Free Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

accepting them.” At the thought of her own death, she became even more unsteady and her eyes filled with tears.
    â€œNow, Lottie, Lottie!” her sister said soothingly.
    â€œWould you pass the jam, mother?” asked Angel, in a polite, indifferent voice.
    After tea she went out. She walked through the streets, without wondering where she was going. I am quite alone and there is no hope, she thought. The argument between herself and her aunt went on in her head; sometimes, so intensely did she suffer what she thought, her lips moved and she muttered aloud.
    The streets were grey and gritty. Lights were already shining through the bright, engraved and frosted windows of the public-houses, though darkness was an hour away. Outside the Music-Hall a long queue waited for the early doors of the pit to open. Angel passed the Prison, with its plum-coloured brick and dagger-like slits of windows. She felt very little curiosity about any of the lives that were lived inside these places where she had never been. She could perfectly, she thought, imagine what went on, in the public-house and the music-hall and gaol. Experience was a makeshift for imagination; would neither be, she felt sure, half as beautiful, or half so terrible.
    At the back of the Prison were a little park and some public gardens. Children were bowling hoops around the boarded-up bandstand where the Temperance Brass Band played on summer Sunday evenings. A few people were walking briskly along the gravel paths, between wind-raked evergreens. These paths wound up towards a shrubbery on a small hill where there was a great cast-iron statue of a lion, a landmark for miles. Some boys were now walking round it, looking up at its huge testicles and sniggering.
    This hateful town! thought Angel. She sat down on a seat and closed her eyes. The boys stared at her curiously, and one of them tapped his forehead and winked at the others as they went away.
    She sat there alone, and the statue towering above her slowly darkened against the sky, became a menacing black shape, striding above the tops of the shrubbery trees. She faced and suffered her solitariness; braved out the agony of longing she now felt for someone to be sitting beside her to whom she could communicate her bitter loneliness. This desire for compassion was so overwhelming that her heart seemed to contract. She held her breath for seconds together and tightened her lips. When she heard someone coming towards her, she looked up and found the sky was dark. A park attendant came into the shrubbery, shouting. “All out, now! All out!” Angel stood up hurriedly and as she brushed past him, he said “Are you all right, Miss?” For she looked ill, he thought, or in some trouble; or both. But she did not answer him. She almost ran towards the Park gates, as if she could fly away from what she had suffered there, leave it up there, the pathos of her solitariness, with the lion and the dusty evergreens and the dark sky.
    In the weeks that followed, her fortitude returned. Aunt Lottie came as usual and directed her remarks at Angel rather than to her. Angel continued with the writing in which nobody but herself believed.
    In the early summer, a letter came from Gilbright & Brace. When she had read it, she had a delightful sensation of being lifted up, of rising towards the ceiling; her body seemed to have become as light as air; bliss flowed through her veins. She handed the letter to her mother, who read it through twice, looking suspicious at first, then bewildered.
    â€œThey want to print it?” she asked.
    Angel nodded.
    â€œWhat does it mean, thirty pounds?”
    â€œWhat it says. That is what they will pay me in advance.”
    â€œAre you sure? Thirty pounds! Oh, I wish I had your Dad here to advise me. I wish there was somewhere to turn for advice. I could ask the doctor, I daresay, or Mr Phippin at the Chapel. Don’t you go and sign anything, Angel; not till we’ve