Angel (AKA The Real Life of Angel Deverell) by Taylor Elizabeth

Author:Taylor, Elizabeth [Taylor, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Coming of Age, Novel, Fiction, Classics
ISBN: 9780670125012
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 1957-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

PART 4

I

THEY returned to Paradise House from their honeymoon. There was scaffolding over the front—the South side—and patches of new plaster, a smell of paint and putty and a sound of hammering. The balustrade had been mended and the fallen urn put back. Two peacocks had arrived. Angel had sent an order for them when she was in Greece, and Nora received them nervously. They moped on the terrace, which they covered with their droppings; they moulted; they sometimes screamed but never fanned out their tail-feathers.

Nora was worried about everything, especially Angel’s increasing extravagances. The house was eating up money, she wrote to her; but Angel never had the letter. They had moved on; for everywhere was so disappointing. Greece was especially disappointing. It was nothing like her novels. There was so much fallen masonry, dazzling and tiring to the eyes; olive groves looked dusty and really there were only pillars to temples. The food was nauseating, plates of black octopus and black olives and black liver-sausage. She had had good food all her life and missed it. Esmé laughed at her squeamishness. They were both tired from travelling and he from seasickness. He tried to hide the fact of his nausea because it prompted her to make long speeches on will-power and morbid imaginings, on abandoning oneself to the rhythm of the boat and thinking of other things, not of oneself the whole time. “The food isn’t wholesome and that is why you are sick. It is foolish to blame the elements or the sea. I was wiser than you knew when I refused the egg and lemon soup and that ghastly-looking squid lying in rancid oil.” Esmé stuffed his fingers in his ears.

The sea-sickness speech irritated him dreadfully, but there were other annoyances, too. She had brought with her a flowing white pleated garment and in this insisted on being photographed, standing on a plinth. She owed this to her readers, she said. And she collected souvenirs. Wherever they went he was loaded with peasant costumes—which she would put on as soon as they reached their hotel—with baskets and bottles of wine, with pottery, with strings of beads and ikons and plaster statuettes. She could not learn the currency and managed to convey an impression of deep suspicion, frowning at the coins she was given and muttering her distrust. At Rhodes, she boxed a little boy’s ears for tipping a live mouse from a cage into the harbour. “Christianity has made the place drab,” she said in Athens. At Delphi, she bottled some water from the sacred spring. “It shall be a present for Nora,” she said. “To inspire her with poetry.” Esmé thought it a cheap enough present. His irritations he worked off by correcting her pronunciation of Greek and, when they reached Venice, of Italian.

Venice—although Italy—was strangely less disappointing. It had the advantage, but was not to have for much longer, of not having been the background of one of her novels. There, Angel bought a great deal of vulgarly ornate glass, more baskets, more peasant-costumes.

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