Angel (16 page)

“No, madam.”

“The sandwiches are bad.”

“I'm sure I didn't know, Madam.”

“Please take them away before any more harm is done. It is a lucky thing that I felt too tired to eat. Now, Mr Twining, if you have anything more to ask me, will you do so.”

He had thought of one or two questions and read these out to her. She listed her hobbies haphazardly: playing the harp and learning Hebrew, astrology, painting on silk, needlework. “These I made,” she said, patting one of the black satin cushions embroidered with sequined peacocks. She had bought them at a bazaar she had opened.

“And what future plans have you—for writing, I mean?”

“Many; but I shall not divulge them. The literary world is ever watchful: there are many who would rather steal a march than follow an example.”

“May I quote that?” he asked, not quite certain of her implication.

“As you please,” she said indifferently.

“And your favourite authors?” he asked, coming to his last question rather abruptly, for he was afraid that he was going to be sick.

She considered other writers aloofly. “Shakespeare,” she said reluctantly. “Perhaps Goethe,” she added, using a pronunciation of her own.

“And of modern authors?” he asked, unaware of the danger in which he placed himself.

Her face had a strange quality of darkening in anger, the blood gathering under the white skin made her look as if a shadow had fallen over her: then the sun suddenly came out.

“Only one comes to my mind,” she said. “One of my own sex.”

“Marie Corelli?” he suggested confidently.

“Marie Corelli? I am afraid that in my opinion Miss Corelli writes like a Sunday-school teacher. I meant Miss Nora Howe-Nevinson, Lord Norley's niece. A very great poetess who can proudly take her place with Tennyson and Shelley.”

Mr Twining jotted this down in haste; then he took up his bicycle clips; apologised for his visit and bade her goodbye. As soon as he had turned the bend in the drive and was out of sight of the house he dismounted and was sick in the laurel bushes.

When Mrs Deverell had crept away at tea-time, she went to bed, and was not to get up from it again. Angel visited her before dinner and paced about the bedroom in annoyance, full of curt inquiries and the resentment that the idea of other people's illnesses bred in her.

“Is there nothing you want, then?”

“Nothing, thank you, dear.”

“There are idle hands downstairs if you do. You need only ring.”

“No, nothing, thank you.”

“In what
way
do you feel ill.”

“Just the pain I've had lately—in my chest, you know.”

“You must have eaten something.” In Angel's mind all illnesses were the fault of those who suffered them—some negligence or over-indulgence. “By the way, those crab paste sandwiches at tea were quite bad. How they could have made them without vomiting, I don't know.”

“Oh dear, not now,” Mrs Deverell implored.

“Sultan might have been poisoned. Do you think you ought to see a doctor?”

“No, I shall be better in the morning. I think it is only indigestion—but such a pain in my chest.”

“Probably wind.”

“I daresay.”

“You ought to take more care of what you eat.”

“I get so hungry and then after a few mouthfuls I can't manage any more.”

“It sounds like a clear case of wind to me,” said Angel. “I'll get back to work, if you are sure there is nothing you want.”

“I just wish Lottie would come,” Mrs Deverell whispered, and two tears ran out of the corners of her eyes on to the pillow.

“Well, she'll be here for two days after Christmas.”

Christmas seemed far away, and Mrs Deverell thought that she would never have the strength to reach it. When Angel left her, she gave herself up to the tears and they flowed away from her face until her cheeks were sore. She was crying for her sister and for the safety of the old days amongst her neighbours. She had no feeling of security in her daughter's home, and in the night she dreamed that she was running all the way to Leamington Spa: time was short and she kept losing her way. The next day she suffered an internal haemorrhage. A telegram was sent to her sister; but the journey from Leamington took too long, and Mrs Deverell died without seeing her.

“There is a Miss Howe-Nevinson,” said Bessie.

Six months after her mother's death, Angel was still in black from throat to toes. She had a purple suède-covered book of poems in her hand when Nora entered.

“Oh, my dearest Miss Deverell. Only yesterday, on my return from Italy, did I hear of your tragic loss. I could not keep myself away from you, not even to write to you first. My impulsiveness is a by-word among my friends. Oh, it seems such a short time that we were all happy together in this room. Say that I didn't do wrong in coming to you.”

She had put forward her cheek to be kissed and a tear sat prettily on her veil. Then she drew back and looked with anxiety at Angel. So much black accentuated her thinness and her pallor. She had discovered this accidentally, standing before her long looking-glass on the funeral afternoon, and, pleased with what she saw, decided to prolong her mourning, a convention she would otherwise despise. One of the Volunteer Street practices, she would have called it, contemptuously.

“You are ill,” Nora announced. “And tired. And, for all my inquiries since I came back, I hear nothing of that overdue novel, and, to be quite frank, we are all exasperated by the delay.”

“I am beset by servant-troubles,” said Angel. “At the moment, there is only Bessie, whom you saw, and some mumbling old crone who does the rough, as she calls it, and leaves pails of dirty water about in dark corners and dusters on the stairs. If I complain, she tosses her head and threatens to go.”

“Our greatest novelist bothered with buckets of water and having to lower her eyes from far horizons to dusters left on staircases!”

“My mother managed the servants,” Angel said. Managed them badly, she had often told her, but the truth was that after her death, no one but Bessie would stay. Mrs Deverell's timidity with them had aroused their protectiveness, not their scorn: now that she was dead they saw no reason for enduring Angel's tantrums and her exacting ways. Only Bessie stayed on. She had gone into service from an orphanage. She knew nothing of any other world and was afraid to make changes; to live in the shadow of tyranny she thought an inevitable pattern of life.

“You shall talk to me of your mother,” Nora insisted. “I am not one of those selfish people who avoid such conversations. I know what it is to be bereaved, and how much one suffers from having one's lost loved ones banished, their names unspoken. It is a conspiracy among people who hope to avoid the trouble of giving comfort; and I will not be part of it. You shall talk and talk as long as you please and I shall listen.”

“But there is nothing to say.”

“Ah, there must not be reserve between
us.
You yourself have made us seem kindred spirits. Moreover, undeservedly, you have elevated me almost to your own sphere. I think you know what I am speaking of.” She opened her bead-work bag and took out a strip of newspaper. “When I returned from Florence, there was a note from my uncle and this cutting from the
Norley Advertiser.
I read it at first unbelievingly. It did not seem possible to me that you could have read and praised my poor verse; that you should place it where you did was incomprehensible. When I could grasp that it was true, I felt as if the gates of heaven had opened wide.”

So my flattery brought her, Angel thought. Not my mother's death or anything else but the charm of being overpraised. She had cast out her silken thread and months later had drawn back her prey.

This was unjust to Nora, who had a great capacity for worship—especially adoration of her own sex—and would have returned to Angel whatever had happened.

“I am staying with my uncle,” she said. “Tomorrow, I shall come over again. . . . I am sure that you will not deny me that pleasure . . . and I shall settle down to make myself useful to you. How better can I serve literature than to banish you from the domestic sphere? I shall shoo you off to your study and turn the key, too, if you are intransigent. Then, with Bessie's help—not to say the old crone's—I shall find plenty of ways of being busy. I can mend gloves and iron veils and make cakes and preserve gooseberries. Don't look round, wondering where you can find gooseberries in April—they are only metaphorical. I might even rise to great heights and engage a cook for you, some wonderful treasure, who will be a constant memorial to me.”

Angel gave one of her rare smiles. So much coming my way, she thought. She bided her time, then asked after Esmé. What was he in her mind now, she often wondered? Little more than a beautiful face haunting her, a memory of elegance and vivacity. The memory was an obsession, though: she was staked on it, she felt.

Nora bent her head and looked vexed. With her head at that angle, her moustache showed dark on her lip. She had a censorious air.

“Perhaps I
can
speak to you of him,” she said. “To my uncle I may not any more. His name must not be mentioned under that roof. There was trouble in Italy and I will not try to hide it from you—you have such a wide acceptance of life. Esmé was always unstable. He was expelled from school for laying wagers. We have no money of our own, you know, or none worth speaking of, and
shall
have nothing but what comes to us from my uncle. Yet knowing that, knowing how sternly self-disciplined my uncle is, how ruthless in denying himself worldly pleasure when his duty is to be done—in the face of that puritanism, my brother deliberately flaunts his waywardness. Useless for me to warn him that he was putting our futures in jeopardy, and useless for me to try to hide his misdemeanours—there have been so many.”

Angel was silent. Nora's words cascaded over her so fast that she could not snatch any meaning from them. She tried to compose her expression into one of polite, impersonal concern. Nora saw her moisten her lips before at last she asked: “What kind of misdemeanours?”

“His adventures with his unsuitable friends, gambling, extravagance. When our parents died, I kept house for him. There were parties in his studio which woke the neighbourhood. I would lie in bed, shrinking from the thought of the morning when I must face the servants. I stayed at home, rather than meet people who might complain or think that I was party to it all, or tradesmen who might be offensive in speech as they often were in their letters—about money, usually. My brother is attractive to women, but quite heedless and forgetful. Perhaps he did not realise what hopes he encouraged, but while he was being charming—and he often contrives to be both rude and charming at the same time—I would watch with a feeling of doom. I knew that I should be asked to pick up the fragments when whichever poor girl it was at the moment found herself cast aside. It was I who would endure the scenes and tears and the protestations. They would come to me and beg me to intercede or arrange meetings; so few had any pride or modesty where he was concerned. And they would never believe that there was nothing I could do to help. I was often blamed for the collapse of their romantic hopes: they saw me as a possessive sister who would not give up her place in his home. They could not bring themselves to find any inadequacy in themselves, and thought that I had taken away from them what in fact they had never had.”

“And your brother remained free?”

“Until Italy,” said Nora. She felt a sense of drama as she said these two words. A curtain should have fallen here, with an interval of conjecture and anticipation before Act Three began. Instead, she marked the pause by standing up and going over to the window. She sighed and seemed full of impatience and anxiety. “Oh, the narcissi!” she exclaimed. “Drifts of them, like the milky way. You should always have white flowers around you.”

Angel did not quite like the sound of this: she was suspicious and exasperated by the interruption. She ignored the narcissi and wondered how she could return to Esmé. After seeing Nora's contempt for the lack of pride in her brother's “poor girls”, she was careful not to betray herself. Both astutely waited. Then Nora gave in and said: “Italy was my uncle's Christmas gift to us—to Esmé and me. He is a kindly old man, you know, and so dogged in trying to see the best in all of us. He has always been dogged about Esmé's wretched painting—unless he thought that it was something to keep him out of mischief . . . and if he thought that, he was sadly wrong—so Esmé must go to Florence to see the paintings there, and I should go with him—a part of the project which didn't suit him at all. It was a ludicrous situation.
I
went to all the Art Galleries and the Churches and Esmé was never to be found. I shall never forget those months—the loneliness, the premonitions of disaster, the sense of evil and betrayal. He came back to England before me: without a word to me, he simply disappeared. I was left to manage the journey alone; but, before I could set out on it, I had to face the hideous squalor he had left behind.”

Staking a great deal, but shrewd as to the risk she ran, Angel said: “I am sure this is painful for you to speak of, and you may regret having told me. Would you not rather banish it altogether from your mind?”

She was right in thinking that Nora was too far gone in histrionics to pull herself up, and rather cynically watched her come back to the sofa and sink down on it, quite given over to the horror of her recollections.

“He had most of our money and took it with him, or had to give it up before he went. I was searching his room for some clue to his disappearance when the storm broke over me. The padrone was banging on the door, requesting a word with me. A word! Thousands of words, rather. I had discovered the letter Esmé had left for me, but I had no chance to read it: the words—Italian I could not keep up with—overwhelmed me. I must pay money, I began to understand—very much money; not just money for our rooms, but money for his daughter. I could hear her wailing somewhere along the corridor—one of those pretty Italian girls, but she would grow fat in middle age, like her mother. I had been nervous for some time about her provocative ways, with Esmé: she waited on us at meal-times and managed somehow to be both servile and challenging. It was quite disgusting. I said ‘Si, si', over and over again, but the dreadful man went on ranting, waving his arms above his head, clasping his hands on his heart, letting his eyes fill up with tears—oh, I never want to go to the Opera again. In the end, he went away, but I knew that at any moment he might come back. I had promised the money, without any idea of how to get it. Then I opened Esmé's letter and realised that I must. It was the feeblest note, just to say that he had been obliged to go, that he could not wait to warn me; the girl had made accusations against him, which were true—more or less true, he wrote; but that is too difficult to understand—and she had spoken of the gravity of her condition and his responsibility for it, which he could not disprove. Oh, I felt soiled and cheapened—I was forced to haggle with shopkeepers over my mother's jewellery and take much less for it than I could ever have believed. I was virtually held prisoner; wherever I went, trying to raise money, I could see the girl's young brother following me at a distance. Their family honour was set at a certain price and Esmé had not paid it. When I was at last able to, they were quite gay again and chirruped about me like birds as I packed my trunk to come away. They had the audacity to send their kind regards to my brother.”