Angel (11 page)

“It's your age,” Lottie told her. “Madam's been the same. Pecks at her food, they say, and keeps sighing, and the tears always ready for the turning on.”

“Yes, that's how it is,” she agreed.

She sometimes felt better when she went back to see her friends in Volunteer Street; but it was a long way to go, Angel discouraged the visits, and her friends seemed to have changed. Either they put out their best china and thought twice before they said anything, or they were defiantly informal—“You'll have to take us as you find us”—and would persist in making remarks like “I don't suppose you ever have bloaters up at Alderhurst” or “Pardon the apron, but there's no servants here to polish the grate.” In each case, they were watching her for signs of grandeur or condescension. She fell into little traps they laid and then they were able to report to the neighbours. “It hasn't taken
her
long to start putting on side.” She had to be especially careful to recognise everyone she met, and walked up the street with an expression of anxiety which was misinterpreted as disdain.

The name ‘Deverell Family Grocer' stayed for a long time over the shop, and she was pleased that it should, although Angel frowned with annoyance when she heard of it. Then one day the faded name was scraped and burnt away, and on her next visit to Volunteer Street, she saw that “Cubbage's Stores” was painted there instead. She felt an unaccountable panic and dismay at the sight of this and at the strange idea of other people and furniture in those familiar rooms. “Very nice folk,” she was told. “
She's
so friendly. Always the same. And such lovely kiddies.” Mrs Deverell felt slighted and wounded; going home she was so preoccupied that she passed the wife of the landlord of The Volunteer without seeing her. “I wouldn't expect Alderhurst people to speak to a publican's wife,” the woman told everyone in the saloon bar. “Even though it was our Gran who laid her husband out when he died.” All of their kindnesses were remembered and brooded over; any past kindness Mrs Deverell had done—and they were many—only served to underline the change which had come over her.

At a time of her life when she needed the security of familiar things, these were put beyond her reach. It seemed to her that she had wasted her years acquiring a skill which in the end was to be of no use to her; her weather-eye for a good drying day; her careful ear for judging the gentle singing sound of meat roasting in the oven; her touch for the freshness of bacon; and how, by smelling a cake, she could tell if it were baked: arts, which had taken so long to perfect, fell now into disuse. She would never again, she grieved, gather up a great fragrant line of washing in her arms to carry indoors. One day when they had first come to Alderhurst, she had passed through the courtyard where sheets were hanging out: she had taken them in her hands and, finding them just at the right stage of drying, had begun to unpeg them. They were looped all about her shoulders when Angel caught her. “Please leave work to the people who should do it,” she had said. “You will only give offence.” She tried hard not to give offence; but it was difficult. The smell of ironing being done or the sound of eggs being whisked set up a restlessness which she could scarcely control.

The relationship of mother and daughter seemed to have been reversed, and Angel, now in her early twenties, was the authoritative one; since girlhood she had been taking on one responsibility after another, until she had left her mother with nothing to perplex her but how to while away the hours when the servants were busy and her daughter was at work. Fretfully, she would wander about the house, bored, but afraid to interrupt; she was like an intimidated child.

Angel worked incessantly, locked in the room she had chosen for a study. When she had finished a book, she would pause with exhaustion and wonder if she could not rest for a while, travel, spend some of the vast amount of money she had earned. For a day or two, she would relapse into the indolence of her childhood and sit inert in her chair with the cat on her lap, for hour after hour. The idea of the holiday faded: there was no one to go with her, except her mother whose chatter vexed her; and she was afraid that while she rested she might be forgotten. The publication of some other woman's novel would send her scurrying back to her study: men writers did not affect her so strongly.

In the study, she had suffered hours of great bitterness and anger. Her morbid resentment of the faintest criticism was unfortunate in one so subjected to printed derision and abuse. The pain seemed worse as it became more familiar. Rowland Pearce, who, as Ronald Price, had come, cringing, to a bad end in her third novel, was only a symbol to her of the throng of mockers, the ‘jostling jackanapes' as she had called them, “those who would sneer at Shakespeare because they could not write
Hamlet
themselves.” When Theo Gilchrist told her—and no one else would have dared—that Rowland Pearce was also a novelist of great distinction, she had said that she could very well visualise the anaemic tosh that he would write, a man who knew nothing of literature, or of good behaviour, either.

“It is glandular,” Willie Brace told his partner, when he heard of this reply. “That inordinate vanity, the insufferable touchiness. She is all for you, Theo, your very own Guardian Angel, and may you never be bludgeoned to death for having to oppose her.”

Theo had long ago invented a senior partner, a Mr Delbanco, who was too aged to travel to London, although he maintained an unreasonable interest in the firm. To his caprices Theo was bound to defer. It was he who put forward suggestions and advised alterations (chiefly to avoid litigation) in Angel's manuscripts. “For myself, I am satisfied, but Mr Delbanco is a little uneasy,” was a recurring strain in Theo's letters, and when Angel swept Mr Delbanco's suggestions scornfully to one side, or wrote one of her staggeringly vitriolic letters, Theo felt relieved, as if he had just managed to dodge a furious blow.

The harmless and not very successful fiction of Mr Delbanco made a unique relationship in Angel's life, for with Theo Gilbright she was spontaneously honest: as far as her self-delusions would allow her, she spoke the truth to him and the only deception between them was his. The gold-mine had prospered and some of his feelings towards her were bound to be self-congratulatory. The more the critics laughed, the longer were the queues for her novels at the libraries; the power of her romanticism captivated simple people; her preposterous situations delighted the sophisticated; her burning indignation when some passing fury turned her aside from her plot into denunciations and irrelevancies, swayed some readers into solemn agreement and others into paroxysms of laughter. Many were shocked by what, in those days, was called ‘outspokenness' and by her agnosticism—for in her books only fools and hypocrites were made to believe in God—and to be spoken against once or twice from pulpits had been of some assistance to her. Her distaste for religion had begun when she was taken as a small child to chapel and was a rationalisation of what had been in the first place simply a hatred of the building itself and its yellow, varnished pews and sea-green window. Her dislike spread to all that went on there, the women's tremulous voices in the choir, the banality of the hymns, the unctuousness of the Minister. Her loathing had spread and intensified as she sat there: it took in the dull faces, old ladies' beaded bonnets, bedraggled feather boas and all the camphorous Sunday clothes and the stifling small-talk on the pavement outside when the service was over. “I wanted something beautiful,” she told Theo Gilchrist. “Nothing to do with God. I think that if someone offered me a hundred pounds to go to that chapel again, or one like it, my legs would become paralysed. I should never be able to drag them towards it or force myself to go inside.”

She spoke to him of her childhood as to no one else and almost as if, by doing so, she might be rid of it. He listened with compassion. Sometimes he wished that in her writing she might be half as direct and simple as she was when she talked to him; but he knew that she never would be and that they both might profit less if she were. She would never write about the kind of life she had known when she was younger. She escaped from it to her dukes and duchesses, her foreign counts, her castles and moonlit terraces. There were dungeons and crypts and family vaults in her stories, but not cemeteries; the only poor were penniless beggars; and the seaside always was abroad. She wrote with ignorance and imagination, and Mr Delbanco had constantly to be on the watch to guard her from her own solecisms, from wrong modes of address and strange phrases of Italian or French. Theo had never had to busy himself so much with rules of precedence and protocol and he longed to take a rest with the happenings in some ordinary middle-class family.

He sometimes longed, too, to take a rest from the hazards of her correspondence. Two or three times a week, her letters, carelessly scrawled in violet ink, arrived at the office with her complaints about the insufficiency of his advertising, his lack of chivalry in not challenging her critics, the shortcomings of Mudie's, the negligence of compositors. She accused him of cheese-paring; her advances, she said, were so niggardly as to be insulting. She mentioned great sums which had been paid by other publishers to other women novelists—to Miss Corelli and Miss Broughton—and suggested that from the fortune her books had provided him he was subsidising the bungled efforts of all the other writers on his list. “As it is by
my
industry that these poor little books are published at all,” she wrote, “it would be merely civil of you to acquaint me with your future plans for spreading this charity about.”

“Success hasn't gone to her head,” Theo argued with his wife. “I remember the first time she came to the office. It was a hot day and she was tired and dusty and bewildered; but, all the same, vain and indomitable. She was born like it, I swear. I can see her howling herself rigid in her cradle. They are never happy, these sports which ordinary, humble people throw off: they belong nowhere and are insatiable.”

Once he saw a large cactus-plant in a flower-shop window. From one unpromising, barbed shoot had sprung a huge, glowering bloom. It looked solitary and incongruous, a freakish accident; and he was reminded of Angel.

The Birches at Alderhurst was a red brick house with a great deal of coloured glass let into the panels of the front door and round the edges of the downstairs windows, so that lozenges of red and blue slanted across the tiles in the hall and over the rich wallpapers of the rooms. In the white and gold and crimson drawing-room a parrot and a marmoset spent uneasy hours together, with bouts of nervous hostility and long wary silences. Parrot-seed was scattered over the Turkey carpet; encouraging mice, the servants said, but they said it only to one another. They cleared up after the marmoset with murmurings of disgust and said that the house smelt like the Zoological Gardens.

Almost as soon as the house was bought and the rooms so richly furnished, Angel began to doubt if it was the best setting for her. It lacked romance and atmosphere. She remembered her school, the grey walls and the cedar trees, and the pictures she had in her mind of Paradise House, and she knew that her own house expressed nothing but the fact that she had made money.

Her discontent began with the Gilbrights' weekend visit. Hermione Gilbright's detestation of her had not lessened because, as a gold-mine, Angel had surpassed Theo's dreams. To spend from Friday to Monday under her roof was the dreariest duty to her, and she complained for a fortnight that her husband had not the power to keep business affairs and social life in separate compartments.

They drove from London on Friday evening in Theo's new De Dion Bouton. At her first glimpse of them as they turned in between the laurels, Angel could guess that Hermione's face was sulky behind her veil. She reminded herself of the shabby house in St John's Wood from which they had come, that the sales of her last book had far exceeded the others and that she was a very famous novelist indeed. She smoothed her crimson satin dress and glanced at her white hands for reassurance. Then she sat down at the piano and began to improvise dreamily, with the soft pedal down to blur mistakes and so that she could hear approaching footsteps.

The piano was on a daïs, and when the tired and dusty Gilbrights were shown in and she let her hands fall into her lap with what was supposed to be a start of surprise and rose to welcome them, Hermione was obliged to tilt back her head and look up at her.

“And I was listening for the car,” Angel told her. “I had hoped to run out and welcome you.”

Theo sensed his wife's irritation, and knew that Angel would not have lied in such a way if he had been alone.

Mrs Deverell, dressed like a rather grand housekeeper, took them to their room.

“
Her
life is one I shouldn't care to live,” said Hermione, when she and Theo were alone. “Did you notice the photograph of Angel garbed as one of the muses, sitting on a marble seat in a trance, with her mother standing up behind her at a respectful distance? It was among the conglomeration of stuff on the piano. I always notice photographs first when I go into rooms. I am sorry there are none in here. I would rather have them than that mooney girl with the pitcher. Or this goitrous peasant maiden with the tambourine. Dinner will be dreadful, and only the first of three. Now, if I put on the amber satin I shall clash furiously with her. Or was that a tea-gown she was wearing? I have read of tea-gowns. Oh dear, and there are no canaries for me to feed if things get bad. I shall have to take refuge with that evil-looking parrot. Wasn't it impressive, that first glimpse of her with her hands straying over the keys: I see now what the phrase means. Are you thinking that all I say is in execrable taste? Because that is what you look as if you were thinking?
Are
you thinking that?” she repeated more sharply when he did not answer her. “Thoughts, for instance, about the sanctity of hospitality, about being under her roof, and breaking bread with her?”