Free Angel by Elizabeth Taylor Page A

asked. Goodness knows what trickery they may be up to. I can’t help thinking it’s you that’s meant to pay, and where do they think I’m to lay hands on thirty pounds?”
    â€œ They mean to pay,” said Angel quite gently. “There’s nothing to fuss about, mother.”
    She put the letter in her pocket, but kept her fingers on it. She stood looking out of the window. The ugly street below was golden with sunshine and full of gay sounds.
    â€œIt’s a beautiful name for any book—‘The Lady Irania,’” said Mrs Deverell. “Oh, I don’t know what to think. I feel quite flustered and put out. How can I explain it to people? What are they all going to think? And if you go to London, like he says, how am I to leave the shop to go with you?”
    â€œYou won’t,” said Angel. “I shall go alone.”
iii
    Gilbright & Brace had been divided, as their readers’ reports had been. Willie Brace had worn his guts thin with laughing, he said. The Lady Irania was his favourite party-piece and he mocked at his partner’s defence of it in his own version of Angel’s language.
    â€œKindly raise your coruscating beard from those iridescent pages of shimmering tosh and permit your mordant thoughts to dwell for one mordant moment on us perishing in the coruscating workhouse, which is where we shall without a doubt find ourselves, among the so-called denizens of deep-fraught penury. Ask yourself—nay, go so far as to enquire of yourself—how do we stand by such brilliant balderdash and live, nay, not only live, but exist too. . . .”
    â€œYou overdo these ‘nays’,” said Theo Gilbright. “ She does not.”
    â€œThere’s a ‘nay’ on every page. M’wife counted them. She took the even pages, I the odd. We were to pay a shilling to the other for each of our pages where there wasn’t one, and not a piece of silver changed hands from first to last.”
    â€œSo Elspeth read it, too?”
    â€œRead it? She devoured and gobbled every iridescent word.”
    â€œSo will other women.”
    â€œI should hope more reverently.”
    â€œPerhaps that too. I feel an extraordinary power behind it all, so that I wonder if it is genius or lunacy. I was quite fascinated.”
    â€œAnd so was I. Especially at the way they treated the champagne.”
    â€œShe isn’t the first writer to have it opened with a corkscrew and she may not be the last. What does that matter?”
    â€œAll those butlers, too! Well, you back your fancy, Theo. Also deal with her when she comes. Elspeth and I imagine an auburn transformation and a moleskin cape smelling of camphor, a neat little moustache and a Gladstone bag stuffed full of translucent manuscripts. More and more Lady Iranias. The Irania Class we can call them, like ocean liners. All I ask you to do is to have her tone it down. The card-playing scene may well land us in trouble. Some of these old ladies don’t know how inflammatory their writing is. It is too much to hope that she will be inflammatory herself. Angelica Deverell is too good a name to be true.”
    â€œThe address is puzzling—Volunteer Street; and Norley is a dreary old town.”
    â€œSome old lady, as I say, romanticising behind lace-curtains.”
    â€œIt even sounds rather sordid.”
    â€œShe may be an old man. It would be an amusing variation. You are expecting to meet Mary Ann Evans and in walks George Eliot twirling his moustache.”
    Yet nothing Willie Brace could guess or invent was half as astonishing to them as Angel herself when she was shown in one afternoon. The partners were sitting waiting for her in Theo’s office, but Willie went out as soon as he had shaken hands. He dared not glance at Theo, and outside on the landing he steadied himself for a moment, clutching the rail of the banisters in an agonising spasm of stifled laughter.
    Theo was