Angel (28 page)

“Poor little pigs!” Esmé said.

“I don't think!” said Marvell.

The winter passed and Venus Wood remained a secret between them. Angel and Nora were both occupied with producing pamphlets and attending meetings. Vegetarianism led to so many other enthusiasms and indignations, to campaigns against vivisection and vaccination, the muzzling of dogs, the use of pit-ponies. Nora was given new chances for martyrdom. Duties called her from opposite directions at the same time: there was always some pleasure she could deny herself, as on one evening when Angel set out for a meeting at Lady Baines's. At first, Nora thought that she could go and then she was sure that she must not.

“I shall have to stay; although I should have loved the outing. I don't seem to have had a breather all day; but Bessie is baking bread and she will never knead it enough if I am not here to watch over her.”

Marvell had the car on the drive and was just running a leather over the windscreen when Angel and Nora came out of the house.

“The evenings
are
drawing out,” Nora said. “Last week it was dark at this time.”

A shot sounded far off and the noise ricocheted about the valley.

“I am always hearing this,” said Angel. “What does it mean, Marvell?”

He passed the leather slowly over the glass, seemed to consider and then said: “Poachers, I shouldn't be surprised.”

“How dare they? In my grounds, do you mean?”

“It sounded like it, madam.”

“Then I shall have them punished for trespassing and plundering, slaughtering harmless creatures. I won't have it, Marvell.”

“No, Madam.”

“It's your business, you understand, to make sure that it's stopped.”

“I'll see to it tomorrow.”

He held the door open and she settled herself in the car. “I shall be back at six-thirty, Nora.”

“Give my kind regards to Lady Baines,” Nora said wistfully and turned back to the house.

When the meeting was over, Marvell drove Angel back through the dark lanes. “Quite a nip in the air,” he observed, but received no answer.

As soon as they reached Paradise House, Nora came running down the steps.

“Esmé hasn't come in,” she said. “I think Marvell should help us look for him.” She had flung a coat over her shoulders and her teeth were chattering. “It's been dark for so long and I've been round and round the garden calling until I'm hoarse.”

“I'll go straight away,” Marvell said. He took a torch from the car and set off at a jog-trot. “I've been to the stables,” Nora shouted after him, but he ran on without replying. The light from the torch swung from side to side, striking the boles of trees. He ran without hesitation and he did not waste his breath with calling.

Angel had said nothing. She stood on the drive, seeming irresolute, as if not quite certain what the commotion was about. Then a great sense of danger dawned in her. She flung her muff down on the steps and turned to Nora, almost thrusting her away from her. “You go to the orchard and call.”

“Es-mé, Es-mé,” Nora began to shout immediately as she set off. To hear her own voice seemed to give her courage.

Angel followed Marvell. She felt instinctively that he had chosen the right direction. She had no light and kept running into the trees; brambles snatched at her ankles and caught her skirt as she stumbled forward, her hands stretched out before her. She thought that she was lost in the darkness, and after a while she stopped and tried to find her bearings, and then she heard footsteps and saw a light zig-zagging between the trees. Marvell was coming back. She managed to call out to him once, her voice harsh with terror.

“Madam, turn back; we must get help.”

She could not move or speak. The torch-battery was running out, the light dimmed, then it failed altogether.

“Venus Wood lake,” Marvell was saying, but his words seemed nonsensical to her. “His wheel-chair there on the bank and the boat turned over on the water. Oh, madam. . . .”

“What boat?”

“There's not a sign or sound; the water just as still and black as the sky and his crutch floating out there on it. Something terrible wrong, I would say. Poor madam!” He made a movement towards where he could sense but not see that she was standing, but she had suddenly started forward.

“Don't go there, I beg you,” he said. “You come along back to the house with me and we must send for the police.”

She was plunging on through the trees away from him, in the direction he had come.

“Oh, don't go to that dreadful place,” he shouted after her.

Half-running, she blundered on. The trees blocked her path like obstacles in a nightmare, seeming to move forward in her way. She began to call Esmé's name as she ran, and the sound of her distracted voice made Marvell's heart turn over. When she came to the edge of the lake she fell silent. It was not so dark there where the trees parted, and the water looked smooth and polished, unmoving. For a moment she was too afraid to call or make any sound: it seemed to her that her slightest breath might precipitate disaster. Then she began to whisper his name over and over again: as her panic grew, her voice rose until she was screaming hysterically. She tried to blot out everything with her cries. The sound rang round and round the lake and frightened birds flew off the tops of the trees, their clattering wings like derisive applause from hundreds of clapping hands.

THE memorial—Esmé's memorial—was built on rising ground beyond the house. It could be seen from the lime avenue; people approaching by way of the drive were confronted by the untidy gap in the woods where beech trees had been felled. Nature had hastened to fill in the space temporarily with fire-weed, now bracken was beginning to encroach upon the granite obelisk; rabbits nibbled the grass under the iron chains which railed it off; the stone was splashed with the droppings of rooks and wood-pigeons.

The memorial itself had never been finished. Angel's further plans to embellish it with a flight of steps and a marble seat carved with Esmé's name had never been fulfilled. Word had come to the stonemason that her credit was not good in the neighbourhood, and he had decided to send in the bill for the obelisk itself before risking more materials. Now, fifteen years after Esmé's death, a part of the money was still owing. The mason did not consider, as Angel did, that a signed first edition of one of her works was a generous substitute for half the sum. She was, as the years went by, inclined to try more and more to settle her accounts with anything but money: dismayed and indignant tradespeople received copies of her novels or old photographs of herself; they invariably returned them, but by that time the account had been written off in Angel's mind: she herself was calmly satisfied that justice had been done. Consequent rudeness she ignored; they were part of the general unrest, the prevalent philistinism which had brought about so much wretchedness, socialism, income-tax, the decline of her own fame and, lately, a recurring threat of war.

Few people came to Paradise House; those who did almost fought their way through weeds to the front door. Lady Baines drove over once or twice a month from Bottrell Saunter and, apart from the vet who was always being summoned to dose a sick cat, the doctor was their most frequent visitor. He called nearly every week to attend to Nora's gout.

“How can she have gout?” Angel had asked when the illness was first diagnosed. “A glass of elderflower wine's the most she ever takes.”

“Heredity,” the doctor said wearily. He knew what he was up against—Angel's impatience with Nora for being ill and her impatience with him for saying that she was.

“Gout!” she said furiously when she returned to Nora's bedroom. “Some fine relations you must have had.” Brewery folk, she thought, as Aunt Lottie would have done.

Aunt Lottie had died in peaceful retirement, but a year or two before her death she had paid a week's visit to Paradise House. The invitation was given in a spirit of condescension and accepted from curiosity. Angel looked forward to making the most of the situation in which, in the face of all that Aunt Lottie could ever have imagined or desired, she was the mistress of Paradise House, sleeping, no doubt, in Madam's bedroom, and Bessie up in the attics where Aunt Lottie's place had been, where Angel herself, if she had not had other plans, might have found herself, too. Motives, on both sides, were spiteful and the visit was stimulating for that reason. Angel was as over-bearing as she could be and Aunt Lottie remained resolutely unimpressed. It was horrible to see the dear old place in such a state, she said, and she wouldn't have come if she had known. Madam must be turning in her grave.

“You should have seen it when I took it over,” said Angel. “Burnt out, broken down.”

“Best to have let it be; best to have let it fall down and put it out of its agony. Why throw away good money, just to be left with this great mockery of a place?”

At every turn there was something different to deplore.

“All these horrible dirty cats, the smell is dreadful. I'm sure they're all breeding like rabbits. And what does that Marvell do the whole day long to be letting these weeds clutter up the terrace? Madam's rose-garden, what a mercy she's not here in my place to see that.” It was the burden of her conversation, that Madam's death had been propitious indeed: all the same, she dwelt on the picture of her revolving in her grave at the sorry decline of her old home.

Angel was complacent. She knew that her aunt was retaliating as best she could; but the fact was indisputable that something had come about which she could never have believed possible, and Angel was not ending up in prison or the workhouse, as her waywardness had always indicated, but at Paradise House itself, however ruined and run over it might be.

“You ought to sell it—not that you could,” her aunt often said.

“I intend to stay here for the rest of my life.”

“The timber would fetch something,” Aunt Lottie said, ignoring her. “Cut your losses and build yourself a nice little bungalow, a small place that you could manage to keep clean.”

Paradise House was not clean. Even with most of the rooms shut up, Bessie could not manage it, old as she was and with such haphazard help as she got from the cottage people in the valley, who could not come if it rained or if their children fell ill, and when they did come were too much infected by the air of neglect in the house to do much work. Nora was now so often laid up, and Angel, as Bessie said, never took a duster in her hand.

“What happened to that girl—Angelica?” Angel asked Aunt Lottie. Old inhibitions persisted and her voice was surly.

“Girl! Well, my goodness, her own daughter's expecting her second.” But she had not grown up in Angel's mind, and never would. “She married a very nice gentleman, a barrister, but things aren't what they were for them. All the wrong people have come to the top these days and the real gentry have to reduce and cut down. It's hard for people like that, I always think, and Miss Angelica wasn't brought up to do a great deal for herself.”

Angel imagined her struggling to put on her own stockings.

Theo had retired and the business was run by a nephew of Willie Brace, who seemed blandly impervious to Angel's threatening letters. She would not admit the thought that her fame had reached its peak and passed away; instead, her great vanity grew; she was entangled in delusions. She insisted that there was a conspiracy against her, that she had made powerful enemies by her outspokenness: indeed, she was able to look round her and find with the greatest difficulty enough friends to count upon the fingers of one hand: Nora, Lady Baines, Theo, perhaps, who sometimes wrote letters to her or sent a book which he, always mistakenly, thought that she would like to read. To make her list up to five, she would have to include the scoundrelly Marvell, with whom she enjoyed a cantankerous day-to-day relationship—she, trying to beat him into submission—he, eluding her with craft. There was also a young man who called occasionally to look at Esmé's paintings. He had discovered one or two of them in London and tracked down the rest of the collection at Paradise House. Angel was suspicious and insisted that they were not for sale, but she felt sensations of tenderness towards him. That he was an art critic might have affected her differently, but his enthusiasm for Esmé's paintings disarmed her.

“Do you see?” he asked her, as they stood in front of her portrait. “The wonderful economy in colour and composition?”

“I always thought the hands exceptionally well done.”

“And in portrait-painting something a little extra is asked for. The work cannot be judged quite from the usual standards; for the point is that there must be some likeness—the imagination is fettered.”

She raised her hands and glanced at them. They were shiny and crinkled nowadays, discoloured and with veins on them as thick as worms. To her, they were still as smooth and white as in the painting. “Something tragic and solitary about the pose and setting, the eyes yearning . . . perhaps I embarrass you?”

“I am never embarrassed,” she said coldly.

“In most portraits of women, the attempt to catch the true expression fails; instead of looking mysterious they appear as smug as the Mona Lisa; a warm smile turns into a smirk; far from appearing sad, they seem merely harassed.”

“That was my dear dog, Sultan,” she said.

The other paintings were put up on the easel one by one and murmured over. The young man, whose name was Clive Fennelly, was dressed in a navy-blue suit; his black shoes were dusty; he was determinedly citified in his appearance. His dark eyes seemed too luminous in his pale face, his greasy hair was receding already at the temples. He looked unhealthy, but there was something about him, perhaps his voice with its intimate tone and adenoidal drawl, which was sexually attractive to women. Angel was especially conscious of such an attraction—from fear of its ultimate meaning—as with Esmé when she first had known him. She sensed a promise of tenderness, the quality she always searched for and so often brusquely rejected, not knowing how to deal with its effect upon herself, suspicious of the emotions it aroused in her.