Angel (33 page)

As a girl, she had dozed and day-dreamed through the long lonely evenings while her mother was at work in the shop, and now she had fallen back into that habit. With her feet propped on the fender, a cat in her lap for warmth, she would drowse and dream, and the more she rested the more difficult it was for Nora to rouse her.

A letter from Lady Baines managed to do what Nora could not, and brought Angel up from her chair, gasping with anger, incoherent. Then she began to cough, clutching the edge of the chimney piece, bowed over, shaken. At the end, when she turned to face Nora, her eyes were brilliantly green and her cheeks and forehead flushed.

“Let her never come here again,” she said, beginning her tirade at the end; for the explanatory part of her anger had gone on while she was coughing and she had already reached the summary. “That's a fine thing from a friend. Erstwhile friend, I
should
say. Presiding over the countryside, condescending at meetings with her parvenu American ways. Too many mixed marriages tainting the great English families . . . I would say so to her face. She has aped our ways very well indeed; but this will always happen with people who are pretending to be what they are not—the performance is suddenly shown to be what it is, they make an unexpected mistake and their true vulgarity comes into sight. As now.”

Nora had been making little interrupting noises for some time, but now when Angel stopped she could think of nothing to say. “‘Nouveau riche,' is the word for her,” Angel said smartly. Two words, Nora thought, dazed. “She has bought her position with a cheque here and a cheque there. I think money must be her god. Lady Midas Baines we must remember to call her in future; that is, if we can bring ourselves to mention her.”

“What has she done?” Nora could at last ask.

“She has only offered me money. You may read the letter.”

Nora took it and while she read Angel told her what it contained. “She is worried that we have fallen on hard times; suspects—I gather—that we have sold the William and Mary escritoire.” As we have, thought Nora. “Hints, or so I fancy, that she would have liked to buy it herself. Perhaps she would like to look round the house and name other things we have that she may covet; she can snatch the chairs from under us, and the table, too: we can eat our meals off the chimney-piece and use the floor-boards for our beds. Why not, since we are fallen on such evil times? An emerald ring in a shop in Norley reminded her of mine and then that I no longer wear it. I must put on my tiara next time she comes to luncheon—though she will never come inside this house again. Do you see that she will lend or give whatever we need, for ‘we are old friends', as she says. Old friends may be humiliated and insulted. It is no doubt what they are for. Is that the gist of it?”

“The letter is not quite as you say,” Nora began. “It is full of good intentions, though I agree. . . .”

“Full to the brim. I will ‘good intention' her.” It might have been Aunt Lottie speaking, the trembling anger in her voice was so like that which Angel, with her high-flown ways, had long ago provoked.

For the rest of the day, the storms broke at intervals, pieces of her mind were hurled about the room, and the anger went on all the time in her breast, sometimes exploding in paroxysms of coughing or of words; speeches precipitated, often beginning half-way through a sentence, into the midst of Nora's gentle monologues.

“. . . And then”, Nora was saying, “it seemed that it was mid-winter all of a sudden, and I was decorating a tree for Christmas, only it wasn't a Christmas tree at all, but our old Nurse, Esmé's and mine. I was just going up on tiptoe to fix a star to her forehead. . . .”

“She calls me a pauper, forgetting who I am,” said Angel. “‘Perhaps you are unaware', I shall say. Have you seen my cheque-book, Nora?”

When it was found, she at once wrote a cheque for sixty pounds—which was all the money she had—and addressed it to a charitable society of which Lady Baines was the president. Marvell was called to take it to the post immediately and was ordered to be ready with the car at eleven o'clock the next morning.

“I should like to go over now,” said Angel, “and demand an explanation of her; but it will do her good to get the letter first. It would be diverting to see her face when she receives the cheque.”

“And it is best to sleep on your wrath,” said Nora vaguely.

Angel lay awake on it instead, and the sun came up on it. By morning, she was swollen with unrehearsed speeches. At eleven o'clock, dressed in some moth-eaten chinchilla, she went out to the car.

“Now don't be late,” Nora said anxiously, coming to see her off. “Remember that Mr Fennelly is coming to luncheon and bringing his article about Esmé.”

“Don't worry. What I have to say to her will be short and sweet.”

“Did you . . .?” Nora leant through the car-window and whispered.

“Yes, yes,” said Angel impatiently. All the same, they were not half-way there when she had to stop the car and get out. Marvell leant his elbow on the steering-wheel, looking grimly ahead of him, while she went trailing through brambles into a little wood at the roadside. She's a weak-bladder one if ever there was, he thought. Nice for me, I must say. It's a masterpiece.

“All right now?” he asked, as she came into view again.

By the time they reached Bottrell Saunter, exhausted by anger and her wakeful night, Angel had fallen fast asleep.

“We're here, madam,” Marvell said as he stopped the car before the house. He looked round and, seeing how things were, got out and stretched his legs for a bit. A maid had opened the door and he went up the steps to have a chat with her. Lady Baines was in bed with a chill, but sent a message that Angel was to go up to her.

“It would be more than my position is worth to disturb her now,” Marvell said. “Last time I woke her up, there were proper tantrums. Instant dismissal the next time, she threatened me with.”

The maid looked at him with distaste and went back to her mistress. An impasse had been reached. Lady Baines, propped up in bed, had tidied her hair and was waiting; Angel, sitting bolt upright in the car, slept on. Marvell, enjoying himself, strolled about the garden, looking at the rose-bushes with an air of professional contempt, pretending to be pinching off blight where there was none. The maid, keeping an eye on him, lingered in the hall, flicking a feather-brush about the banisters. A second message was brought down from Lady Baines; but Marvell only pursed his lips and shook his head.

“Then I shall go out and tap on the window to her,” said the maid. “I can do it quite respectfully, if you can't. The doctor is due at any moment and Madam must have her chest rubbed before he arrives.”

“You can rub Madam's chest till you're both blue in the face, but you're not laying a finger on that car.”

He spread his arms wide apart as if he would fend her off physically.

“The rudeness!”

“You do your duty: I'll do mine. Leave it at that.”

He sauntered away, sat down on a seat among the flower-beds and lit his pipe. Another maid drummed her knuckles on a window-pane and frowned at him and made scolding gestures which he ignored. He smoked his pipe peacefully and basked in the sunshine while he watched the white doves walking on the roof. A gardener was down on his knees before the herbaceous border with a barrowful of weeds beside him. Poor sod! thought Marvell. The weather-cock glinted as it veered round in the gentle breeze; the trees looked as polished as the windows of the house; monstrous begonias lurked beneath their own leaves and a spray turned giddily, casting water out over the lawn. From inside the house came pleasant, domestic sounds, voices mingling with clattering, chopping, splashing in the kitchen; a vacuum-cleaner hummed away upstairs; someone ran a duster over the keys of a pianoforte, up the scales, down, then all among the black notes. It was as different as could be from Paradise House.

Angel slept on, and when he had finished his pipe and knocked it out, Marvell gave what he meant to be a mocking bow to the maid at the window and went softly back to the car and drove off as quietly as he could. A pleasant morning, peacefully exciting—and plenty more to come, he thought, when the forty winks is done.

More did not come till they were back at Paradise House. Angel, waking up, was hard put to it to sort out where she was. The wrong vista seemed approaching. She groped for the solution, and for her lost anger which had been laid aside while she slept.

“Perhaps you don't remember, madam, the last time I woke you up I got what for. I try to keep pace with my orders but it's change and change-about with you the whole time.” Her anger—more than half of it she had meant for Lady Baines—stimulated him. “Not to wake you up, and not to be late for lunch, I was told. I pondered what to do. Whatever I did wouldn't be right, I could see that.”

Clive Fennelly had arrived already and, unaware of the situation, came hastening from the house to greet her.

“You thundering dunderhead!” said Angel. “You block-head!” She turned to Clive as she spoke, and bowed. Her joints cracked as she stepped out of the car, as if they were angry, too. Clive followed her into the hall. “That fool!” she shouted, as Nora came from the library. “He will have to go. He has made me look a figure of fun, and to my worst enemy. How can I go back now and say what I must say?”

“Couldn't you write?” Nora suggested, when she had heard the story.

So Angel wrote all the afternoon, bending shortsightedly over the page, waving away all interruptions, whilst Clive sat by with his manuscript on his knee. When at last she turned to him, she looked exhausted. Some of the fury was transferred to the letter; some by its very heat had been burnt out; but there was still enough to last a lifetime. She did not apologise to Clive, who had come all the way from London, at her request. “Wonderful!” he kept thinking. “She is quite wonderful. There is no one like her in the whole of Northwood. One could dine out on her for weeks.” Yet he did not and never would! He kept her carefully to himself, almost as if from superstitious reasons.

At tea she was in a gracious mood, talked to him of Esmé and promised to play the piano to him afterwards.

“I think the damp has got into it,” Nora said. “It sounded very twangy the other day when Silky Boy was walking on it.”

“We can but try,” said Angel sweetly. “And now let me glance at your essay, Clive.”

He wondered where they stood with regard to Christian names. When she called him ‘Clive', he thought that she expected him to call her ‘Angel' or ‘Angelica' in return: but if he did so, she might think him impertinent; and, if he did not, would be quite likely to imagine the difference in their age implied. For this reason, he always wrote to her on post-cards. She spoke of him to Nora as ‘Mr Fennelly', and so put Nora in her place.

She took his essay to the window, straining her eyes to read it. “‘A literary painter,'” she said. “I like that very much. That would have pleased Esmé.” It seemed to her to be praise indeed; but Clive looked away, blushing. “This about concentration must come out. Esmé had
great
powers of concentration.” She read on. “What is this? ‘His discoveries were limited'? Ah, Mr Fennelly, how little even you have understood him.”

Clive, having lost his Christian name again, watched sadly while she went to her desk and began to cross his words out, and write others in.

“What is chiaroscuro?” she asked. “It is not derogatory? ‘Exquisite,' yes. ‘Tender', yes. ‘Feminine'! Come, come!” She scratched out the word. “There was nothing feminine about Esmé. A woman could hardly, I think, have painted those scenes inside the public-houses.”

The dismembered manuscript was handed back at last, and they went to the drawing-room, where evening sunshine poured in through the long, dusty windows and the wallpaper sagged and hung down from the plaster.

“Now that the war is over we can have the house redecorated,” Angel said, sitting down at the piano. Clive went to the window and, while she strummed and improvised, he stood in the sun and looked out at the tangled garden, feeling that he was under a spell. He loved her, almost as if he had invented her—bad fairy, wicked stepmother, peevish goddess, whatever she was.

“Do sit down, Clive,” she said, her harsh voice raised as she played a series of discords.

He perched obediently on the window-seat. In the rose-garden below hundreds of striped caterpillars were devouring the ragwort.

“Yes,” Angel said, resting her hands for a moment in her lap and gazing round the room. “The whole house shall be painted and be made pretty again. You shall help me to choose the wallpapers. We will have a gold and white stripe in here and a plain crimson in the dining-room.”

She began to play again, more softly, as she planned this new grandeur for Paradise House. But where was the money to come from? Lord Norley lingered on: from time to time, he opened one eye and looked at Mrs Warren. “A drag on the rations,” Marvell said to Bessie.

When Nora came into the drawing-room, Angel stopped playing and said: “Nothing wrong with the tone of this. A very nice piano, I think. We must have it tuned and polished and send it to Rosita Baines. I expect her covetous eyes have often rested on it.”

SNOW muffled Paradise House, went up in drifts to the lower window-sills. Each morning Marvell had to dig his way in to see to the fires. The cats could not or would not go out and Angel had ashes carried in for them and put in the empty grate in one of the unfurnished rooms. “It smells like the tiger-house at the Zoo,” Marvell grumbled. Before dark he went back to his stuffy room to fry a bloater or dig into a jar of pickled onions. The three old women were alone in the house. The snow sealed them in. By morning the drifts had been renewed, Marvell's footprints across the yard covered over: on all the frosted windows ferns delicately grew; icicles hung from the gutterings.