Angel by Elizabeth Taylor Page B

money. She was baffled and alarmed and worn out by the violence of her fury. She longed for some way of healing herself and wished that she might finish the novel she was working on and start another. She would call it “The Charlatan’ and it should deal with a literary hack, an impoverished scribbler, a novelist manqué, a twisted and embittered man, making a despicable living by reviling the work of better writers than himself, assuaging his jealousy and impotence by destroying what he could not himself create. She imagined him with the utmost vividness: a misshapen figure of a man, with a stained waistcoat and a sneering voice. He had repulsive personal habits, no friend in the world, and a name as much like Rowland Pearce as she could manage.

PART 2
i
    To the older people in Norley, Alderhurst had once been a remote upland village where the children went in wagonettes on Sunday School treats. Its water-tower was a landmark for miles and its bluebell woods and silver birches were famous. As time went on, industry made Norley an impossible place for industrialists to live in; the Georgian residential streets were too involved in areas of working-class houses and had fallen into desuetude. By the end of the century the houses being built all over old estates, old farmlands, had reached Alderhurst. Laburnums and other suburban trees mingled with the silver birches, and hedges of spotted laurel and golden privet hid the lawns and the gravelled sweeps in front of the new houses where it was now fashionable to live.
    By the time Angel and her mother went there to live, the roads had been made smooth and pavements laid. The water-tower rose above the thinned-out woods. Very few of the inhabitants felt the sadness of the place; but Mrs Deverell was one of them. In the days of the Sunday School treats she had thought it an enchanted country; she had plundered sheaves of bluebells from its woods and had loved to run shouting between the trees, with snapping twigs underfoot and brambles catching at her skirt. Her memories were all of happiness; even of the year when it had rained. She had sheltered with her coat over her head, and listened to the drops beating down from leaf to leaf. When it had stopped, a rainbow had come out behind the water-tower and the earth and air had smelled poignantly sweet.
    â€œI never thought I would live here,” she had told Angel. But nowadays she often suffered from the lowering pain of believing herself happy when she was not. “Who could be miserable in such a place?” she asked; yet, on misty October evenings or on Sundays, when the church bells began, sensations she had never known before came over her.
    â€œIt’s your age,” Lottie told her. “Madam’s been the same. Pecks at her food, they say, and keeps sighing, and the tears always ready for the turning on.”
    â€œYes, that’s how it is,” she agreed.
    She sometimes felt better when she went back to see her friends in Volunteer Street; but it was a long way to go, Angel discouraged the visits, and her friends seemed to have changed. Either they put out their best china and thought twice before they said anything, or they were defiantly informal—“You’ll have to take us as you find us”—and would persist in making remarks like “I don’t suppose you ever have bloaters up at Alderhurst” or “Pardon the apron, but there’s no servants here to polish the grate.” In each case, they were watching her for signs of grandeur or condescension. She fell into little traps they laid and then they were able to report to the neighbours. “It hasn’t taken her long to start putting on side.” She had to be especially careful to recognise everyone she met, and walked up the street with an expression of anxiety which was misinterpreted as disdain.
    The name ‘Deverell Family Grocer’ stayed for a long time over the shop, and she was