Angel (31 page)

At the top of the hill they passed The Four Cedars, now a Nursing Home.

“Slightly more salubrious up here,” Marvell said.

On the drive home, Angel was silent. She closed her eyes and leaned back, filled with relief and satisfaction at the way she had ordered her life. Before they reached Paradise House, she fell asleep. Marvell turned into the mossy drive and said: “Well, we've done it. The petrol's lasted. But that will be the last of the gallivanting for a while.”

He drew up in front of the house and opened the door. “We're here, madam. Grub up!”

Angel opened her eyes and stared at him. “How dare you wake me?” she said. “You could see perfectly well that I was tired and sleeping.”

“And hear,” he agreed.

“Close the door at once and leave me in peace.”

“Must be time for dindins, madam.”

“Close the door. And your impertinent mouth as well.”

“Sorry madam. Just as you wish, madam. Pleasant dreams.”

He slammed the door and sauntered away, whistling. Angel composed herself for sleep again, but the drowsiness had gone, and she was hungry. Obstinately, she stayed there a little longer, her eyes closed tightly and a stern expression on her face.

As soon as Theo arrived, he began to wonder if he could bear to stay.

It was Spring before he found that he could tear himself away from the bombs. Air-raids were bad, but Angel with her heart full of grievances would be no better, might offer less respite.

Marvell had met him at the station and, driving him to Paradise House, was full of disloyal confidences. Angel had a cough. She thought that she was as strong as a horse, but she had always had a nasty chest on her, to his mind. Nora had had an attack of gout but was now downstairs with her foot on a stool. She kept a walking-stick beside her and knocked away any cats who came near. “
That
stirs up Madam's disputatious gases, if you please. I thought blows would follow, with the gouty one getting the worst of it. Me, supposedly pasting up some wallpaper which had come down with the damp. A lot of furbishing's been going on on your account.”

Theo, wondering how to stop this over-shoulder conversation, said nothing.

“Poor old souls, after all,” said Marvell. “You'll see some changes, sir. Nothing but skin and bones, Madam is: going a bit nutty, too.”

“I have grown rather deaf,” said Theo. “I find it a strain trying to hear what you say, so I will close my eyes for a while.”

He kept his eyes shut but, when they turned down into the valley, he was aware of the sudden darkness. He felt apprehensive and wondered what he should find, what ordeals lay ahead. Angel's letters, wildly abusive about his old firm, had contained hints of poverty and even starvation. To these, Marvell had added his own suggestions of illness and lunacy.

The house was damp from the winter's rain and fogs. He thought of his comfortable rooms in the house in St John's Wood, of his leather chair drawn up to a bright, fluttering fire and whatever he felt like drinking on a wine-table within reach. Windows rattling from bombs seemed nothing, now that he was faced with the decay of Paradise House.

Angel was in the library, and the fire she sat beside was of hissing, dribbling logs. The lap of her purple dress was covered with white cat's hairs. Nora was opposite her, with her swollen foot propped up on a stool. She was unravelling some tangled wool. “Gain a minute,” she had said to Angel who was doing nothing but nurse a cat. Odd little Nannie-phrases came to her lips from time to time: to her, they were familiar and consoling, but Angel only stared as if she did not understand.

Theo was welcomed with fussy motherliness by Nora, and by Angel with regal condescension. They were ageing in different ways, he thought. The edges of Nora's face were blurred and uncertain, her body had sunk into shapelessness, her colour softened; but Angel was more angular than ever—skin and bones, as Marvell had said—her hair was still startlingly black against her pallor; an air of neglect and grotesqueness about her intensified by her clothes, which were always, nowadays, the remnants of past grandeur—this evening, an old gown which clung about her limply because the velvet was damp, had been hanging in a wardrobe where fungus might grow any day.

“I am sorry I couldn't come to meet you myself,” Angel said.

From time to time there was a terrible sound in her chest, as if some ancient clock were gathering itself, ready to strike.

Theo was brought some home-made wine by Bessie, and the two women sat watching him drink it.

“We will have dinner in here, please, Bessie,” Nora said.

“Yes, of course, miss.”

Angel was ‘madam', Nora ‘miss'.

“I hope you won't mind, Theo,” said Nora. “It is so difficult for me to get about from room to room with this foot.”

“And there's no fire anywhere else,” Angel said. “I haven't been into the dining-room all winter. As it is, we burn logs faster than Marvell can saw them up.”

“The coal situation is difficult,” he agreed, though he wasn't much interested. His own house-keeper seemed to manage very well.

“Especially difficult about
paying
for it,” Angel said severely. “That's the pressing part. And how is that young nephew of Brace's getting on?”

“I have nothing to do with the business now,” Theo said uneasily. “I imagine pretty well, though.”

Angel said “Ah.” She seemed to be biding her time. She had fallen back into her old idle way of admiring her hands and she sat smoothing them and turning them about. “And Mr Delbanco?”

Theo had not thought of that old friend for years. He said: “Mr Delbanco died some years ago.”

“I thought he must have done. I never hear anything of him from that young Brace. When I inquired, he couldn't place him at all. ‘It is a little puzzling,' I told him, ‘since he is head of your firm—the power behind the scenes, as he was always spoken of'.”

“As time went on, of course, he did less and less, his power waned. And you?” he asked bravely—for it had to come. “Are you working hard?”

“I will not write for an ungrateful world.” This she believed. Not that her inventiveness had died, her imagination at long last tired. She thought that the reluctance she felt now to sit down at her desk and begin work was due to the fact that, like many a great artist before her, she was rejected by a world grown Philistine. “Let them all blow themselves to blazes,” she told Nora once when they were speaking of the war, which was not a forbidden subject as the other war had been. “There is nothing in them for us to worry about.” She was often violent about people, as are so many animal lovers.

“Or an ungrateful publisher,” she said now to Theo. “Where would he be now if it were not for me, I wonder?”

“I think we should let Theo have his drink in peace,” said Nora.

“I am not interfering with his drink. I am telling him about his partner's nephew.”

Bessie came in to lay the table, and Nora gave her so many instructions about the cooking that to Theo the dishes were old but intractable friends when at last they were brought in.

“No wine, Theo, I am afraid,” Angel said. “You won't need me to give you the reason why.”

He was tired from his journey and had looked forward to going to bed, but now he was beginning to suspect that the sheets would be damp. He was too old for these venturings. Angel and Nora thought that he looked old; his face had fallen in at the cheeks and temples and his skin was shiny and intricately wrinkled. The beard that once had been so fiery was sparse and silver; he looked a different shape altogether. As if his skeleton were coming to the surface, thought Nora with a shiver.

At this time of the evening, the cats began to play about the upstairs passages. They thundered up and down the bare corridors, and Angel listened with the indulgent smile which no person but Esmé—whom it had infuriated—had ever received from her.

Theo had often thought that it was just as well that Esmé had died: it could never have been kept up, Angel's legend of their perfect marriage. The flaws must in time have become as obvious to her as they were to everyone else. Esmé's indifference had curdled into resentment and malice; crippled and hampered as he was, he must in time have broken or broken away. A figure from long ago, he seemed now to Theo, sitting eternally on the stairs at Angel's London party, both confounded and derisive. So long ago, there was another occasion—Theo had almost forgotten it—of callous betrayal. But there was no need to worry now. The risks, he thought, the knife's-edge her peace-of-mind was once balanced on.

The telephone-bell echoed startlingly in the hall, for, as Theo had noticed, the house was very bare of furniture. The massive chests and tallboys, with their ormolu and marquetry, which Angel had bought when she was young and rich, were no longer to be seen, and he wondered uneasily if they had been sold.

“Nora can't help shouting when she telephones,” Angel explained. “She has grown very deaf.”

“I hadn't noticed.”

“She doesn't realise it herself, and of course I try to keep it from her.”

Nora returned. She sat down and took up her fork and pushed some stewed apple about her plate, looking thoughtful, knowing that Angel was waiting and edgy with curiosity. Then the pain of not telling became greater than the desire to tease. “He is sinking,” she said. A look of peace and complacency passed between them.

“Are you going?” Angel asked her.

“He is in a coma.”

“If he wouldn't know you, there's no sense in making the journey. You can't be expected to go there just to comfort the servants.”

“Quite.”

“He is in good hands.”

“The best. Mrs. Warren's, for instance. She has been with him for as long as I can remember.”

Angel frowned. “I hope you haven't underestimated her, Nora. She has the advantage of having
been
there, week in, week out, you know; and he dependent on her as he must have been.”

“I never underestimate anyone. And I pride myself that I know a little about his affairs and intentions.”

“If you only know a little, you have no cause for pride. Nora's uncle,” Angel said, turning to Theo, who was wishing that cats liked stewed apple; then he might have slipped some down to the blue Persian sitting at his feet. “Lord Norley. He has had a stroke and is dying.”

“Another old man on his way,” Theo said, feeling depressed.

“We never talk like that,” Angel said briskly. “A bomb can fall on young or old these days.” She appeared gratified that the young were in it, too: this seemed to even out the dangers of being old. “Lord Norley is a different matter. He has been unconscious for days. He is as good as dead already.”

“Or as bad as dead,” said Theo, who did not understand the situation.

Next day, Lady Baines came over early to luncheon and they spent a peaceful hour sitting on the terrace in the thin, spring sunshine, cleaning the cats' ears. Canker was discovered in one, and fleas in a litter of kittens.

“Fetch a sheet, Marvell,” Angel called to him. “Say ‘please',” he muttered to himself. He was spraying weed-killer indiscriminately about the garden.

“No, a blanket would be better,” said Lady Baines. “They can't hop off a blanket so easily.”

Theo was disconcerted by the sight of what was brought out from the house: was sure that it was the blanket from the library-table, and hoped that it would not be returned there afterwards.

The kittens were caught and smothered with powder and the fleas dropped off them on to the blanket where Lady Baines, with sharper eyes than Angel's, was quick to kill them.

When it was time for luncheon, she was ready for it, she said. She set her hat straight on her head and, with her tweed skirt covered with flea-powder, went to the library with a good appetite.

“A good morning's work,” she said to Theo. “So satisfying.” He was itching all over and hoped that the cause was his imagination. He would be glad to get away—from the cats, the fleas, the damp, and these three eccentric women. He had always been glad to get away from Angel; she tired and exasperated him; but he had never been able to replace his first impression of her with any other. At that first meeting, long ago in London, she had seemed to need his protection while warning him not to offer it: arrogant and absurd she had been and had remained: she had warded off friendship and stayed lonely and made such fortifications within her own mind that the truth could not pierce it. At the slightest air of censure in the world about her, up had gone the barricades, the strenuous resistance begun by which she was preserved in her own imagination, beautiful, clever, successful and beloved.

“Ah, carrot flan,” Lady Baines exclaimed. “But where,” she asked, her glance attracted away from the dish which Bessie offered, to an oblong of unfaded wallpaper between two windows, “where is the William and Mary escritoire?”

“It has gone to be treated for wood-worm,” Nora said.

And I suppose, Theo thought, that all that silver they once had has gone to have the dents taken out.

“I should have left that for a month or two—well, that is what
I
was once advised by a man in Wigmore Street. In September; I am sure I was told that, when the grubs are nearer the surface of the wood, d'you know? I am surprised that anyone would dream of dealing with it in the spring. Where did you take it?”

She was indefatigably, almost crazedly interested in other people's trivial affairs.

“A place in Norley,” said Nora.

“I shouldn't have trusted anyone local, not after that escapade about Major Cubbage's commode. Well, I hope they will be ruthless, that's all.”

Theo wondered why wood-worms were excluded from her compassionate attitude to other creatures, and remembered that she had pounced quite gleefully on the fleas: he supposed that it was a question of size and that she would say that she had to draw the line somewhere.