Angel (35 page)

Authors: Elizabeth Taylor

The snow, as if it had done its worst, thinned and melted. Nora, who could not go to the funeral, sat in the library with her leg up on a stool and a drawerful of papers on a chair beside her. She had watched the hearse and the old car drive off; Marvell, in ancient livery, which he had not worn since the days when he had taken EsmÃ© to the races, and Clive Fennelly, who had suddenly arrived, having read the obituaryâ'An Edwardian Novelist'âin
The Times.
Lady Baines had sent a wreath, which Nora had pretended not to see.

She will not like that, she thought, as the coffin was carried out to the hearse. To lie in that graveyard among dead bodies.

Odd thoughts swarmed in her brain. She was a little tipsy from some brandy Clive had given her to drink before he left the house. Sometimes, particularly at the moment when the cars had driven away and a cloud of yellow petals had scattered from the wreaths on the top of the hearse, she could hear a sound as if stakes were being driven into her head. She tried to be busy with the drawerful of papers, old manuscripts and letters, but she wished that Clive would soon come back. Bored with her grief now, her mouth pouched and swollen from weeping, she brought up great sighs, as if each must come with her last breath, the last she ever cared to take.

When Clive returned, some irrevocable change came with him. She could not believe that the dreadful thing was finally done, and at first she recoiled from him as if he had had some guilty part in it.

“Who was there?” she asked timidly after a while.

“Your doctor; a Lady Baines, so Marvell tells me; Marvell and I.” He tried to make it seem as big a congregation as he could. “Some other people I didn't know,” he lied.

“Rosita Baines is not one to be kept out of anything,” Nora said. “It was kind of you to come, though,” she added quickly. “What a strange ending! Once I imagined her being buried in Westminster Abbey, as Heaven knows she should have been.”

“You won't stay here alone?” he asked, trying to end that train of thought.

“No.” She looked round the room as if it were a person she was soon to escape. “When I am better, I may go abroad. I have money, you know, from my late uncle, and I may do as I please.”

Then she leaned over and took some pages of writing from the drawer and handed them to him. “I found a will this afternoon; she must have sketched it out a long time ago and never finished it or had it witnessed. She was never business-like and wouldn't be persuaded ever to discuss dying. It was distasteful to her, you know.”

Clive took the papers and began to read the rough draft of the will scrawled in acid green ink. “I, Angelica Howe-Nevinson, widow of the late EsmÃ© Howe-Nevinson, Esquire, of Paradise House in Hampshire, declare this to be my last will and testament, hereby revoking all other wills made by me, and bequeath everything of which I die possessed to my dear friend and sister-in-law, Nora Howe-Nevinson. I appoint as executors the same Nora Howe-Nevinson and in conjunction with her, Theodore Gilbright Esquire of Bloomsbury Square, London, publisher and life-long friend, who is empowered with authority to deal with all copyrights of my literary works and of all correspondence from me to other persons, which he shall preserve from publication. The manuscripts of my works I bequeath to the British Museum.”

Clive looked at Nora and then back at the papers. “It made me sad to read it all,” she said, “though I was sad enough before.”

“That the executors,” he read, “shall set aside a sum of money to preserve Paradise House as it stands at the time of my”âthe word âdeath' had been crossed out and âdecease' superimposedâ“to be retained as a public memorial and true record of my life.”

“There
is
no money,” Nora said.

“To my chauffeur, William Marvell, my motor-car,” he read aloud and Nora shrugged. “The garnet bracelets she leaves to Bessie went a long time ago,” she said.

“When was this written, do you suppose?”

“Perhaps soon after EsmÃ© died.”

“And her publisher, this Gilbright?”

“He is an old man now, too old to travel.”

“What will happen to the house?” he asked.

“I shan't be here to see.”

He remembered other ruined houses he had sometimes discovered in the depths of the country, often blackened and burnt out, or just abandoned, and he had found them fearful and haunting places. At Paradise House, the neglect had started long ago. With Nora gone, no one would come to take on the prodigious burden of its decay. It would be engulfed in the valley, closed over and smothered by the encroaching branches: out-of-doors would creep indoors; first, ivy thrusting into crevices, feeling its way through broken windows and crumbling stone: bats would fly in through the empty fanlight and hang themselves from cornices in the hall; fungus branch from the walls in fantastic brackets; soft cobwebs drape the shutters. The tenacious vegetation of that lush valley would have its way there in the end.

“It is no place for you,” he said gently, laying the papers aside.

There was a sudden stamping in the hall and Marvell came in with a trug filled with wet logs. Melting snow dripped off his boots on to the carpet. He stacked the logs beside the fire and brushed up the hearth.

“You had a cup of tea?” Nora asked him.

“Yes, miss.”

“We must try to be brave now. In time we shall get used to it, you know.” She felt that some such remark was asked of her, but her lips trembled as she made it. Her wintry grief budded into small hard tears again.

Marvell looked grim. He tried steadfastly to ignore her words, which seemed aimed to break him. There is nothing left to get used to, he thought, as he took up the empty basket and went out.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

First published in Great Britain by Peter Davies Ltd, 1957. This edition published in the United Kingdom by Virago Press.

Cover image: Dmitri Kardovsky, Portrait of Marya Anastasievna Chroustchova, 1900; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taylor, Elizabeth, 1912â1975.

Angel / by Elizabeth Taylor; introduction by Hilary Mantel.

Â p. cm. â (New York Review Books Classics)

ISBN 978-1-59017-497-5 (alk. paper)