Angel (25 page)

The boredom of life at Paradise House was becoming too much for him. The only relief to the tedium had been the days at the races with Marvell, days he could no longer afford. He had sometimes thought of going to London to meet Laura, but to do so would have involved him in a conspiracy with Marvell, and that he shrank from. That morning a letter had come from her to tell him that she was married.

“I wish you would stop sighing,” Nora said. “It is so very irritating.”

He stopped sighing, and began to tap his teeth with his finger-nails.

“I can't think why you don't do some work,” she added.

He did not enlighten her, but stared in silence out at the budding garden. He had half meant to begin a landscape, loving the bone-bare shapes of hills and hangers; but now all the tiresome little leaves were unfolding, blurring the outlines he admired.

Where was Angel, he wondered? Reading her works aloud to some sulky, helpless invalid, no doubt. This new rôle of benefactress had suggested itself to her when she had realised that the country people gave no sign of recognition when she drove by. She did not expect curtsies, she told herself, but those sullen stares puzzled her. She felt her presence at Paradise House resented. The cottage people stood too much in awe of her, no doubt, for she was not just the Squire's wife they were accustomed to, but a celebrity, a world figure. That they would not know how to behave was understandable. With her jars of jam and her beef-broth she set out to show them the way. She began to be a dreaded figure in the neighbourhood. Esmé, from Marvell's innuendoes, could realise how dreaded. The innuendoes wounded him; he was so vulnerable to them that he could sense them coming, he would try to stave them off and, when he failed, would not forgive himself for having let the opportunity arise. But once spoken, the words were allowed to pass: he pretended that he had not heard or had not seen the implication; he betrayed himself and Angel and hated both himself and her in doing so. Nora snipped off a thread and pulled the darning mushroom out of the sock. She wondered if it would be provoking him too much if she asked him to stop tapping his teeth. Although she had a sense of mastery over him and was sure that he knew it, if she goaded him he might become violent. As a boy, he had once turned her teasing to terror and had swung a croquet-mallet at her shin. At that moment, no thought of the consequences could have deterred him. She had driven him beyond reasoning and had ever after hesitated to do it again. And cripples are noted for their ungovernable tempers, she reminded herself. She supposed that frustration made them savage.

If I could go for a long tramp, thought Esmé, I might shake off all the annoyances. He imagined walking very quickly indeed, shedding one worry after another as he went, breaking into a run, arriving breathless at his destination, but free.

“What time is it?” he asked in a dull voice, not bothering to turn round from the window to look at the clock.

“A quarter to four.”

Nearly an hour to tea-time, he found himself thinking, as if he were a child. The thought took him back many years to a nursery afternoon with a sky outside as overcast as this one. He tried to step quickly back from the image, from the suffocation he felt at the memory, at the picture shouldering its way up from the darkness. There had been rain on the outside of the nursery window and the smear of his own breath on the inside; Nora, as now, sitting beside the fire with her sewing or her poetry-writing or her scrap-books or any other of her pursuits which kept her so busy. He had looked out into the deadness of the afternoon, at a monkey-puzzle tree wet with rain against the wet sky. “What time is it?” he had asked and Nora had said: “Look for yourself.” But he had not bothered to turn. It could not be less than an hour to tea and there was nothing to do. He had felt burdened by the thought of all the afternoons of his life; yet the boy had been protected as the man could not be; had been unable, fortunately, to see himself thirty or more years later standing at another window but in the same sort of panicky boredom, still thinking that there was nothing to do, and with the extra burden of memory.

He longed for a diversion.

“What time will Angel get back?” he asked.

“Not much before six, I expect.”

Any diversion, even death, he suddenly thought; the words formed so distinctly in his mind that he was afraid he might have spoken them aloud. When she comes back, I shall speak to her, he decided. I shall tell her that I must have the money. She has treated me like a child: we will see if it still holds good.

He wondered in a detached way what her reaction would be: he had at last learnt to stand so far aside from his own pride that whatever she said would be interesting to him. He rather hoped for a storm; it would bring his experience of this dull day to a climax: the hours could hardly drag by in quite the same way afterwards: the tempo must quicken. His decision stimulated him. He also felt enormous relief at the thought of telling her, of laying his burden on her. The money now seemed as good as his. He wished that she would come quickly; but he could pass the time better, having something to look forward to. He had made up his mind, and he tried to turn it to other matters, fearful of changing it.

She listened to him with her head bent, as if it were she who was in disgrace. Impatiently he had followed her up to her bedroom when she returned from her sick-visiting. He might have had good news to tell, he was so suddenly eager to speak to her. At least I don't have the trying business of wheedling it out of him, she thought. His technique with confessions was bold. It was less painful to him to begin at the end with the sum total, or even an exaggeration, of his trouble: then, when the listener was staggering from the first blow, he would make his way back towards the beginning, toning down his excesses with mitigating circumstances, an air of candour and self-reproach, a sadness that from the weakness of his character, the effects of his childhood, not much better could ever have been expected.

Angel sat at her dressing-table. She had taken off her hat and was swirling it round and round on one hand, gazing down at it as she listened. Esmé lurched about the room on his crutches. He went over to the window and straightened the curtains, then he banged on the glass to frighten the peacocks down on the terrace. Angel flinched at the noise.

“You see,” he said, and he turned on her a look both helpless and ingratiating. “You see what you have married. I wonder that you were ever so silly.”

“I have never regretted it,” she said stiffly. A little later she asked in a frightened voice: “Have you?”

“But it is
you
who have reason to. It is I who have let you down and I who have had nothing to give. Nora, for instance, might say that I married you for your money.”

She was still absorbed in her contemplation of her hat; her fingers smoothed the velvet flowers and touched their beaded stamens. Then she took in a deep breath very sharply, and lifting her head stared at herself in the looking-glass. “I have no money,” she said.

She saw his reflection slope back against the window-sill. He glanced down at the carpet and traced a design on it with one of his crutches.

“I thought. . .” he began and then changed his mind about whatever he had been going to say and said in an exhausted tone: “Then I am to be disgraced and done for. I thought that there was only one way out of it and so there is.”

“Something must be thought of,” she said quickly. “I can get some money.” She looked wildly round the room as if searching for it there and then. She knew his moods of despair, so much more desperate since the war, and half-knew that his life contained too little to occupy a grown man: she feared lest he might now decide that it contained too little to justify prolonging it; his dull voice, his hopelessness threatened this. She struggled to put aside her guilt and fear. “I will find a way, I promise you. I should not have been so lazy lately, or so extravagant. This house costs a great deal . . . Nora will tell you. She knows how I stand.”

“But
you
wouldn't tell me. . . .”

“What do you mean?”

“You tell me nothing. I am treated like a small boy. You and Nora run the place. It might not
be
my home as well.”

“But we run it for you.”

“Well, please don't bother to. And, if it costs so much, especially don't bother to.”

“I love it.”

He knew that he had said too much.

“I feel such a despicable fool having to come to you for money,” he explained. “It is my own sorry fault for squandering what I had; that only makes it worse, and no man would want to ask what I just had to ask.”

She knew that he had had a little money of his own, and supposed that he had squandered that as well.

“There is so little here to pass the time—as I am,” he said. He banged the toe of his shoe with one of the crutches.

She had known this too, and to smother her self-reproach had tried to make Paradise House like a pretty bird-cage full of amusing devices: instead of swings and looking-glasses and tinkling bells, she had furnished the studio, acquiesced in the race-going. He had not come to love his captivity; he had only lost the courage to escape.

“How soon?” she asked. “How soon must you have the money?”

She blushed, which he had rarely seen her do; he felt shocked at the sight, the ugly colour running up one side of her neck and across her forehead.

“It is a question of staving him off,” he said. “From now on, until I pay him, can only be unpleasant and may well be worse.”

It did not occur to Angel to try to borrow the money; only to earn it, as she always had done. She laid down her hat and then took a deep breath and stood up. She felt strength gathering in her, a physical strength in her arms and finger-tips and a glowing confidence in her heart. She smiled at him, but he lowered his eyes.

“Don't worry,” she begged him. “Only tell me this—when you said that there would only be one way out if you couldn't pay . . . what did you mean?” She waited fearfully for his answer.

“I meant that I should have to ask Nora for the money.”

She felt great relief and was able to smile condescendingly and say: “Oh, that would never have done. We mustn't ask such favours of other people. Besides, Nora wouldn't have as much money as that. You must just leave it to me. It will be all right. You shall see. I will work day and night to take this worry from you.”

He made no movement towards her and had nothing to say. Alert in his sensitiveness, he wondered what other crude words she would have to torture him with. He felt that he must beat her off with his crutch if she came near him. He pretended that he did not know she was waiting for him to reply. After a moment's hesitation she left him. He listened to her hurrying across the landing, and then there was a lovely peace in the room, as if a bluebottle had gone suddenly out of the window.

“Well, we're not having it, that's all. Not any more. You can get that straight.”

Angel, on her way to find Nora, heard this strange voice shouting in the library: it was difficult to tell if it were a man's or a woman's. It rasped and rattled with breathy fury. When she opened the door she saw an old lady confronting Nora. She was dressed in black with a white scarf folded across inside her collar; her fists were clenched in grey cotton gloves. On the table beside her was a jar of Nora's gooseberry jam.

“I'm saying,” she said as soon as she saw Angel, “I'm saying you can put a stop to it. The poor old man was crying when I got home. It was pitiful to hear. ‘You mustn't leave me,' he said, ‘or she'll come back. Don't let her ever come again.' ‘She won't come again', I promised him,—‘or only over my dead body.' And you wouldn't have got in this time if I hadn't had to take some washing back and left the door on the latch in case his sister looked in. Crying himself sick, he was. He hasn't much longer to live. I'll see that he has his week or two in peace.”

“What is this?” Angel asked Nora.

Nora shrugged. “It seems that your kindness isn't appreciated.”

“And I can make my own jam, thank you,” said the old lady. She took the jar from the table and held it for a moment to the light. “Look at the colour of that,” she sneered. “I'd be ashamed to own it mine.”

Nora put her hands over her ears. “Angel, do stop her,” she said.

“Angel!” the old lady shouted. “I like ‘Angel'. Angel's rich, I must say. A fine Angel, clarring about with your pots of jam, pestering people when they're under the weather, frightening that poor little Doris Nott when she had a temperature of a hundred and three, sitting there reading at her till she was nearly distracted, some book about heathens, too . . . and her mother too nervous to send you about your business. . . .” Angel walked across to the door and opened it and stood beside it. . . . “Well, I'm not too nervous. Put a step over my threshold just once more, that's all.”

“I am waiting for you to go.”

“No doubt you are, as others have waited for
you
to go.”

She seemed reluctant to come nearer to Angel, to pass close to her as she would have to on her way out, and she could feel the power of so much suppressed fury threatening her. Her own anger was petering out, but the satisfaction it had given her was spoilt by the fear that it might have provoked physical violence. She almost ducked as she skirted Angel at arm's length and then made up for the indignity by shouting, once safely in the hall: “Well, I've warned you.”

Bessie came hurrying from the inner hall. “See this person out,” Angel said and at once she went back into the library and shut the door.

“The terrible old creature,” Nora said. “I felt sure that she was crazy and I was just going to ring for Bessie when you came in. I wouldn't have bothered you or had you upset in this way.”