Angel (20 page)

The portrait was finished and Angel had expressed her gratitude. Sultan was so realistically presented that she was afraid that she was, too. In the middle of dressing, she would stop to study her face, in the triple glasses drawn together to reflect her profile, sometimes catching a strange glance unexpectedly, wondering all the time if she was what Esmé saw. The portrait lacked exuberance and he had painted her in her darkest clothes against a banal background; the empty window behind her, the bare wall, emphasised the suggestion of loneliness. He had been tempted to scrawl a title upon the blank side of the canvas: ‘Study In Solitary Confinement'. Her eyes and the dog's looked mournfully out of the picture; Sultan's dully, hers reflectively. One or two critics, long after, were to note this, but at the time people thought the portrait dreary and tactless and wondered why Esmé had not the wit to modify the arch of her nose, the eccentricity of her clothes and correct her slight astigmatism, and if she would not disguise her own pallor, he, on canvas, might have done so. Nora was openly scornful; no one else dared to say a word; no more commissions for portraits came from it.

Angel, at first shocked, soon grew used, from constant looking, to seeing only what she chose, especially the narrowness of her bare hand with its emerald ring. She would gaze at this detail for a long time each day. One of the lesser ancestors was moved from the wall and Esmé's painting was put there in its place; for a reason she would not give, some silk drapery was hung in front of it, hiding it completely.

“Is it Lent?” Esmé asked when he saw this, and was vigorously shushed and hissed at by his sister.

Plans for the farewell-party made Nora happy again. She had a great deal to do and the knowledge that when it was done they would return to Alderhurst where there would be even more for her to do. The invitations had been going out for weeks, in relays of lessening optimism, beginning with dukes and filling in later with baronets and foreign titles. To have been under the same roof as Angel at some time or another, even if at the other end of a long table or in a distant part of a ballroom, was enough to qualify for an invitation; but it seemed that Nora had been right: London was empty; dukes had gone North for the grouse, marquises had disappeared to Biarritz; one countess had even joined her children at Frinton rather than stay any longer in the deserted capital; there was nobody about. Esmé complicated the situation by reading the list of guests before the invitations were sent and scratching out one name after another. “Don't ask him,” and “Leave her out—or me, if you please,” was all that he would say.

“Why make London your nest when you have fouled it so?” asked Nora.

In the end, actresses had to be invited and opera-singers and one or two elderly men-of-letters; no critics.

In the evening, Hermione's sharp eyes were everywhere. Angel had ordered a bower to be made of a recess at the head of the stairs and here, among potted hydrangeas, she waited to receive her guests, with Nora placed a little farther back and in a darker dress. Angel was in lilac, so low-cut in front that her top ribs showed in rows.

“Magnificent!” said Esmé, and to Nora's annoyance raised Angel's finger-tips to his lips.

At the sight of him, Theo drifted out of sight behind a screen of pampas-grass. Later in the evening, when champagne had made them both nonchalant, they spoke to one another.

“Your idea about the illustrations,” Esmé began. “Awfully sorry, you know, but it's not in my line.”

“Never mind,” said Theo gratefully. “Just an idea.”

“Very kind.”

“Where is your portrait of Miss Deverell?”

“Well may you ask. Stuck in the dining-room and covered with a curtain. Why hang it up at all, if it so displeases?”

He was to discover why. After a string quartette had played, and no one, taking Angel's lead, had attempted to listen, the double doors were opened to the dining-room. A buffet-supper, smothered with smilax, was laid on a long table: a boar's head, a salmon, concoctions of lobster hung about with whiskery prawns, timbales and galantines, all masked with sauces and mayonnaises, or half-masked with aspic.

“How delicious!” said the elderly men-of-letters, edging towards the table as they had learnt to do at many literary receptions. Then Esmé saw Theo coming towards him, looking ruffled and concerned. “You must stop her,” he said in a low voice. “A horrible suspicion has come to me from something I overheard your sister say. . . . How could she have encouraged her? Did you know of this? I suppose you did.”

“Did I know what?”

“That she is going to unveil her own portrait—here, in front of everyone.”

“Good God!”

Esmé looked behind him for escape, not in Angel's direction, where Theo wanted him to go.

“You must put a stop to it.”

“I can't get at her.”

“Shake your head.”

“But she isn't looking.”

The music of Strauss faded significantly: there was an expectant hush and the literary men looked up from the array of food rather irritably, wondering what was going to happen. Angel, smiling and happy, faced the room, waiting for absolute silence. Behind a screen of potted palms Esmé and Theo backed away out of sight; they went a little way down the staircase where they could not be seen, and sat there side by side, with their hands over their ears. When they heard the music beginning again, they raised their heads and looked at one another.

“Not ‘God Save the King',” said Esmé.

There had been an embarrassed murmuring, someone had begun to clap, then stopped.

“What on earth did she say? I hope no one ever tells me. I shall have something to say to Nora. Nothing would ever make me go back into that room.”

“I shall have to, and Hermione will tell me every detail of what happened,” said Theo. “She will not have missed a single thing.”

“It will be all over London. You see, my sister is in love with her; she has surrendered her judgment to love.”

“She is devoted to her, I know. . . .”

“She is in
love
with her,” Esmé insisted. They had both drunk too much champagne. “In love. In love,” he repeated.

“The sooner she goes back to the country, the better.”

“Yes,” said Esmé doubtfully. He suddenly felt his indignation go.

“I wish my fondness for her would suspend
my
judgment,” Theo said.

“I wish mine would, too.”

“I shall have to go back to Hermione. I shall say that I got separated from her in the crush and have been looking for her everywhere.”

“I shall say that I got taken short.”

Then Esmé stood up and walked carefully down the stairs and out of the front door.

Hermione had scarcely missed Theo. She was spooning up jellied consommé, thinking out her account of the evening for Willie and Elspeth Brace. Food was beginning to soothe embarrassment. The unkinder guests were delighted with the evening. The literary men would dine out on it for weeks. “Delicious,” they said again and again, and no one could know what they referred to.

“Was it all right?” Angel asked Theo. “People seem pleased.” She had been looking for him and he had kept his eyes on his food as if by doing so he became invisible.

“So good,” he said weakly. I mean the soup, he told himself, although it had jellied too much, he thought, and was rubbery. Elaborate food was always a little below par, he decided.

“And what do you think of the portrait?”

“It is too crowded about for me to go to see. I must tell you later.”

“Do you know where Esmé is?”

“He seemed rather unwell to me. I believe that he has gone home.” He thought, seeing her look of anguish: And I hope that he has not gone for ever.

She had wasted her evening, if he was not there. Oh, make it end! she prayed. She was for ever exhorting some unknown power—not God, but some vague enemy, the one who upset her plans and frustrated her at every turn. Make them all go home! she willed the antagonist. Let it be over!

They returned to Alderhurst without seeing Esmé again. They found the garden full of golden-rod and Michaelmas-daisies and spiders' webs. Nora went happily to work about the house and Angel wandered in the shrubbery with Sultan or explored the new roads which were cutting deeper and deeper into the woods and thickets. Her summer, with its exquisite sense of expectancy, was gone and the expectancy was gone, too. She was overcome by melancholy, tormented by her longing for a tender word. Esmé had answered none of her letters; she wondered if he had gone abroad again. Sometimes she dreamed of him: the dreams had an air of reality which stayed with her all day: they enveloped her; she was incapacitated by the improbabilities they contained, and unable to work or to concentrate on anything that Nora said.

Then Sultan had distemper and died, and she was out of all control with grief. A few days later, Esmé received a distracted letter, on black-edged paper, begging him to come and comfort her, to stay for a few days and take her mind off her loss. He had ignored her other letters, partly because he was too lazy to reply and partly because her behaviour at her party, so bizarre, so menacing, had made him disinclined to meet her again. But this astonishing letter moved him. He forgot that he had thought her vain, mad, outrée, and began instead to think of her being tender and full of supplications.

He had not wanted to become involved in their household, and out of London she and Nora were also out of his mind: yet he found himself writing a letter of condolence (for no one but he could fully understand, she had assured him) and promising to visit them. He had been pretending for weeks to a persistent young woman he knew that he was always in the country from Friday to Monday, and this time it could be true.

At once Angel seemed to get over her grief. He had dreaded her despondency, not knowing that his letter had put an end to it. She met him at the station in a small pony-trap that she had hastened to buy in order to drive him about the lanes without having any room for Nora to accompany them. Her happiness as they jogged back towards Alderhurst was tinged with triumph.

Nora welcomed him with reserve, but she had obeyed Angel about the food, which was excellent and abundant and suited to masculine tastes: there was a saddle of mutton and wing-ribs of beef, a York ham with Cumberland sauce and a terrine of grouse. After meals in restaurants or faggots and chips carried back to his room, Esmé was delighted by all this and made wistful, as was intended, by the thought of the lost comforts of domesticity.

The house was comfortable, although by Sunday it was beginning to seem claustrophobic to him; he felt the ennui of the week-end guest, defenceless, unable to escape, beset by strange church-bells; restless, overfed, and tired from too much conversation. If he were left alone for a moment, he fell asleep.

On Saturday evening, some neighbours had dined: a professor of Greek, who listened gravely to Angel's descriptions of Athens in the fifth century, two ill-favoured women who were dog-breeders, and a clergyman who seemed to have been invited for no other reason than to be demolished in argument by his hostess. After dinner, they were taken to the shrubbery to see Sultan's grave. The dog-breeders thought they had the very thing to take Angel's mind off her loss. “Not to replace Sultan, or to attempt to do such a thing,” one of them said tactfully. “Just to give you something else to think about. The only thing to do. You will grow to love him for his own sake.”

“What is he?” Esmé asked.

“A wonderful St Bernard.”

“Those dogs that have the brandy,” Esmé said wistfully.

“I could never love him as I loved Sultan,” said Angel.

“Of course not; of course not.” The two ladies nodded and agreed, feeling now that the cheque was almost in their hands.

The next evening, Angel and Esmé set off in the pony-trap to look at the St Bernard. The cheque changed hands and the dog was put in the trap where he looked mournfully about him; his face sagged, seemed dragged down; he sighed and blinked his bloodshot eyes. His name, Czar, was engraved on a brass plate on his wide, studded collar.

“We will send on the pedigree,” one of the ladies promised. “We will put it in the post.”

“Please don't,” said Angel. “I love animals for themselves. Those pieces of paper are meaningless to me.”

“Heavens, that house!” said Esmé as they drove away. “The choking smell of animals! And all the cushions covered with hairs.”

“I didn't notice,” Angel said.

It was a heavy, thundery evening; the sky looked curdled, with loose, watery clouds passing below the sun. Angel drove on, away from Alderhurst. She had a poor sense of direction, but she thought that she remembered coming that way home on the night when Theo had taken her in his motor, and at last she was sure. Ahead of them was a signpost and the steep lane leading down to Paradise House. From the high-road they could look across the tops of the trees in the valley. She drew on the rein and turned off the road at a sharp angle to begin the descent.

I hope not more calls, Esmé thought, and he could not help yawning. The dog swung his head up and gazed at him, without curiosity. “You see, he is quite at home already,” Angel said. “And who is the most beautiful dog in all the world, then? Who is my precious darling one? Oh, damnation, there's a great cart stuck right across the road.”

“Do we
have
to go down here?” asked Esmé, and yawned again and again until his eyes watered.

Angel did not answer him, but waved her whip at an old man who was unloading logs from the cart into his cottage-garden.

“Will you move your cart,” she called out querulously.

“There's no road through,” he said, coming up the lane towards her. “I would have to take the cart right down and turn it about.”

“Then kindly take it down and turn it about. We want to pass by.”