Angel (8 page)

This hateful town! thought Angel. She sat down on a seat and closed her eyes. The boys stared at her curiously, and one of them tapped his forehead and winked at the others as they went away.

She sat there alone, and the statue towering above her slowly darkened against the sky, became a menacing black shape, striding above the tops of the shrubbery trees. She faced and suffered her solitariness; braved out the agony of longing she now felt for someone to be sitting beside her to whom she could communicate her bitter loneliness. This desire for compassion was so overwhelming that her heart seemed to contract. She held her breath for seconds together and tightened her lips. When she heard someone coming towards her, she looked up and found the sky was dark. A park attendant came into the shrubbery, shouting. “All out, now! All out!” Angel stood up hurriedly and as she brushed past him, he said “Are you all right, Miss?” For she looked ill, he thought, or in some trouble; or both. But she did not answer him. She almost ran towards the Park gates, as if she could fly away from what she had suffered there, leave it up there, the pathos of her solitariness, with the lion and the dusty evergreens and the dark sky.

In the weeks that followed, her fortitude returned. Aunt Lottie came as usual and directed her remarks at Angel rather than to her. Angel continued with the writing in which nobody but herself believed.

In the early summer, a letter came from Gilbright & Brace. When she had read it, she had a delightful sensation of being lifted up, of rising towards the ceiling; her body seemed to have become as light as air; bliss flowed through her veins. She handed the letter to her mother, who read it through twice, looking suspicious at first, then bewildered.

“They want to print it?” she asked.

Angel nodded.

“What does it mean, thirty pounds?”

“What it says. That is what they will pay me in advance.”

“Are you sure? Thirty pounds! Oh, I wish I had your Dad here to advise me. I wish there was somewhere to turn for advice. I could ask the doctor, I daresay, or Mr Phippin at the Chapel. Don't you go and sign anything, Angel; not till we've asked. Goodness knows what trickery they may be up to. I can't help thinking it's you that's meant to pay, and where do they think I'm to lay hands on thirty pounds?”

“
They
mean to pay,” said Angel quite gently. “There's nothing to fuss about, mother.”

She put the letter in her pocket, but kept her fingers on it. She stood looking out of the window. The ugly street below was golden with sunshine and full of gay sounds.

“It's a beautiful name for any book—‘The Lady Irania,'” said Mrs Deverell. “Oh, I don't know what to think. I feel quite flustered and put out. How can I explain it to people? What are they all going to think? And if you go to London, like he says, how am I to leave the shop to go with you?”

“You won't,” said Angel. “I shall go alone.”

Gilbright & Brace had been divided, as their readers' reports had been. Willie Brace had worn his guts thin with laughing, he said.
The Lady Irania
was his favourite party-piece and he mocked at his partner's defence of it in his own version of Angel's language.

“Kindly raise your coruscating beard from those iridescent pages of shimmering tosh and permit your mordant thoughts to dwell for one mordant moment on us perishing in the coruscating workhouse, which is where we shall without a doubt find ourselves, among the so-called denizens of deep-fraught penury. Ask yourself—nay, go so far as to enquire of yourself—how do we stand by such brilliant balderdash and
live,
nay, not only live, but exist too. . . .”

“You overdo these ‘nays',” said Theo Gilbright. “
She
does not.”

“There's a ‘nay' on every page. M'wife counted them. She took the even pages, I the odd. We were to pay a shilling to the other for each of our pages where there wasn't one, and not a piece of silver changed hands from first to last.”

“So Elspeth read it, too?”

“Read it? She devoured and gobbled every iridescent word.”

“So will other women.”

“I should hope more reverently.”

“Perhaps that too. I feel an extraordinary power behind it all, so that I wonder if it is genius or lunacy. I was quite fascinated.”

“And so was I. Especially at the way they treated the champagne.”

“She isn't the first writer to have it opened with a corkscrew and she may not be the last. What does that matter?”

“All those butlers, too! Well, you back your fancy, Theo. Also deal with her when she comes. Elspeth and I imagine an auburn transformation and a moleskin cape smelling of camphor, a neat little moustache and a Gladstone bag stuffed full of translucent manuscripts. More and more Lady Iranias. The Irania Class we can call them, like ocean liners. All I ask you to do is to have her tone it down. The card-playing scene may well land us in trouble. Some of these old ladies don't know how inflammatory their writing is. It is too much to hope that she will be inflammatory herself. Angelica Deverell is too good a name to be true.”

“The address is puzzling—Volunteer Street; and Norley is a dreary old town.”

“Some old lady, as I say, romanticising behind lace-curtains.”

“It even sounds rather sordid.”

“She may be an old man. It would be an amusing variation. You are expecting to meet Mary Ann Evans and in walks George Eliot twirling his moustache.”

Yet nothing Willie Brace could guess or invent was half as astonishing to them as Angel herself when she was shown in one afternoon. The partners were sitting waiting for her in Theo's office, but Willie went out as soon as he had shaken hands. He dared not glance at Theo, and outside on the landing he steadied himself for a moment, clutching the rail of the banisters in an agonising spasm of stifled laughter.

Theo was glad to be left alone with Angel as she sat down on the edge of her chair and glanced severely about the room. She was late for her appointment, for she had been lost in London. Paddington Station had been complete confusion to her, and when she had reached Bloomsbury, with so many pauses to study the street-map she had bought, she seemed to have hurried from one square to another, like someone in a nightmare, and then all round this last square looking for the right number.

Theo saw her pale face glistening, guessed that she had been late and anxious, imagined her walking too quickly through the hot streets. Her boots were dusty and her hair untidy. He often noticed that people visiting London invariably got themselves covered with smuts which Londoners managed to escape.

He rang for some tea, giving her time to get back her breath and look about her. Then he said: “Don't think me impertinent, but I really expected someone a good deal older.”

“Do you mean that now you won't publish my story?”

“No, of course, my remark had nothing to do with that.”

“What
had
it to do with?” Angel asked suspiciously.

“A publisher is bound to make conjectures about an unknown writer's age. It may seem irrelevant to you, but we should be less willing to risk ourselves over a first novel by someone of seventy than we should if it were by someone with years of writing ahead of them. ‘Under or over?' we ask ourselves. That means ‘forty'.”

“Did you think I was over forty, then?”

“We gave up guessing. You might have been a bald-headed old man for all we knew.”

He saw her stiffen. She lifted her chin. He realised that she had great pride and not a trace of humour in her. “‘Man'?” she repeated. “You knew my name. I shouldn't have deceived you.”

I must never be facetious, he thought. He poured out the tea and gave it to her.

“Do you think you will write another novel?”

“Oh, yes. I can let you have another one in a few months.”

“So soon? You must be careful not to tire yourself too quickly, or write yourself out.”

“I should never do that,” she said simply and drank her tea.

“What is the theme of the new book?”

“It is about an actress.”

“Are you interested in the theatre, Miss Deverell?”

“I have never been to one.”

“Then you are a great reader, perhaps?”

“No, I don't read much. I haven't got any books, and nowadays I am always writing.”

“But even so, most authors take some interest in the works of others. Is there no Public Library you could join?”

A little colour came into her cheeks and she said, “I don't think I should want to.”

“Then if I send you some novels, will you read them?”

“What will they be about?” she asked cautiously.

“I can't make a hazard at your tastes, unless you can tell me something you have read and liked.”

“I quite liked Shakespeare,” she admitted. “Except when he is trying to be funny.”

Mr Gilbright got up hastily and walked to the window. He appeared to be deep in meditation as he looked out over the square. “And?” he asked gravely, after a while.

“I liked
The Three Musketeers
, although I have only read bits of it in French when I was at school. And a book about a German baron who kept his wife shut up in a tower, but would never allow her to be seen by any other person. He took her meals to her himself and spent hours brushing her hair.”

“How did it turn out?”

“The book was taken away from me before I reached the end. I had to make up the rest for myself.”

He realised the hunger she had suffered; the deprivations of her wilful, ranging imagination, and said, “I should like to know what you invented.”

“That she died and he lost his reason. He told no one and would not let her be buried. He kept her body locked up in the tower and every day he sat there, brushing her hair. One day a servant followed him there and saw him putting jewels on the corpse's hair and singing a lullaby. When he was made to bury her he leapt blubbering into the grave and stabbed himself.”

“I am thinking how unwise it is to take books away from young people before they have finished reading them,” Mr Gilbright said. “I shall be hard put to it to find you anything as powerful as that when I am looking for a book to send to you. You have an unusual vocabulary for one who reads so little.”

“I never forget a word,” she said simply.

“And the longer they are the better you like them?” he suggested.

“They all have their uses,” she said in a more reserved voice.

He sat down at his desk again, aware that his questions were arousing her suspicion, and shuffled in a business-like way through a folder of papers. “Miss Deverell,” he began, “we should like to publish your book, as I have said, and I hope we shall make a success of it. In a capricious world, no one can be sure. Obviously, there are some suggestions to put forward and some alterations we hope you will make.” He smiled, but felt authority ebbing from him. “That is usual,” he said quickly. “For instance, we cannot have a character called the Duchess of Devonshire as there is one in . . . in everyday life; if a duchess's life could ever be so described. But that can soon be changed. We can easily find a way out of that. Perhaps you have erred on the lavish side. I don't know much about grandeur, and great establishments, but I thought we might cut down and manage with one butler, eh?” His jocularity was coldly received. “May I give you some more tea?”

“No, thank you.”

He studied the papers on the desk, and then taking, as he told himself, the cue from her writing, said robustly, “The game of cards in Chapter Nineteen—the wager that if he, Lord Blane, wins he shall sleep with Irania. . . .”

“I didn't say ‘sleep', I said ‘lie with'.”

“Ah, yes, quite right. I don't know that we shall keep out of trouble with that. It may offend certain sections of the public. We have to be more than careful. There are some risks we cannot take, you know, and a great deal of your writing is more powerful than is generally permitted. I think your description of childbirth might be toned down. It is extremely harrowing. And this,” he glanced at the manuscript lying before him, “this about biting her lips until the blood ran down her throat. Do you think that is possible?”

“Oh, yes,” said Angel.

“Did you mean ‘outside' her throat, or ‘inside'?” he asked nervously.

“Inside.”

“Oh, good! Yes. Well, I expect you see what I mean. I daresay I know more about the reading public than you, and you will take my word that I have an idea as to what will pass among the weakest of them. We publish for them, alas, ‘the bread-and-milk brigade' my partner calls them. They decide. They bring the storms about our ears. For them we veil what is stark and tone down what is colourful and discard a lot that—for ourselves—we would rather keep. So will you take away your manuscript for a while and see what you can do for us?”

“No,” said Angel.

She made her way back to Paddington Station, feeling exhausted and depressed. She would not take a cab as Mr Gilbright had suggested, but pretended that she preferred to walk and enjoy the air. She was worried about money and feeling hungry, and when she came to a dingy little tea-shop she studied the price-list, whitewashed on the window, and went in. The tiled tops of the tables were steamy from cooking that was going on in a back room, and there were alarming sounds of food being thrown into boiling fat. Angel ordered a glass of sarsaparilla and a piece of pastry covered with long shavings of coconut. Two men were sitting at the next table eating faggots and peas. They were wearing bowler hats, though one man took his off for a moment to scratch his head. When Angel, in her usual penetrating voice, asked the waitress if there was a w.c., they laughed aloud. “Certainly not,” said the waitress. She looked prim and indignant, but as Angel left she could be heard joining in the laughter.