Angel (27 page)

Bessie was in the hall when she went downstairs. She was brushing up feathers from a torn little bird that the cats had brought in: she straightened her back and said good-evening suspiciously, as Angel passed. So she has finished swinging the lead, Bessie thought, thankful that there would be no more trays to be carried upstairs.

Nora was in the library, writing, but she did not know where Esmé was.

“You ought to get one of those artificial limbs,” Marvell told Esmé as he pushed him through the woods in his bath-chair.

“Those
what?
” Esmé asked contemptuously. “Oh, for God's sake, don't run the damn thing straight over these tree-roots. It jars my leg that isn't there.”

“Very sorry, sir,” said Marvell, pulling a face behind Esmé's back. Esmé knew perfectly well that he was doing this. Venus Wood was on the other side of the valley, but they made their way there most evenings at this time, along the rough track, Marvell puffing and groaning as he pushed and Esmé snapping at him, enjoying their strange companionship all the same. They made an odd picture to the few people they ever met, boys out bird's-nesting, men going home from work to the half-dozen cottages scattered in the valley, women collecting kindling wood. Marvell wore an old panama hat stuck with jays' feathers, Esmé carried the guns across his knees.

The duck-shooting had been Marvell's idea.

They had discovered the lake in Venus Wood one evening when they had lost themselves on their walk. The stretch of water, tarnished in the evening mist and reflecting the high trees which rose from its edge, was almost sinister in its silence and its unexpectedness. Nothing was stirring there; it was so enclosed, so windless. But as they stood on the bank, looking about them, they became conscious of a faint disturbance in the air, as if a breeze were blowing up; it was a far-away commotion, a gathering volume of sound. As it grew louder, it resolved itself into the beating of wings and the crying of the wild duck as they flew in over the tree-tops to the lake. At once, notions of wholesale slaughter came to Marvell's mind.

A rotting punt was half out of the water among some rushes, and this Marvell had later managed to repair. Like schoolboys, they could think of nothing but their new enthusiasm and, with Angel in bed and never wanting the car or wondering where they were, they were free to do as they pleased. When the boat was ready, Esmé had gone with Marvell to buy the guns in Norley.

Then, at the very time when their plans were all made, with the boat ready and the guns obtained—but not yet paid for—Angel had finished her novel and was to be up and about again. It had been her custom to wheel Esmé about the grounds for an hour before dinner, accompanied by Czar and several of the cats. He could only think now that at some moment during their boring perambulations the ducks would come flying in over the trees, alighting on the surface of the lake, the elephant-grey lake, dozens and dozens of them ready for slaughter, and he would not be there to see.

And Lady Baines was to balk his designs even more.

She came to luncheon the next day in her maroon-coloured Fiat with its fringed and buttoned upholstery, silk tassels, cut-glass bottles, vase of roses and maidenhair-fern. The chauffeur's livery matched the motor car.

Lady Baines was Angel's nearest neighbour, she had declared on her first visit, ignoring the dozens of cottages, the doctor's house, the Vicarage, which lay between Paradise House and her own home. “No one between us and Lady Baines at Bottrell Saunter,” Angel told people, doing the same.

Widowhood had increased Lady Baines's authority. She was nearing sixty, and for many years, since her husband died, had given most of her time to what she called ‘public work', in spite of the fact that it was largely settled in secret—‘settled nicely', as she would say, having pulled all the strings, had a word with so-and-so, written notes, summoned underlings to her presence. When the time came for the public meeting itself, her antagonists, ready to be crudely defiant to her when she opposed their schemes, would be flustered to find that she had nothing to say: instead, an attack would be launched from a quite unexpected quarter, from some nervous school-teacher or verbose trade-unionist; support would come from all parts of the floor, for Lady Baines's notes had been sent far and wide; she had had a word with so many people and told them to have more words with other people and they would hasten to obey. Party politics meant little to her: she saw them as a sign of weakness, in fact. On the Bench and on County Council Committees she was indomitable and inflexible, using herself as her standard. She set an example, and when other people fell short of it there was a sickness in the community which she was prompt to deal with; broad-minded, humanitarian, her work for unmarried mothers, sexual perverts and adolescent delinquents was energetic and forthright and discussed by her always in the most explicit and technical of terms. She knew about life and nothing shocked her. In her bearing and manner, with her expensive, dowdy clothes, her fine pink-and-white complexion and her love of gardening, she was most people's idea of a typical elderly Englishwoman. She had, though, come from Boston, Massachusetts, as a bride; but that was long ago.

“You're getting fat, Esmé,” she said as soon as she came into the drawing-room. “You'll let yourself get out of condition. You need more exercise.”

“How can I take exercise, like this?”

“I had a cousin who lost a leg in Africa . . . had it snapped off by a crocodile. Ridiculous man. Making a laughing-stock of Christianity, everybody thought . . . I forgot to say that he was a missionary. But ridiculous or not, he faced the situation with courage.” Esmé winced. “He never gave in. He got himself a wooden leg and he started to play games, a thing he'd never gone in for much before; cricket, you know, with a runner, of course, when he was batting.”

“Of course,” murmured Esmé disdainfully.

“Polo, ping-pong, croquet. . . .”

“How wonderful!” Angel said briskly, to put an end to the catalogue.

“Archery, tricycling. . . .”

“How very grotesque!” said Esmé.

“Another thing,” said Lady Baines. “Until your wooden leg arrives . . . and I must remember to get you an address . . . until then, what is wrong with sedentary exercises?”

She sat down on the edge of a chair and stretched one leg forward; with her hands on her hips, she began to bend and chant, “Over to the left, straightening, down to the right.” Her toque slipped down over her forehead. “Trunk bend to the right, trunk bend to the left.”

Bessie came in to announce that luncheon was ready, and seemed spellbound.

“Have you got all that, now, Esmé?” asked Lady Baines. “Another one for the pot-bellied. Grow
tall
. . . .” She put up her chin and quickly straightened her hat. “Stretch. Shoulders back. Buttocks clenched. Now draw in the diaphragm. Hold your breath.” She held hers for what seemed an unconscionable time. Bessie withdrew and stood in the hall with her hand over her mouth. Nora and Angel looked at one another uncertainly, Esmé, with loathing, at Lady Baines. “Exhale!” she shouted triumphantly, when she had done so. “Now luncheon!”

But luncheon was not any better. They listened queasily to her descriptions of incestuous cottage-life about which she had been making some inquiries. When the veal pie was brought she asked for the crust only.

“Have you ever
seen
a calf led to the slaughter?” she asked Nora, who was glad to say that she had not.

“I have only seen soldiers,” said Esmé, but no one paid any attention to him.

Angel could remember the cul-de-sac leading off the Butts in Norley: Abattoir Lane, it was called; the panic-stricken beasts were driven into it, herded together, lowing and baying, making frenzied attempts to escape. But Lady Baines was describing it vividly, even the inside of the slaughter-house, for she had made it her business to do the full inspection.

Nora looked at her plate in disgust and remorse.

“Beautifully tender,” Esmé said, to annoy Lady Baines, to show how little her words influenced him.

“If we had to do it ourselves, or even be present always when it was done, there would not be one of us who was not a vegetarian,” she was saying.

“And poor little beans, too,” said Esmé, “shredded to bits and dropped into boiling water.”

“I love animals,” Angel said slowly. “I hate violence.”

“I was sure it was only thoughtlessness,” said Lady Baines. “And so you have finished your novel? And what is this one all about?” Without waiting to be told, she said: “I ought to write a book myself one of these days.” She implied that it would be a long time, however, before she had not some better way of occupying herself.

“How
blunt
she is,” said Esmé wearily when she had gone. He could see that Angel was preoccupied about something.

The duck-shooting had to be secret. Angel's thoughtfulness had led to this. “I see that I shall have to revise our ideas,” she had said at dinner after Lady Baines's visit, and she refused to eat the fish or the ham savoury. “All animals are the same, after all. I keep thinking of my darling Czar being treated so brutally, the cats snared like rabbits or the peacocks shot like pheasants. I blame myself for what I have done—corpse-eating, as Lady Baines so rightly describes it. I am sure that we can live very well on vegetables and eggs.”

“But what will Czar live on?”

“He can live on eggs as well.”

“Poor eggs!” said Esmé. “What fiendish brutality!”

As soon as dinner was over, Angel went to her desk and began to make notes for a pamphlet she would write, a letter she would send to
The Times,
a lecture she would give. She was burning with her new indignation and eager for the crusade. And now for the first of the great vegetarian novels, Esmé thought. But he was glad to see her busy writing. The next evening, when she was still doing so, he was able to go to the lake with Marvell. At dinner they had had cheese-pudding.

“I am sorry we couldn't go for our turn round the garden,” she told Esmé. “I had to write while it was all in my mind.”

“It didn't matter, Marvell took me.”

“Where did you go?”

“Through the woods a little way.”

“Then that was all right,” said Angel.

What we need, Marvell and I, is a retriever, Esmé thought, looking with contempt at Czar who was in a dejected mood after his first vegetarian day.

Esmé's terrible moment had passed. Angel had given him the money, made her bright and soothing speech, smiled her fond smile. He had been able to pay his debt and the threatening and insulting letters had now ceased; but he was wounded in a way he prayed to forget, and he shied away from the reminders.

“Those weeks of writing so many hours a day have strained your eyes,” Nora said, as Angel peered at a letter she was reading. “You are getting quite a frown. Why not see someone? Perhaps you should wear spectacles.”

“I don't believe in them,” Angel said. “They make muscles lazy. Work is good for every part of the body.”

But she often covered her burning eyes with her hands, and when Esmé saw her do this he always looked quickly away.

Theo was happy about her new novel: it broke into a canter at the first sentence, he wrote. It raced away. It was in her early style, full of swagger and exaggeration. He hoped that, with the war forgotten, she had rediscovered her romantic vein, given up her preaching, her irrelevant thunderings and denunciations. He did not know yet what damage Lady Baines was doing.

“Marvell gets less and less done,” Nora complained. “The garden's a disgrace. He leaves that boy to work on his own. There is no supervision. He himself just disappears. What does he do all day?”

“I'm afraid I take up a good deal of his time,” said Esmé, with a look of simple candour.

“If you got one of those self-propelling chairs or one with a motor to it, you could take yourself out and let Marvell get on with his work.”

“Rather tricky to manage in the woods with all that undergrowth and the tree roots across the paths.”

“You needn't go to the woods.”

Angel thought Nora's was a good idea and she sent for the invalid chair at once. Marvell was not very pleased when he saw it; it would lessen Esmé's dependence upon him, which might in time lessen his own power to arrange his life as it most suited him. He was now sometimes obliged to stay at work while Esmé went down to Venus Wood alone.

When he went without Marvell, Esmé often left his gun behind. He was sometimes quite content to sit there on his own or to lower himself into the punt and paddle it out into the middle of the lake, watching the sky and water changing colour. He preferred the solitude to Marvell's shiftings and whisperings as they waited to open fire. He was better able to feel and observe the nature of the strange and isolated place. He was drawn to it: it had for him a hallucinatory quality and came often into his dreams, sometimes in a way which disturbed him. I won't go there again, he would think hurriedly, just at the moment of waking.

He liked to sit quite still and guess how long it would be before the moment when he would first hear the ducks coming in. It was almost apprehensively that he strained his ears; something so inevitable about their coming gave him a sensation of dread. He tried to imagine an evening when he would wait in vain, and he believed that if ever there were such an evening he would go home very much disturbed and never visit the place again.

When the short days came, the ducks were earlier, flying in in the afternoon, sometimes when the sun seemed to be slipping down through the branches of the trees, with its pink light all over the surface of the water and the frost-rimed bracken at its edge.

It would be dark before he was out of the woods, his hands dead with the cold and his limbs stiff. Marvell, a little huffily, would greet him; in spite of his crossness at having been left out of the expedition, he usually had some little treat for Esmé, something to warm him up, some cocoa and a bacon sandwich; once, as Esmé was now starved of meat, a pot full of pigs' trotters, in their gluey juice.