Angel (26 page)

“I'm not upset, but I don't want to discuss it. As you say, she was mad.”

“I shouldn't go there again, or to any of them. The ingratitude!”

“There won't be any more time now.”

She closed her eyes for a moment and then, as if this had served to turn her mind to something different, said: “I think I shall go to bed.”

“Yes, have a rest before dinner, then you will feel quite different again.”

“I mean that I shall go to bed to stay.”

“You have tired yourself out. Shall I send up a tray?”

Already on her way upstairs, Angel began to take the pins out of her hair, and loop after loop dropped to her shoulders. “I am going to bed to finish my novel,” she said. “I won't get up again until it's done. I will have my meals up there and no one need interrupt me.”

“But Lady Baines is coming to tea tomorrow.”

“You can tell her that I am ill. Say anything you like.”

“I don't understand.
Are
you ill?”

“No. It is a vow I have made to myself. I will stay there until I have written the last word.”

Nora stood at the bottom of the stairs, her hands clasped anxiously.

“But why this sudden hurry? Surely you could wait until Lady Baines has been?”

“No. Every hour matters now. I need the money,” Angel said. She was at the turn of the stairs. Her hands were full of hair-pins and the long black hair hung down to her waist.

It is Esmé, Nora thought. She was half-tempted to ask questions, but before she could sort out her words in their most tactful order, Angel had reached the landing and could not have heard.

Two of the cats leapt up the stairs after her, another squatted down in a dark corner of the hall. Nora clapped her hands at it and shooed it out on to the terrace. She felt suddenly braced and energetic, and with her thoughts on meals, on light but nourishing food—beef tea and fish soufflé came at once to her mind—she hurried through the baize door for a word or two with Bessie.

Day after day, Angel sat up in bed writing. The cats were glad. They liked to have someone in a warm bed where they themselves could lie about and doze. When Esmé went in, as he was sometimes compelled by guilt to do, a dozen pairs of golden eyes would be turned towards him, would blink contemptuously and then close again. Angel would blink, too, but keep her unfocused gaze upon him, her eyes questioning him, as if her tongue were tied, her thoughts elsewhere.

The wet weather trailed away, the sky lifted and dazzling sun poured over the dripping garden. Steam rose from the woods and the heavy silence the rain had imposed on living things was at an end: birds came out to the tips of the branches and began to stake their claims again; rooks woke early, clamorous above the chimney-pots, and there was a stirring in the undergrowth, movement once more, as mice, shrews, rabbits began to emerge; the grass was full of insects and, as soon as Angel's bedroom lights were put on in the evening, moths flung themselves against the window-panes. Rain was shaken from fur and feathers, the boughs dripped until they were dry. Then the heat became settled. It seemed unlikely that it would ever rain again. People in the cottages began to grumble about their vegetable gardens and worry about the water in the wells.

The weather passed Angel by. She was writing about St Petersburg, about fur-swathed figures driving in troikas through the endless snow. The Russian revolution had filled her imagination with the most lively pictures of captivating luxury and arrogance set against a background of vast pine-forests with wolves, and country estates with colourful serfs; cossacks, tuberculous students; music, chandeliers, intrigues, adultery: great tragedy, too, for the beautiful and proud—this, her favourite theme.

When the sun poured too strongly into her bedroom, she wiped her forehead with the sheet—without disturbing the cats—and went on writing. She remembered that in this way she had written so much of her first novel, translating herself, as its heroine, to the Paradise House of her imagination. Now she was a famous writer, living in Paradise House itself and, if not rich any longer, she had at least spent a great deal in the past and still had the means within herself of earning more. She recollected with distaste and pity the girl she had been, and thought with relief of how her life had changed. Beyond all this—the unimaginable good fortune—she had Esmé. Even her day-dreams of the past had not envisaged
him
for herself, although she had invented him, or someone much akin to him, in one book after another. I have everything, she would think, not in gratitude, but in profound wonderment and content.

Esmé took her letters to her one morning. There were still plenty from her admirers; every morning came some from people to whom her books had been a turning-point in their lives, an inspiration or a solace in grief. She read these letters several times and always answered them, with a vague graciousness, in her sprawling handwriting, in violet ink. She imagined such letters going their way, the recipients thunderstruck, felled by gratitude and surprise: they would be passed round and boasted about and handed down as heirlooms. Occasionally, she received the other kind. Clergymen objected to her views. She was accused of corrupting the young. These letters gave her a sense of power and she enjoyed reading them; she could perfectly understand that clergymen would be provoked, and she did not write for children. Letters which merely made carping criticisms, about flowers coming out in the wrong season, Orion appearing in the night sky in August, or some confusions with Greek deities, she put down as the work of literary critics, a part of their general scheme against her.

She laid aside her writing and opened the first of her letters, and the usual look of pleasure brightened her face. “Here is a dear old man,” she said. “At times, he writes, my books have rescued him from despair, lifted him to a higher sphere. . .” she peered short-sightedly at the letter. . . . “Yes, ‘higher sphere' I think it is . . . how kind of him to write. And what an educated hand-writing.” She passed it over to Esmé, full of confidence, and took up another. “Dear Madam,” she read, “Since you can only describe what you write of from your own experiences, we must deduce from this fact that you are nothing but a common whore. Please keep your excesses to yourself and spare yours in disgust, Lover of Literature.”

Esmé looked up quickly at the sudden stillness. She read the letter through again and began to tremble: her eyes burned and blazed. “Lover of literature!” she gasped. “Lover of scurrilous slander.”

“Let me see,” he said gently.

While he was reading the letter, she tried to calm herself, to fight down nausea. Then she heard him laughing, softly at first and then he flung back his head and laughed as he had not done for years. She looked at him in amazement which changed to cold disdain.

“So you don't care what is said of me?” she asked when he had finished. “It doesn't matter what is written—the most slanderous, defamatory thing about my personal character?”

“It isn't to be taken seriously,” he said hurriedly.

“It wasn't written as a joke; you must see that.”

“You aren't upset about it, surely?”

“I feel very sick,” she said and her eyes filled with tears.

“My dear Angel, you must learn to be above such a petty thing. It was scrawled by a lunatic when the moon was full. Who else would sit down and take such trouble?”

“I still feel sick,” she insisted. Then more calmly, she added: “Yes, he must be mad.”

“He or she.”

She looked again carefully at the letter, then at the postmark. London E.C.4 meant nothing to her. “Such illiteracy: do you see the handwriting? The excruciating composition, and the nasty little piece of paper. Oh, but all the same I am upset now. I feel that I can't start my day's work. I am tired already.”

“Get up and come out into the garden. You can work there under the trees or on the terrace. Don't waste the sunshine.”

“No, I shan't work so hard or so fast as I shall if I stay here. I should waste time by dressing myself and I can eat my lunch more quickly on my own up here. And I have vowed to myself, too.”

Every pathetic word alienated him. He grew sulky again with guilt and no longer cared if he comforted her or not.

“I will read the other letters another time,” she said quietly, putting them on one side. “Will you burn this loathsome one? We will try to forget it.”

He went up later in the day and she seemed cheerful again. Manuscript lay all over her luncheon-tray; the cats slept on some of the pages. The sun beat into the room. She had taken off her nightgown, her black hair was thrust back from her glistening shoulders and her face was damp with sweat. He sat down in a chair by the window and watched her.

“Am I interrupting you? Tell me to go away if I am.”

“No, no.” She shook her head and went on writing. The blue-black hair lay against her cream-coloured arms; the skin under her armpits was a deeper colour, of a shade near apricot. With his eyes half-closed he tried to set limits to the picture he saw, as if he were going to paint her as she sat upright among the tumbled bedclothes and the crumpled pillows. The raven hair was a wonderful contrast to the gradations of white through cream to warm yellow. He studied the textures of the linen with its grey shadows and her skin with its golden lights. He sat and considered her, trying to see her afresh, wondering what she was like, as he had often wondered when they were first acquainted. Since their marriage, she had become nothing better than a constant irritation: he overlooked her courage, her loyalty to him. In the trenches during the war, she had not seemed a real person to him, symbolising home and warmth and comfort, as wives did to other men. He never spoke of her and few of his fellow-officers knew that he was married. When his time for leave had come, he could not return to her, to what he now thought of as a barren conflict. Once I get back here, to France again, he had told himself, I shall never see another leave. He was hopeless about the future of the war and had only lived from day to day longing for this precious respite from the rain and the rats and lice, the flat, sodden landscape with its splintered poplars and ruined churches, its noise and his fear of it. It was intolerable to think of spending the few good days, the last of his life as he saw them then, at Paradise House with Angel. He had married her when he was in despair, had had nothing to give her and never would have, certainly not love, and he begrudged her, knowing well how she was suffering, his few days away from the war.

I could have spared her those, he now thought. It was a thing I once had to offer. And the chief reason why I cannot feel affection for her now is that I behaved basely to her then.

Nora opened the door. She had come up to collect the tray. She liked to do this herself because she missed Angel's company, especially at meals, which she and Esmé ate in silence. Today, she thought it a good thing that she had come herself. “Angel! Where
is
your nightgown? You mustn't sit there naked, however hot it is. What if Bessie had come up to fetch the tray?”

She was miserably put out at the sight of Angel's nakedness and Esmé's presence. This was part of the life under that roof which she chose to ignore. She stacked the pages of manuscript neatly and picked up the tray. “Please, Angel!” she said. “Do remember what I have said. It is wrong to embarrass servants.”

“Oh, fiddlesticks,” Angel murmured when she had gone. “What is she chattering about?” She shook her damp hair back from her shoulders.

“Couldn't you have the blind half-drawn if you are so hot?” Esmé suggested.

“No, I couldn't see.”

She looked at him for a moment with an expression of fear. “My eyes are much worse,” she said. “I have to write so large and look so close to see, but even then they burn and ache and keep misting over.” She covered them for a moment with her hands. Trying to be kind to her, he went over to the bed, took her hand from her eyes and looked at her. “Suppose I were to go blind. . .” she began. “What would happen to us?”

“Such lovely green eyes,” he said, refusing to be drawn into her anxiety. Then he said lightly: “And why should you expect to see with them as well?”

She smiled, but she knew the truth—that the compliment was only what he paid to escape being troubled. One more worry I must keep to myself, she thought.

She finished her novel before the end of September. It was early evening when she wrote the last word, and she at once got out of bed and began to dress herself. Her legs were weak from having rested so long and she felt stifled and uncomfortable in her clothes. One or two cats took over the warm place she had left in the bed and she gathered up the scattered papers out of their way. She felt a reluctance to leave this room and face the strangeness of downstairs again. When she was half dressed she went to a window and leant out. It was a cool and colourless evening. One of the peacocks dragged itself along the terrace, looking sick to death. She was unlucky in her pets, she often said; though Esmé felt it was the pets themselves who were unlucky.

The parrot had died; the marmoset long ago had caught pneumonia and perished, with agonies of shivering and teeth-chattering and little pleading noises; Sultan had his grand memorial over at Alderhurst; various cats had simply disappeared; she had tramped the woods calling for them, but they would never be seen again. Now this peacock seemed unable to support itself upon its legs. As she leant out of the window watching it as it trailed feebly about below, she heard two shots from the distant woods a long way away; in the still evening she heard their echo running round the valley. The sound emphasised the stillness. No one seemed about. She wondered where Nora and Esmé were, and, feeling suddenly as if she had been deserted when she most needed company, she hurried to finish dressing. The end of her work, to which she had advanced so determinedly, so eagerly, came with a sense of anti-climax. She had emerged from it at last, to a perfectly dull evening with nothing exceptional in the least likely to happen, no fanfare of trumpets, not a glass lifted in salutation, or even any sensation within herself other than tiredness and a certain shrinking from the world.