Angel (34 page)

Nora's hands were swollen with chilblains, but Angel seemed unaware of the cold; her shawl would slip from her shoulders without her noticing; often she let the fire go out as she sat dreaming by it.

“It would happen at such a time, the snow,” she said fretfully one morning. Lord Norley had died at last and left a large part of his fortune to Nora, and Angel was impatient to go out and spend some of it. Death duties, bequests to charity, Mrs Warren's annuity, other remembrances and kindnesses, tokens of gratitude, and old servants provided for had taken more than enough of poor Nora's money, she said. “And what use is blood if it is not thicker than water?” she asked. “It will not warm
us
. But Mrs Warren, for instance, can now be idle for the rest of her life, and every old crony who ever raised his hat to him has a nice fat cheque to jog his memory of the occasion; charity begins at the uttermost ends of the world, it seems.”

As the snow continued, birds that had always before been chary of the house with its swarming cats came nearer, for shelter and the hope of food; they printed their dagger-like footmarks across the terrace and scuffled the snow upon the window-sills. Against the whiteness of the garden the stone walls of the house were as dark as lead; smoke rose from two of the chimneys and discoloured the pale grey sky. The days seemed long, the evenings longer. They passed the time with plans for travelling when the spring came.

Angel's cough grew worse, but she seemed heedless of it; after each attack she would calmly wipe her eyes and settle herself more comfortably in her chair. She refused to see the doctor and, when he called upon Nora, shut herself up in the ice-cold drawing-room until he had left, playing the piano or looking out at the buried rose-garden, at the sad monochrome landscape; weeds, roses, were all gone, only thorned branches broke the snow, looped across the whiteness like barbed wire. Once, she met the doctor unawares, before she could reach the drawing-room door. Emboldened by Nora's anxiety, he said that he thought she would be well-advised to have him examine her chest. Her indignation—as if at a suggestion of the utmost indelicacy—brought on more violent coughing than ever. She fled up the stairs away from him.

Marvell engaged the doctor in conversation before he left. He had been making some show of clearing the drive so that the car could be turned round and he was glad to lean on his spade for a moment or two and talk to another man for a change. Angel roamed up and down the corridors, chafing her hands more from impatience than the cold, and Silky Boy, her favourite, ran beside her.

She felt unwell and restless, with a sensation of disease; there was a bitter taste of anxiety in her mouth and she could not reason with herself or still her apprehensions. She heard the doctor's car going slowly away, and the shadowy house was caught up in silence. “It is all precarious,” she thought suddenly; then wondered what the words meant and why they had come into her head.

She talked more than usual at luncheon, trying to stifle the persistent dread she felt, and afterwards, when Nora went up to her room to rest, she was too agitated to sit alone, and she put on a heavy cloak and went out into the garden to find Marvell. The stillness was very strange: there was no sound but that of the crisp snow breaking as she trod on it; she could see her breath fly from her mouth and a few soft snowflakes drifted about her and settled on her hair. Silky Boy followed her, picking his way with suspicion and distaste across the snow.

Marvell, not expecting to be discovered in such weather, had taken the afternoon off and was snug in his hovel, cleaning his gun.

“You have finished work for the day?” Angel inquired.

“What am I supposed to do—mow the lawns or go out and pick strawberries? The sky's full of it. You've got no business venturing out with that chest. I was talking to the doctor about you only this morning. ‘Madam's cough is chronic,' he said. Those were his words. Bed and physic is what you need; not trapesing about in the cold.”

He held the gun up to the light and squinted along its barrels.

“How dirty you keep your quarters,” Angel said, looking scornfully about her. I am frightened, she suddenly thought. But there was nothing to be frightened of; not even poverty now. I have come such a long way, she told herself, and done all that I wanted and there is nothing to fear.

“If you don't take care of yourself, someone must,” Marvell was saying. He put the gun back in its case as tenderly as if he were laying a baby in a cradle.

She remembered Esmé calling him ‘Nannie' and smiled.

“You are getting fussy in your old age,” she said.

“You're no chicken yourself.”

He watched her slyly, to see if she would ignore this or fly into one of her rages and once more give him notice to leave. Instead, she said simply: “We are all getting old,” and sighed; unlike herself, he thought, and regretted what he had said.

She was fidgety and full of sighs.

“Who is this?” she asked, picking up an old photograph from the littered overmantle.

“My auntie,” he said, narrowing his eyes, watching her.

“And this?”

“Myself.” Unnecessarily he added: “As a baby.”

“Quite a nice baby,” she said indifferently.

“Thank you, madam.”

Snowflakes were coming faster out of the darkening sky, large ones stuck to the window-pane and slowly melted.

“Now, you get off back,” Marvell said. “This will go on all night now it's started. I suppose I'd better come over with you and make up the range for that dotty old woman. You can put this over your head.” He handed her a newspaper. Rather unwillingly she left the little room and the two of them set out towards the house. When they spoke, the flakes flew into their mouths. Angel held the newspaper over her head and walked slowly with the snow in her face so that she kept her eyelids lowered. Sometimes she stumbled and he would say “Steady now!” and hold her arm for a moment.

When they came to the house, from habit they parted; she made her way slowly to the front door; he trudged off to the back entrance.

Nora was waiting in the library, full of reproaches. “You're wet through,” she scolded. “Whatever possessed you?”

“I felt lonely,” said Angel and the words surprised herself.

“You should go straight to bed, I think.”

“Oh, no, no, no. The house is like a prison in this weather.”

It had often seemed that to Nora, but she had not said so.

When Bessie came in with tea, they were both standing like children, looking out of the window at the whirling flakes; faster and faster they came; the world seemed demented with the hurrying snow: but by the time it was dark it had settled to a more relentless rhythm. Tracks made during the day were obliterated, and then, too late, Angel remembered Silky Boy.

“He didn't come back with me,” she said, getting up quickly from her chair.

“He must have gone in the back way with Marvell,” said Nora.

They searched the house, calling along the corridors, Angel rapping a spoon upon the edge of a tin plate; they flung open one door after another and made insane enquiries of the other cats.

“He mustn't stay out in all this snow,” Angel said.

“He will soon come mewing at the door, you will see.”

“You know how delicate he is.”

In spite of Nora's protestations, she unchained the front door, stepped over the ledge of newly-fallen snow into the thin, cold air, calling and coughing. In the shaft of light from the house the whiteness outside was dazzling, the steps were a smooth unbroken slope. Her own footprints of the afternoon had gone, and the cat's shallower ones must have been covered long ago. She stood there calling “Silky Boy” over and over, and Nora stood in the hall calling her.

“All day I knew that something terrible would happen,” Angel said, when at last she gave up and shut the door. “It was because of that that I went out this afternoon.”

“Your going out
made
it happen.” It will make something else happen, too, Nora thought, looking with anxiety at Angel's too-bright cheeks.

There was another long vigil at the front door before she could be persuaded to go to bed, but she was glad to lie down when at last she did; her forehead beat and burned and the heaviness of her limbs seemed too much for the insubstantial bed to bear—the bed flying as light as a bird through space.

In the night she awoke and heard the cat crying out in the garden. Like a mother whose anxiety is suddenly over, she felt as much angry as relieved. I knew that he would come, she thought, as she flung back the bedclothes and stepped rather dizzily down on to the cold floor-boards.

At the head of the stairs she was overcome by vertigo, clung to the banisters and was afraid to look or step down. She sensed the dim well of the hall as a void into which she was being fatally drawn; taking each stair as a fresh hazard, she groped her way down.

After days of silence, the night had grown noisy. Wind had sprung up, buffeting the house, tugging and sucking at the doors and windows. Outside, the trees creaked as if giants were swinging from the branches.

She ran her hands over the cold walls, groping for the light switches and, when she found them, she thought, so that is what the hall looks like in the middle of the night. Its ordinariness was strange: it was just waiting for the morning.

When she opened the front door the wind rushed in. Snow had stopped falling. The sky was shabby like rubbed suède, with stars scattered untidily. Across the wedge of light, the cat walked towards her; prankish though full of guilt; his tail, his glance wavering; snow in his whiskers; his small mew both peevish and grateful.

She was beyond scolding him; wondering how, with her head so fiery and confused, she could resume the journey back to her room. As she began to climb the stairs, the cat, quite arch and benign now, sprang after her, shaking the melted snow from off its fur. She reached her bed at last and drew the cold covers over her, and the wet cat sat down on her pillow among her tangled hair and began methodically to clean its frozen paws.

What had happened in the night Nora could only guess from the unchained front door, the light left on in the hall and Silky Boy asleep on Angel's shoulder. Angel herself could only turn her head on her pillow and murmur in her delirium.

Marvell, when he was sent for, was like Angel with the cat and, beside himself with fear, could find only words of abuse. He had never worked as he worked that morning until the doctor came: trying to dig a way clear for the car relieved his feelings. The last hundred yards the doctor had to come on foot, sinking sometimes knee-deep in the drifts. Marvell went out to meet him: they fought their way towards one another like last survivors in a polar region, and Marvell was shouting above the screaming wind before ever he could be heard. “It wasn't for my want of telling her, the pig-headed idiot. ‘You've no right out,' I said: ‘you know your chest as well as I do.' Now what's she landed herself with? Pneumonia it is, I can tell you, doctor, sir. ‘It's pneumonia,' I said, ‘and you can take the blame yourself.' ‘You've got fussy in your old age,' was what she told me and ‘Someone's got to fuss,' I said. The bloody stubbornness of her, and I'll tell her to her face. I'm not one to mince my words with her.”

For a moment or two, they pushed their way through the snow in silence. Then Marvell said: “She's as strong as a horse, you know,” and tears began to run down his face.

In the night, Silky Boy, banished by the doctor, crept back to Angel's bed. Nora, sitting by the fire, in her day clothes, had not the heart to take him away, for Angel turned her cheek towards him with a look of peace and comfort on her face. Or so it seemed to Nora, trying to find signs that she was conscious of anything at all.

The fire burnt dully and sometimes the smoke was turned back into the room, as if the damp chimney could take no more of it. After a while, when Angel's breathing sounded more even, Nora turned out the light and, sitting with her gouty foot up on a stool, tried to snatch at some sleep herself. She was disturbed towards dawn by Angel gasping for breath and trying to raise herself up from her high pillows, and Nora dragged herself across the room, knelt beside her and laid her wet cheek against her hand.

Angel felt nothing. The room was utterly strange to her; it shifted and turned about and she was enfolded in blackness; not a glimmer of light from any direction helped her to realise her whereabouts.

There should be a window somewhere, she thought in terror. If she could understand where she was, she might remember who she was; but she was lost, isolated, without identity. It suddenly occurred to her that she was dead: her heart thundered in her body and Nora felt the sweat trickling down the inside of her arm, running from her wrist into the palm of her hand. Then to Angel it seemed that she was not so much dead as back at the very beginning. It is to be done all over again, she thought. It would be morning soon and the drays would rattle across the cobbled Butts and into the entrance of the brewery; the factory sirens would sound and men would begin to go to work down Volunteer Street.

Nora sponged the sweat from her forehead and then leaned close to her as her lips moved.

“Where are you?” she said gently, as if to a sleepy child. “Why, you are at home, with Nora and naughty Silky Boy, at Paradise House.”

The panic lifted. Angel was overwhelmed with relief. She realised that it was not to be gone through again; after all she was at home, in her own bed, with her own life behind her. “I am Angel Deverell,” she said and the words were very loud and triumphant and echoed round the room. Nora heard nothing for nothing had been said. She held Angel in her arms until she knew that she had died. The cat sprang off the bed and went to the door, mewing to be let out. He looked at Nora and yawned; but it seemed a feigned yawn, as if he were frightened, and pretending to be bored instead.