Angel (32 page)

“Of course, at one time of the year, but I can't recall which it is, they come out of their holes and fly about,” said Nora. “If one could catch them then. . . .”

“Fly?” cried Lady Baines. “And how, pray, my dear Nora, can worms fly?”

“I think they are really beetles, you know.”

The carrot flan was finished, but the argument continued in the most tiresome way. Yet was it worms and beetles that they were really bothered about? wondered Theo. Nora was growing quite shrill and kept glancing at Angel; seemed to be saying: “There are some things your clever friend
doesn't
know.” Lady Baines was deliberately calm, as if she could afford to be so, being in the right.

“I will settle it once and for all,” Angel said, and she threw down her napkin and got up. “There is Esmé's insect-book somewhere.”

The library had few books. At the dark end of the room there were some shelves behind glass. When she opened the doors, mustiness was released, a smell like stale potpourri.

“I am sure I read . . . don't
you
agree with me, Theo?” Nora asked, nervous now at the thought of being faced with proof, the printed word. Which way would it go? She had been quite positive that she was right, but as soon as Angel took the book from the shelf, doubts disturbed her. Had she been thinking of something else all the time?

“We shall soon see,” Lady Baines said soothingly. She lifted a hand gently and turned towards Angel.

A piece of paper, an old letter, had fluttered from the pages of the book, and Angel stooped and picked it up. The glass door of the bookcase swung open too wide; she closed it and began to read the letter. Theo looked at her. They were turned towards her, expectantly: Nora, with the tips of her fingers on the edge of the table, leaning forward anxiously; Lady Baines's hand slowly sinking as her pose changed from that of calm to one of concern.

Angel then folded the paper and put it in her pocket. She came back to the table, gave the book to Nora, and sat down. She was still and steady: by being frozen with shock was able to keep erect; but her bearing was precarious: movement or any warmth might loosen her, and collapse was only held off, not an impossibility.

“But this is only about
moths,”
said Nora, ruffling the pages of the book. At the sound of her voice, Angel's eyelids dropped and then rose, but she made no other movement.

“Is something wrong?” asked Lady Baines. No one answered her. When Bessie brought the coffee, Angel poured it out. Her hands were steady, Theo noticed; but some dreadful destruction within her had become apparent on her face, and her eyes were surrounded by darkness; he could see a raised vein pulsing on her forehead. They were all caught in the silence, though one after the other made feeble efforts to break it.

Even disastrous news could not rouse her. Nora was called to the telephone and came back wringing her hands, but with a bright smile on her face. “He is rallying,” she said. “Mrs Warren says that he opened one eye and seemed to be looking at her.”

“Ah, yes,” said Angel. From time to time she coughed her shattering cough, but when she recovered she was silent and still again.

As soon as Lady Baines put down her coffee-cup and began to look round for her gloves, Angel rose to speed her on her way. Theo and Nora were left in the library. Nora took up the book from the table, blew some dust off it and tiptoed across the room to the bookcase. They waited anxiously, listening to the hiccoughing noises as the old car was started up. Long after it had gone, the sound of it came back faintly now and again as it turned a curve of the drive: they waited for Angel's footsteps across the hall; but she did not come. She was out there on the terrace, re-reading the letter, Theo guessed.

“If it was anything . . .” he began to tell Nora and then stopped, thinking he heard Angel at last returning. Walking slowly and stiffly, as if she were asleep, she came to Nora and gave her the letter.

“That is where your foolish chatter about worms and beetles led me,” she said. Although her voice was harsh, it was a relief to them to hear it again. Nora, reading, looked frightened: then it was Theo's turn; Angel nodded towards him and Nora passed the letter over. It looked a lost, pathetic thing, like all old letters; the moment it had matched had gone so long ago. One edge, which had obtruded from the book, was brown; damp had faded the ink; the paper was seamed, as if it had once been crushed up in anger and then smoothed out again.

Theo read:

“Dearest Esmé,

“You will be surprised to hear that I am married. I hope you will forgive me for breaking my promise, but it was one you had no right to ask me to make. We could never have been together again and I have come to realise this lately, not hearing from you. I know how weak you are, too weak to take one single step forward, or away. You must not blame me now for taking a step myself. There is so much of life for me to live and I must do the best I can and in my own way and who knows may be happy in the end, though never I know in the way we were happy together on that last leave.

“My husband does not know of your existence. It is better to start afresh and forget, so I am sending no address and you will understand that you must not try to write. I . . .” but here a tear, perhaps, or just the damp, had obliterated the rest of the sentence, and there was only the name ‘Laura' and a scribbled postscript: “Please destroy this.”

If only he had! Theo thought, feeling tired and unable to decide how to behave. It was necessary for him to say something, but he could not sort out words in any useful order. He could see a picture instead: Esmé and the girl in the grey velvet hat. The long-ago betrayal set against the tea-time sounds of cup against saucer, laughter, social voices. He had forgotten, for so much had happened since, so much that had mattered to him more. After Esmé's death the betrayal had seemed to become a fainter threat, and then gone out of his head altogether.

“He didn't ever
have
leave,” Angel said desperately.

Nora ducked her head and brought her necklace up over her chin in a nervous movement: the string broke and jet beads scattered into her lap and rolled across the floor. Eagerly, and in spite of the pain from her swollen foot, she went down on her knees to gather them up, glad of something to do.

“
Did
he have leave?” Angel asked. “Did he, without telling me? Then he came home after all; he told lies to me and
pretended
that he was so badly treated and that they couldn't spare him? And came back to England, to someone else.
Did
he?” She suddenly shouted at Nora who, now on all fours, looked up in terror.

Oh, please, good Lord, Theo began to pray.

“No,” said Nora, seeming to repeat a lesson she had off by heart. “No, of course not. So untrue.” She shook her head vigorously.

“Then what?” Angel sank down into a chair and began tremblingly to cry. “I can't ask him,” she sobbed. “He can't explain to me.”

“But he
could
explain,” Theo said. “Something simple and reassuring it would be, I've no doubt. Leave he did not have.”

“Certainly not,” said Nora.

“There are the
words
,” said Angel.

“If we can read them,” Theo said. “Such a cramped-up, sway-back, illiterate hand, and the ink all faded away.”

“But ‘leave' it says.”

“I think this is some old letter from before the time of your knowing Esmé.” Theo could be grateful that the letter was undated—if not for much else. “You mustn't begin to grieve now about Esmé's wild oats. It is so long ago, and not concerned with you at all.”

He looked very knowing when he spoke of wild oats, though he had never sown any himself. “Would Esmé have kept such a letter for a moment if it could have been what you suggest?”

“I can't ask him: I can't ask him what it means.”

“I don't suppose you ever remember him opening that book in all the time you were married.”

“I am sure that he did not,” said Nora. She dropped a handful of beads into a glass goblet on the chimney-piece.

“He was always interested in moths,” said Angel.

“Oh, when he was a boy; yes,” Nora agreed.

“But it says ‘leave'. You can't explain that away. That last leave, those are the words. So there was more than one, then?” Her voice rose waveringly to a shriek.

“Esmé never had leave,” Theo said quietly. “So there is a mystery here.”

“How could you know if he did or didn't?”

“Yes, I could know,” Theo insisted. He covered his eyes with his hand and tried to think. “I am the one who
would
know; but it is so long ago and my memory plays tricks on me. But that I put in a word for him, I do recall—his C.O. was some vague relation of Hermione's, I believe. Oh, I didn't do it for Esmé's sake, so much as for yours. I knew what you suffered from that separation.”

“Why didn't you tell me this?” Angel looked suspicious, but expectant, too, as if she were ready to believe that he could rescue her.

“I waited for the reply to come: when it did, I was disappointed; said nothing; soon forgot the matter.”

Nora was staring at him with her mouth half-open, and he tried to shake this expression of disbelief off her face by pretending to see another bead under her chair.

“Then why does it say ‘leave', if there was no such thing?” Angel had clutched at the straw he had offered and was going to use it if she could to rebuild the fortress; but as she backed away from the truth she felt compelled to repeat that question over and over, like a child saying ‘good night, good night,' fearfully mounting a dark staircase, staving off peril with words.

“What it said I couldn't tell from such blotted and faded handwriting,” said Theo. “From what I know to be true, though—of the facts of the case as I remember them, of Esmé himself, his character, his love of you—I am sure that it must be another word altogether.”

“It looks like another word to me, certainly,” Nora said without thinking.

“Well, shall I throw the letter away?” Theo asked. “You can soon forget it. Your memory of Esmé will answer it; if he cannot himself.”

“Yes,” Angel said. “Thank you, Theo,” she added.

Does she believe me or not? he wondered. If she did not just yet, in time she would. He tossed the letter on to the fire, as Esmé should have done many years ago. When he did so, Angel looked away.

Wretched, feckless ghost, Theo was thinking irritably of Esmé. With his half-kept secrets; though he must long ago have become dust, he still had the power to destroy her. There was not much else left of him for anyone to remember—his half finished memorial up on the hill, the small collection of his paintings in that morgue-like studio, and Angel's love, as crazed and persistent as ever it had been. But it is as much as is left of anyone of us after so long, he decided. Perhaps a great deal more. As we grow older, we are already dying; our hold on life lessens; there are fewer to mourn us or keep us in mind. I am on my way already and taking the last of Hermione with me as I go. He was utterly depressed.

The blackened paper on the fire arched up and fluttered, with a frail, tinny sound, in a sudden draught from the chimney.

“Another half-an-hour and we can have a cup of tea,” Nora said. “And now here's Silky Boy, Angel, come to cheer you up.”

The Abyssinian cat stalked indifferently past Angel and made for Theo, whose knee he leapt upon, dough-punching in an hysterical way and drawing loops of thread out of his tweed trousers.

The afternoon went tediously by, with Nora fussing and Angel pre-occupied. Just to drink a cup of tea broke into the boredom wonderfully. Then that was done and there was only dinner to hope for. Angel was beginning to accept what Theo had told her: how, he could only marvel at. But he could see that there were moments when the facts, as they seemed indisputably to be, leapt at her: the truth took her by the throat; then her hand would fly up to her cheek and her eyes stare. Her suffering at such moments was too sharp to be endured: she could not live with such a kind of truth. With Theo's help and Nora's acquiescence she had begun, oysterlike, to coat over, to conceal what could not be borne as it was. The letter was not mentioned again.

The next day Theo went home. He was glad to go. He had done what he could for her. He was never to see her again.

To Lady Baines it seemed that Angel was deteriorating along with her dwindling fortune, but it was a decline of which Angel herself was quite oblivious. She was not so much living in the past as investing the present with what the past had had. To herself, she was still the greatest novelist of her day, and not the first in history to receive less homage than was her due. No one bought her books, and only the middle-aged or elderly had ever read them: she did not know that she was now a legend of which the young had only vaguely heard; risqué, their grandparents, in quaint fashion, said her novels were. The young were not tempted, for such démodé naughtiness does not attract. Lady Baines herself, no great reader, could remember hiding
The Lady Irania
beneath her pillow and being much taken up by the characters in it; they were large enough to satisfy her love of life and her liveliness, though they were bold, absurd and over-serious: her friends in Boston, and later in the Home Counties, were not.

When she met Angel for the first time she had noted the same qualities in her and found that they amounted to eccentricity. Whatever else had happened to Angel, she was still as bold and serious and absurd as ever she had been, but, unwillingly, Lady Baines began to be aware of pathos, too. She was not a subtle woman, and perhaps it was poverty that underlined for her that pitiableness in Angel which only Theo, and once or twice Esmé (who had tried to shut his eyes to it), had ever seen.

To Lady Baines, Paradise House in decay had none of the romantic appeal that it had for Clive Fennelly. Her own house was full of respectful servants, the garden neat with clipped hedges, bedded-out plants and raked and weeded gravel. She thought that Marvell, so insolent and dirty, should long ago have been pensioned off. Angel, though as arrogant as ever, seemed to be drifting into indolent ways, dreaming away her time, hunched over the fire in some tattered old gown, her hair half-pinned up, her eyes hooded by drooping lids. Sometimes, when she was not alone, she seemed to withdraw herself from a conversation, and her lips would move as if to some soundless monologue of her own. When she spoke, as often as not it was an irrelevant remark breaking in upon Nora's polite small-talk; it would seem to come from nowhere and to be unanswerable, yet she expected her train of thought to have been followed. Sometimes she would give way without inhibition to violent and noisy coughing. Nora, wincing, would say reprovingly, “Oughtn't you to
take
something?” meaning, “Oughtn't you to try to stifle it; or go out of the room?” Angel ignored her.