Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  I know now that his reaction was far more complex than I understood, that jealousy was involved, and that not all of his anger was directed against Vickers. I did not know it then. Already confused and distressed, feeling I was losing something that mattered to me but which I could not define, I started forward. I said his name. I think I held out my hand. The motorboat drew alongside. Frank Gerhard turned back.

  “How old are you?” he said.

  When I replied that I was twenty-five, he made no comment. He did not need to; I knew what he thought. At twenty-five, I was more than old enough to exercise my own judgment.

  Grow up: he might just as well have said the words. He said a chilly but polite “Goodbye,” instead. I could have told him then (and some years later, I did): I was trying. But it was difficult to grow up, hard to break free. Constance had loved me as a child; Constance liked me to remain … a child. Even physically—and that had long been absurd.

  “Stop growing,” she would say to me as, in my teens, I mounted to that five feet ten inches at which I would (mercifully) stop.

  “Don’t grow so fast,” she would cry, half-mocking, half-serious—and I, desperate to retain her affection, would have stopped if I could.

  “Oh, you make me feel a dwarf,” she would complain. “It’s horrid. I hate it. I shall never catch up.”

  “You’re so tall for your age.”

  It was one of the first things she ever said to me, the day I arrived in New York. My first day with my godmother. My first day in a new world. I was quick to be enchanted.

  We were standing in that hall of mirrors, looking at our reflections, while Jenna waited silently to one side. I had been on an ocean liner for several days. I had just been in an elevator for the first time. I still felt in motion; beneath my feet, the carpet was waves.

  “How many Victorias can you see?” my new godmother said. She smiled. “How many Constances?”

  I counted six. I re-counted and found eight. Constance shook her head. She said we were infinite. “How tall you are for your age,” she said. I looked at our reflections. Aged eight, I already reached almost to my godmother’s shoulder. She was very perfect and very tiny. I wondered why my height should be a cause for regret.

  She had sounded regretful. She took me by the hand; she led me through the hall into a very large drawing room. From its windows I could see the tops of trees. I thought: We are in an aerie. The floor of the aerie rippled.

  “You must meet Mattie,” Constance said, and Mattie, wearing a white uniform and white shoes, came forward. She was the first black woman I had ever met. There had been no black people in Wiltshire in 1938. There had been none in first class aboard ship. I stared hard at Mattie’s skin. There was a purplish hue to this blackness, like the skin of a hothouse grape. Her cheeks were round and taut; they looked polished. She was enormously fat. When she smiled, her teeth were whiter than white. The room hefted me about.

  “Like as two peas in a pod,” said Mattie mysteriously. “Just like you said.”

  She gestured as she spoke. There, on the table next to her, was a photograph of my father. I knew this photograph; the very same one always stood on my mother’s desk. There was my father, in some long-ago time: He looked careless; a croquet mallet swung in his hand. I stared at this photograph. I thought about my father, and my mother, whom I had left behind at Winterscombe; who were dead.

  A large black bear came into the room; he licked my hand. This was Constance’s latest dog, a Newfoundland of profound gentleness. This was Bertie.

  Three thousand miles. I was still traveling. I felt the air lift me up and propel me toward something very obvious, but something I had had to travel across an ocean to discover. There I was, eight years old, tall and skinny, with bones that stuck out. I had a high bridge to a thin nose. My muddy-green eyes did not quite match, one being greener than the other. Three thousand miles, and I could see a new Victoria. There she was, receding into a tricksy infinitude, a girl who looked exactly like her father.

  I began to cry. I had promised myself I would not do this, but once I began I could not stop. I wanted my father back; I wanted my mother back; I wanted summer and Winterscombe and my friend Franz-Jacob. I said so. Once I started talking I could not stop that either. Out it all came, on a tide of misery too long suppressed: my parents’ death, my own terrible guilt, the boast to Charlotte, the prayers morning and night, the enormity of penny candles lit every Sunday to speed a wicked prayer to heaven.

  They were all very kind, but my strange godmother was the kindest of all. She put me to bed, in a room so luxurious it made me weep again, for the plainness of Winterscombe. My godmother sat down. She took my hand. She made no attempt to be soothing, and because of that, the tears finally stopped.

  “I am an orphan, too,” she said. “Like you, Victoria. I was ten when my father died. It was an accident, a very sudden thing—and I blamed myself, just as you do. People always do that when someone dies—you’ll understand that when you’re older. We always think: but I could have done that, I could have said this. You would still feel like that, even if you had never made up those stories, never said those prayers.” She paused. “Do you believe in God, Victoria? I don’t—but do you?”

  I hesitated. No one had ever asked me this before. Belief was assumed at Winterscombe.

  “I think so,” I said at last, in a cautious way.

  “Well, then.” Constance’s face became sad, so I thought it must make her unhappy to be an atheist. “If you believe in God, and He’s a good God, you can’t believe He would play a trick like that, can you?”

  “Even if He wanted to punish me—for telling a lie, to Charlotte?” I looked at her anxiously.

  “Certainly not. He would make the punishment fit the crime, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I know He would.” She looked down. She pleated the sheet between her fingers. She looked up. “It was a very little crime, Victoria, I promise you that. Why, it was so small—a speck of a crime! He has much bigger ones to worry about. Imagine—He has to think about killing and theft and war and hate. Really big things. All the monsters! You told a little lie, out of a great deal of love. He would never punish you for that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am totally, three hundred percent, absolutely sure. I give you my word on it.” She smiled. She bent forward and kissed me. She stroked my forehead with a small hand crammed with pretty little rings.

  I believed her. I felt a sudden certainty that she saw into the mind of God, this strange godmother of mine. If she said this, if she gave me her word, it was true. The relief was very great; the loss was still there, but the guilt lessened.

  Constance seemed to know this—perhaps she could read my mind, too—for she smiled again and held out her hand, palm upward.

  “There. It’s almost gone, hasn’t it, all that guilt? Is there any left? Just a bit? Right, give it to me. That’s it, put it there in my hand—all of it now! Good. Oh, it likes it here—I can feel. It’s tickling my palm. It’s running up my arm. It’s joining up with all the other guilts—it has lots of friends, you see? There!” She gave a wriggle. “It’s in my heart now. That’s where guilt likes to live, you know. It’s settling down nicely. You don’t need to worry. It will never come back to you.”

  “Is that where guilt lives—in the heart?”

  “Definitely. It skips about sometimes, and people think: Oh, I have palpitations! It isn’t, of course. It’s just the guilts, limbering up.”

  “And you have lots of them already?”

  “Lots and lots. I’m grown up.”

  “Will I have them again—when I’m grown up?”

  “Some perhaps. And regrets, too—they can be nasty. We’ll make a pact, shall we? If you feel them creeping up on you, give them to me. Really. I don’t mind. I’m used to them.”

  “I might go to sleep now.”

  “I thought you might. Did you sleep on the ship? I never could
. I don’t like ships. And the sea—all that sea. The sea is horrid.”

  “Shall I call you ‘Aunt’? I thought I might.”

  “Aunt?” Constance made a funny face. She wrinkled up her nose. “No, I don’t think I would like that at all. Aunt sounds very old. It smells of mothballs. Besides, I’m not your aunt, and Godmother is a terrible mouthful. Do you think you could call me Constance?”

  “Just that?”

  “Just that. Try it out. Say ‘Goodnight, Constance,’ and see how it feels. Actually, it’s the middle of the morning, but we shan’t mind that.”

  “Goodnight … Constance,” I said.

  Constance kissed me once more. I closed my eyes and felt her lips brush my forehead. She stood up. She seemed reluctant to leave me. I opened my eyes again. She looked both sad and happy.

  “I’m so glad you’re here.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry if we upset you. That photograph—it was very thoughtless. Did you not realize how like your father you are?”

  “No. I never did.”

  “Do you know, when I first met him, he was thirteen years old, almost fourteen. He looked exactly as you do now. Exactly.”

  “Truly?”

  “Well, he didn’t have braids, of course.” She smiled.

  “I hate the braids. I’ve always hated them.”

  “Then we shall banish them,” she said, to my great surprise. “Unbraid them. Snip them off. Whatever you like.”

  “Could we do that?”

  “Of course. We’ll do it tomorrow if you want. You decide—they’re your braids! And now you must go to sleep. When you wake up, Mattie will make you some pancakes. Do you like pancakes?”

  “Very much.”

  “Good. I shall tell her to make a great stack. And look, while you sleep, Bertie will guard over you. You see—here he is. He’ll lie down like a great rug at the end of your bed, and he’ll snore. Will you mind that?”

  “No. I think I might like it.”

  “He dreams, you see. When he snores, and scrabbles his paws, it means he’s having his favorite dream. He dreams about Newfoundland, you know, and swimming in the sea there. He loves to swim. He has webbed feet. He swims in his dreams, and he sees … oh, such marvelous things. Great caverns of ice, and polar bears and seals and walruses. Green icebergs, as tall as Everest. And sea birds—he sees those, too, when he dreams….”

  I was not sure when she left, not sure when she stopped speaking. The words became Bertie’s snores, and the snores the yelp of gulls. The room became very watery, and as I swam it, I thought my godmother was astonishing. She could banish braids without a second thought. She lived in an aerie. She gave me my father back—there he was in my hair and my skin and my eyes—and if he was so close, my mother must be there, too, just behind him, just to one side, where the seas began, in the elevators.

  I slept for a long time: hours and hours of the morning and afternoon. When I woke I ate five pancakes; Mattie introduced me to maple syrup. I sat at the kitchen table and Mattie told me her life story. She had run away from home when she was twelve years old and had many adventures. Mattie had once sung with a dance band, washed sheets in a Chinese laundry, learned to pick pockets, and scrubbed floors in Chicago.

  “Can you still pick pockets?”

  “Sure can. Nothin’ to it,” Mattie said, and demonstrated.

  The next day my godmother kept her promise. The braids were unwound. It was a great ceremony. I stood on a sheet in the middle of the drawing room. Mattie encouraged. Jenna watched.

  Snip, snip, snip: Constance cut my hair herself with a pair of silver scissors. She cut it to a more manageable length, so it just touched my shoulders.

  “Now! See how pretty you look,” Constance cried when it was over. I stared in the glass. Not pretty—I would never be that—but a definite improvement. Even Jenna said so. Then Jenna frowned, and I thought perhaps she was upset, that she thought it too soon to make changes. I looked back at Constance uncertainly. She was an orphan, like me. When guilt sat in the palm of her hand, it tickled. She owned a dog with webbed feet who dreamed of icebergs. She was very small and very beautiful.

  Snip, snip snip: hanks of red hair on a sheet, a sheet laid out on a flowery carpet. I did not care if it was too soon. I needed someone to love, and I loved Constance there and then. I loved her the way an orphan does, which she would understand: at once, unreservedly.

  I think Constance knew. She did not say a word. She held out her arms to me. I ran into her arms and she hugged me tight. When I looked into her face it shone at me.

  I thought then that she looked so happy because she loved me too. I still think, even now, that that might have been true. On the other hand (reluctantly, with an adult’s hindsight) I can see something else. Constance liked to make conquests. Maybe I was loved; maybe I was a pushover. I still do not know.

  This is what we did, every afternoon I remember. At three o’clock, no matter how busy her schedule, Constance would return home. She and I would walk Bertie. We would sail down in the elevator, cross the avenue, walk up Fifth a way, and take Bertie to explore the smells of Central Park. We would walk into the entrance near the zoo, which sometimes we would visit, because Constance loved the animals, though she hated to see them locked up. With the bears and the marmosets, we would mourn their imprisonment, and then we would walk to the stream. Do you know that part of the park? There is an ornamental lake with a fountain. There is the bandshell not far away. Once Constance and I went there in January. There was snow. A white Manhattan circled the park. We were the only people.

  Bertie liked the snow and he liked the New York winter. But he had a thick coat—a waterproof coat, with a thick, oily underfur—and he hated the heat of those wartime summers. They made him listless and miserable. To begin with, Constance and I used to persuade him into the kitchen, and sit him by the refrigerator with the door open. This was fine for Bertie, less good for the contents of the refrigerator. The servants complained; Constance bought Bertie an air conditioner. This he liked very much. We would turn it on full power, and Bertie would sit there, facing into the blast with his ears blowing.

  The other expedition we often made—and went on making for years and years, until I was well into my teens—was to a pet shop located on the corner of Sixty-second and Lexington. It was a smart pet shop, catering to the smart clientele living nearby on Park Avenue, and many of the pets it sold were exotic. There were talking parrots and angora rabbits; there were pythons who had to be anointed every day with baby oil to prevent their skins’ drying. There was every description of dog—shaggy ones, smooth ones, large ones, small ones. There were also cats and kittens.

  Given the proximity of Park Avenue, these cats, too, were rare of their kind. There were no ordinary tabbies or black-and-whites; there were somnolent, aristocratic Persians, bluepoint Siamese, Burmese; above all, there were Abyssinians. These cats I loved. They were elegant and restrained; they surveyed the world from their cages with a disdainful air; their fur blended caramel with black. They were the cats of Egyptian tombs, though I did not know that then. All I knew was that I wanted one.

  I wanted one the more, I think, because I knew it was an impossibility. The only pet animals Constance disliked were cats. When we went to the pet shop she avoided their cages; nothing would have persuaded her to stroke one. “No cats for us,” she would say. “And besides, we have Bertie.”

  It was on our return from one of these visits to the pet shop that I first asked Constance about her other dogs, Bertie’s predecessors. We were turning west toward Fifth. Constance smiled. We swung along at a brisk pace.

  “Heavens! Well, the very first was called Floss. Your uncle Francis gave him to me. He was the prettiest dog, brown and black and white, with a tail like a feather. Then there was Box—someone else gave me him. He was white, fluffy, very obedient. He came with me to live in New York, and he lived to be fifteen years old and rather fat. Then, let me see … I had a Pekingese for a while, then a pug—I lov
ed my pug! Then, when he died, I decided to change. All my dogs had been little dogs, you see. I thought I would go to the opposite extreme. I met Bertie.”

  “Why did you want to change—from such little dogs to such a large one?”

  “I just did. Let me see … Bertie is six. I was changing. I do that every so often. I change quite radically. I slough off my old skin and grow a new one, like those snakes at the shop. Yes, that was it. I changed, and I bought Bertie to celebrate. It was the right decision. Bertie is noble. And very wise. But you know that.”

  “Do you love him very much, Constance?”

  “Yes, I do. I think I love him the best of all. If he died—and big dogs don’t live so long, you know, as little ones—well, I don’t want to think how horrible it would be. Bertie will be my last dog. I owe it to him. I’ve decided.”

  “Truly, Constance?” I was very impressed. “Your last dog? You wouldn’t have another?”

  “Faithful unto death.” Constance checked her stride. “Yes. Bertie is my better self. I make a solemn oath, right here, on Sixty-second. I swear it.”

  “Of course, you did love the others, too,” I said as we turned onto Fifth. “Floss especially. He was the first, and—”

  I was about to add that Uncle Freddie had told me the sad story of Floss’s death, and how ill Constance had been with grief afterward.

  “Oh, Floss, yes,” Constance said, interrupting. “He caught tetanus, you know. It was terrible. He died at Winterscombe.”

  I knew what tetanus was—one of my father’s horses had died of it. Tetanus was not the same as being trampled in Hyde Park, but I did not like to say so. I was brought up to be reticent; reticence was polite.

  We entered our apartment building. The elevator bore us up. Constance had just told me the first of her lies, but I did not know that. I thought that my uncle Freddie, who could be vague, had been wrong.