Angel (15 page)

She stood up and was smoothing her gloves. She frowned.

“About your holiday. . .” he said.

“I shan't have a holiday.” She thought: Esmé might write to me; his sister might ask me to go to see his paintings and I should not be there.

He followed her downstairs, glancing dejectedly at his partner's office-door. “How is your mother?” he asked as he took her hand to say goodbye.

“My Aunt says that she seems unwell and is losing weight. But there is no earthly reason why she should not be in the best of health,” Angel said indignantly. “She has everything she wants and nothing to do all day. Goodbye, and thank you for giving me your time and advice.”

“It was a great privilege,” said Theo.

Angel continued to ignore her mother's condition, her lack of appetite and her listlessness. That autumn, Aunt Lottie went to live at Leamington Spa, and all of her pleasure and relief at being chosen to accompany Madam was spoiled by her anxiety at leaving her sister.

Still restlessly discontented, Angel began to take long walks in the afternoons—to turn over in her mind, she believed, the next few pages to be written: but in that she deluded herself; for in the damp autumn woods nothing of Ancient Greece came to her. Novels were no longer games that she made up in her head as a part of day-dreaming. Her day-dreaming lay in a different direction now, and it was of Esmé she thought on those long walks; the idea of Esmé, rather; for she was forgetting fast, against her will, what he had looked like and how his voice had sounded.

She bought a great dog to keep her company on these walks. He—Sultan, she called him—would crash on ahead of her through the undergrowth, nosing the ground, as clumsy as Caliban, missing all of the wild life about him, yet bewildered by intimations of living creatures near him too quick for him to see; of a feinting, teasing proximity; a camouflaged watchfulness; derisive scamperings. Sometimes he came back to Angel for reassurance, his tongue flapping as he panted towards her. She was all of his life: when she was not with him, he slept. He was docile and cowardly and sycophantic.

Then one afternoon his bewilderment and lack of self-respect and fearfulness broke in a frenzy of destruction. Goaded for so long, despised by swift, shifting creatures in the grass, by pheasants going up in a clamour under his very nose, unnerved as he was and disconcerted, he rounded suddenly on his environment, decided to try his strength once and for all. A Yorkshire terrier ran yapping from a gateway and Sultan pulled up, hesitating and trembling, before he leapt upon the terrier and set his great jaws at its throat.

Angel was afraid. At first she could do nothing; then, like her dog, she smothered her fear in fury, ran forward and began to lash his back with the lead she was carrying. At this, Sultan lost all control; he shook the terrier until its yelping stopped: then he backed away from his victim, puzzled that its resistance was over. As its mistress came running to the gate, she cried out in horror at the violence of the scene—the great slavering dog and the demented-looking woman with the leash in her hand. Sultan turned aside, slinking close to the hedgerow, his bloodshot eyes wary, slobber dropping from the corners of his mouth. He started and cringed at every sound and was ready to snarl again if it would help him. Dusty and bloody, the terrier lay dead.

“You should keep your dog indoors if you cannot control him,” Angel said coldly.

For a moment, she thought that the distracted woman was going to run forward and strike her and she stepped back a pace. Grief at the sight of the dead animal overcame violent anger; tears incapacitated the woman. “I can't touch him,” she sobbed. “I know he's dead. The great brute has killed him and I can't pick him up.”

“Can't you call a gardener?”

“Yes, and I can call the police as well.”

“Your dog attacked mine, you know.”

“Attacked! This poor little thing? And you were hitting them, urging the beast on, the worst thing you could do. I saw you as I came down the drive. I called to you and you wouldn't listen.”

Sultan browsed warily in a ditch full of fallen leaves.

“If I can reimburse you in any way, you must let me know,” said Angel. She glanced down at the watch that was pinned to her breast and looked as if she were going to hurry away.

“I know who you are,” the woman said quickly. “I know perfectly well, and you are as insolent and ungracious as I have always heard. My husband shall speak to the police.”

“Then I will discuss it with them. I dislike conversations with hysterical women.”

She called to Sultan and he crept towards her. She could feel the woman's outraged indignation, the silence in which one abusive threat after another was rejected as unworthy until it seemed that there
were
no words for the occasion: she half-expected physical violence—a stone thrown after her, perhaps—and she trembled as she walked on, trying not to quicken her pace.

In her agitation, she took a wrong turning, and she was exhausted when she at last reached home. A bicycle was propped against the front wall of the house, and she remembered that she had promised to see a reporter from the Norley newspaper and was an hour late for the interview.

When she opened the drawing-room door, she was astonished to see her mother sitting there with a blotchy-faced young man who was studying a photograph of Angel at the age of six months, a photograph Angel herself had for long meant to destroy. The baby was sitting upon a lumpy fur rug, the wrinkled soles of her bare feet enormous and out-of-focus.

“Her eyes weren't really crossed like that,” Mrs Deverell was saying. “She must have had the wind.”

She was flushed and chatty and did not seem in the least dismayed when Angel asked for the photograph and tore it in two and only then turned to the young man to apologise—in the manner of one doing him a great favour—for being late.

He had scrambled to his feet in a frightened way and now said that something or other had been a pleasure. He is dreadfully unpresentable, Angel thought, and in the middle of what he was saying she went to the fireplace, and pulled the bell-rope.

Sultan ranged about the room as if it were all different now or he thought it should be: yet he had not established his status after all, for Angel had not spoken to him on the walk home and he was unsure of what his act of ferocity had meant or what it boded for him. He ignored Mrs Deverell and began to sniff at the young man's boots, then to lick his hands. The young man put his hands in his pockets.

“Twining,” he said in a startled way, answering Angel's request for his name. “Desmond Twining.”

“Sultan has scratched his leg,” said Mrs Deverell.

“Yes. Mr Twining, before you go, I will give you a report for your newspaper of an incident that took place this afternoon. You can print it with a few comments I will add for you on dog-owners who let their vicious pets loose to roam the roads and savage other dogs.”

“Oh, dear,” he murmured timidly, wiping slobber off his trousers with his handkerchief, apologetically, as if it were his fault it was there. “I don't think it would be in my department.” He looked gloomily at the notebook which lay on the sofa beside his bicycle-clips. There was not a stroke of shorthand in it yet; more than an hour was wasted, except for the facts about her early life that he had gathered from her mother's conversation. These he was fast forgetting, and he longed to open his notebook and jot them down before it was too late; but all the paraphernalia of tea were brought in and he had as much as he could do to manage his tea-cup and get rid of the fringe of cress between his lips as he ate a sandwich. Mrs Deverell, who suddenly looked ill and extinguished, sipped a little of her tea and hurried from the room.

“Anything my mother said to you before I came,” Angel told him, “must be forgotten or ignored. She is unwell, you know, and falls into strange inaccuracies.” She had never before acknowledged her mother's ill-health and did so now only to suit herself. “What you want for your purpose, I can tell you. I think that I know by now what the public expects of me. Will you have another sandwich?”

He pushed the last of the cress between his lips and leant forward. One without any greenery would be easier, he thought, choosing another sandwich. Then he took up his notebook and opened it discreetly, leaving it on the sofa beside him so that he could jot things down though hardly seeming to.

“You were born in Norley,” he began. “Of course, that we all know.”

“But do we?” Angel asked with false sweetness. “If you know that, it is more than I have been able to establish myself. My infancy seems to have been wrapped in mystery. Brought to Norley at a very young age I certainly was; but from where, I cannot discover. My mother's reticence hides some old grief and I would not, for that reason, question her, or ask about my father, whom I never saw.”

She leaned back in her chair, turning her hands one way and another, to display them to herself, catching the firelight in her rings. The young man was quite flabbergasted, as he afterwards told his editor. Was she confessing, almost boasting, of her own illegitimacy? His uncle had gone to the Volunteer Road Schools with her father, Ernie Deverell, and there was a faded photograph of him, knicker-bockered and waxen-faced, in a group taken in the asphalt playground. Mr Twining had intended to mention this connection, and it was on account of it that he had been chosen for the assignment. “A little common ground may set the ball rolling,” the Editor had said, and his phrase, which had sounded vague enough at the time, now seemed a preposterous assumption. Clutching at a sunnier interpretation of her words, Mr Twining asked: “He died, then, when you were a child?”

“Perhaps,” said Angel. “Or perhaps later: or not at all.”

While he was trying to sort this out, he took a bite from his sandwich. It was crab, he thought, or some sort of paste made with crab: whatever it was, it was quite bad.

“There was someone in those early days,” said Angel, safely eating chocolate cake, “who was spoken of as my father; a timid, harmless little man, I have gathered. I am sure I should have found him an excellent person, though of little account. Indeed, I owe him my name. But it is all so fraught with mystery, as I have said, and I think that in your little piece about me you may hint at mystery; but, for my mother's sake, leave it at hints. For myself, I feel beyond such petti-fogging conventions.”

Nauseated and alarmed, he at last managed, by not breathing, to wrench down what was in his mouth. Then he drank some tea and felt waves of heat spreading over him; his heart thumped; he was so flurried that tears pricked his eyes. And all this time had passed and there was nothing in his notebook and not a thing in his head, either, but hints of mystery which could never be of any use.

“I sometimes wonder if I have foreign blood,” she was saying. He agreed that this might be so, for her black hair and her white skin were just what he always imagined when he heard the words “foreign woman.” She looked magnificent in her dress of peacock blue, with her long hands lying in her lap; the dog, now mercifully sleeping, at her feet.

“You began writing . . . when?” he asked, poising his pencil above the notebook and trying to forget the potted crab.

“I was fifteen.” She suddenly remembered the appalling circumstances in which she had begun her first novel—the mingled shame and indignation from which she had fled to writing; the pretence of illness and the boredom and loneliness she had endured. It seemed long, long ago. I could not live it again, she thought. All is changed for the better and I have escaped.

He had something to write down at last, and she then gave him a list of her novels and their dates, which he could have looked up for himself in the Public Library.

“Won't you have a piece of this chocolate cake, Mr Tinsel? It
is
Tinsel, isn't it?”

“No, Twining, I'm afraid. I haven't quite finished my sandwich,” he said, glancing at it.

“You mustn't let our discussion put you off your tea.”

“No.” He stopped breathing, took another bite, swallowed desperately and prayed, Oh, please God, let it stay down. Make it stay down.

Sultan stirred, stretched himself and passed wind. Angel reached out and took a bunch of peacock's feathers from a vase and began to fan the air.

“Have you any message?” Mr Twining asked earnestly. “A summing-up, perhaps, of what you strove to express in your novels, a word, a piece of philosophy for our readers?” He had rehearsed this question as he toiled up to Alderhurst on his bicycle and was glad to bring it out now to cover his embarrassment.

“I should like to call for a wider understanding of spirit, a tolerance and breadth, a deeper response to life,” Angel said placidly, still fanning.

Sultan now lumbered over to Mr Twining and began to sniff at his plate. “May I? Is it allowed?” Mr Twining held up the sandwich, coyly questioning, his face quite radiantly hopeful.

“Oh, he is so spoilt,” said Angel, and leant forward and took a sandwich from the dish and dropped it in front of Sultan. “Let him have one to himself: not steal bits of yours.”

Sultan pushed it with his nose, sniffed at it and turned away.

“Quite spoilt,” Angel said again and, as she bent down to pick up the sandwich, Mr Twining put the rest of his into his jacket pocket.

“Oh, but it isn't. . .” Angel began. She opened the sandwich and examined it. “I don't think it is good, not fresh: no, it is
poisonous.
How
dare
they?” She threw it on the fire in disgust. “
You
had one,” she said accusingly, turning to stare at Mr Twining.

“
Mine
was all right.”

“It couldn't have been. They were all made from the same nauseous stuff.” She went to the bell and rang it.

“I didn't notice anything—”

“You must have done. You just sat there and let me offer one to Sultan, knowing that it might poison him. I think that is abusing my hospitality, Mr Twining. I could never have forgiven you if anything had happened to poor Sultan. He has had enough to try him for one day. Bessie!” she said to the maid when she came in, “are you trying to poison me?”