untruthful, Nora told herself. Or, if it is untruthful, then so are ‘Romeo & Juliet' and ‘Hamlet'. She was sure that Shakespeare had not confined his inventiveness to his plays. To spread it over everyday life was a sign of an exuberant genius. Exuberant Angel really was, that summer. She went to the Royal Garden Party in violet satin and ostrich-feathers with purple-dyed chinchilla on her shoulders; amethysts encrusted her corsage and mauve orchids were sewn all over her skirt where they quickly wilted. Glances of astonishment she interpreted as admiration.

As soon as the Garden Party was over, she turned to the real business which had brought her to London, and when she had discovered Esmé's whereabouts from Lord Norley, she set out to find him. It was one of the few excursions on which Nora was not asked to accompany her. She was going, she said, to inquire about an evening-wrap at Reville's; she made coy references to Nora's approaching birthday and there were hints of secrets and surprises. To everyone but Nora, Angel was at her most embarrassing when she was trying to be arch; her smile became monstrously roguish; she was altogether too tall and bony for such behaviour.

Nora was not surprised to see her set off on foot with Sultan. She liked walking in London, and often on sunny evenings made Nora accompany her, sometimes to the Albert Memorial, which she admired very much, or for a stroll along the embankment. Sultan went everywhere with her, even to the dressmaker's where he had once lifted his leg over a roll of silk which was propped against the wall and quite ruined it.

It was a long walk to Chelsea. When, after an hour, Angel came to the street where Esmé was living, she was much stared at. Children dancing round a barrel-organ backed away at the sight of Sultan, who ambled along beside her, panting and dribbling. It was a hot, sunless afternoon: the pavements were gritty and dust swirled down from the end of the road where the river ran by. The street was busy, noisy with children, the din of the barrel-organ and a rag-and-bone man shouting. Barges hooted on the river. A boy shovelled horse-droppings into a hand-cart, and when he moved on the pigeons came back and settled in the middle of the road. As Angel walked away from the embankment, the long street became quieter; the houses were now sometimes semi-detached, with flights of steps leading into heavy porches, and they stood back in small gardens with a few trees. When she came towards this end of the street it was quiet; there were no children playing there until suddenly they came running down the road at the sight of a watering-cart. They leapt into the edges of the arching spray and jumped over the water which began to criss-cross down the gutters, trickling dust-coated to the drains.