Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth Taylor (1912–1975) was born into a middleclass family in Berkshire, England. She held a variety of positions, including librarian and governess, before marrying a businessman in 1936. Nine years later, her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote’s, appeared. She would go on to publish eleven more novels, including A Game of Hide and Seek (available as an NYRB Classic), four collections of short stories (many of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and other magazines), and a children’s book, Mossy Trotter, while living with her husband and two children in Buckinghamshire. Long championed by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Barbara Pym, Robert Liddell, Kingsley Amis, and Elizabeth Jane Howard, Taylor’s novels and stories have been the basis for a number of films, including Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005), starring Joan Plowright, and François Ozon’s Angel (2007). In 2013 NYRB Classics will publish a new selection of Taylor’s short stories.

Hilary Mantel is an English novelist, short-story writer, and critic. Her novel Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize in 2009.

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ANGEL

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

Chapter One

"It means," Angel said. Her tongue moistened her lips. She glanced out of the classroom window at the sky beyond the bare trees. "It means 'the highest heavens'."

"Yes, the sky," Miss Dawson said suspiciously. She handed the exercise-book to Angel, feeling baffled. The girl had a great reputation as a liar and when this strange essay had been handed in—"A Storm At Sea"—Miss Dawson had gone through it in a state of alarm, fearful lest she had read it before or ought to have read it before. She had spent an agitated evening scanning Pater and Ruskin and others. Though disdaining such ornamental prose, such crescendos and alliterations, before she would say that the piece was vulgarly over-written she hoped to find out who had written it.

She had confided in the headmistress, who also felt the need for caution. She thought it a remarkable piece of writing for a girl of fifteen; if, indeed, it was by a girl of fifteen.

"Has she ever done anything like it before?"

"Nothing. A line or two covered with blots."

"'Lightning laced and veined the sky,'" the headmistress read. "Did you look through Oscar Wilde?"

"Yes, and Walter Pater."

"You will have to question her. If she is making fools of us, it isn't the first time."

Angel, when feeling dull, was liable to faint and had once told a story of being followed from school through the gas-lit streets on a winter's afternoon; though later, to a policeman, she confessed that she might have been mistaken.

She was questioned by Miss Dawson when the other girls had gone home. She doesn't believe I wrote it, she thought, glancing with contempt at the flustered little woman with the slipping pince-nez and bird's-nest hair. Who does she think wrote it if I didn't? Who does she think could? What a way to spend your life—fussing about with school-lessons, getting chalk all over your skirt, going home to lodgings at night to work out the next day's Shakespeare—cut to page this, line that, so that we don't have to read the word 'womb'.

She looked round the dreary, darkening classroom, at the rows of forms and long desks, and all the familiar maps and religious pictures. Once it had been a bedroom in a private house, The Four Cedars, which was now this school, run aimlessly as it was for the daughters of local tradesmen. Angel had often, during dull lessons, tried to imagine it as a bedroom again, with plush curtains drawn, a fire in the grate, a white satin gown over a chair and herself being laced into her stays by a maid.

"Well, I hope you will keep it up," Miss Dawson said dubiously. She dipped a pen into red ink and wrote 'Very Fair' at the end of the essay.

"Do you read a great deal, Angelica?"

"No, I never read."

"But why not?"

"I don't think it's interesting."

"Such a pity. Then what do you do in your spare time?"

"I play the harp mostly."

She doesn't believe that, either, thought Angel, seeing the suspicious look again tightening Miss Dawson's face. She was as resentful at not being believed about the harp—which was indeed untrue—as about the essay which she had certainly written herself, and with the greatest of ease and speed, just because she had suddenly been in a mind to do so.

When Miss Dawson dismissed her, she gave a little bobbing curtsy as she was expected to and ran downstairs to the cloakroom. The staircase was very dim. A light shone from an open door across the hall. The conservatory with its palms and eucalyptus trees was grey and ghostly. All of the girls had gone home.

The cloakroom had once been a large scullery. It was fitted with pegs from which only shoe-bags hung now and, in one corner, Angel's hooded cloak. Black-beetles often ran about the cracked stone floor and the walls were damp. There were bars across the window, and it was a frightening place at this time of day. The girls used the back door, where there were shoe-scrapers among the ferns, a row of dustbins, a heap of coke, and always a great many pale yellow slugs.

The lawns and carriage-drive, lighted windows and the four cedars themselves could be glimpsed from the side path and the tradesmen's entrance. Here, among the laurels, two girls, younger than Angel, were waiting. It was Angel's task to see them safely to and from school. Their parents were customers at her mother's grocery shop.

The two little girls, Gwen and Polly, had been apprehensive, waiting there in the dusk. The lamp-lighter had gone by long ago and the sky was now a deep blue. There was a smell of evening in the air, smoky and disturbing.

"I had to stay behind to hear my praises sung," said Angel. She was pulling on her woollen gloves as she hastened along the pavement. Gwen and Polly trotted beside her. They descended the hill, past crescents and terraces of Georgian houses and dark gardens full of whispering dead leaves.

"When you are at Paradise House," Polly asked, "do you ever go into the garden by yourself in the dark?"

"I take my dog with me Trapper. We go all round the grounds. It's rather ghostly by the stables—just the sound of the horses blowing and stamping."

"Are they your very own horses?"

"They will be when I inherit."

"But who looks after them now?"

"Grooms and stable-boys. It is all kept in order and so is the house. There are dust-sheets over the drawing-room and drugget over the carpets, but the housekeeper sees that everything is polished and shining ready for the day when I can go there myself to live."

"It seems a pity," Polly said, "that you have to wait. Why can't you go there now?"

"My mother lost her inheritance because she married beneath her. She can never go back, so don't ever mention anything to anybody about Paradise House for that reason."

"No, of course not," they whispered quickly, as they always did. "But why mustn't we?" asked Gwen.

"It breaks my mother's heart to hear of it. If you breathed a word of it at home and it came back to her, I couldn't answer for the consequences."

"We wouldn't breathe a word," said Polly. "will you go on telling us about the white peacocks?"

Every day they listened to the story of Paradise House. It was more vivid to them than the mean streets into which the crescents and terraces dwindled and which lay nearer to their own homes. Naked gas-jets burned in little corner shops, but the rows of yellow brick houses were dark: lights burned in those front parlours, behind the fern-tables and plant-pots, only on Sundays. Coal carts and brewers' drays clattered by, but there were no carriages. The sickly smell from the nearby brewery the girls had grown up with and did not notice.

"Will you tell us some more tomorrow?" Polly asked, stopping by the railings of their little front garden.

Angel often felt jolted when the girls stopped at their gate; partly, from having forgotten them; partly, from having to transfer herself too suddenly from Paradise House to this mean district with its warehouses and factories and great brooding gas-holder.

"I might," she said carelessly. They opened the gate and said goodbye to her; but she had gone on her way already, holding her cloak about her and hurrying along, full of her own strange thoughts again.

Halfway down Volunteer Street was a row of shops: a...