Angel (29 page)

“I love this house,” he said. They came down the stairs from the studio into the hall. There was a shaft of sunlight over the floor in which a cat lay crunching a dead mouse. “So cruel!” Angel murmured wearily, turning her head. “God's fault: not mine,” he heard her say. She sat down for a moment in one of the empty niches in the wall. Once she had planned to set statues in them, but had long ago forgotten.

“This house and you in it,” said the young man. He was completely sincere. The space, the quiet, the strangeness captivated him; it was so unlike the neat villas, the golden privet hedges, the shaved lawns of the suburbs where he lived. The wildness and beauty were enhanced for him by Angel herself in her dress of faded, streaky red, her coiled-up hair with not a grey thread in it, her eccentricity which seemed to him so typical of the decaying aristocracy. He was to be allowed to come again and to take photographs of the paintings for an article he would write, but on no account were they to be entrusted to him or anyone else in London, not to be bought or borrowed or looked at.

When he returned it was half-way through August and the house was full of dusty sunshine. He drove in his open car along the lanes to Paradise House. In the fields on either side, the braided ears of wheat were a pale colour against the blue sky; the elm-trees almost black. From the sunny landscape, he descended into the over-lush greenness of the valley where water trickled over stones, the earth smelt of mushrooms.

The front door stood open and a peacock stalked out of it as Clive Fennelly came near. Bessie crossed the hall, drying her hands on her apron. “Madam's in the courtyard. You are to go round,” she said. “Shoo that saucy bird off as you go, if you please, sir.”

Clive clapped his hands rather nervously at the peacock as he passed by, and did not like the look he got from its round eye.

In the grass-grown courtyard he could hear voices. In a wash-house, he found Angel bending over a mangle; her long wet hair was between the rollers, and Marvell was turning the handle. Water splashed down on to the stone floor.

“I am nearly ready,” said Angel in a muffled voice. She could see only the visitor's feet in the doorway. When Marvell released her hair from the rollers, she swept it back over the towel on her shoulders, straightened herself and held out a wet hand in greeting.

“Thank you, Marvell,” she said, walking away with Clive. “He always washes my hair and it dries much quicker that way,” she explained. “It is really rather thick and long. We will go up to the studio and get things ready for you. My dear friend, Miss Howe-Nevinson, who was ill when you last came, is much better this morning and getting up for lunch.”

All the morning she watched Clive at work. She paced about the studio, brushing her hair, and when it was time for luncheon she went down with the towel still on her shoulders and her hair spread over it. Because Nora protested, she determined to keep it down all day.

All through the meal she and Nora quarrelled, Angel irritably and Nora with many gentle reproaches. Clive, sensing the enjoyment both had from this, was not embarrassed. It is what will be missed, he thought, when one of them dies and leaves the other all alone. Worse, in a way, it will be, than losing a husband or a wife; perhaps this is a more consoling relationship.

“But if Bessie makes mint-sauce you say you prefer onion-sauce,” Nora said. “And if I order onion sauce, you ask for red-currant jelly. I'm sure I don't know where I am.”

Her illness seemed to have emboldened Nora. She spoke her mind more freely and had found out what a pleasure that could be.

Angel refilled Clive's glass with wine and left Nora's empty.

“I should think I might have onion sauce
and
mint-sauce and red-currant jelly, too, if I want them,” she said.

“The table looks like a grocer's shop already with all the pots of this and that. Mr. Fennelly must think us very strange.”

Mr. Fennelly went on eating his mutton.

“I should like some more wine, please,” Nora added in a quiet, aggrieved voice.

Angel filled her mouth and, chewing slowly, looked dreamily out of the window.

“Angel, I said that I should like a little more wine.”

“
You
fetch the red-currant jelly and
I
will give you some more wine.”

“But why not ring for Bessie if you are so set on having it?”

“I reminded her of it when I saw her laying the table. She said there wasn't any.”

“Well, if she said that there isn't any, then there isn't any.”

“August—and all the red-currant jelly finished?”

“Mr Fennelly will be tired of hearing about red-currant jelly.”

“No, no, not at all,” he said quickly. “Most fascinating.” Angel glanced at him suspiciously. “I didn't realise it was a seasonal thing,” he added.

“I make it in June,” Nora explained, “and in the ordinary way it is a bad year when it doesn't last right through until the following June. Fifteen pounds I aim at, and a long and tedious job it is. This year, however, I was in bed with gout when the fruit was ripe. Not much gets done when I am not about.

“Gout runs in her family,” Angel said.

They are like naughty children, Clive thought.

After luncheon, Angel took him for a walk.

“I should like to have come,” Nora said, “but I have to try to clean some of the silver.”

“Yes, you ought to rest your foot,” said Angel.

It was the time of year when the peacock shed his feathers and, as they walked along the terrace, Angel gathered them up, turned them so that the light struck the gold and bronze and blue, stroked her cheek with them as she talked—a strange figure to Clive, in her long, faded red dress and with her black hair hanging down her back. Cats followed her, arching themselves and cavorting about the hem of her skirt, bewitched by her presence. After a while, as Angel led the way out of the garden and up the slope towards the obelisk, one cat after another lost interest and flagged, felt themselves drawn too far from home, or were distracted by scramblings in the bracken. Two young Abyssinian cats remained, going lithely on up the hill, their wide tufted ears pricked forwards, their coats, ticked like a hare's, shining in the sunlight.

Clive Fennelly took out a handkerchief and passed it over his face. He thought that Angel, despite her own eccentricity of dress—was it an ancient evening gown or fancy dress?—and her hair falling to her waist, might object if he were to take his jacket off. The two cats went purposefully ahead, knowing this walk, he guessed; he and Angel, who now beat time with the bunch of feathers to some music which only she could hear, followed them. Trees parted, and the obelisk, so preposterous in its conception, now showed above them on the skyline. Prime Minister he might have been, Clive thought, or some discoverer of the North Pole; not an unknown minor painter of erratic talent and, from what one gathers, the very slackest of habits.

Every time he tripped over a briar or stumbled on a mole-hill, he felt that she must be deploring the pavements on which he usually walked, and perhaps be imagining with clear contempt the crescents of cosy houses, all so unlike her own house, the flowering trees, the neatness of the suburbs where he lived.

“There is one of my late husband's paintings in the Norley Art Gallery,” she remembered to tell him.

“And also an immense Watts presented by you.”

“Ah, you have seen it? That was Lord Norley's choice, you know. I merely gave the money. It was not at all the sort of picture that Esmé or I ever cared for.”

“I wondered about that.”

Breathless, he turned to look downhill, to give himself a rest. Below them, the walled garden was now visible. They could look right into it, at the tangled growth and broken glass, and see the rotting fruit lying on the paths; in the quiet of the afternoon a frenzied buzzing rose up from the wasps that clustered over the bruised windfalls or tunnelled into sleepy pears. Heady, the smell of the fermenting fruit. He could imagine the steamy heat down there where neglected peach-trees grew in the dusty glasshouses: the fruit at luncheon had been bored into and speckled by insects and picked up off the ground, he guessed; not off the trees.

The two cats turned and waited, seeming impatient. Angel resumed the climb and they trotted gladly at her side. When they came to the top of the hill, she sank down upon the spongy turf amongst rabbit-droppings and thistles. Clive sat down, too, and the cats stretched out, yawning.

Paradise House was in miniature now, a model laid out upon a tray. The stables were arranged about a square courtyard, and a minute Marvell could be seen, crossing to the pump with a bucket in his hand. From far away came the hoarse donkey-cry, the wheezing and coughing, as he jerked the pump-handle; water gushing into the bucket flashed silver. There was no other view, only the tops of trees spreading away into the haze.

“Down there my husband was drowned; the lake is hidden in the woods,” Angel said. “Such a short time we had together. I think of other marriages and how they dwindle, and hang fire, and fall into neglect, and I am thankful that although ours was so soon over it was as perfect as it could be while it lasted.”

She suddenly pulled her gown down off her shoulder and began to scratch some spots; flea-bites, they looked like to Clive. “As perfect as could be,” she repeated. “I wanted this place to be a memorial to that and to him. While he lived here he was completely happy. It is something to know that. It has had to be a comfort to me all these years that I have been alone.”

“To have his sister with you must have been a comfort too,” he suggested.

“Ah, Nora!” Angel smiled, as if at some wry reminiscence. “Poor Nora! Yes, I suppose it has meant something to have her here and to do what I could for her; but she is very old-maidish, you know: her little arguments are often hard to bear. Spinsters fall into such eccentricities.” She spat on her hand and rubbed the flea-bites. “You must have noticed at lunch-time, for instance, the silly, pettifogulising little ways. How unlike her brother she has always been!”

Clive thought of the different stages of loyalty to the dead—the weak and imperfect dead. The first stage of having to withstand doubts, forget faults: then the next stage of acknowledging the faults, facing the doubts, learning to accept the dead ones as they were and settle down and live with the acceptance. Angel had never reached the second stage. She did not believe that Esmé was not made perfect by his dying. Yet, there was a suggestion of tenacity in her idealising. “She is fiercely loyal to my brother's memory,” Nora had told him when they were left alone for a moment, and had spoken as if great ferocity were necessary. Angel had settled for perfection, had vehemently achieved it in her mind and was now at peace. The dead belonged to her as no one living could have done.

She was watching the cats, so absorbed that she had forgotten Clive. They had discovered a spring trickling downhill through the grass and, like two children, they experimented with it, seemed to discuss its dangers, with heads cocked and eyes alert: one put a curving paw into the water, as tentatively as if it were scalding hot; the other sniffed and shook drops from his whiskers. Their curiosity was then diverted by a passing fly: the water suddenly bored them and one yawned and turned its head, showing a pink triangle of opened mouth, ribbed roof to it and petal tongue. With starting, glancing movements the other advanced upon it, trying to work up a fantasy of peril and recklessness: hissing, paw raised, like an heraldic beast, the threatened one waited: they fell upon one another; rolling and struggling, went downhill, scuffling like hares with their hind legs. At the height of battle, tenderness checked them, they stopped fighting and began to lick one another peaceably. When Angel called, they came to her; but made drama even of that, weaving their way sleekly through the grass, jungle creatures now, softly treading, menaced, they pretended, from all sides.

“When I was a child, I could not have believed how happy my life would be,” Angel said, gathering the cats on to her lap, where they plucked at the threads of her skirt with out-stretched claws.

“To have such creatures share one's home! What a privilege!” she said, kissing their warm paws.

He thought of the chairs in her drawing-room, the brocade on which the cats had sharpened their claws, and of the curtains they had torn to ribbons.

Perhaps she saw nothing as it was, everything as it should be, though doubtless never had been; thought she retained whatever her hands had once touched: fame, love, money. Like a fortune-teller in reverse, he knew what she had been, and could tell what she had had by her assumption that it was all there still. The wrecked gardens seemed not to grieve her, as they obviously grieved and irritated Nora; the prodigious collapse of Paradise House he could foretell; the stains already running up the walls, brickwork at the back held together only by matted ivy, floor boards rotting, plaster crumbling.

“A great place to keep going,” he said, looking down at it.

“It is not a difficult house to run. Old servants get lazy, though,” she added. “In fact, we had better go down again soon, so that I can tell Marvell to mend the car. Otherwise, he will leave it until the morning, and keep me waiting when I want to go out.”

When she stood up, she trod on the hem of her dress and ripped it undone. They walked round the outside of the iron chains, to view the obelisk from all sides. It was the same from all sides. Nothing was written on it.

As they went down the hill, other cats came to meet them. “I will pick you some peaches to take back to London,” Angel said, for she had begun to feel great affection for this young man and wished to spin out his visit. The door of the walled garden fell off a hinge as she pushed it open. Clive walked gingerly behind her, dodging round the waspy fruit, starting with horror when a toad shifted under a rhubarb leaf. The glasshouses were stuffy and he hoped that other toads—or worse—were not lurking there. “Tell me if you see any peaches,” Angel said, peering short-sightedly among the leaves. “If there are none, then Marvell must be selling them. I long ago suspected it. Is that one?”