Angel (19 page)

And Angel had brought him back to painting. She had reminded him of it—for his inertia had been as bad as that; he had forgotten it and ceased to trouble, except in the small hours when he remembered that it was the best part of his life.

When Nora had heard that he was to paint Angel's portrait, she was incredulous. “He can't paint at all, let alone a likeness, let alone a likeness of you. He will make you all grey and wretched as he makes everything. Oh, he won't do justice to you, dearest Angelica. I shall feel the shame of it. And it was I who always wanted your portrait painted. Oh, I believe I put the idea into your head. But I had thought of Orpen, perhaps, or Sargent. I had never, never dreamed of Esmé. And to put Sultan in it—he will never sit still, he isn't the sort of dog to
be
in a portrait. You should have a lap-dog or one of those white hounds. Sultan, darling that he is, just doesn't go with evening dress.”

“I am not wearing evening dress.”

“But people always do in portraits. There, you see, that is Esmé, beginning as he means to go on, insisting on being different from other people. Quite fatal, that attitude has always been.”

“Your brother and I are in accord over it.”

She could not bring herself to say his name.

Esmé had had his way about the snuff-coloured dress. To Angel, it became associated with fearful delights and nervous tension, and she would begin to tremble as she put it on.

“You must help me to find out how to do this,” Esmé said as he put her in the chair by the window and arranged her hand against her skirt. When he touched her, her heart swerved.

They were alone in the room, except for Sultan ranging dejectedly about. Esmé's thoughts were all bent on her; for an hour he was hers. She had never allowed herself to hope for such delight.

“Now your eyes—so!” He put his finger-tip under her chin and tilted her face towards him. A wonderful great bony nose, he thought. I shall make something of that. “Beautiful eyes,” he said, as he had said once before. Then he remembered that the compliment had been too much for her, and he turned away quickly so that she could hide her embarrassment.

He had borrowed a pastry-board from his landlady and now pinned some paper to it and sat down to make some sketches.

“Do talk if you want to,” he told her, but for once she could find nothing to say. Her lips were tight together and her eyes fixed pleadingly upon him. She listened to the faint, tinny scratching of charcoal on the paper, longed to see what he was making of her, braced herself to face dismay. Sometimes he muttered an irrelevant remark, threw it at her, as a means of communicating with her, or to tide them over the long silence. His narrowed eyes stared at, seemed to devour her features; yet not see her. She faced him gallantly, stared back as steadily as she could, feeling not there, in a way outraged; for how could he look and yet so monstrously ignore her?

His head swayed as if to some music she could not hear—dreamily, hypnotically. She was exhausted and wanted to cry out or to cry. Just when she could bear no more, the dream fell from him, his face changed, he looked at her quite differently, at
her
again, and smiled. Then he put the board against a wall, so that she could not see the drawing, and fetched a bottle of madeira from a cupboard. He filled a chipped wineglass and handed it to her and poured some into a tea-cup for himself. The cup was white and had a gilt clover-leaf on it and reminded her of the living-room above the shop in Volunteer Street.

Love had laid her waste, so that she was open to other emotions, too, from which she once had been immune. Compassion followed the picture of her old home into her mind: furiously she rejected it, it still had a reality which other places since those days had not. She felt a moment's pity for her mother, glimpsed how much more real it must have been for her, who had lived longer in it and left it at a later age. How imperfectly it must have prepared her for her life at Alderhurst. Angel could see how
that
must have lacked substance: in the end, she had lost the strength of application to the task.

She moved restlessly, as if to evade these thoughts. The wine branched delicately in her, the faintest warmth. I want love only, she thought. Not the other intrusions.

Love and the wine transformed her. As she was
now
he wanted to paint her—not staring him out in defiance, as she had done; but glowing, uncertain, with thoughts crowding in, some of them, he could tell, disturbing.

“I read one of your books,” he said, sounding as if it were rather a surprising thing to do.

She blinked, jolted by what he had said. She always supposed that everyone had read all of her books and had them nearly by heart, that they thought about them endlessly and waited impatiently for the next one to appear.

“My landlady lent it to me. I sat up until I had finished it.”

She drank her wine.

So it is only compliments about her looks which devastate her, he thought.

“It was called
Aspasia
.”

She acknowledged this to be the title of one of her novels.

He brought the bottle of wine to refill her glass and standing close to her as he poured it out, said: “I think that the secret of your power over people is that you communicate with yourself, not with your readers.” Then he moved away.

She reflected on this, sipped her wine, frowned, then swung on him a look of astonishment. She wondered how he had divined the truth of those trance-like experiences, the act of will by which she projected herself into another world out of which, when the time came, she emerged physically shaken. There were no readers there in that fever.

“Yes, that is true,” she said.

He had thought the novel, with its confusion of Greek and Roman deities, its high-flown language, its extravagance, tiresome in the extreme, and he had only ventured on it from curiosity; but some of the white-heat in which it was created struck back at him from its pages; he could understand how less sophisticated readers would be carried away, beyond criticism of all the inaccuracies and improbabilities.

“You are made to suffer?” he asked, then wished that he had not, dreaded a description of the soul wrestling in the toils of creation; could not bear that, he thought.

She touched her breast. “Here,” she said. “The most appalling indigestion. I think I breathe badly when I am writing—hold my breath and let it come in gasps. I feel cramped. Then when I stand up the pain begins—it is all right if I can belch. Why do you laugh?”

“You surprise and delight me,” he said. “There are so many questions I find myself asking. I want to know more and more before I begin to paint. For instance, which came first in you—the novels or the loneliness?”

She made no answer.

“You tell me things about yourself—your childhood, your girlhood—but they don't match. I simply cannot piece them together. Something is missing. How am I to paint you if I don't know what it is? What, for instance, happened in Italy?”

“I have never been there.”

“But what happened
about
Italy? Was it love? I suppose that it was love. It is always that that makes us unhappy.”

“I suffered jealousy,” she said, and as she turned her head away from him he saw her throat move as she swallowed.

The portrait progressed, and so did Nora's anxiety. Her birthday, after all Angel's hints and suggestions, had been completely forgotten. The day came and passed without a word to single it out from any other, and she went to bed early, feeling deeply hurt. There was a great deal in her life now to wound her: Esmé had been callous; Angel was more so, but with Angel Nora felt the pains of martyrdom more exquisitely. She brooded over her sufferings with a saintly acceptance of them, added each new one to her hoard and wondered if any woman ever was so wretched. She had no weapon of retaliation save death, and this came continually into her thoughts and dreams. “If I were to die, she would be sorry,” or “She would realise how much I do for her, what I protect her from.” The life suited her devotional nature and at no time did she ever think of leaving Angel, unless it were to die. She gave up her time gladly, but she did not forget that she had given it up. She had sacrificed her poetry, she would recall; not remembering that her inventiveness had already run out when she had made the sacrifice, or that she was not always attending to Angel and the servants: there were long hours when Angel was writing when Nora found it difficult not to be quite idle.

In Lulworth Gardens, though, Angel wrote not a word. She began to enjoy being well-known and a success, she gave parties and went to them and met a great many people and spent a great deal of money. At large gatherings, she was easily recognised on account of her air of authority and the absurdity of her clothes. At small dinner-parties, she was dull and dominating. If, for a moment, she were not the centre of attention, she fidgeted and exclaimed and interrupted. “Angelica Deverell was here the other evening,” some people liked to say, but she was not invited twice. That summer, though, there were enough invitations to fill her days, if not Nora's. In the country, Nora accompanied Angel everywhere: in London she was left at home. Angel did nothing to draw her into the gaiety. She kept her in the background: when she could not, she introduced her to people with a tone of exaggerated kindness. “And this is my very dear friend, Miss Howe-Nevinson.” Her way of saying this suggested that Nora was her paid companion and she herself a most liberal and fond employer. “We are like sisters,” she would sometimes add. The words had once been Aunt Lottie's when she had spoken of her mistress; but Angel did not remember.

Esmé worked hard, not only at the portrait, but at some more of his interiors of London public-houses. He fell in love over again with those subfusc bars, with their ferns and patterned glass, marble-topped tables, immense hat-stands. When he showed Angel what he had done, she praised him as soon as she recoiled. She was not shown the portrait, but she rehearsed the speech of gratitude with which she would try to smother her indignation. “You are my only ally and support,” he told her and made all her duplicity worth-while.

Then one day, she went all the way to Chelsea for a sitting and he was not there. “He didn't say anything,” said his landlady. “I will wait,” said Angel. She waited for an hour, and then sent a little boy for a cab and went back to Lulworth Gardens. Esmé had gone to Goodwood and forgotten all about her.

“We arranged for you to come on Friday,” he said, when she arrived again the next day.

Both of them knew that he was lying.

“Then it was my mistake,” said Angel.

In that hour in his room she had studied the unfinished portrait, going to the easel again and again to look at it, but remaining baffled. There were dark sweeps of colour, folds of drapery, her hand with a glove; but her face was a blank; the feeling of not being there she always had when he was painting her, was intensified.

Nora spent her days longing to return to the country. Esmé was a threat to her once more: she imagined him running away with Angel for her money, or running away from her, leaving Nora to bear the consequences. She felt dispossessed and lonely in London; no longer sole confidante and constant companion; and she knew that whatever happened between Angel and her brother there would be no good in it for herself.

Esmé had lost money at Goodwood and had impinged on a set of people from his past life and been snubbed. When he awoke in the early hours of the next morning, he had comforted himself by thinking of Angel, and had been quite magically soothed and able to fall asleep again.

Each day now, Nora pointed out how the season was over; she could always mention someone who had gone off to Scotland or Cowes or Baden Baden, and urge that Angel should give the grand evening party she had so often spoken of and then they could return to Alderhurst. But Angel made an excuse of business still to be attended to. She was writing nothing and the only claims upon her time were the sittings for her portrait and visits to her dressmaker; she was spending extravagantly on clothes. Willie Brace had been wrong in saying that she would always be haunting them with her complaints. She went there once, near the end of her stay in London, with the extraordinary request that to her next book which they were to publish in the autumn should be added a frontispiece and several coloured plates painted by Esmé.

“So it has happened at last,” Theo thought and wondered how he could stave off the suggestion.

“London has agreed with you,” he said. She was wearing the most bizarre hat with a Hussar's plume. It added so much to her height that the effect was overwhelming and he wondered how he could ever say no to her demand. He was not able to. He hardly went the right way about it in pointing out all the other occasions when her judgment had been proved wrong. She was especially angry at his mentioning her pseudonymous novel, her trap for the critics that not one of them had fallen into. The plan had failed, as Theo had warned her it would. The sarcasm was as bad as before. “If this is not Miss Angelica Deverell,” one reviewer had written, “then Miss Deverell had better look to her laurels. Here is somebody who may exceed her in confusions and absurdities.”

“The secret was out before the book,” Angel had said accusingly. She said so again now. It was impossible to get anything into her head, Theo decided. He wished that she would have an agent to whom he could talk about practical matters. At the mention of costs she would fly into a rage and ask if she were not the best-selling author he had ever had, and would hint that there were other publishers in London, in that very Square indeed. “Not a hundred miles from here,” Aunt Lottie would have said. Before Angel left, Theo had promised to see Esmé to discuss the illustrations.

“Nora will write to Hermione to invite you to my farewell party,” Angel said, and left him with two events to dread, instead of one.