Angel (22 page)

The sea-sickness speech irritated him dreadfully, but there were other annoyances, too. She had brought with her a flowing white pleated garment and in this insisted on being photographed, standing on a plinth. She owed this to her readers, she said. And she collected souvenirs. Wherever they went he was loaded with peasant costumes—which she would put on as soon as they reached their hotel—with baskets and bottles of wine, with pottery, with strings of beads and ikons and plaster statuettes. She could not learn the currency and managed to convey an impression of deep suspicion, frowning at the coins she was given and muttering her distrust. At Rhodes, she boxed a little boy's ears for tipping a live mouse from a cage into the harbour. “Christianity has made the place drab,” she said in Athens. At Delphi, she bottled some water from the sacred spring. “It shall be a present for Nora,” she said. “To inspire her with poetry.” Esmé thought it a cheap enough present. His irritations he worked off by correcting her pronunciation of Greek and, when they reached Venice, of Italian.

Venice—although Italy—was strangely less disappointing. It had the advantage, but was not to have for much longer, of not having been the background of one of her novels. There, Angel bought a great deal of vulgarly ornate glass, more baskets, more peasant-costumes. Esmé had shellfish poisoning and was sick again. Angel had never had any patience with other people's illnesses, and she thought that Esmé was doing his best to spoil her honeymoon, from heedlessness, gluttony or lack of common-sense. They went in a gondola on the Grand Canal in the moonlight, but that again was not what she had imagined. Later, she was to write of such an excursion as the climax of romance. But Esmé was not romantic. “We like different things,” he said. “A great pity.” He had loved Greece, and her complaints there had exasperated him.

He knew that she became especially watchful as soon as they were in Italy, and he was careful to guard her peace of mind. When they walked in the narrow streets or sat in the great Square drinking coffee, he looked neither to right nor to left. Once she remarked, in a voice irritating with its tone of leniency and condescension, on a girl who passed by them: “
So
pretty!”

“Oh, was she? I didn't see.” He half-turned his head.

“A great pity that they so soon coarsen and grow florid,” she added.

Like many romantic, narcissistic women she shied away from the final act of love-making. She would have lived in a world of courtship and hand-kissing if she could. Sex seemed to have nothing to do with her. It was a sudden reversal, not a continuation, of the delights of being wooed. She had to become a different person before she could endure it, and she was not always able, even for love of Esmé, to make the change. That desperate communication with herself in which she writes, holds good in love as well, he thought.

She was happiest when she was lavishing love and presents upon him. As soon as she guessed that there was something he wanted, she would not rest until it was his. She did not notice that he was growing sulky, like a spoilt child. The gifts were all so inevitable, and the signs of his gratitude so eagerly looked for. She had a sad way of damaging his enthusiasms, in the way that she had damaged Greece, with her scorn. Jealousy was at the root of her cynicism. He was not to admire anything or anyone but her; not even a fragment of sculpture.

For the most part, their moments of happiness did not coincide, so were bound to be imperfect; but there were times when she was animated and interested and he was pleased to have her company. It was not much to say of a honeymoon, but she seemed oblivious that their marriage had not made a very brilliant beginning. She could be gay and conspiratorial when she was alone with him, and enjoyed the laughter they had together over a foolish young woman, a fellow-passenger as they came up the Adriatic, who had fallen in love with Esmé and was for ever finding questions to ask him about the ship's time or the weather. Angel, basking in Esmé's indifference to the girl, enjoyed the situation. “I suppose there will be countless other young women,” she said and she took for granted that they would all be part of the same joke, drawing husband and wife closer together rather than alienating them. Esmé, for his part, was quite glad that she was there to protect him from the girl's tiresomeness.

Even in Greece, they had had some idyllic times, especially when she could forget her distaste of the ruins or her certainty that all the mules were overloaded. They spent a morning wandering on a hillside, looking for tortoises; they ate their luncheon of garlic-sausage and olives and watched the lizards among the stones. Esmé had tried to dig up a mandrake, scooping the earth away with his fingers, and Angel knelt beside him watching. He uncovered the shoulders of the strange root, exposed the smooth, bifurcated body. “It is like an idol,” she said. “Or an image for sticking pins into. And will it really scream as you drag it from the ground?”

“That is what we are going to find out.”

She leant closer to him, silent and tense. Make it scream! Oh, make it scream! she prayed. There was a loud snap and the root had broken. Esmé pushed the earth over it again. Angel was quite bitterly disappointed. Later, they lay down in the shade and fell asleep. When he woke first, he saw a little snake lying close to her head. As Esmé moved, it slid away under a stone. He was pale and trembling as he pulled her to her feet. She looked at him with pleasure, but deep amusement, too.

“It was lying near your head. It was almost in your hair.”

“But I like snakes,” she said.

They went back home through France. In the South, the landscape, the vines and cypresses and the flat, crenellated roofs seemed to whirl round in the intensity of the heat. They became anxious to be home, and they thought of Paradise House embowered in greenness, in a mist of rain, as they had often seen it since the first evening. Angel was full of her plans for it, the ones she had made before they were married and the new ones she thought of every day. Esmé was acquiescent. It was
her
money and he took it for granted that she would spend it to his best advantage. Even on his honey-moon he had begun to have a faintly convalescent air and managed to convey the idea that he must not be troubled with trifles.

The trifles emerged as soon as they reached home. The door was opened by a servant they had never seen before. Nora had engaged her while they were away and she stared at her new mistress as if she were hypnotised and looked as if she would take flight.

“Welcome!” said Nora, coming across the hall with her arms outstretched. “Good evening, Esmé,” she added, turning to him when she had kissed Angel.

So that is how it is to be! he thought; we shall have to see. Soon after their betrothal, he had asked Angel if there would be room for Nora and him under one roof. “Oh, yes!” she had said blithely. “I could not do without either of you.”

“I know how bridegrooms should behave,” he now said. “But I cannot very well carry Angelica across her own threshold.” I cannot very well carry Angelica, he added to himself.

“
Our
threshold,” she said, looking about the hall. “Where is Czar? All the way home, I had in my mind the picture of him coming to meet me. I thought he would come bounding down the steps. There's nothing wrong with him, is there?” she asked with a sudden change of voice.

“No, nothing,” Nora said. “Edwina, fetch Czar from the library, please.”

The maid hurried away and Angel raised her eyebrows at Nora. “Edwina? How very unsuitable.”

“She refuses to change. I had to take what I could get. They told me at the Agency in Norley that girls simply won't work out here. It's too much in the wilds and they are frightened of the walk home on their afternoon off.”

Angel had a curiously silencing thought—I was once offered a job in this house myself. But it did not seem to be the same place. She could not—even if she had cared to, and nothing did she desire less—have peopled it with the ghosts of Aunt Lottie's Madam and that other Angelica; she did not imagine Aunt Lottie herself coming home down the lane after one of her Wednesday afternoons in Volunteer Street, brushing Madam's hair in one of the rooms upstairs or looking out of one of those windows and seeing Angel's novel left out there on a seat on the terrace.

Edwina now came back into the hall, dragging the dog by his collar.

“Come Czar!” Angel called, patting her thigh.

He sat down and yawned, then turned his head and looked out of the open door.

“He seems so staid after—after other dogs,” Nora said apologetically.

He gave no sign of recognising Angel and bore her embraces indifferently. A poor start, Esmé thought.

“Ah, you put the portrait here, Nora,” said Angel, straightening her back and looking about her. “I had really imagined it in the dining-room.”

“It can soon be moved,” said Nora, wondering how many more mistakes she had made. She had supervised the move from Alderhurst, so that they should come back at the end of their honeymoon to their new home.

“You must have worked truly hard,” said Angel, with a puzzling warmth. “How lucky we are, Esmé, to come home and find it all done for us.”

Nora's gratitude for this tribute lasted, and fortified her later when they went over the house and Angel exclaimed with vexation at the way carpets were laid and curtains hung.

At the end of the house, on the first floor, a room facing North had been planned and furnished as a surprise for Esmé, and Angel went ahead of them and opened the door to see if all of her instructions had been obeyed. It was her idea of a studio, with all she had ever imagined it should contain: the dais, the easel, the lay-figure, the draperies. Esmé, when he saw it, could not think of any suitable words. Angel watched him and waited. “It is so splendid,” he said, “that I shall be too overawed to paint.” She looked pleased. I shall often be able to say true things, in the confident hope of being misunderstood, he thought.

After dinner, Angel went to the library with Nora to sign cheques. She sat down at the table and Nora settled nearby with an ‘I told you so' look upon her face. Presently, Angel said severely: “We are spending too much money. There won't be enough in the bank to meet all this. You know what I have had to pay for the house.”

“I tried to point that out to you. I have been dreadfully alarmed at the way the bills kept coming in.”

“Two dozen dusters! What do we want with two dozen dusters? Surely, old rags would do?”

“I hadn't any old rags,” Nora said patiently.

“I could have given you some of my old vests and things if only you had asked. What is this? Two loads of manure? And there must be all that pony's dung lying about. I noticed a great heap of it in the lane on our way down—all flattened by the wheels of the trap and wasted.” She signed her name to a cheque for five hundred pounds to Lucille. “I am sorry to criticise, Nora, on my first evening at home, but salmon and duckling at one meal is quite unnecessary. We shall have to do without some of our little luxuries until I have recovered from buying the house.”

And since you are now landed, Nora thought, with the biggest luxury of all—Esmé, the luxury no woman can afford.

“I have signed quite enough,” Angel said pettishly. “That bank-manager will be angry with me.”

“Just the bill for the peacocks,” Nora pleaded. “The man wrote such an impatient letter.”

“I will write him an even more impatient letter back. Two drearier, mopier birds I never saw. I hate dispirited creatures. Ah, well, I am tired now and I shall go up to bed. My own bed at last, not one full of fleas.” She went to the window and looked out at the narrow stretch of parkland, yellow with buttercups and with two oval clumps of elm-trees. Beyond that, the woods rose away gradually towards the horizon.

My first evening here, she thought. “I shall want some bookplates printed,” she said to Nora. “Just ‘Ex libris' and then Angelica Howe-Nevinson, Paradise House.' And some device with peacocks,” she added. “I will ask Esmé to do a design.”

More expense, Nora thought.

“If Bessie has unpacked, I can give you your present,” Angel said as she went upstairs with Czar following. Alone in her room, she felt a sudden panic about money: she had put it away from her when Nora was there. I must keep it all going, she thought,—the house, and Esmé and all I have promised him—balancing it on my finger-tips, racking my brain. She felt disinclination amounting to nausea at the thought of starting another book. There is nothing in me, she moaned aloud, covering her mouth with her handkerchief as if she were going to retch. Perhaps it is all finished. Soon she felt better, and began to wander about the bedroom, looking at the things that Bessie had unpacked. She took the medicine-bottle of water from the Sacred Spring which she had brought with such care from Delphi, uncorked it and drank deeply. Perhaps its magic had ceased hundreds of years ago and had only been for poets in the first place, but it seemed an experiment worth making. She replenished the bottle from the water-jug and took it along to Nora's bedroom.

“You see, I carried it safely all the way from Greece for you,” she said.

“What is it?”

When Angel had told her, Nora gave it a peculiar look and put it down on her dressing-table. “I shall always treasure it,” she said.

Angel returned to her own room and found that Czar had settled himself on the eiderdown at the end of the bed. Angel undressed and let down her long, black hair. She felt nervous and not herself at bedtime, wondering in an unsettled way if she would be expected to play that ludicrous and alien game of sexual love, in which not only she, but Esmé also, seemed to her to lose identity as well as poise.

Esmé had spent an hour or more going round the gardens, rather fancying himself as a kind of rustic squire. When he came back to the house, he saw the lights in his and Angel's bedroom and went up at once. She was asleep, with her dark hair spread all about her pillow, and most of the rest of the bed was taken up by Czar, who opened one bloodshot eye and looked at him. There was an overpowering smell of dog in the room, and when Esmé tried to pull him off the bed he began to growl. “Oh, leave him, the blessed,” Angel murmured, stirring in her sleep. “So very long since he has seen us.”