Angel (6 page)

“It does seem a pity, what I've just been hearing,” Aunt Lottie said. She was rosy from the cold and she held her hands over the fire for a moment, then straightened herself and began to take the pins out of her sealskin cap. “I can't see anything against your going to school for just one more term. After all, we'll have to pay for it. Then if we could get you a nice job in an office, you'd have all your evenings for writing your stories. It's a shame not to make the most of your education, I think. All that French!” Now she had taken off her hat and was pushing the pins back into it, oblivious of the bitter feelings she was provoking.

Angel waited until her aunt had finished speaking, then, saying nothing herself, closed her book and went out of the room.

Aunt Lottie turned round in surprise and looked at her sister.

“So it's been all the week,” said Mrs Deverell. “I don't know what's come over her.” She sat down where Angel had been sitting and put her hand across her eyes. “If only Ernie were still with me! I never was so worried.”

“It looks very much to me as if madam needs a good box on the ears,” Aunt Lottie said briskly. “You've spoilt her, Emmy. Story-writing! Where's she got that from?”

“When she comes back, don't say any more.”

Mrs Deverell began to lay the table for tea. Twice Eddie called up the stairs that he was busy in the shop and she went down to help him.

The cook from Paradise House had sent some almond tarts, and Aunt Lottie arranged them on a plate.

“I'll call her,” Mrs Deverell said uncertainly. She wondered if the girl would come, or even answer. Perhaps she had locked herself in her bedroom again.

“Tea's ready, Angel!” She tried to keep anxiety from her voice, but her sister could hear it and thought of the piece of her mind she was more than ready to give to her niece.

Angel came in, blinking at the brighter light. She seemed unconcerned, though vague. The three of them stood behind their chairs while Grace was said.

“It's kind of cook,” said Mrs Deverell. She glanced at the almond tarts as she sat down. “They must think a lot of you.”

“Well, it's eighteen years I've been in service there. I sometimes wonder what Madam would do without me,” Aunt Lottie said complacently. “I don't think she could put on her own stockings, nor lay her hands on anything. ‘Where's this? Where's that?' it is from morn till night. Only yesterday she said: ‘We've been together since we were both eighteen.' I sometimes think we're more like sisters. I went on her honeymoon with her. We went to Paradise House together.”

“Do you put her stockings on for her, then?” Angel asked. They were surprised at this unusual interest. The two sisters looked at one another.

“I do,” Aunt Lottie said. “Is there anything so strange in that?”

“Well, it seems strange to
us
,” Mrs Deverell said soothingly. “I don't think I should like to have someone do that for me.”

“What happens on your half-day?” Angel asked. “How does she manage then?”

“She has to make do with ringing for one of the housemaids. I always go in to tidy up when I get back. I take a pride in her clothes and she knows it. ‘Look at this lovely new négligé we've got', she'll say, excited as a child.” Aunt Lottie had turned to her sister, but Angel listened carefully. “I always feel proud of her when she goes down to dinner. Like on her wedding-day. She was a credit to me then. I've never seen gloves on any lady that fit like hers. When she goes to the Opera you'd think they'd grown on her: not a wrinkle anywhere. I glue the tops of them to her arms with a touch of spirit gum. I suppose it's a work of art, which sometimes she hasn't the patience for. Miss Angelica comes in and reads to her when she gets restless.”

“What does she read?” asked Angel.

Aunt Lottie's glance back at her was full of suspicion. “Oh, some book,” she said, wondering what was in the girl's mind.

It will do for Haven Castle, Angel was thinking. Irania, the heroine, lolled on a couch whilst someone like Aunt Lottie put on her stockings: with her gloves glued to her arms, she sat in a box at the Opera. Later, when as a bride she was brought to Haven Castle, her maid followed, carrying a jewel-case. Only death would part them.

After Christmas, the days were of an enervating neutrality. The watery light stayed later each day, hung colourless above the railway-bridge and behind the grey and yellow brick terraces. The deep darkness of winter was over, the muffled cosiness of the foggy afternoons, and now there would be two months or more of biting winds raking the bare branches and this pale light stretching out a minute or two longer each tea-time—as if it were welcome, thought Angel. “Saving the gas,” her mother said.

In the shop trade fell off, and during the long evenings the door-bell scarcely rang. Mrs Deverell removed the cotton-wool snowflakes from the window, wondering why she had bothered with them. Her spirits had risen before Christmas, with so much bonhomie about: now they sank rapidly. There were wholesalers' bills to be paid: left-over Christmas cakes, reduced in price, were stacked at the counter, but no one bought them. More than anything, above all her worries about money, she dreaded having to answer questions about Angel. Incoherently, to different people, she gave different reasons for Angel's having left school, among them—and the most foolish of all—that she needed her help at home. All of her neighbours knew that the girl never appeared in the shop, or made her mother a cup of tea or stirred out-of-doors to do the shopping. She remained consistently out of sight, and this began to give rise to gossip. “Wouldn't you just come to chapel with me?” Mrs Deverell asked.

“No, thank you.”

“If you would only get out for a breath of air. You look so pale.”

“I am always pale.” For a moment, she looked up from her writing and stared in front of her: then smiled.

Perhaps she is going mad, Mrs Deverell thought in a panic. There was her Aunt Ethel who became so queer. To her, no malady was very likely unless there was some other instance of it in the family.

In the past, she and Lottie had been proud of Angel's superior airs: now she was afraid of them. Under their influence, her own strength of character was disintegrating into fussiness and timidity; she was full of feeble suggestions and propitiations; when the strain became too great, she made aggrieved speeches about sacrifices she had made, about the best years of her life and working her fingers to the bone. Angel ignored it all. She went on filling up her six exercise-books with a trance-like devotion. Sometimes, to stretch her limbs, she would walk about the room, stare in the looking-glass and rearrange her hair, which was drawn back from her forehead with a tortoise-shell comb, or go to the window and glance down, almost without seeing, at the unreal people walking on the pavement.

Her mother mentioned her writing only to Lottie. It seemed to her such a strange indulgence, peculiar, suspect. There had never been any of it in the family before; not even on her husband's side where there had been one or two unhinged characters, including the queer Aunt Ethel.

On her sixteenth birthday, Aunt Lottie came to tea. She brought a painted silk handkerchief-sachet and an invitation to Paradise House. There were to be tableaux vivants in aid of charity, with Miss Angelica as a beggar-maid in a most bewitching gown of brown velvet all torn to shreds and patched with crimson satin. Madam had heard so much of Angel, and had said that she might sit with the maids and watch the dress rehearsal. “What a wonderful opportunity,” said Mrs Deverell, looking flustered. She could tell from Angel's expression of disdain that she would not go.

“You could come in with the carrier and be there within the hour,” Aunt Lottie said.

Angel was unsteady with anger and humiliation. To go to Paradise House in such a way! She imagined herself, dressed in her old serge school clothes, all that she had, sitting humbly among the maids, watching that other girl in her velvet rags. Being condescended to by those who thought themselves better, and treated as an equal by those who imagined themselves as good. I shall never go to Paradise House in that way, she thought.

“A wonderful opportunity,” her mother repeated anxiously.

“I don't want to go.” She was wounded and infuriated, almost too wounded to be able to let her thoughts dwell on what had been done to her.

“And why not?” Aunt Lottie asked menacingly.

“I am not interested in their private theatricals. Why should I be?”

“It strikes me you're an ungrateful little hussy.”

“Now, Lottie, give her a chance to explain herself,” Mrs Deverell said.

“There's nothing to explain,” said Angel. “Nothing to explain that either of you could ever understand.”

Will it be like this for ever? her mother wondered. Or might it even go on getting worse, as it has done? Aunt Lottie seemed for the moment quite speechless.

“Well, if no one wants any more tea. . .” Mrs Deverell said quickly and stood up. “For what we have received, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” she added.

At Easter, Angel finished writing her novel. On the day after Easter Monday, she wrapped it up and addressed it to the Oxford University Press, whose address she found in one of her old school books. She waited until Eddie had gone out to collect orders, then, as soon as her mother left the shop for a moment, she ran downstairs with the parcel under her cloak. She took a florin from the till and set out for the post office. Her mother, hearing the door-bell jangling, came hurrying into the shop and saw Angel going down the street.

The air was like crystal, a shock to Angel after so much of being indoors. It was a brisk, blowy morning with some signs of spring. By the railings of the Board School two almond trees were covered with blossom.

An iron bridge went over the canal by the brewery and under it the water slipped by, brown, covered with bubbles, between the walls of warehouses. Angel saw it all with unbelieving eyes, as if she had come back as a stranger after many years and felt amazed that it had altered so little.

In the churchyard by the Butts, the trees were hazed over with green buds, daffodils were almost in flower. The post office faced the churchyard, and when Angel had posted her parcel, she crossed the cobbled square and sat down on an iron seat among the graves.

The reality of the scene and of all she had noticed on her walk that morning had reduced the feverishness she had felt for the past months and had brought her to a state of convalescence. She was afraid, and shrank from the coldness of the iron seat and the sight of the blades of green leaves stabbing the soft and mossy ground, and when the clock in the tower above her began to strike she flinched nervously.

People in deep mourning were coming into the churchyard. They paused outside the porch and whispered shocked words to one another before they entered. Some cabs drew up at the gateway and a woman was helped out of one of them. The wind blew her crêepe veil close against her face so that her white cheeks and the dark hollows of her eyes could be seen. There was a hearse drawn by plumed dark horses. It halted slowly, with a dreadful air of inevitability. It was what you waited for and it has come, the bearers seemed to imply, almost smug in their faultless reverence as they carried the coffin with its pale wreaths and black-edged cards towards the porch where a clergyman was waiting.

Angel stood up and followed it. No one glanced at her as she sat down by a pillar at the back of the church, which was still full of flowers from Easter Sunday, but smelt only of damp stone. For a moment, she wondered why she was there. Even if she had felt a need to renew contact with life, a funeral was a strange way of doing so: and she felt no such need: at sixteen, experience was an unnecessary and usually baffling obstacle to her imagination. This small, stunned congregation was less than life-size to her, and all of that morning she had felt the diminution of her surroundings. Nothing had been stored up for her return to the world: day by day, her environment had frittered itself away and now had a vitiated air.

A great deal of what she encountered irritated her, running contrary to her sensibilities. She had removed herself, romantically, from the evidence of her senses: the reality of what she could learn by touching, tasting, was banished as a trivial annoyance, scored out as irrelevant.

She unhooked a dusty hassock and knelt down as the others did. Her black woollen stockings were thin over her knees, and the hassock was cold. She cupped her face in her hands and closed her eyes, but was not listening to the prayer. I think I came in here because while I am waiting I have nothing to do, she decided. What she awaited was her miraculous deliverance. Her novel was an escape-thread spun out of herself, and so sudden and deep an alarm for its safety pierced her—just as she was rising from her knees—that she felt she must fly from the church and rescue it. What if some postman should guess its contents and from malignance throw it into the canal! Or if the train to Oxford collided with another in some tunnel and broke into flames!

At this moment, the coffin was hoisted from its trestle and carried down the church. Angel was the last to leave, and when she came out into the open, the hearse was gone; to the new cemetery on the outskirts of the town, she supposed. The slight disappointment allayed some of her agitation. She gave a threatening look at the post office and began to walk towards home. It might take two days, she supposed (but at
most
, she could not help adding), for the novel to reach Oxford; then she must allow another three days for the publisher to read it, which he could easily do, if he sat up late at night; and another two days (at most) for his reply to reach her. It would be a long week, with a long, long Sunday in it. She knew of only one escape from her boredom, and when she came to a stationery shop she went in and bought an exercise book with the last of her money.