Angel (12 page)

“No. I was simply thinking how vulnerable she is.”

“If she could hear, she would dislike that remark more than anything I have said.”

“Perhaps.”

“And perhaps she
can
hear. Oh, what made me choose yellow for a dress? I forget that I have gone so grey. I shall be a pathetic sight, which is worse than being macabre, so she will have the best of it. And of what use are topazes to me now, at my age? It is I who am vulnerable. The only ascendancy worth being in is to have more years to live. She is young and famous and rich and has fine hands. And I am ageing and grey and getting fat and burdened with a sulky husband who forces me into situations of the most intolerable tedium and shows no gratitude for my forbearance.”

“Forbearance! You are a spiteful little chatterbox.” He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her as she sat at the dressing-table. “If you go through this with flying colours—but not so flying as to invite suspicion—I will buy you a nice present, a souvenir. I
am
grateful, for I know you will really try in spite of all you say. And you aren't
really
grey, you know. I can still see a lot of brown hairs.”

She began to shake with laughter, and love for him brought sudden tears to her eyes, and she turned aside to hide them.

Hermione's colours were not flying throughout dinner: they were dipped, less in submission than wonderment. She soon became convinced that Angel was mad, that her own high spirits could never counter such insanity and were not called upon to do so. She fell back into a state of relaxed fascination while Angel attacked Theo on business matters and questioned him closely upon details which he could not have been expected, by anyone but Angel, to carry in his head.

From time to time, Hermione made a flurried, murmured attempt at conversation with Mrs Deverell, who kept her eyes on her daughter, with the look of bewilderment which had become her everyday expression.

Theo listened patiently, as he had often to do, even with authors less tiresome than Angel, to stories of his own inadequacy.

“My mother was in the biggest bookshop in Norley and found that they had not a single copy of
An Eastern Tragedy
left. That was a week ago. This morning she called again to look round—as you often do, don't you, mother?”

Mrs Deverell nodded. She was, in fact, sent there regularly, to pry and ask questions, and was well-known from these appearances.

“Again, not one copy! In a locality where—heaven forbid that I should boast—but there is,
must
be, if only among inquisitive and gossipy people and not in literary circles at all, a constant call for my books. Imagine the turning away of dissatisfied customers that goes on, day after day!”

“They could order more,” said Theo. He was rather enjoying his food, and Angel, who chose wine in haphazard ways, according to its expensiveness and the attraction of its name, had struck lucky with the Nuits St Georges.

“But I think there must be your part of it, your business of seeing him supplied. I know that, if he were in the least encouraged, he would put in a whole windowful of my books from
The Lady Irania
onwards.”

“‘Irania' is out-of-print,” Theo said foolishly.

“And isn't it high time it was
in
print again?”

“That is rather Delbanco's side, you know.”

“Who?. . .” began Hermione.

“Mr Delbanco,” Theo said, turning to Mrs Deverell, “is the power behind the scenes.”

After dinner, they walked round the garden. The evening air was still, scented with pinks and syringa. Two more whole days! Hermione thought restlessly. She pinched at the leaves of lemon balm and held her scented hand to her face. “What is this called?” she asked.

Angel bent down and examined it, suspicious, as if it had no right to be there. She was always too busy writing about what she thought of as ‘nature' to go out of doors to look at things. “Mother, do you know the name of this plant?”

Mrs Deverell, who had been trailing them down the winding asphalt path, rather, Theo thought, like a wardress guarding prisoners at exercise, came up to investigate.

I wish I hadn't asked, thought Hermione.

Mrs Deverell, no longer used to having her opinions asked, looked doubtfully at her daughter. “I think that's what your Auntie Lottie calls Lad's Fancy,” she said.

At the mention of her aunt, Angel turned and walked on. They followed her, encircling potting-sheds and a shrubbery. On either side of them, the young fruit-trees were an intense green in the fading light. Against this acid, lucid greenness, Angel's crimson dress, which had turned out
not
to be a tea-gown, was as bright as running blood; and Theo slackened his pace for the pleasure of watching the red upon the green as she walked ahead of him along the petal-covered path.

She seemed not to notice that he had fallen back. Without any warning, she was smothered with a choking feeling of unhappiness and disappointment. The warmth of the darkening, perfumed air would, on any other evening, have driven her indoors to her desk. It was an hour when not to be in love sets up a painful agitation: to be in love may be more painful, but is appropriate and can be borne, perhaps, with more composure.

Why is there no one? she wondered, facing the house as she walked on, hastening away from the others without knowing what she did. She drew her silk scarf more tightly round her shoulders, clutching it to her with her hands crossed on her breast. She had looked forward to this evening, to the pleasure of punishing and impressing Hermione and having Theo to talk to. But he had said nothing. She herself had gone relentlessly on about sales, royalties, shopkeepers, unable to control her tongue: as her mistake grew, she had wilfully added to it. He will be under my roof, she thought, glancing up at the eaves, where birds—martins, if she had known—had built. It isn't as I thought it would be; and he is the only friend I have. She was rarely so truthful with herself.

As she came close to the house, the walls threw warmth out towards her: the brick still held the day's sun. She turned at the door to wait for the others. Theo came first. He was holding a flower in his hand. “A present from your own garden,” he said and slotted it through the large brooch on her bosom. He had sensed her agitation and seen her clasp her arms about her as if she were shuddering. And now, at this gesture of tenderness with which, from some half-formed wish to comfort her, he had surprised her, tears filled and magnified her eyes.

“You are cold,” he said hastily, and he re-arranged her scarf on her shoulders and urged her on into the hall before her mother and Hermione could see.

“You miss nothing, Hermione,” he told her when she remarked upon this scene later—“most affecting,” she called it.

“I am only warning you. Don't trifle with
her
feelings.”

“For heaven's sake, I gave her a flower—from her own garden.”

“She would think it was the
thought
. . . .”

“The thing had snapped off. I didn't even pick it, just picked it
up
. I was going to put it in my own buttonhole, then the other seemed more polite.”

“It was the thought,” Hermione repeated. “She isn't like other women. She embroiders everything to suit her own vanity. Once roused, she could be a tigress.”

“A broken-off flower can hardly be expected to rouse anyone.”

“I am only warning you. The flower itself is neither here nor there. I
know
what she is like. I feel it in my bones. Nothing would be trivial to her, because she is so hungry for love. That gesture, that flower would mean what a whole basketful of orchids and a sonnet would mean to other women. Or why did she have tears in her eyes? She has poured all that passion into her novels, but there is plenty more to come. She dare not suspect it in herself, for there is nothing in her everyday life to meet it, and that she would never admit. I am sure she believes that she is beautiful and wonderfully attractive to men besides being famous; but her self-protectiveness would forbid her to ponder why so little comes of it. How sensible she is! Let her
be
sensible. There is no kindness done by denting her armour or even reminding her that she wears any.”

“Madame Heger!” he said. “That's who you are. It is a delightful situation. My rêole of the Professor I like very much.”

She was fussed and nettled—just at that point, he knew, where she would suddenly see that she had gone too far in absurdity and would begin to laugh at her exaggerations.

“Poor little flower!” he said. “What risks I ran with it.”

“I expect that at this moment she is pressing it in some vast, heavy book.”

When Angel had pressed her flower and put the book away in a drawer, she sat by the empty fireplace with her white cat on her lap. She thought of Theo and Hermione alone in their room. They would be undressing, going over their day, discussing, comparing; quite different, she imagined, from their everyday selves.

Mrs Deverell came in, to say goodnight, she explained; but really to fuss about the next day's meals, the tea-party especially. She had ordered this, that and the other, quantities of everything; but would it be enough—for titled people, she wondered?

“I wish he wasn't coming,” she kept saying. “When I woke up this morning, it came on me with a rush. It's really true! I thought. It's really going to happen. Such wicked ideas came into my head, how I wished he'd fall off his horse and break his leg or that his carriage would overturn, anything rather than him come here. I don't know what they'd say to this in Volunteer Street. I don't know what I'd have said myself if anyone had told me five years ago that I'd be pouring out tea for a lord.”

“I'll pour out the tea,” said Angel.

“Well, perhaps he won't come. That's all we can hope.”

“He'll come,” said Angel.

“I wish tomorrow was over. I'm so glad Lottie can manage to come and give me a hand. She can always tell me how things ought to be.”

“Lottie?” Angel said sharply.

“Yes, she promised she would come over soon after dinner, I mean lunch. She will have to stay the night, I suppose.”

“How dare she invite herself here?”

“
I
invited her. I felt I would never manage on my own. I never looked more to Lottie than I do now. She knows what people like that expect.”

“Why did you try to hide this from me? I had to know it in the end.”

“I didn't try to hide anything—why should I try to hide my own sister? It's just that I've had so much to think about with these visitors and so on, I never thought to say before-hand. . . .”

“I will
not
have Aunt Lottie here. It isn't her day. How can I ask Lord Norley to meet her—for all I know, one of his friends' maids? We may all be equal in the sight of God, as you are always telling me, but we are not all equal in
my
eyes, and it is
my
house and there are some embarrassments I won't inflict on visitors who come here.”

“It was only just to put me wise as to the arrangements. She will be quite happy to keep behind the scenes.”

“And what do you suppose the servants will make of that? Isn't it possible for us to give someone a cup of tea without your running to your relations for advice as to how to pour it out?”

“I can't stop her now,” Mrs Deverell said, simply and humbly. Her meekness brushed Angel with a moment's shame, and she could not prevent the thought rising: Once she was my mother and told me what to do and I did it, and now she is nothing—unless she is a child who has done wrong and cannot get forgiveness, can only hope that the punishment will pass. To be moved and shamed angered her further, and she tried to cover the wound with another show of vexation. “It is too bad,” she began. Then the scene petered out into unreality. She felt exhausted, yawned and yawned, and then could not pick up the threads of what had gone before. “Oh, I'm tired,” she moaned, thrusting her hands into her hair and lying back in her chair.

“I'm ever so sorry,” Mrs Deverell said softly.

“In the morning,” said Angel. “I can't think now.”

“Well, goodnight, then. Shall I take the cat?”

“No, leave him.”

Mrs Deverell went unhappily to bed.

Lord Norley brought two of his week-end guests with him. Their presence irritated him and he would far rather have packed them off to tea with Angel on their own and had an hour's peace, and he was sorry that there was no way of doing this.

“Oh, dear, there are two people in the carriage with him,” Mrs Deverell said. She had been listening for the sound of the wheels on the gravel and darted away from the dining-room window to hiss at Lottie.

“Madam always has extra cups on the tray,” said Lottie, who had never been so full of advice.

“Our china won't disgrace us, that's one thing,” Mrs Deverell said, clutching at small comforts.

“Madam's, of course, is priceless.”

“We had better get out of this room before we are trapped.”

“I, for one, am staying here.”

“That you can't, Lottie. Angel won't hear of it.”

“Then I'm afraid Miss Angel can do the other thing. You may have slackened
your
principles, Emmy, since your way of life has changed, and I sometimes wonder if you don't have any recollections at all of how we were brought up, chapel three times Sundays and the wonderful example of Dad and Mother. You may be glad to shake hands with Lord Norley and have him under your roof, but I never could. What is there to him, after all? Brewery money and a brewery title, and all the wicked harm his trade's done to the town. . . .”

“Oh, Lord, she
does
look fierce and clever,” Mrs Deverell said, with her eyes on the gravelled sweep, where the carriage had now stopped. “I must be in with Angel before the door is opened to them.”