Angell, Pearl and Little God

  In his own room it was dark, but some light came in from outside so that he was able to move across to the dressing table without stumbling. Then he switched on a single light and saw himself staring at a stout dishevelled grey-faced old man whom he hardly recognized. His breathing was noisy and he tried to quieten it in case it should wake the sleepers in the next room. He sat down on a chair and put his head in his hands.

  So he sat for a time, while a car started up and accelerated away in the quiet street outside. His hands were still trembling when he got up and went back to the safe, reopened the door. He lifted out what he had seen the first time – the Smith & Wesson . 45 revolver he had picked up in Mersa Matruh more than a quarter of a century ago. There had been two packets of bullets in the belt when he found it, still wrapped in their original grey paper, and these he had kept. With fumbling fingers he tore open one of the packets and broke the revolver and fitted the heavy bullets into the six chambers. Then he took the piece of oily rag out of the muzzle of the revolver and pulled back the safety catch.

  Then with it in his hand he caught sight of himself in another mirror – a beautiful ornate Napoleonic mirror with gilt eagles above the glass. As soon as he saw himself he knew that these last few moments had been a sort of self-dramatization, a fantasy projecting itself into three or four actions that did not have any significance in real life. In a sense it was a desperate seeking after a remnant of self-respect, like someone gathering together the pieces of a broken vase so precious that one has to cling to the illusion for a little while that the shattered thing can be repaired.

  He knew, of course, that he would never have the courage to use this gun – even if it would still fire – neither on them nor on himself. Least of all on himself. He knew in his bowels that, apart from the corroding bitterness of betrayal, his chief emotion at this moment was fear lest Godfrey should waken and know he had been discovered.

  He knew that Godfrey the prize-fighter was immensely more dangerous with his fists than he, Angell, could ever be waving an antique revolver.

  In any case all his training supported his craven instincts in insisting that no precipitate action must be taken now. Above all he must have time to consider his course of action, to weigh the consequences of what he had found and what he did about what he had found.

  Carefully he wrapped the revolver in its cheesecloth and put it back in the safe – took out his briefcase – then locked the safe, put the keys back in his pocket. He looked round the room. There was no evidence of his having been in here except the slippers by the bed. He picked these up and tip-toed to the door, switched off the solitary light and went carefully downstairs. Here he picked up his bag, and with his coat over his arm he silently left the house.

  He spent the night at the Cadogan Hotel. About five he fell into a troubled sleep but was awake again before eight. He rang for breakfast and a newspaper but he found he could not read. He ate his breakfast – two eggs and four rashers of bacon, four slices of toast and marmalade and coffee with rich cream. At times his big frame was shaken with a tremendous anger, but each time it was a mountain in labour bringing forth a mouse. He could not even cry. This would greatly have relieved him – like blood-letting – but it did not come.

  Once or twice he sat up in bed and cursed: cursed Pearl and her beautiful evil body and hoped and prayed it would rot as Anna’s had rotted. Sometimes he directed his curses at Little God. It seemed to him that he had been the object of a gigantic conspiracy. Pearl and Godfrey had clearly known each other before; possibly his intervention had been discussed between them and it had been planned that Pearl should agree to marry him just to see what she could get out of him. No doubt a good part of the £5000 settlement had already gone to Godfrey. No doubt the jewellery he had been prevailed upon to buy would go the same way if they could get at it. No doubt they expected that Pearl would be able to twist him round her finger and eventually prise large sums of money out of him. It was a monstrous conspiracy which might have gone on for years but for this unexpected return from Switzerland. Perhaps even her grasping, acquisitive father was in it.

  It would have been splendid if he had had the courage of his convictions last night and shot them both as they lay in their lecherous bed. Crime passionnel. A distinguished solicitor killing to defend his honour. It would go down well in France, but an English judge would regard it coldly and without leniency. He, Wilfred Angell, bachelor of law of London University, would probably have to spend years in prison, whatever the extenuating circumstances. It was far better not. It was better to proceed slowly. It was better to take care. (Apart from the fact that he did not have a licence for the gun. As a memento of some earlier, braver and more heroic life, he had not felt able to part with it. Yet he had never been able to bring himself to pay the licence fee.)

  Slowly, shakily, like a man recovering from a serious illness, he rose and washed and shaved. Had this betrayal occurred four months ago he would have felt far less about it. But since August he had committed the cardinal error of falling in love with his wife. This was not just hurt self-esteem; it was a dagger in the back.

  He dressed and packed his bag and went downstairs and paid his bill. At some stage today he would have to return home and he had no idea whether he could hide his distress from Pearl or even if he wanted to. Anger surged up in him like lava in an erupting volcano. Even if he did not dare challenge Godfrey Brown he could well challenge her, could strike her, could beat her, could whip her naked with a leather belt.

  But bitter distress followed anger and he saw plainly that if he did any of these things she would leave him and never come back. Fiercely though he hated her, he did not want her out of his life. If there were to be some revenge it must be on a woman who continued to be within reach. So divorce also seemed an unwelcome solution. It did not punish her enough. And it branded him as a cuckold. His friends would snigger among themselves and say, ‘Poor Wilfred, but what else could he expect?’

  He telephoned for a messenger, and when he came he gave the contract and option into his hand for immediate delivery to Hollis & Hollis. Then he left the bag at the hotel and began to walk across the Square and up towards Hyde Park Corner. Something must first be done with the day. Simon Portugal would be home about four. Perhaps it would be all right for him to return home now: if Pearl had recovered sufficiently from her prurient self-indulgence she should be at Christie’s attending to the bidding on the Canaletto. But he dared not risk it. He could not risk facing her until he had made up his mind what to do.

  He reached Hyde Park Corner and walked on to Green Park. For November it was a pleasant day, mild, with misty gleams of sun. The brown withered leaves scuffed under his feet as he walked. Shelley had described the autumn leaves as ‘pestilence-stricken multitudes, yellow and black and pale and hectic red’. But it was people who were pestilence-stricken, sickeningly concupiscent, greedily lecherous, common scum, meanly vilely hypocritical and deceitful. Pictures, revolting pictures floated before his eyes, of Godfrey Brown, thin sharp vulgar midget of a man, crawling over that pale beautiful statuesque body. Like a giant worm, like a spider. Like a great grey spider. There had been something prophetic in the dream in Geneva.

  He sat on a bench. At the other end of the bench was a nurse-maid with two little boys. They ran to and fro with shrill cries, sharp with incentive. The rumble of London went past him on the still air. ‘I would ne’er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’

  After about an hour it came to him that he was cold, and he got up and walked down Brook Street to Claridge’s, where he had his hair trimmed and a manicure. But his woe-begone expression in the mirror was no reassurance, and the manicurist’s soft hands massaging his with cream reminded him unbearably of Pearl.

  He went on to his club, but it was still some way from lunch time and there were few members about. The bar was open and he bought himself a stiff whisky
and went into the library to read the papers. For a long time he sat staring at a book recording pictorially the latest Park-Bernet sales in New York. They meant nothing to him.

  On quieter consideration as the morning progressed, he realized that some of his earlier conclusions were faulty. This could hardly have been a conspiracy from the start. Despite his very scanty personal experience of a woman’s anatomy he knew that Pearl had not deceived him when she told him that he was her first man. Indeed he knew only too well that she had remained virgo intacta for about three or four times after their first adventure together. They had both been beginners, she no less than he.

  There might still have been a lesser conspiracy to deceive, by acquiescing at her marriage to him for the sake of the ultimate profit, but, setting aside jealousy, a critical view wouldn’t support the theory. Pearl’s early attitude towards Godfrey had been one of dislike. It could have been assumed, but if there had been an understanding between them, why confess to him at all that she had known Godfrey before?

  No, everything suggested that his base and vulgar deception was of recent growth, and everything – or almost everything – suggested that not Pearl but Godfrey was to blame. He fancied he knew when it had all begun, quite recently, because of Pearl’s changed attitude towards him.

  The luncheon gong had gone, and he went into the dining room immediately, the first there. He was not feeling convivial so he asked for a small table and picked up the menu. A waitress came across. He ignored her and went on staring at the menu resentfully. Clear soup, sole colbert, a fresh apple, a glass of white wine. It was as much as he would allow himself.

  But why? But why? Was it going to make any difference now?

  ‘We’ve some poached mussels, sir,’ said the waitress hopefully. ‘And the avocado pear’s nice. And there’s sirloin steak. Or …’

  ‘Mussels,’ said Angell. ‘ Yes. Bring me a plate of mussels. Say two dozen to begin.’

  Two dozen, sir? Yes, sir.’

  ‘And I’ll have a bottle of Puligny Montrachet with them. The ’64.’

  ‘I’ll fetch the wine waitress.’

  The mussels came and he swallowed them slowly while a few people filtered into the dining room and dotted themselves about the larger tables. Many of them he knew, but he contrived to be staring at something else when they came in. The mussels were excellent. The wine could have been a fraction more chilled. The waitress came across to remove his plate.

  ‘I’ll have another plate of mussels,’ he said.

  ‘Another plate, sir?’

  ‘Yes. There’s nothing in them.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll bring them right away.’

  Godfrey was to blame. One could see it all now. He was an extraordinary character: sneering, sly, insinuating, sexually mesmeric, with his beautiful hair and clear olive skin, vulgarly virile in his smiling, liberty-taking impudence; indeed with all the characteristics that would appeal to the lowest instincts in a common coarse-grained, unfastidious woman like Pearl. Even one like Flora Vosper who should have known better; but she probably had the jaded, sensation-seeking tastes of a faded courtesan. Possibly Pearl had tried to resist at first. Possibly she might have had that much faint fidelity.

  He finished the second plate of mussels. As he did so a man called Chipstead took the chair opposite him. ‘ Hullo Wilfred, mind if I join you? You’re looking lonely all on your own.’

  ‘Oh?’ Angell’s stare was not encouraging. ‘ No, I’m not at all lonely.’

  Chipstead was an accountant who had done very well for himself as a result of some mergers, and he spent a good deal of his time out of his office and in the club. He fancied himself as an art collector and a judge of wine, but Wilfred thought little of him in either capacity.

  ‘I see you bought a Canaletto this morning. You ought to be feeling cock-a-hoop, eh? Are those mussels good?’

  ‘Quite good. Waitress, waitress!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Don’t leave me all day. I want four lamb cutlets, well done, three potatoes baked in their jackets, and cauliflower. A double helping of cauliflower. And send the wine waitress.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  When she had taken his order too Chipstead said: ‘I suppose it was the doubt cast on its genuineness that depressed the price.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Canaletto. I gather you took it to be genuine?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Well as I look at it you’ve paid a betwixt and between price. If it’s genuine you’ve got one of the bargains of the year. If it’s a copy, even a contemporary copy, you’ve paid three times what it’s worth.’

  Angell finished the last of his bottle of Puligny and ordered a bottle of Cheval Blanc 1961. It was disastrously expensive but what did it matter?

  ‘I gather there’s a whole flood of fakes on the market nowadays,’ Chipstead said, and repeated his remark when Angell did not reply.

  ‘The Canaletto is not a fake.’

  ‘No. Well, not a deliberate one, I agree. These are deliberate ones I’m speaking of. There’s Picassos and Chagalls and what-have-you. It makes one afraid to buy.’

  Angell did not have too long to wait before his cutlets came.

  ‘It’s an extraordinary thing,’ said Chipstead, ‘ the price one has to pay nowadays for almost any old junk so long as it’s genuine. When my grandmother died in the thirties she had a lot of undistinguished Victorian paintings – a couple of dozen at least – and we sold ’em off to a dealer. I doubt if we got more than a fiver each for them.’

  Angell split open his potatoes with a knife and put butter and salt and pepper in. The steam rose through his fingers. Godfrey was the one to blame. You could guess what had occurred by the change in his manner. Those first visits – obsequious, polite, the servant, then the gradual change with the glint of conspiracy in the eye, the dropping of the ‘sir’, the calling round when he wasn’t at home; then the neglect, the near insolence in his voice when Angell had rung him that last time. The near insolence and the triumph. The insufferable triumph.

  ‘I doubt if we got more than a fiver each for them, which wasn’t nearly the value of the frames. Today – probably not one of those painters is anything like well known, but I’d guess the least they’d fetch in an auction room would be a couple of hundred guineas each. It just shows.’

  Angell belched behind his hand and began to eat. He was miserable, sore, jealous, enraged; his mind’s eye provided vividly obscene pictures that might have come from a postcard seller in Montmartre; they goaded him and would not let him rest; yet what he was eating and drinking was somehow becoming a defence against the worst that his imagination could do. Every mouthful that went down added something to the barrier against hurt, to the poultice on the sore place. His very hunger and emptiness over the last weeks contributed by contrast. Each gulp of wine helped in the anaesthesia.

  The club made a splendid bread and butter pudding, a moist, creamy pudding full of sultanas that was far removed from what its name suggested; and after the chops he had this. As the tightness of his waistcoat increased, as the packing-in process neared its limit, Angell began to feel less hostile towards the brash intrusive fellow sitting opposite, a fellow who in the last ten minutes had been intimidated into silence. He began to talk a little, grudgingly, and they rose from the table together and had brandy and coffee and cigars together downstairs. By the time they separated it was 3.30 and, although Angell was still very unhappy, he was not as unhappy as he had been before. He felt very angry, rather confident of himself and sleepy. Outside the club there was a taxi waiting, and against the instincts of a lifetime he hailed it. In no time at all he was paying it off outside his home.

  ‘Hullo!’ Pearl called from the kitchen as he came in ‘That you, Wilfred? Safely back?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. Safely back.’

  She came out, looking cool and beautiful and completely unchanged. She put her hands on his shoulders and kissed his cheek. Soft lips
. Perfume. Lying lips. Common clay.

  ‘Guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘What – the Canaletto?’

  ‘Yes. It went to you at four thousand one hundred pounds. That was quite a bit less than you were prepared to pay, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Than Sir Francis was prepared to pay.’

  ‘The bidding was very quick. I could hardly follow it. And then suddenly it stopped – like turning off a tap – and the auctioneer hit down with his knuckle thing and said: “Sold at four thousand one hundred pounds. Angell.” Just like that.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘Did you have a good trip? Everything successful?’

  ‘Very successful, thank you.’

  ‘No fog this time? No diversion to Zurich?’

  ‘No diversion.’ Angell put his hand to his mouth and hiccuped.

  There was no obvious embarrassment now they had met. The secret that each held bore no betraying stamp on their faces. Deception seemed as easy to wear as an extra coat.

  ‘You look tired, Wilfred.’

  ‘I am a little. One never sleeps as well in a strange bed. D’you know.’

  ‘Are you going back to the office? Or shall I make you tea?’

  ‘I had a meal. On the plane. A meal on the plane.’ He took off his hat and coat. ‘I think I’ll go and lie down for an hour. I think I need the rest.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You do that. You look as if you need a rest.’

  Flora Vosper said: ‘Did you buy yourself a new dressing gown?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Godfrey. ‘Like you said. Name on and all.’

  ‘Well, that thing you wore at the Albert Hall. So loud and showy.’

  ‘You bought me that too.’

  ‘Nonsense. Maybe you bought it with my money.’

  ‘Maybe. Anyway, this is much more luxe. I’d best be going.’