Angel (30 page)

It was over-ripe, half-covered with a wrinkled skin of mildew, but she made him pick it. “You can cut the bad bits out when you get back to London,” She held out her skirt in front and he dropped the fruit into it when it was gathered—some as hard as apples and with skins like green felt, some bruised and brown. “When you eat them this evening,” she said, “you will know that they were still growing on the tree this afternoon.”

He put his hand into the leaves, a sensation he disliked very much, grasped the only good-looking peach he had so far found and the only one he could imagine himself eating, and felt a sharp pain in his thumb. The wasp crawled round the fruit.

“Now what's wrong?” asked Angel. “If you are stung, just suck your thumb hard. I daresay Nora can find something to put on it when we get back to the house. She is a great one for fussing round. Don't leave the peach there after all that.” Again the leaves brushed at his wrists; he shooed away the wasp and picked the peach. “That's a good one,” Angel said. “Nothing like Paradise House peaches.” As they made their way out of the garden she had her skirt bunched up in one hand and held the peach in the other as she ate it.

“Do pick up any pears if you want them,” she said. “I know what London fruit is like.”

They found Marvell in the courtyard.

“Have you been busy with the car?” she asked him, guessing that he had not.

“No, madam; to my mind the axle's gone, and that would be beyond my jurisdiction. It's no more then anyone could expect, the drive all stones and tree-roots.”

“I want you to hurry and get it mended. I must drive over to Bottrell Saunter in the morning.”

Bottrell Saunter! My God! thought Clive, standing by, sucking his thumb. He had had rather a lot for one day and his head was aching.

“Now, madam, if you could just get but a glimmer of sense in your head you'd understand that the car will have to go away. It's a garage job, a broken axle.”

“You are supposed to be a chauffeur; you should fix it. I take no interest in mechanical things, so don't bore me any more. Just have it ready in the morning.”

“It won't be ready. . .”

“And when it is done, you had better see to the drive. If it needs tidying up, then tidy it; don't come and worry me.” She switched off her anger and gave Clive a warm and gentle smile, as if to underline the contretemps with Marvell and show that it was only with
him
that she was forced to be impatient. As they turned to go, her face became stern again and she said: “And will you stop stealing the peaches. I know what you are up to.”

In a frenzied voice, he called after her: “And that's the last time I'll wash your hair for you, madam. You'll see. It can get crumby with nits for all I care.”

“And now for Nora and her wasp-sting remedies,” said Angel. “I have brought you a wounded man,” she called, as she ascended the steps; her skirt, full of mouldy fruit, held out before her.

“What pleasure can he get from life at his age?” Angel said. They were discussing Lord Norley—their last hope—as they so often did. “However old is he now?”

“Ninety-seven, if you please,” said Nora. “A vein of obstinacy in him. Esmé had it too. But even if he died tomorrow it would be too late now, it couldn't help us in this present difficulty.”

The war had finally made it impossible for them to go on living so largely on credit. They found that they could not dodge from one shop to another for their rations: it seemed that some bills must be paid, or supplies would be cut off.

“It wasn't a very pleasant thing for a tradesman to do, to send such a letter at this season. It could be quite enough to spoil our Christmas altogether. Seventy-five pounds! Yes, it shows a fine Christmas spirit, I must say, to mention it at this season. And such a hypocrite, too. I can picture him singing hymns and carols, ‘Goodwill to all men' and so on.” Nora gave a sarcastic laugh. “Then he retires to his back-parlour to write threatening letters to elderly ladies.”

“I think ‘elderly' is rather premature. But it is an impertinent tone for a tradesman to use Angel said placidly.

“And what proof have we that this bill is right? To spend seventy-five pounds would have taken us years and years. ‘To Goods' indeed. ‘To account rendered.' It means nothing. I am only surprised that he drew the line at seventy-five pounds. Why not a hundred and seventy-five, or
two
hundred and seventy-five?”

If she says ‘
Three
hundred and seventy-five' I shall scream, Angel thought. “I can sell my emerald ring,” she said quickly to stem the mounting hysteria in Nora's voice, but she only managed to change its course.

“Why
should
you? In the end, what shall we have left?”

Marvell came in to ‘do the black-out' as he called it. He climbed onto a chair and fastened the shutters across the insides of the window.

“Don't come so early,” Nora told him. “We could have seen for another half-an-hour by daylight. We mustn't be so wasteful of electricity.”

Above her, light shone from a grubby, cobwebbed chandelier. The edges of the room—it was in the library that they were sitting—were in darkness.

“We can't infringe the laws,” answered Marvell. “I must do things when I think of them.”

“I want to go into Norley in the morning,” Angel said.

“We might just do it on the petrol. I'm not promising.”

The war was a personal annoyance to Angel, but nothing more. The passionate bitterness of that other war had faded and was forgotten: in this, there was no one to be taken from her; she had no case against it and did not care. The only people she knew were old; all that was happening in their world were small discomforts or fears that death might come a little sooner than they had bargained for, and in a different manner from what they had hoped.

Marvell was old, too, and relentlessly rude; but was a part of her life. They had sharpened their wits on one another for years; he had seen her through her grief at Esmé's death: she was most bound to him when she was admonishing him, being admonished; and she struck off his anger purposely when she was bored, though knowing that his was always the last word.

When he had drawn the shutters and gone, they heard Bessie shuffling across the hall to bolt the front door; chains rattled, she made a good job of it. They were shut in then for the night, though it was only tea-time: no one would come.

Under the light, they sat on opposite sides of the table, Nora sorting through a boxful of bills, Angel writing a letter to Theo. There is a peaceful communion between two people working together at the same table: the clock ticked, the logs shifted on the fire and Angel's pen scratched across the page. An old blanket covered the table; the bare wood had been cold to Nora's wrists and she had chilblains.

Bessie brought tea in on a tray and they made room for it at one end of the table, spread the bread and margarine with jam and ate it as they read and wrote. There were no interruptions save from the cats, who sometimes mewed from outside to be let in or from inside to be let out. Then Angel went at once to open the door. They spoke occasionally, but almost as if to themselves. “I shall tell Theo what I think of that Willie Brace's nephew,” Angel said. “He wouldn't like to see us starve, I know, or to discover how I am cheated.”

“
Did
we have coal delivered here in June?” asked Nora. “I certainly can't recall it, if we did.”

“Your household books seem all confusion,” Angel murmured.

“Yes, I am sure that you could do them better,”

“Oh, no, no! Too late now, anyhow. I could never straighten them out at this stage.”

Sometimes an aeroplane beat its way overhead, throbbing and droning across the valley, and Nora always listened nervously until it had gone. “Ours” made a different sound from “theirs”, she declared. She could always tell. “Nonsense!” said Angel. “He is deliberately boycotting my books, that nasty Brace fellow. Because I have spoken my mind to him from time to time. No respect, either. It was rash of Theo to retire and a sorry day for me when he did. I wasn't treated like this in
his
time.”

“Give him my kind regards,” said Nora. “He must be a very lonely man these days.”

They both thought for a moment sympathetically about Theo's loneliness, disregarding their own. Hermione had died before the war. “And
I
know what it means,” said Angel snubbingly. “Though my marriage was always perfect and theirs anything but that. All the same, there is a sense of loss.”

Sometimes Nora felt herself almost too provoked. Your perfect marriage, she thought scornfully. I could tell you something about that.

“Yes, he is a poor old man,” Angel said. For some reason, she visualised Theo sitting hunched-up and wretched in a fireless drawing-room, no lights on and sirens wailing. “I will invite him here and give him a rest from the bombs for a day or two,” she said.

Nora's thoughts swept over her larder shelves. There was still a tin of butter from Australia, she remembered. Some old admirer of Angel's books had sent it from the backwoods, where only, it seemed, they were ever read now. The tin of meat which had come at the same time had been thrown into the dustbin and retrieved from there by Marvell. “Thank goodness for the prunes,” Nora said. “I dreamt the other night that I cooked a whole pan full of them with salt instead of sugar and Rosita Baines already on her way to dinner.”

“When?” Angel looked up from her writing with a puzzled, unfocused look.

“In my dream . . . I was saying.”

Nora's catering dreams bored Angel dreadfully and she rarely listened. Although Nora knew this, she could not forgo the pleasure of telling them, or repress the resentment she felt when they were ignored.

“I wish you would take my advice and have your eyes seen to,” she told Angel. “I don't think you realise how bad they are. You peer at the page and your writing goes all slantwise and I'm afraid your eyes do, too. I don't like to say this, but it gives you such an odd look and I think you ought to know.”

“Umpity, tumpity, lumpity,” Angel muttered.

“What did you say?”

Angel mouthed as if she were shouting, but kept her voice low. “I said that there is nothing wrong with my eyesight. I get so tired of repeating everything, Nora. I wish that you would try to listen. Much worse just lately, I've noticed. Of course, if you are getting deaf, you can't be blamed, but I wonder if it isn't really a lazy habit. Mr Fennelly was remarking on it when he was here.” She got up and put another log on the fire and, as she did so, took a quick look in the glass above the chimney-piece. Nothing wrong with her eyes, she was quite sure. She picked a cat up from the hearth-rug and held it against her shoulder for warmth. “Strange that I haven't a single grey hair yet,” she said.

Nora was flurried and huffy and would not answer.

In the morning, Marvell drove Angel into Norley and she sold her emerald ring. She was a little grieved to part with it, but as she drove away from the jewellers, she thought: “At least I had it once, and that is so much better than never having had it at all.”

The shop-windows were full of frosted Christmas trees and stars and paper garlands. She remembered the blobs of cotton-wool her mother had once stuck all over the window of the shop in Volunteer Road.

“When you come to the Butts,” she suddenly told Marvell, “I want you to take the turning into Volunteer Road, by the brewery.”

“That's a terrible slummy part, madam.”

“Just do as I say and drive slowly.”

The heavy and sickly smell of malt pervaded the neighbourhood; a dray clattered out over the cobbled entranceway. So little here had changed, no more than a name or two over a shop-front. The Garibaldi, the Volunteer looked just the same, with dirty brick-work, facings of glazed tiles and windows engraved with the words ‘Saloon' and ‘Ladies Only' and ‘Jug and Bottle.'

“Straight on!” she said to Marvell. Yet when they came level with her old home, for some reason she could not look. She turned her head, as if otherwise she might be observed and all the secrets of her heart exposed, and glanced instead at the scene she had often looked out upon from their first-floor window—the terrace of grey and yellow brick houses, ledges of slate over the bay windows, the lamp-post to which the children had tied their skipping ropes. Then the danger-place was passed. They drove under the railway-bridge where bus-tickets and rags of old newspapers blew about in eddies of grit and dust. “In the beginning was the Word,” was the message on a poster outside the chapel beyond the bridge.

“Turn left, up the hill,” said Angel.

Here, the terrace houses had small front-gardens. Something disturbing stirred and rose in Angel's mind, came to the surface with two names: Gwen and Polly. Her powers of recollection, through long, deliberate disuse, were poor; but there was more here than she wanted, and she thrust the memory back, with a sensation of having narrowly escaped from some threatening and depressing thing.

Curiosity and her triumph at her long-ago deliverance from the horrors of Volunteer Street had started her on this exploration; driving through the streets, knowing nobody, caring for nobody. I am Angel Deverell, she had thought. A name in the world; a world, too, in which Norley is perhaps the drabbest, shoddiest spot.

The ancient car and the strangely dressed figure sitting in it were not unnoticed: one or two people glanced as they went by, and these glances she took to be signs of gratified recognition. These passers-by would go home and tell their families whom they had seen. Such a gentle mood of complacency she wanted threatened by no Gwens and Pollies, and she soon smothered that remembrance: they had grown old now, she thought, those two ghostly girls; or were getting old, rather, as she was herself, and would have done nothing with their lives, pottering, shopping, passing time; were perhaps at that moment lost in the queue outside the butcher's, where the corpses of sheep (as Angel described them to herself) hung, split in halves, inside the window.