Angel (10 page)

“That terrible meal! The silences! You didn't help much, truly, Theo. And when I rushed in with silly, harmless questions, I was simply rebuffed. Did she think I really cared if she were ever in Italy or liked Browning? I was made to feel that I had been impertinent. Had I?”

She was sitting at her dressing-table, beginning to take her hair down. He came and stood behind her and took the pins out for her. She dropped her hands into her lap and sat looking at him reflected in the looking-glass, his grave, kind face, the untidy red beard and hair: he was a broad, clumsily-built man and she waited patiently while he fumbled with the hair-pins: when he stooped to pick up those he dropped he breathed heavily, for he was getting enormously fat in middle-age. She teased him and he smiled. Her hair came down coil by coil, and when it was all unpinned he began to brush it.

“Are there any?” she asked.

“Any what?” But he knew, for she asked the same question every night.

“Grey hairs.”

“None.” There were a few, but she could not have seen them herself.

“
Did
I ask questions at dinner that I shouldn't have?”

“I don't think so. She is abnormally touchy.”

“Tremendous offence taken at almost everything I said. And yet it is all right for her to ask you if my pearls are real. While I am sitting in the room and supposed to be playing the piano for her entertainment.”

“Don't be cross. It did no harm.”

“But why does she think that she may behave in that way? No wonder that she writes like a servant-girl! What can her background be? Where does she come from? From what conceivable kind of home?”

“I don't know.”

He kissed the top of her head and moved away. She could no longer see him in the looking-glass.

“Are you protecting her from me?” she asked suspiciously and, when he did not reply, she lost her temper again. “Oh, Willie is right,” she cried. “You will make a laughing-stock of yourself. How can you have such blindness in you, such delusions? A gold-mine, indeed! A rude, unpromising, grotesque gold-mine, if ever there was one.”

From the shadows he said gently: “Please hush, my dear! Don't let yourself be angry over such a pathetic young person. I shall send you off to feed your canaries again.”

Her indignation would not give way to amusement. She said: “You know I never try to interfere in your business affairs, but I can't help regretting your name being associated with such freakish nonsense and knowing that people will laugh at you.”

She had braided one side of her hair and now began on the other. To her astonishment, she found that her hands were trembling. In her thoughts about Angel she knew that ‘distaste for' had become ‘dislike of'. She wanted the book to fail.

“In all my life,” Aunt Lottie told her sister, “I was never so disgraced. Nor ever saw Madam so angry. When I looked out of one of the windows and saw that book lying on a seat down on the terrace, my heart turned right over.” She pressed her hand to her breast in case the same thing should happen again. Her sister poured out some more tea for her. This story was being told for the second time, and although in its repetition it lacked suspense it was filled in more richly with detail. The first version had been a stark explosion, beginning with “That girl of yours!”

Sometimes, when she was alone with her sister, her manners lost some of their Paradise House daintiness, and now she had both elbows on the table and both hands to her cup of tea which she was blowing to cool. “Last Monday—no, I'm telling a lie: it was Tuesday, of course, because the dressmaker was there. Miss Angelica had come up from the garden for a fitting of the crushed-strawberry nun's-veiling and had left the book on one of the seats. That's silly, I remember thinking, because it was clouding over for rain. Then I thought the book seemed familiar and I realised what it was. Oh, dear, my legs might have been jelly. Well, after that, I suppose Madam must have come along the terrace and picked it up. I didn't see, because the dressmaker called for me to talk about altering the bronze silk. The sewing-room is in a lobby off the landing, and there I was standing by Madam's dummy, handing pins to Miss Toogood, with the door ajar, when I saw Madam herself coming up the stairs holding the book between finger and thumb as if it was poison-ivy.” Aunt Lottie demonstrated this, with a slice of bread-and-butter. “She went into Miss Angelica's room, and I excused myself from Miss Toogood and went quietly along the landing. I heard Miss Angelica say: ‘But, Mamma, all of my friends are reading it.' Then Madam said: ‘I shall ask Palmer to put it on the kitchen-range. I hope I have said enough and can trust your good taste in the future.' I thought she was coming out of the room then, so I went back to Miss Toogood. ‘You look queer,' she said. ‘I have these giddy spells,' I told her and she let it go at that, barring advising some iron pills. I don't know how I got through that day, but nothing was mentioned until Madam was dressing for dinner, then she put on one of her funny little smiles. ‘Oh,' she said, ‘what an odd coincidence it is,' she said, ‘that this new authoress who has caused such a sensation has the very same name as your niece.' My face flamed up. I could see it in the mirror. ‘Perhaps you've heard of her,' she said; then she said: ‘
Have
you heard of her?' I couldn't answer, only to say: ‘Oh dear, oh dear, madam.' ‘So there
is
a connection?' she asked. ‘I would rather have seen her dead at my feet,' I said. I couldn't help the tears falling.”

Mrs Deverell looked uneasy, but sympathetic. “What did she say to that?”

“She asked our Angel's age, and when I said ‘seventeen' she just shook her head. Then she laughed, but not a nice laugh, and she said: ‘And to think that I once considered her as a maid for Miss Angelica! Well, I can't lay blame on you for your relations and I shan't do so. It is an unsavoury book and we will just forget it. There will be no need for you to mention it, or your niece, in this house.'”

“Whatever would Ernie say to all this?” Mrs Deverell moaned.

“
His
side has something to answer for,” said Aunt Lottie. “No one can point to anything on
our
side, that's one thing.”

“But Ernie would have been just as upset as us. He was such a good, quiet man and never caused any trouble to anyone.”

“There was his sister Ethel. Have you forgotten how she used to carry on? Burning incense and flying into tantrums and wearing those outlandish clothes.”

“We just used to put it down to her never marrying,” said Mrs Deverell tactlessly. “And
she
was religious right up to the time when they had to take her away; but wild horses wouldn't drag Angel inside the Chapel nowadays. I don't see any likeness.”

“Too much; or too little; both are as bad where religion is concerned.”

“Perhaps Angel's a real clever girl, after all, and we don't understand,” her mother said wistfully.

“You could be excused for thinking so, in your position, I daresay; but there's no doubt, Emmy, she has brought us all down, and stopped she must be from dragging us still farther.”

“She's at it now. In her bedroom, writing.”

“It makes me shudder to think what's coming from her pen. You must tell her you won't have it—that it's got to be put a stop to.”

“I can't,” said Mrs Deverell hopelessly.

“Emmy!” Aunt Lottie lowered her voice and her cheeks flushed. “Tell me, where did she find out all that . . . you know . . . the facts of life.”

“Certainly not from me,” said Mrs Deverell proudly.

Angel came in and sat down at the table, ignoring her aunt.

“The tea isn't very fresh,” Mrs Deverell said anxiously.

“It was quite fresh when you called her,” said Aunt Lottie.

“Yes, you shouldn't neglect your meals, Angel. I think you've been at it long enough for one day.”

Angel looked tired. There were dark shadows under her eyes, as if she had smudged them with her ink-stained fingers.

“
I
think she's been long enough at it for ever,” said Aunt Lottie. “I can see that much more of it and my life won't be worth living. It's all round the servants' hall as it is, because of course Palmer
didn't
put the book on the kitchen-range. Cook took charge of it. She keeps it under one of the big dishcovers and lends it round. The sniggering that goes on, and the insinuations I am exposed to, Emmy, you can imagine for yourself. ‘What about a nice game of cards?' the footman dared to say to me. They all knew what he meant by that. I could have slapped his face. And with Madam upset and the under-servants tittering, it will be lucky if I can keep my position.”

“Give it up, then,” Angel said casually. “Tell them to go to the devil. Retire.”

“Retire! I like that!” Aunt Lottie gave an imitation of one of Madam's nasty little laughs. “And what, pray, should I use for money if I did?”

“I would give you enough.”

“Oh, you
would
! That's very generous of you, I'm sure.”

“No, it isn't. I shall have plenty.”

“And what makes you think that?”

“My book is a success and so will all the others be that I am going to write.”

Her calm infuriated her aunt. “I don't know what you mean by a ‘success',” she said loudly. “I should have thought it was more of a disgrace. Madam's word for it was ‘unsavoury' and cook was only too glad to be able to point out a piece from the newspaper, saying it was gibberish.” She pronounced the word with a hard ‘g' and made it sound vicious.

“The people who are right are those who buy it,” Angel said. “And they will go on buying it. Mr Gilbright says so. So I shall always have plenty of money, and if you want any of it, you're welcome.”

Before they could answer, she left them and went back to her bedroom. Here, she leaned against the closed door and shut her eyes, struggling to control her anger. She hated the word ‘gibberish', however it was pronounced: it bit into her like acid. There were other words, equally hurtful, which reviewers had used and which she would never be able to hear without feeling pain.

Her vanity had been stunned by the way in which her book had been received. No trumpets had come thrusting out from behind clouds, proclaiming ‘genius' and ‘masterpiece'. For a long time nothing at all had happened, and then, slowly, the abuse and sarcasm had begun. The very passages of which she had been most proud, had been printed as if they were richly humorous; her dialogue, her syntax, her view of life, her descriptions of society were all seen to be part of some new and quite delicious joke. No one had wept, it seemed, when reading the funeral scene—unless it was with laughter.

She had destroyed the cuttings as soon as she had read them, but they had been photographed upon her mind. She could remember every word of mockery they contained. Some were unsigned, but the worst, the one with the word ‘gibberish', was above the name Rowland Pearce. Him she hated with unswerving ferocity and tried to find solace in imagining scenes in which she was able to express her contempt for him and to humiliate him in public. She had sent off a long letter to the newspaper: it was full of sarcasm and indignation, and this morning she had seen it printed with a gleeful footnote by the reviewer, as if it were a continuation of the joke. At the same time—too late—a letter had come from Theo Gilbright. “Be calm: resist reading the reviews, if you can: above all, never answer back.”

The book was selling well, but she had expected fame and praise as well as money. She was baffled and alarmed and worn out by the violence of her fury. She longed for some way of healing herself and wished that she might finish the novel she was working on and start another. She would call it “The Charlatan' and it should deal with a literary hack, an impoverished scribbler, a novelist manqué, a twisted and embittered man, making a despicable living by reviling the work of better writers than himself, assuaging his jealousy and impotence by destroying what he could not himself create. She imagined him with the utmost vividness: a misshapen figure of a man, with a stained waistcoat and a sneering voice. He had repulsive personal habits, no friend in the world, and a name as much like Rowland Pearce as she could manage.

To the older people in Norley, Alderhurst had once been a remote upland village where the children went in wagonettes on Sunday School treats. Its water-tower was a landmark for miles and its bluebell woods and silver birches were famous. As time went on, industry made Norley an impossible place for industrialists to live in; the Georgian residential streets were too involved in areas of working-class houses and had fallen into desuetude. By the end of the century the houses being built all over old estates, old farmlands, had reached Alderhurst. Laburnums and other suburban trees mingled with the silver birches, and hedges of spotted laurel and golden privet hid the lawns and the gravelled sweeps in front of the new houses where it was now fashionable to live.

By the time Angel and her mother went there to live, the roads had been made smooth and pavements laid. The water-tower rose above the thinned-out woods. Very few of the inhabitants felt the sadness of the place; but Mrs Deverell was one of them. In the days of the Sunday School treats she had thought it an enchanted country; she had plundered sheaves of bluebells from its woods and had loved to run shouting between the trees, with snapping twigs underfoot and brambles catching at her skirt. Her memories were all of happiness; even of the year when it had rained. She had sheltered with her coat over her head, and listened to the drops beating down from leaf to leaf. When it had stopped, a rainbow had come out behind the water-tower and the earth and air had smelled poignantly sweet.

“I never thought I would live here,” she had told Angel. But nowadays she often suffered from the lowering pain of believing herself happy when she was not. “Who
could
be miserable in such a place?” she asked; yet, on misty October evenings or on Sundays, when the church bells began, sensations she had never known before came over her.