Angell, Pearl and Little God

by Winston Graham

  Eventually, feeling not at all sleepy, he got up, fastened his waistcoat across his broad silk-shirted body, and padded into the kitchen. She was busy rearranging some pans and looked up inquiringly.

  ‘I feel tired, Pearl, so I’ll go to bed early. Good night.’

  ‘Good night.’ She hesitated; there was no accepted routine. Then she put up her cheek to be kissed. He kissed it, resting his lips briefly on the satiny skin. He did not touch her arms. She smelt refreshingly of perfume.

  He went up to bed and undressed and lay, a solid, middle-aged mountain under the sheets, staring at the Dufy flower painting over the Adam mantelpiece. He heard her come upstairs, and he listened quietly to her preparations for bed. Presently he put out the light and instantly went to sleep. Since marrying he had not had a recurrence of the claustrophobic loneliness which affected him on the night of the flight to Switzerland. All this summer he had kept extremely well, and he had no intention of disturbing either his mental or his physical equilibrium with ill-considered adventures into a way of life that other married men followed.

  The next morning when he reached Lincoln’s Inn there was a letter from Lord Vosper saying he had decided to accept the terms offered by Land Increments Ltd for the purchase of an option to buy Merrick House and 200 acres of land in the parish of Handley Merrick, Suffolk.

  Vosper had taken four months to make up his mind.

  Chapter Eight

  On Angell’s reckoning it would now take six or eight weeks to get the deal finalized. They needed Chancery Counsel’s advice, and he went to see Saul Montagu, who was about the best man on property now in chambers. It would be quite a tricky agreement to draw up, since Lord Vosper had as yet no legal title to Merrick House or lands, and it was essential to bind him as securely as if he did. There were technical problems in finding the best way of binding a man to sell what he had not yet got.

  Vosper’s solicitor would have to draw up the draft contract of sale, and then when everything was ready for signing, the contract would be annexed to the option agreement. But when Angell called personally to see Hollis, the old man seemed unwilling to begin his part of the business until the draft option agreement was forthcoming. Hollis’s view was that there was no need for undue haste and that the proper steps should be taken in the proper order. Also there would be the problem of obtaining sight of the deeds, and other information, from the solicitors acting for the trustees. This could no doubt be arranged, as the two firms had frequent dealings. But it would take tact, said Hollis, and it would take time. Angell came away irritated, and unconvinced that much would happen in that office until Saul Montagu had done his part.

  In the middle of all this a telephone call from Godfrey Brown to Mr Angell.

  He couldn’t get round, he said, couldn’t get away; but Lady Vosper had had a real nasty turn on Sunday; so he thought he’d ring. The doctor had been each day, so had Mrs McNaughton. Lady V was suffering from something else now, the doctor said. Tension, or something.

  ‘Hypertension?’

  ‘That’s it. That’s right. Doctor says she got to go slow. Some hopes. She’d sooner blow-up, she says to him. Says if she’s better she’s driving to Merrick this week-end, celebrate the end of her lay-off. Handle a car again, she says. Do her good. You can’t win. She gets her own way.’

  Curiously this telephone call, this speaking privately, ear to ear, added a dimension to Godfrey’s association with Angell that Angell didn’t like. Instead of a visit to the office, where the difference of age and respectability and station was immediately clear, confidences on the telephone brought them to a level. It was as if Godfrey already understood too much, as if, without knowing why, he perceived that Angell was not doing him a favour by allowing him to ring.

  ‘Bye bye for now, sir. How about if I come round next week, when we get back?’

  ‘That will hardly be necessary. Unless there is something really important to tell me.’

  ‘If we’re still in London. Minute she’s better, we’re off. Mr Angell …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If I got something to tell you, maybe I could call at your house next time?’

  ‘My house? Why?’

  ‘So near. Five minutes’ trot, see. I can nip round in no time. Your office is way out. I got to take two buses. When I’m out Lady V always wants to know where I been.’

  ‘Yes. Well, possibly. But only if you … Well, yes you could. In the evenings. Monday and Friday evenings after six are best. Tuesdays and Thursdays I am always out.’

  ‘Right. O.K. Thanks. If there’s anything fresh I’ll nip round.’

  That night in bed Lady Vosper said to Godfrey: ‘I think I’m going to die.’

  ‘What? What d’you say? Oh, lay off it, Duchess, you give me nightmares.’

  ‘Something Matthewson said today.’

  ‘What’d he say? That old frost.’

  ‘I said something about hunting next year, and he just said: “Well … we’ll tackle that problem when it arises.” It wasn’t really so much what he said as the expression on his face. One felt pretty certain he believed the problem would never arise.’

  ‘Oh, wrap it up. You’re as tough as your riding boots. Made to measure. Can’t wear out. Drink a drop less, that’s all you need to do.’

  ‘I’m not so damn sure, my little Godfrey. I’m firing on one cylinder only, you know. Have been for the last eighteen years.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem to me like one cylinder. You’re a six-cylinder de luxe open sports with independent suspension and automatic transmission—’

  ‘No, don’t touch me any more. That’s another thing.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I can only stand so much of it these days. You knock me over, you little devil. Listen to me—’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Oh, what the hell. I’m tired.’

  ‘Tell me about Silverstone. You know. The crash.’

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘Not properly. You just said it happened when you was lying second.’

  ‘Well, it was a long time ago. At that time you were a squalling brat in an orphanage.’

  ‘O.K., O.K., I was a squalling brat.’

  ‘And I was lying second with only three laps to go. That mean anything to you?’

  ‘Yeah. You’d got a chance of winning.’

  ‘I’d got a chance of winning. A major event. I had, Flora Tower, independently entered, a woman driver. Two of the Italian champions in it too, and both retiring with transmission failures. I only had Lee-Turner to pass and I tried to do it on Stowe and again at the Chapel Curve. Then on Beckett’s Corner I skidded past him but I was going too fast and I spun off the course and overturned. The car finished on top and I was underneath. Proper place for a woman, you might say.’

  ‘Want a fag?’

  ‘You know I always do. Don’t burn a hole in the sheet, man! This is the last of my wedding linen!’

  ‘Which wedding?’

  ‘The Bonny Mayhew, of course. It was the only one we got presents for.’

  ‘So?’

  Flora blinked to try to remove the black spots that were floating in her vision. She was no sentimentalist, and contrary tides of feeling contested within her. In reminiscence ran the danger of nostalgia, and she was not sure if she began where she would stop.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Why the hell should you be interested?’

  ‘Why not? So I am. Why not?’

  She stared at him through the smoke. He didn’t look as if he was having her on.

  ‘Oh, that wedding – that was a month before the outbreak of war. That was when we were married. I was just nineteen, and my dear mother thought we were rushing it. But we knew better. Bonny was the same age – he came to me one hot August day in a thunderstorm and said, “Russia and Germany have signed a Non-Aggression pact. Come on; we’re getting spliced next week!” And we did. Mother was shocked; she thought the neighbours would think I was pregnant.�
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  ‘And you wasn’t?’

  She refused to be provoked. ‘Miriam was born in 1941. Bonny knew there’d got to be war after that pact.’

  ‘What’s a Non-Aggression pact?’

  ‘I’ll tell you some day.’

  ‘Whose side was Russia on in the war? I thought we were fighting Germany.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a book. Can you read?’

  Godfrey rubbed his nose on the sheet. ‘ Bonny Mayhew. Kook name for a man. Like a girl. Did you like him?’

  ‘His real name was Bonamy. Nobody used that. Yes, I – liked him, you insolent little man. We liked each other. He was hell-bent; one knew he couldn’t last. He was shot down over Crete in 1941. I always felt he was one of those men who was half in love with easeful death.’

  ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. Anyhow, I’m not. I don’t welcome death any way it comes, any time, and it depresses me when my doctor looks as if he’s at a wake.’

  ‘Tell me about the next one.’

  ‘What one? Paul Tower? But I’ve told you.’

  ‘Not properly, you haven’t.’

  Flora Vosper drew at her cigarette. Her fingers these days would never stay steady.

  ‘Paul was another play-boy. Maybe I attract ’em. But Paul was forty-six when we were married. He’d made a packet during the war and had just sold his engineering works in Coventry and had money to burn. I helped him burn it. We sizzled all over the Continent for five years. It amused him to have a wife who was known on the Grand Prix circuits … Odd about that crash: I knew if I over-took Lee-Turner I had to take a risk that no sane professional racing driver would ever take, but I knew damned well that I’d never get as near winning a major race again. Both Ascari and Farina out with transmission trouble and almost all the other names had had mishaps. It was a vile day, greasy and windy …’

  ‘What happened after the crash?’

  ‘They fished out one kidney, mended my shoulders and rib. I was about again in a couple of months as bright as a bee. But Paul wouldn’t let me race again, damn him. I suppose that began the break-up. Anyway he met his Judy the next year and I met Julian Vosper, so we had a double break and a re-splicing.’ She yawned. ‘You’d think you could go on for ever with one kidney. People do with one eye. And anyway you only have one liver to begin.’

  ‘Bloke I knew used to box, only had one lung; never did him any harm; welter-weight; Sam Fox; wonder what happened to him; he had a greengrocer’s shop; he’s around somewhere, you bet.’

  ‘Well, if you’ve only got one, it depends how that one works. Mine’s packing up, it seems.’

  The bedroom in the flat had a big bay window overlooking the garden at the back, and a sudden light from a flat opposite flooded across the thin curtains and cast stripes and shadows on the wall.

  ‘Lord V was a lot older than you, was he? How many times had he been hitched before?’

  ‘He was fifty when we married. Seemed a bit old to me then but it doesn’t now. I was what? – thirty-two. Yes, I was his third, as he was mine. Everything considered we got on marvellously well.’

  ‘Maud FitzGerald and Gerald fits Maud, eh?’

  ‘Right. And it would be the same today if he hadn’t had a coronary when we were in Bermuda five years ago. A bumper coronary, the doctor called it, the bloody fool. He might have been talking about a school picnic. Julian was sitting at the table having lunch and he said to me: “It’s going dark, Flora,” and I looked up and before I could get up and walk round the table he was dead.’

  ‘You’re in a right mood tonight,’ Godfrey said. ‘ Know any more good funerals?’

  ‘Yes, my own.’

  ‘Oh, give over, Flora! Time I was hopping it and I can’t leave you here moaning about yourself like a fog horn. Like a nice cup of char?’

  ‘I don’t mind telling you I’m scared, Godfrey. I don’t want to die.’

  ‘And you’re not going to! Little God’ll see to it. Little God’s honour!’

  She half laughed. ‘I wish you were Big God as well.’

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Like me to stay on? I always set my alarm for seven, to get in my run before Mrs Hodder turns up. What d’you say?’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Little Man, I think it would help. I seem to need the company.’

  Pearl’s premonition that most of her contemporaries would think her stark raving mad had been confirmed. Hazel and Chris, and Pat Chailey, and most of the girls in D. H. Evans, and those of her schoolfriends who knew, and various young men up and down Selsdon and Purley and Sanderstead.

  She was also aware that there was a good deal of sniggering behind hands and bawdy speculation. She bore it with what even to herself was a surprising lack of embarrassment. So far as the girls were concerned she was certain that their derision was a way of hiding an element of envy. She had talked to too many of them and heard too many of them talking to each other to doubt for a moment that the second preoccupation of them all, after wanting to get married to some good-looking boy, was that the good-looking boy should have a super job with lots of lovely money. And if there was lots of money it wasn’t too important that the boy should be so very good-looking or so very much of a boy. She had only carried this reasoning to an extreme conclusion. She had married someone without looks or youth but with what amounted to real wealth. So one balanced against the other. The swings and the roundabouts. There was no love but there was leisure. There was no sex but there was satisfaction in prestige. Maybe there was no heady exaltation of young lips and young limbs; but oh, the heady exaltation of a large bank balance and a personal cheque book! Perhaps in time the joy of money and position would wear off. But so, everyone said, did the joys of love.

  As for the young men, if they at once mourned her and sneered at her, what had they offered her but gauche compliments and furtive fumblings in the dark? She had married, they thought, a fat old buffer old enough to be her father, she had married, she thought, culture and good taste and the refinements of life …

  Of course disillusion had set in early after her marriage. She realized quickly enough that the tips of the iceberg in Wilfred Angell’s nature which had shown during their courtship were in fact only too truly representative of the massive elements under the surface. He was fat because he was greedy, no other reason at all. He was not generous – to say the least – though so far she had not used the word meanness even in her private thoughts. He was something of a bully, and would quickly raise his voice in restaurants if not given the best attention, in spite of the subsequent frugality of his tip.

  He had a number of curious old-maidish habits. He usually bathed only in the evenings before dinner when he was going out, so that ‘there should be no risk of taking a chill’. And every morning he counted exactly the same amount of money to carry with him: one £5 note, five ones, five ten shillings, three half crowns, three florins, four shillings, four sixpences, six pennies; so that he would never be short of change and would know at the end of the day just what he’d spent. And Sundays he didn’t wind his watch, so that it ran right down …

  All these were depressing failings and peculiarities, but Pearl was a patient girl and she did not despair. She was bent on a quiet re-education of his gastric juices, and so far he had not complained. She had £5,000 – five thousand actual pounds – of his money in a deposit account in her name, and this was hers to do with as she liked – thanks to her truly beloved and wise and distinguished and beautiful father. She found she liked the thrill of buying pictures almost as much as Wilfred, and she fully realized his acumen. She loved going with him to a sale and sitting beside him enduring all the tensions and surprises of the auction rooms … And she sometimes suspected that his bullying had arisen out of his loneliness. When the world passes by unheeding, a small boy will shout to draw attention to himself.

  Being a self-contained girl by instinct, she seldom needed company, and she was astonished when Veronica Portugal, whom she’d met at that
first dinner, rang her up one day and asked her out to lunch. She was scared by the idea, and would much have preferred eating on her own, but when it came to the point they had it at the Caprice, which was fabulous if noisy, and she really enjoyed the whole thing. It occurred to her, by way of comfort, that Veronica, though married to a man of her own age, was more in need of company than she was.

  Recently, during recent weeks, she had noticed Wilfred looking at her with a more brooding eye, and she suspected this might be an awakening interest. She didn’t quite know within herself whether she welcomed this or not. She was enjoying her new life and there was plenty of novelty in it without the novelty of discovering sex in the company of a middle-aged man she liked but did not love. But, intuitively rather than by reason, she suspected that her influence on Wilfred might be enhanced if he began to desire her. And she wanted influence over him. Unless she had some guns on her side the contest would be unequal.

  On the 12th August, which was a Monday, she spent all day shopping on her own. She loved spending money, but heredity, upbringing and her own nature were equally against extravagance. She bought frugally, wisely and with a sense of values. About 5.30 she staggered home in a state of subdued bliss, feet aching, parcels on her wrists and many more to come. She took a bath and while in it heard Wilfred come home. She speculated as to whether she should tell him of her shopping and whether she could possibly claim his interest in such things. She had to tell somebody and he seemed the appropriate person. He did not so much mind if she spent her own money, which was something already lost to him; but he had only rarely shown interest in her clothes. Indeed, if one faced the hard facts, he took little interest in anything unless it affected himself. Pearl felt he had to be gently prised out of this position. She did not underrate her task: he was an old bachelor deeply set in his ways and ruthlessly self-centred. But neither did she underrate her own good-tempered perseverance.

  She had just dried herself when the bell rang, and she poised with the Chanel talc in her hand listening. Wilfred had early made it clear that he did not answer his own door, but as he was downstairs and she was up she waited to see what happened. Nothing happened and the bell went again. She took off her cap, shook out her hair, dug her feet into mules, put on the ice-blue silk dressing gown she had bought in Paris at the Aux Trois Quartiers and went down.