There is a certain kind of unhappiness, experienced by a certain kind of woman married to a certain kind of man, which is timeless: outrunning centuries, interweaving generations, perpetuating itself from mother to daughter, feeding off the wet eyes of the puzzled girl, gaining fresh strength from the dry eyes of the old woman she will become – who, looking back on her past, remembers nothing of love except tears and the pain in the heart which must be endured, in silence, in case the heart stops altogether.
Better for it to stop, now.
Angel, waking in the night, hears sharp footsteps in the empty attic above and wants to wake Edward. She moves her hand to do so, but then stills it for fear of making him angry. Easier to endure in the night the nightmare terror of ghosts than the daylong silence of Edward’s anger.
The footsteps, little and sharp, run from a point above the double bed in which Angel and Edward lie, she awake, he sleeping, to a point somewhere above the chest of drawers by the door; they pause briefly, then run back again, tap-tap, clickety-click. There comes another pause and the sound of pulling and shuffling across the floor; and then the sequence repeats itself, once, twice. Silence. The proper unbroken silence of the night.
Too real, too clear, for ghosts. The universe is not magic. Everything has an explanation. Rain, perhaps? Hardly. Angel can see the moon shine through the drawn blind, and rain does not fall on moonlit nights. Perhaps, then, the rain of past days collected in some blocked gutter, to finally splash through on to the rolls of wallpaper and pots of paint on the attic floor, sounding like footsteps through some trick of domestic acoustics. Surely! Angel and Edward have not been living in the house for long. The attic is still unpainted, and old plaster drops from disintegrating laths. Edward will get round to it sooner or later. He prides himself on his craftsman’s skills, and Angel, a year married, has learned to wait and admire, subduing impatience in herself. Edward is a painter – of pictures, not houses – and not long out of art school, where he won many prizes. Angel is the lucky girl he has loved and married. Angel’s father paid for the remote country house, where now they live in solitude and where Edward can develop his talents, undisturbed by the ugliness of the city, with Angel, his inspiration, at his side. Edward, as it happened, consented to the gift unwillingly, and for Angel’s sake rather than his own. Angel’s father Terry writes thrillers and settled a large sum upon his daughter in her childhood, thus avoiding death duties and the anticipated gift tax. Angel kept the fact hidden from Edward until after they were married. He’d thought her an ordinary girl about Chelsea, sometime secretary, sometime barmaid, sometime artist’s model.
Angel, between jobs, did indeed take work as an artist’s model. That was how Edward first clapped eyes upon her; Angel, all innocence, sitting nude upon her plinth, fair curly hair glinting under strong lights, large eyes closed beneath stretched blue-veined lids, strong breasts pointed upwards, stubby pale brush irritatingly and coyly hidden behind an angle of thigh that both gave Angel cramps and spoiled the pose for the students. So they said.
‘If you’re going to be an exhibitionist,’ as Edward complained to her later in the coffee bar, ‘at least don’t be coy about it.’ He took her home to his pad, that handsome, dark-eyed, smiling young man, and wooed her with a nostalgic Sinatra record left behind by its previous occupant; half mocking, half sincere, he sang love words into her pearly ear, his warm breath therein stirring her imagination, and the gentle occasional nip of his strong teeth in its flesh promising passion and pain beyond belief. Angel would not take off her clothes for him: he became angry and sent her home in a taxi without her fare. She borrowed from her flatmate at the other end. She cried all night, and the next day, sitting naked on her plinth, had such swollen eyelids as to set a student or two scratching away to amend the previous day’s work. But she lowered her thigh, as a gesture of submission, and felt a change in the studio ambience from chilly spite to warm approval, and she knew Edward had forgiven her. Though she offered herself to multitudes, Edward had forgiven her.
‘I don’t mind you being an exhibitionist,’ Edward said to her in the coffee bar, ‘in fact that rather turns me on, but I do mind you being coy. You have a lot to learn, Angel.’ By that time Angel’s senses were so aroused, her limbs so languid with desire, her mind so besotted with his image, that she would have done whatever Edward wished, in public or in private. But he rose and left the coffee bar, leaving her to pay the bill.
Angel cried a little, and was comforted by and went home with Edward’s friend Tom, and even went to bed with him, which made her feel temporarily better, but which she was to regret for ever.
‘I don’t mind you being a whore,’ Edward said before the next studio session, ‘but can’t you leave my friends alone?’
It was a whole seven days of erotic torment for Angel before Edward finally spent the night with her: by that time her thighs hung loosely open in the studio. Let anyone see. Anyone. She did not care. The job was coming to an end anyway. Her new one as secretary in a solicitor’s office began on the following Monday. In the nick of time, just as she began to think that life and love were over, Edward brought her back to their remembrance. ‘I love you,’ he murmured in Angel’s ear. ‘Exhibitionist slut, typist, I don’t care. I still love you.’
Tap-tap, go the footsteps above, starting off again: clickety-click. Realer than real. No, water never sounded like that. What then? Rats? No. Rats scutter and scamper and scrape. There were rats in the barn in which Angel and Edward spent a camping holiday together. Their tent had blown away: they’d been forced to take refuge in the barn. All four of them. Edward, Angel, Tom and his new girlfriend Ray. Angel missed Edward one night after they all stumbled back from the pub to the barn, and searching for him in the long grass beneath an oak tree, found him in tight embrace with Ray.
‘Don’t tell me you’re hysterical as well as everything else,’ complained Edward. ‘You’re certainly irrational. You went to bed with Tom, after all.’
‘But that was before.’
Ah, before, so much before. Before the declarations of love, the abandoning of all defence, all prudence, the surrendering of common sense to faith, the parcelling up and handing over of the soul into apparent safe-keeping. And if the receiving hands part, the trusted fingers lose their grip, by accident or by design, why then, one’s better dead.
Edward tossed his Angel’s soul into the air and caught it with his casual hands.
‘But if it makes you jealous,’ he said, ‘why I won’t… Do you want to marry me? Is that it? Would it make you happier?’
What would it look like when they came to write his biography? Edward Holst, the famous painter, married at the age of twenty-four – to what? Artist’s model, barmaid, secretary, crime-writer’s daughter? Or exhibitionist, whore, hysteric? Take your choice. Whatever makes the reader happiest, explains the artist in the simplest terms, makes the most successful version of a life. Crude strokes and all.
‘Edward likes to keep his options open,’ said Tom, but would not explain his remark any further. He and Ray were witnesses at the secular wedding ceremony. Angel thought she saw Edward nip Ray’s ear as they all formally kissed afterwards, then thought she must have imagined it.
This was his overture of love: turning to Angel in the dark warmth of the marriage bed, Edward’s teeth would seek her ear and nibble the tender flesh, while his hand travelled down to open her thighs. Angel never initiated their lovemaking. No. Angel waited, patiently. She had tried once or twice, in the early days, letting her hand roam over his sleeping body, but Edward not only failed to respond, but was thereafter cold to her for days on end, sleeping carefully on his side of the bed, until her penance was paid and he lay warm against her again.
Edward’s love made flowers bloom, made the house rich and warm, made water taste like wine. Edward, happy, surrounded Angel with smiles and soft encouragement. He held her soul with steady hands. Edward’s anger came unexpectedly, out of nowhere, or nowhere that Angel could see. Yesterday’s permitted remark, forgiven fault, was today’s outrage. To remark on the weather to break an uneasy silence, might be seen as evidence of a complaining nature: to be reduced to tears by his first unexpected biting remark, further fuel for his grievance.
Edward, in such moods, would go to his studio and lock the door, and though Angel (soon learning that to weep outside the door or beat against it, moaning and crying and protesting, would merely prolong his anger and her torment) would go out to the garden and weed or dig or plant as if nothing were happening, would feel Edward’s anger seeping out from under the door, darkening the sun, poisoning the earth; or at any rate spoiling her fingers in relation to the earth, so that they trembled and made mistakes and nothing grew.
The blind shakes. The moon goes behind a cloud. Tap, tap, overhead. Back and forth. The wind? No. Don’t delude yourself. Nothing of this world. A ghost. A haunting. A woman. A small, desperate, busy woman, here and not here, back and forth, out of her time, back from the grave, ill-omened, bringing grief and ruin: a message that nothing is what it seems, that God is dead and the forces of evil abroad and unstoppable. Does Angel hear, or not hear?
Angel through her fear, wants to go to the bathroom. She is three months pregnant. Her bladder is weak. It wakes her in the night, crying out its need, and Angel, obeying, will slip cautiously out of bed, trying not to wake Edward. Edward needs unbroken sleep if he is to paint well the next day. Edward, even at the best of times, suspects that Angel tossing and turning, and moaning in her sleep, as she will, wakes him on purpose to annoy.
Angel has not yet told Edward that she is pregnant. She keeps putting it off. She has no real reason to believe he does not want babies: but he has not said he does want them, and to assume that Edward wants what other people want is dangerous.
Angel moans aloud: afraid to move, afraid not to move, afraid to hear, afraid not to hear. So the child Angel lay awake in her little white bed, listening to her mother moaning, afraid to move, afraid not to move, to hear or not to hear. Angel’s mother was a shoe-shop girl who married the new assistant manager after a six-week courtship. That her husband went on to make a fortune, writing thrillers that sold by the million, was both Dora’s good fortune and tragedy. She lived comfortably enough on alimony, after all, in a way she could never have expected, until dying by mistake from an overdose of sleeping pills. After that Angel was brought up by a succession of her father’s mistresses and au-pairs. Her father Terry liked Edward, that was something, or at any rate he had been relieved at his appearance on the scene. He had feared an element of caution in Angel’s soul: that she might end up married to a solicitor or stockbroker. And artists were at least creative, and an artist such as Edward Holst might well end up rich and famous. Terry had six Holst canvases on his walls to hasten the process. Two were of his daughter, nude, thigh slackly falling away from her stubby fair bush. Angel, defeated – as her mother had been defeated. ‘I love you, Dora, but you must understand. I am not in love with you.’ As I’m in love with Helen, Audrey, Rita, whoever it was: off to meetings, parties, off on his literary travels, looking for fresh copy and new backgrounds, encountering always someone more exciting, more interesting, than an ageing ex shoe-shop assistant. Why couldn’t Dora understand? Unreasonable of her to suffer, clutching the wretched Angel to her alarmingly slack bosom. Could he, Terry, really be the only animation of her flesh? There was a sickness in her love, clearly; unaccompanied as it was by the beauty which lends grace to importunity.
Angel had her mother’s large, sad eyes. The reproach in them was in-built. Better Dora’s heart had stopped (she’d thought it would: six months pregnant, she found Terry in the housemaid’s bed. She, Dora, mistress of servants! What bliss!) and the embryo Angel never emerged to the light of day.
The noise above Angel stops. Ghosts! What nonsense! A fallen lath grating and rattling in the wind. What else? Angel regains her courage, slips her hand out from beneath Edward’s thigh preparatory to leaving the bed for the bathroom. She will turn on all the lights and run. Edward wakes; sits up.
‘What’s that? What in God’s name’s that?’
‘I can’t hear anything,’ says Angel, all innocence. Nor can she, not now. Edward’s displeasure to contend with now; worse than the universe rattling its chains.
‘Footsteps, in the attic. Are you deaf? Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘I thought I imagined it.’
But she can hear them, once again, as if with his ears. The same pattern across the floor and back. Footsteps or heartbeats. Quicker and quicker now, hastening with the terror and tension of escape.
Edward, unimaginably brave, puts on his slippers, grabs a broken banister (five of these on the landing – one day soon, some day, he’ll get round to mending them – he doesn’t want some builder, paid by Angel, bungling the job) and goes on up to the attic. Angel follows behind. He will not let her cower in bed. Her bladder aches. She says nothing about that. How can she? Not yet. Not quite yet. Soon. ‘Edward, I’m pregnant.’ She can’t believe it’s true, herself. She feels a child, not a woman.
‘Is there someone there?’
Edward’s voice echoes through the three dark attic rooms. Silence. He gropes for and switches on the light. Empty, derelict rooms: plaster falling, laths hanging, wallpaper peeling. Floorboards broken. A few cans of paint, a pile of wallpaper rolls, old newspapers. Nothing else.
‘It could have been mice,’ says Edward, doubtfully.
‘Can’t you hear it?’ asks Angel, terrified. The sound echoes in her ears: footsteps clattering over a pounding heart. But Edward can’t, not any more.
‘Don’t start playing games,’ he murmurs, turning back to warmth and bed. Angel scuttles down before him, into the bathroom; the noise in her head fades. A few drops of urine tinkle into the bowl.
Edward lies awake in bed: Angel can feel his wakefulness, his increasing hostility towards her, before she is so much as back in the bedroom.
‘Your bladder’s very weak. Angel,’ he complains. ‘Something else you inherited from your mother?’
Something else, along with what? Suicidal tendencies, alcoholism, a drooping bosom, a capacity for being betrayed, deserted and forgotten?
Not forgotten by me, Mother. I don’t forget. I love you. Even when my body cries out beneath the embraces of this man, this lover, this husband, and my mouth forms words of love, promises of eternity, still I don’t forget. I love you, Mother.
‘I don’t know about my mother’s bladder,’ murmurs Angel rashly.
‘Now you’re going to keep me awake all night,’ says Edward. ‘I can feel it coming. You know I’ve nearly finished a picture.’
‘I’m not going to say a word,’ she says, and then, fulfilling his prophecy, sees fit to add, ‘I’m pregnant.’
Silence. Stillness. Sleep?
No, a slap across nostrils, eyes, mouth. Edward has never hit Angel before. It is not a hard slap: it contains the elements of a caress.
‘Don’t even joke about it,’ says Edward, softly.
‘But I am pregnant.’
Silence. He believes her. Her voice made doubt impossible.
‘How far?’ Edward seldom asks for information. It is an act which infers ignorance, and Edward likes to know more than anyone else in the entire world.
‘Three and a half months.’
He repeats the words, incredulous.
‘Too far gone to do anything,’ says Angel, knowing now why she did not tell Edward earlier, and the knowledge making her voice cold and hard. Too far gone for the abortion he will most certainly want her to have. So much for the fruits of love. Love? What’s love? Sex, ah, that’s another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions.
But Angel will turn sex into love – yes, she will – seizing it by the neck, throttling it till it gives up and takes the weaker path. Love! Edward is right to be frightened, right to hate her.
‘I hate you,’ he says, and means it. ‘You mean to destroy me.’
‘I’ll make sure it doesn’t disturb your nights,’ says Angel, Angel of the bristly fair bush, ‘if that’s what you’re worrying about. And you won’t have to support it. I do that, anyway. Or my father does.’
Well, how dare she! Angel, not nearly as nice as she thought. Soft-eyed, vicious Angel.
Slap, comes the hand again, harder. Angel screams, he shouts; she collapses, crawls about the floor – he spurns her, she begs forgiveness; he spits his hatred, fear, and she her misery. If the noise above continues, certainly no one hears it, there is so much going on below. The rustlings of the night erupting into madness. Angel is suddenly quiet, whimpering, lying on the floor; she squirms. At first Edward thinks she is acting, but her white lips and taloned fingers convince him that something is wrong with her body and not just her mind. He gets her back on the bed and rings the doctor. Within an hour Angel finds herself in a hospital with a suspected ectopic pregnancy. They delay the operation and the pain subsides; just one of those things, they shrug. Edward has to interrupt his painting the next afternoon to collect her from the hospital.
‘What was it? Hysteria?’ he enquires.
‘I dare say!’
‘Well, you had a bad beginning, what with your mother and all,’ he concedes, kissing her nose, nibbling her earlobe. It is forgiveness; but Angel’s eyes remain unusually cold. She stays in bed, after Edward has left it and gone back to his studio, although the floors remain unswept and the dishes unwashed.
Angel does not say what is in her mind, what she knows to be true. That he is disappointed to see both her and the baby back, safe and sound. He had hoped the baby would die, or failing that, the mother would die and the baby with her. He is pretending forgiveness, while he works out what to do next.
In the evening the doctor comes to see Angel. He is a slight man with a sad face: his eyes, she thinks, are kind behind his pebble glasses. His voice is slow and gentle. I expect his wife is happy, thinks Angel, and actually envies her. Some middle-aged, dowdy, provincial doctor’s wife, envied by Angel! Rich, sweet, young and pretty Angel. The efficient secretary, lovable barmaid, and now the famous artist’s wife! Once, for two rash weeks, even an art school model.
The doctor examines her, then discreetly pulls down her nightie to cover her breasts and moves the sheet up to cover her crotch. If he were my father, thinks Angel, he would not hang my naked portrait on his wall for the entertainment of his friends. Angel had not known until this moment that she minded.
‘Everything’s doing nicely inside there,’ says the doctor. ‘Sorry to rush you off like that, but we can’t take chances.’
Ah, to be looked after. Love. That’s love. The doctor shows no inclination to go.
‘Perhaps I should have a word with your husband,’ he suggests. He stands at the window gazing over daffodils and green fields. ‘Or is he very busy?’
‘He’s painting,’ says Angel. ‘Better not disturb him now. He’s had so many interruptions lately, poor man.’
‘I read about him in the Sunday supplement,’ says the doctor.
‘Well, don’t tell him so. He thought it vulgarised his work.’
‘Did you think that?’
Me? Does what I think have anything to do with anything?
‘I thought it was quite perceptive, actually,’ says Angel, and feels a surge of good humour. She sits up in bed.
‘Lie down,’ he says. ‘Take things easy. This is a large house. Do you have any help? Can’t afford it?’
‘It’s not that. It’s just why should I expect some other woman to do my dirty work?’
‘Because she might like doing it and you’re pregnant, and if you can afford it, why not?’
‘Because Edward doesn’t like strangers in the house. And what else have I got to do with my life? I might as well clean as anything else.’
‘It’s isolated out here,’ he goes on. ‘Do you drive?’
‘Edward needs peace to paint,’ says Angel. ‘I do drive but Edward has a thing about women drivers.’
‘You don’t miss your friends?’
‘After you’re married,’ says Angel, ‘you seem to lose contact. It’s the same for everyone, isn’t it?’
‘Um,’ says the doctor. And then, ‘I haven’t been in this house for fifteen years. It’s in a better state now than it was then. The house was divided into flats, in those days. I used to visit a nice young woman who had the attic floor. Just above this. Four children, and the roof leaked; a husband who spent his time drinking cider in the local pub and only came home to beat her.’
‘Why did she stay?’
‘How can such women leave? How do they afford it? Where do they go? What happens to the children?’ His voice is sad.
‘I suppose it’s money that makes the difference. With money, a woman’s free,’ says Angel, trying to believe it.
‘Of course,’ says the doctor. ‘But she loved her husband. She couldn’t bring herself to see him for what he was. Well, it’s hard. For a certain kind of woman, at any rate.’
Hard, indeed, if he has your soul in his safe-keeping, to be left behind at the bar, in the pub, or in some other woman’s bed, or in a seat in the train on his literary travels. Careless!
‘But it’s not like that for you, is it?’ says the doctor calmly. ‘You have money of your own, after all.’
Now how does he know that? Of course, the Sunday supplement article.
‘No one will read it,’ wept Angel, when Edward looked up, stony-faced from his first perusal of the fashionable columns. ‘No one will notice. It’s tucked away at the very bottom.’
So it was. ‘Edward’s angelic wife Angel, daughter of best-selling crime writer Terry Toms, has smoothed the path upwards, not just with the soft smiles our cameraman has recorded, but by enabling the emergent genius to forswear the cramped and inconvenient, if traditional, artist’s garret for a sixteenth-century farmhouse in greenest Gloucestershire. It is interesting, moreover, to ponder whether a poor man would have been able to develop the white-on-white techniques which have made Hoist’s work so noticeable: or whether the sheer price of paint these days would not have deterred him.’
‘Edward, I didn’t say a word to that reporter, not a word,’ she said, when the ice showed signs of cracking, days later.
‘What are you talking about?’ he asked, turning slow, unfriendly eyes upon her.
‘The article. I know it’s upset you. But it wasn’t my fault.’
‘Why should a vulgar article in a vulgar newspaper upset me?’
And the ice formed over again, thicker than ever. But he went to London for two days, presumably to arrange his next show, and on his return casually mentioned that he’d seen Ray while he was there.
Angel had cleaned, baked, and sewed curtains in his absence, hoping to soften his heart towards her on his return: and lay awake all the night he was away, the fear of his infidelity so agonising as to make her contemplate suicide, if only to put an end to it. She could not ask for reassurance. He would throw the fears so neatly back at her. ‘Why do you think I should want to sleep with anyone else? Why are you so guilty? Because that’s what you’d do if you were away from me?’
Ask for bread and be given stones. Learn self-sufficiency: never show need. Little, tough Angel of the soft smiles, hearing some other woman’s footsteps in the night, crying for another’s grief. Well, who wants a soul, tossed here and there by teasing hands, over-bruised and over-handled. Do without it!
Edward came home from London in a worse mood than he’d left, shook his head in wondering stupefaction at his wife’s baking – ‘I thought you said we were cutting down on carbohydrates’ – and shut himself into his studio for twelve hours, emerging just once to say – ‘Only a mad woman would hang curtains in an artist’s studio, or else a silly rich girl playing at artist’s wife, and in public at that’ – and thrusting the new curtains back into her arms, vanished inside again.
Angel felt that her mind was slowing up, and puzzled over the last remark for some time before realising that Edward was still harking back to the Sunday supplement article.
‘I’ll give away the money if you like,’ she pleaded through the keyhole. ‘If you’d rather. And if you want not to be married to me I don’t mind.’ That was before she was pregnant.
Silence.
Then Edward emerged laughing, telling her not to be so ridiculous, bearing her off to bed, and the good times were restored. Angel sang about the house, forgot her pill, and got pregnant.
‘You have money of your own, after all,’ says the doctor.
‘You’re perfectly free to come and go.’
‘I’m pregnant,’ says Angel. ‘The baby has to have a father.’
‘And your husband’s happy about the baby?’
‘Oh yes!’ says Angel. ‘Isn’t it a wonderful day!’
And indeed today the daffodils nod brightly under a clear sky. So far, since first they budded and bloomed, they have been obliged to droop beneath the weight of rain and mist. A disappointing spring. Angel had hoped to see the countryside leap into energy and colour, but life returned only slowly, it seemed, struggling to surmount the damage of the past: cold winds and hard frosts, unseasonably late. ‘Or at any rate,’ adds Angel, softly, unheard, as the doctor goes, ‘he will be happy about the baby.’
Angel hears no more noises in the night for a week or so. There had been misery in the attic rooms, and the misery had ceased. Good times can wipe out bad. Surely!
Edward sleeps soundly and serenely: she creeps from bed to bathroom without waking him. He is kind to her and even talkative, on any subject, that is, except that of her pregnancy. If it were not for the doctor and her stay in the hospital, she might almost think she was imagining the whole thing. Edward complains that Angel is getting fat, as if he could imagine no other cause for it but greed. She wants to talk to someone about hospitals, confinements, layettes, names – but to whom?
She tells her father on the telephone – ‘I’m pregnant.’
‘What does Edward say?’ asks Terry, cautiously.
‘Nothing much,’ admits Angel.
‘I don’t suppose he does.’
‘There’s no reason not to have a baby,’ ventures Angel.
‘I expect he rather likes to be the centre of attention.’ It is the nearest Terry has ever got to a criticism of Edward.
Angel laughs. She is beyond believing that Edward could ever be jealous of her, ever be dependent upon her.
‘Nice to hear you happy, at any rate,’ says her father wistfully. His twenty-year-old girlfriend has become engaged to a salesman of agricultural machinery, and although she has offered to continue the relationship the other side of marriage, Terry feels debased and used, and was obliged to break off the liaison. He has come to regard his daughter’s marriage to Edward in a romantic light. The young bohemians!
‘My daughter was an art school model before she married Edward Holst... you’ve heard of him? It’s a real Rembrandt and Saskia affair.’ He even thinks lovingly of Dora: if only she’d understood, waited for youth to wear itself out. Now he’s feeling old and perfectly capable of being faithful to an ex shoe-shop assistant. If only she weren’t dead and gone!
An art school model. Those two weeks! Why had she done it? What devil wound up her works and set poor Angel walking in the wrong direction? It was in her nature, surely, as it was in her mother’s to follow the paths to righteousness, fully clothed.
Nightly, Edward studied her naked body, kissing her here, kissing her there, parting her legs. Well, marriage! But now I’m pregnant, now I’m pregnant. Oh, be careful. That hard lump where my soft belly used to be. Be careful! Silence, Angel. Don’t speak of it. It will be the worse for you and your baby if you do.
Angel knows it.
Now Angel hears the sound of lovemaking up in the empty attic, as she might hear it in hotels in foreign lands. The couplings of strangers in an unknown tongue – only the cries and breathings universal, recognisable anywhere.
The sounds chill her: they do not excite her. She thinks of the mother of four who lived in this house with her drunken, violent husband. Was that what kept you by his side? The chains of fleshly desire? Was it the thought of the night that got you through the perils of the day?
What indignity, if it were so.
Oh, I imagine it. I, Angel, half-mad in my unacknowledged pregnancy, my mind feverish, and the doctor’s anecdotes feeding the fever – I imagine it! I must!
Edward wakes.
‘What’s that noise?’
‘What noise?’
‘Upstairs.’
‘I don’t hear anything.’
‘You’re deaf.’
‘What sort of noise?’
But Edward sleeps again. The noise fades, dimly. Angel hears the sound of children’s voices. Let it be a girl, dear Lord, let it be a girl.
‘Why do you want a girl?’ asks the doctor, on Angel’s fourth monthly visit to the clinic.
‘I’d love to dress a girl,’ says Angel vaguely, but what she means is, if it’s a girl, Edward will not be so – what is the word? – hardly jealous, difficult perhaps. Dreadful. Yes, dreadful.
Bright-eyed Edward: he walks with Angel now – long walks up and over stiles, jumping streams, leaping stones. Young Edward. She has begun to feel rather old, herself.
‘I am a bit tired,’ she says, as they set off one night for their moonlit walk.
He stops, puzzled.
‘Why are you tired?’
‘Because I’m pregnant,’ she says, in spite of herself.
‘Don’t start that again,’ he says, as if it were hysteria on her part. Perhaps it is.
That night, he opens her legs so wide she thinks she will burst. ‘I love you,’ he murmurs in her nibbled ear, ‘Angel, I love you. I do love you.’ Angel feels the familiar surge of response, the holy gratitude, the willingness to die, to be torn apart if that’s what’s required. And then it stops. It’s gone. Evaporated! And in its place, a new strength. A chilly icicle of non-response, wonderful, cheerful. No. It isn’t right; it isn’t what’s required: on the contrary. ‘I love you,’ she says in return, as usual; but crossing her fingers in her mind, forgiveness for a lie. Please God, dear God, save me, help me save my baby. It is not me he loves, but my baby he hates: not me he delights in, but the pain he causes me, and knows he does. He does not wish to take root in me: all he wants to do is root my baby out. I don’t love him. I never have. It is sickness. I must get well. Quickly.
‘Not like that,’ says Angel, struggling free – bold, unkind, prudish Angel – rescuing her legs. ‘I’m pregnant. I’m sorry, but I am pregnant.’
Edward rolls off her, withdraws.
‘Christ, you can be a monster. A real ball-breaker.’
‘Where are you going?’ asks Angel, calm and curious. Edward is dressing. Clean shirt; cologne. Cologne!
‘To London.’
‘Why?’
‘Where I’m appreciated.’
‘Don’t leave me alone. Please.’ But she doesn’t mean it.
‘Why not?’
‘I’m frightened. Here alone at night.’
‘Nothing ever frightened you.’ Perhaps he is right.
Off he goes; the car breaking open the silence of the night. It closes again. Angel is alone.
Tap, tap, tap, up above. Starting up as if on signal. Back and forward. To the attic bed which used to be, to the wardrobe which once was; the scuffle of the suitcase on the floor. Goodbye. I’m going. I’m frightened here. The house is haunted. Someone upstairs, downstairs. Oh, women everywhere, don’t think your misery doesn’t seep into walls, creep downstairs, and then upstairs again. Don’t think it will ever be done with, or that the good times wipe it out. They don’t.
Angel feels her heart stop and start again. A neurotic symptom, her father’s doctor had once said. It will get better, he said, when she’s married and has babies. Everything gets better for women when they’re married with babies. It’s their natural state. Angel’s heart stops all the same, and starts again, for good or bad.
Angel gets out of bed, slips on her mules with their sharp little heels and goes up the attic stairs. Where does she find the courage? The light, reflected up from the hallway, is dim. The noise from the attic stops. Angel hears only – what? – the rustling noise of old newspapers in a fresh wind. That stops, too. As if a film were now running without sound. And coming down towards Angel, a small, tired woman in a nightie, slippers silent on the stairs, stopping to stare at Angel as Angel stares at her. Her face marked by bruises.
‘How can I see that,’ wonders Angel, now unafraid, ‘since there isn’t any light?’
She flicks on the switch, hand trembling, and in the light, as she’d known, there is nothing to be seen except the empty stairs and the unmarked dust upon them.
Angel goes back to the bedroom and sits on the bed.
‘I saw a ghost,’ she tells herself, calmly enough. Then fear reasserts itself: panic at the way the universe plays tricks. Quick, quick! Angel pulls her suitcase out from under the bed – there are still traces of wedding confetti within – and tap-tap she goes, with sharp little footsteps, from the wardrobe to the bed, from the chest of drawers and back again, not so much packing as retrieving, salvaging. Something out of nothing!
Angel and her predecessor, rescuing each other, since each was incapable of rescuing herself, and rescue always comes, somehow. Or else death.
Tap, tap, back and forth, into the suitcase, out of the house.
The garden gate swings behind her.
Angel, bearing love to a safer place.
1976