Bullet-Proof

The best novels of the 1950s weren’t about class, they explored the individual psyche, its tendency to conflict with the social, to withdraw from the public round. Here, Elizabeth Taylor peers into a world without sympathy or insight. Angel. We suspect a worry about herself, her own imaginary powers, her disconnect from others. What is the difference between the artist and a narcissist? When an artist stares into the pool they do not see themselves.

__________

Who is the most disquieting person you’ve met? Not the scariest or the most abusive, or the most violent; our reactions to these less discomfort than fear. If asked, I’d say those who deny my existence, who cannot see me, even when right in front of them. Almost as if…I was going to say, almost as if deaf and blind, but all their senses are intact. Their minds of a high intelligence, though not exceptionable, these characters are impervious to influence, unless in accord with their own ideas. Almost as if…no skin but concrete, nothing to penetrate…again I qualify: Herr Thunderstorm, Mr Sun ferocious in Summer, do get a hearing, extremes to occasionally vibrate through that thick wall. It is we who shout to be heard. Our own subtleties lost, they turn us into idiots and buffoons. So thick those walls they live as if their house the only one in the vicinity. Oh, they know we exist, but we must reflect back their beliefs and pleasures. They talk to a mirror and expect words to react as looks.

You see why they disturb? Unable to impress ourselves on such characters, we lose a sense of the self; our existence melting away. Yet at first contact they seem just like you and me; perhaps even a little more animated, more alive than usual. Longer acquaintance proves us wrong. A certain plasticity is missing. Unable to engage with others on equal terms they find compromise impossible. They cannot adapt to places and people; always the same person, whether in Timbuktu or Taunton; while age affects them little: old at eighteen they are young at sixty-eight. A world frozen in late teen time.

Human? Surely an automata, an almost perfect replica.… Uncanny. They think, talk and act like a human being, but do not accept anything not already inside their own heads. Only that which confirms an idea is allowed through those heavily guarded gates. We have no impact. Our words, our thoughts, our emotions: waste material thrown in the bin. Only if they find them useful are they saved from the dustman. Life exists on their terms only. Our's? No independent validity at all. We are like canaries in a cage, something to amuse a fleeting fancy, but not to be taken seriously. 

Born this way? Elizabeth Taylor suggests they are not quite fully formed at birth; some of the orifices of feeling and thought closed up during childhood and youth; Angelica Deverell effectively sealed from the outside world by being sent to a good school and over praised by her mother and aunt. Encouraged to think of herself as special these adults have facilitated her flight into egocentric illusion. A spoilt child who, after years of pampering - Mrs Deverell should have insisted she work in the shop -, is now able to ignore the social clatter. Not to suffer the bash and bang of mundane living Angel wanders off into her own imagination, now more real to her than the local town.

Lax and torpid, she dreamed through the lonely evenings, closing her eyes to create the darkness where Paradise House could take shape, embellished and enlarged day after day – with colonnades and cupolas, archways and flights of steps – beyond anything her aunt had ever suggested. Acquisitively from photographs and drawings in history-books, she added one detail after another. That will do for Paradise House, was an obsessive formula which became a daily habit. The white peacocks would do; and there were portraits in the Municipal Art Gallery which would do; as would the cedar trees at school. As the house spread, those in it grew more shadowy. Angel herself took over Madam’s jewel-box and Madam’s bed and husband. Only that other Angelica balked her imagination, a maddening obstacle, with her fair looks and all her dogs and horses. Again and again, as Angel wandered in the galleries and gardens, the vision of that girl, who had no place in her dreams, rose up and impeded her. The dream itself, which was no idle matter, but a severe strain on her powers of concentration, would dissolve. Then she would open her eyes and stare down at her hands, spreading her fingers, turning her wrists.

At other times she was menaced by intimations of the truth. Her heart would be alarmed, as if by a sudden roll of drums, and she would spring to her feet, beset by the reality of the room, her own face – not beautiful, she saw – in the looking-glass and the commonplace sounds in the shop below. She would know then that she was in her own setting and had no reason for ever finding herself elsewhere; know moreover that she was bereft of the power to rescue herself, the brains or the beauty by which other young women made their escape. Her panic-stricken face would be reflected back at her as she struggled to deny her identity, slowly cosseting herself away from the truth. She was learning to triumph over reality, and the truth was beginning to leave her in peace.

A wonderfully modulated passage which shows that Angel could have been saved. Although the balance of her personality is heavily tilted towards the interior life, the world outside can intrude, and that at least some truth, painful, difficult, ugly, will get through, if driven in with force, authority and repetition. It was not to be. Father dead, mother busy, her aunt luxuriating in her clever nieces, the opportunities for those thieves of illusion, the facts of reality, to steal into her house are rapidly reduced until policemen cover all entrances. The mind locked and bolted, an electric fence surrounds the garden.

Sixteen is the crisis age. Telling her two followers (Angel doesn’t have friends) about the gilded life of Paradise House, a real place populated by imaginary characters, she imagines her mother a high lady who married low. Such prime gossip is too good to keep secret; this calumny gets back to Mrs Deverell, who cannot tell the difference between fiction and lies. There is a scene, and Angel refuses to return to school. The moment when power shifts from the mother to the child, who is now lost to the world’s influence. Denied a sympathetic understanding, she retreats into herself. Her life a walled-garden, to which only sycophants and servants are admitted. And everybody else? Years later, Theo Gilbright, reflecting on the imaginative poverty of her upbringing, notes that her only reaction to other people is to ignore them. 

Her aunt visits, and asks Angel to be a lady’s maid at Paradise House. Whoa! She experiences a total rejection of her existence. Her reaction shows that the world is lost to Angel. No-one to defeat her now.

Now Aunt Lottie, still smiling faintly, raised her hand, shook her head quietly. “No apology, please, Emmie, I want no apology.” She kept her voice much quieter than usual, to mark its contrast with Angel’s. “I see that I have looked upon my work wrongly all these years. It never seemed to me to be dishonourable to be serving others. I never saw it in that light. We are all servants of God, I thought. I did my work humbly and as my conscience directed: and was glad to do it.  Now I see that I was mistaken. I see that I was wrong not to vaunt myself more, be more puffed-up”. As she warmed to her sarcasm, colour came into her cheeks and her composure began to break; she trembled as her temper rose: she fell into savage repetitions and bitter irony. “I see that humility and unselfishness and ungrudging work are not what are respected. Oh, quite the reverse. It’s setting yourself up as high as you can; giving yourself superior airs, however unwarranted; being too grand to lift your hand to help another, not even your own mother, that’s what’s to be respected, it seems…. No, please Emmie, may I continue? I have sat here week after week, biting back my words; I can’t contain myself for ever… No, pass on Madam’s message I did, as I at least know what is due to my betters; but never for one moment think that I did anything but dread the consequences. I shall go back now and tell Madam what is true – that I could not be the instrument of bringing to her service what we have never had at Paradise House – vanity, selfishness, ingratitude. I am afraid you and I wasted our money, Emmie. There were times when we used to feel proud of all the learning she was getting, not knowing the seeds it was sowing. What use is French, I ask, if you are to spend your life sponging on your mother…. No, please, Emmie, may I …? Trying to ape the lady? Lady! I will try not to laugh.”  She did not succeed; a curious snorting noise came from her. “I have spent my life with ladies and I think I many say that I know where the word applies. I shall be interested to see where all these grand ideas are leading to. Very interested.  Very interested indeed.”

She had gone on too long. She had made the mistake Angel did not make and now she could not stop. Triumphantly, Angel took a slice of bread-and-butter, folded it over and began to eat. She gave the impression that she was doing so only to pass the time; not because she was hungry. She had gained the ascendancy and all three knew it.

How strange are words. A few have power; too many vacuum out all force and effectiveness. If Aunt Lottie had stopped at the right moment her words may have done the job of attaching language to sense and shame; although we are perhaps not quite so sanguine as the author. Could Angel really be swayed by another’s words to perform what repels her? Is a window still open for a thief to sneak in and grab her pride, to find her naked in the bedroom? Going beyond their utility - as a means to act - the aunt’s words speak too much truth, and this, as we know, is not easily translated into action. Words. They luxuriate in their helplessness. Angel knows this, she has constructed a life where the only thing that exists is language; a magic kingdom protecting her from a dull and demanding world. Could a short sharp word-punch really have done the business, punch a hole through that exotically embroidered armour, her sentences and paragraphs? Is Angel’s soul, will and language faculty still attuned enough to society to be aligned to its demands? Again we have our doubts. And yet we know words do get through. They can hurt and cause reflection; but to change behaviour, recast a personality? Already we think it too late. At best Aunt to make Angel a miserable - in all senses of the term - servant. Poor Aunt. Her conversation just another speech in the fantasy fiction so adored by our heroine.

Characters like Angel have only two modes: passivity in the face of opposition or obstruction; activity in the pursuit of what is agreeable. Slobbers over what she loves; avoids what irritates. Words won’t move them, only force; the reason they hate society, for unable to willingly compromise, to freely adapt, they have to be coerced into conformity.1

Aunt Lottie is no sergeant major.

A whole life turn on this confrontation? No. It did, however, increase Angel’s ability to detach herself from the world. It allows her egocentricity to blossom out fully, a sequoia alone on a lawn. Angel didn’t like her childhood, because not only told what to do, but sometimes forced to do it. She is precocious with all its inner confidence and intellectual self-sufficiency - the reason she doesn't learn much from her teachers. Born with the world already in them. Alas, such precocity has its dangers, for it is too apt to live off its own resources; safe in its centrally-heated home it will not venture out and hunter-gather in the cold. After adolescence it may not grow anymore.2 Having quickly acquired enough of what it needs, it no longer absorbs that which would challenge and change it. The fundamentals are fixed at a very young age, and nothing new to alter them. A whole of a life lived within a teenage mind, its sharp intellect a protection from any discombobulating influences. A mind already collecting its pension at the age of 21. It is why Angel’s general ideas and style never varies from that first book; of course details change, new facts are added, but plot and theme are frozen in time, her Greek heroines acting like lush Edwardians.

Shall I explain this? Do I imagine a nod of the head, a welcoming smile? Ok. Intellectually overdeveloped children like Angel are emotionally immature; an imbalance perfect for living inside fantasy worlds (music, fiction, chess, mathematics…) and for passing exams; but making it difficult to understand humanly complex situations, that is most of life, private as well as public. Certain kinds of knowledge depend on the emotions; all great thought and literature requires a depth and subtlety of feeling; these aid judgement, give force and nuance to the intuitions; they allow us to sensibly interpret causes and effects, those invisible threads binding nature and society. All require maturity. The great artist, or the wise person, a rounded human being, where feeling, thought and experience fuse as one. The precocious mind over conceptualises the instincts, the senses converted into concepts which are apt to be too simple and too concrete (they are believed literal facts). There’s a hollowness about such characters. Neither great thinkers nor artists, they are merely clever. Feeling is thought, of a very particular kind, the source of insight and intuitive understanding, and thus profundity. Precocity, by reducing an instinctive receptivity, can prevent this. The tyranny of the over-conscious mind. Of course, not all precocious kids are this way. Some do grow, the mind acquiring the ability to flow with life’s flux, to acutely judge atmosphere, to tune into frequencies too low for reason’s ear. Those who don’t remain excessively rational, their concepts dull, the language clunky, the reasoning mechanical and rigid. Technicians. Bad academics. Conspiracy theorists. Fantasists.… Such teenage minds live in a world solely of words. A cartoon place. Stereotypes. Commonplace concepts. An over-reliance on plot. Brash colours. Angel has no taste. She can only write trash.

A life frozen at sixteen. Although precocious Angel does not have a high intelligence: her talents are for recall and imaginative fancy. She has an excellent memory and can write; however, because she has no understanding of (literally) anything, her books are but collections of trivia held together by the tropical style of the popular romances of the early Edwardian period. For anyone with intelligence or taste her novels are ridiculous, but her childish imagination, her overheated subject matter, and her grandiose prose, are perfectly suited for the popular market, whose literary tastes are as immature as her own.

By luck she sends her manuscript to the right publisher, a man who can look through the nonsense to see the book’s commercial success. So often these seemingly strong characters rely on others (we mistake imperviousness for strength.) Theo Gilbright, too civilised for such precocious barbarity, is unable to exert his will over Angel, who insists on retaining the eroticism and idiocies of her novel; a sign of her isolation from public life. Incredibly she is right. Theo underestimates just how bad is popular taste: silly is a selling point.3

Deaf to nuance, impenetrable to suggestion, unable to interpret situations. What power this gives, if you can get others to believe, to act, for you!

“…You have an unusual vocabulary for one who reads so little.”

“I never forget a word,” she said simply.

“And the longer they are the better you like them?” he suggested.

“They all have their uses.” She said in a more reserved voice.

He sat down at his desk again, aware that his questions were arousing her suspicion, and shuffled in a business-like way through a folder of papers. “Miss Deverell,” he began, “we should like to publish your book, as I have said, and I hope we shall make a success of it. In a capricious world, no one can be sure. Obviously, there are some suggestions to put forward and some alterations we hope you will make.” He smiled, but felt authority ebbing from him. “That is usual,” he said quickly. “For instance, we cannot have a character called the Duchess of Devonshire as there is one in… in everyday life; if a duchess’s life could ever be so described. But that can soon be changed. We can easily find a way out of that. Perhaps you have erred on the lavish side. I don’t know much about grandeur, and great establishments, but I thought we might cut down and manage with one butler, eh?” His jocularity was coldly received.  “May I give you some more tea?”

“No, thank you.”

He studied the papers on the desk, and then taking, as he told himself, the cue from her writing, said robustly, “The game of cards in Chapter Nineteen – the wager that if he, Lord Blane, wins he shall sleep with Irania…”

“I didn’t say ‘sleep’, I said ‘lie with’.”

“Ah, yes, quite right. I don’t know that we shall keep out of trouble with that. It many offend certain sections of the public. We have to be more than careful. There are some risks we cannot take, you know, and a great deal of your writing is more powerful than is generally permitted. I think your description of childbirth might be toned own. It is extremely harrowing. And this,” he glanced at the manuscript lying before him, “this about biting her lip until the blood ran down her throat. Do you think that is possible?”

“Oh, yes,” said Angel.

“Did you mean ‘outside’ her throat, or ‘inside’?” he asked nervously.

“Inside.”

“Oh, good! Yes, Well, I expect you see what I mean. I daresay I know more about the reading public than you, and you will take my word that I have an idea as to what will pass amongst the weakest of them. We publish for them, alas, the ‘bread-and-milk brigade’ my partner calls them. They decide. They bring the storms about our ears. From them we veil what is stark and tone down what is colourful and discard a lot that – for ourselves – we would rather keep. So will you take away your manuscript for a while and see what you can do for us?”

“No,” said Angel.

What power is rudeness! Most of us most of the time assume others will both understand and accept what we say. How deal with someone so alien? Again, Angel is lucky. To meet someone so obtuse! Others would dismiss her as imbecile or mad; their pride to reject such dismissal. But Theo is sensitive. Such a shocking reaction produces self-questioning, for he recognises other qualities, which are publishable. It is why the cultivated are often defeated. Undone by their own generosity and tolerance. So reliant on the intelligent use of words, dependent on mutual understanding, a willingness to share the same mental space, with its room for give-and-take, the cultured are at loss when confronted with the stupid. For words to work they must resonate in the listener. A phrase presses a button in another’s mind…. But if the button doesn’t work? The words lose all meaning. They have no force. One’s only resort to show the person to the door. Theo is too kind; used to giving a little, he surrenders some of the territory. That urge to negotiate, to commune, to come to some agreement…of course he gives it all away. Again Angel is lucky. She has no feeling for Theo. He feels sorry for her: can he really be so cruel to a girl? 

A little older and who knows: a life of dyspeptic poverty? 

Angel cannot negotiate. Book and life are one. The novel does not have an independent existence, and therefore cannot be changed – it is to edit Angel herself, cutting off a finger or toe. All of Theo’s suggestions are a lethal attack. She digs herself in. A conversation about sales reduced to an existential battle. No wonder Theo’s words fail. For Angel there can only ever be winners and losers, and here she has gained a fortune; she has found an influential man whom she can beat.

What will happen when she meets her equal in strength? How she found one…there are a few days of uncertainty, when Angel wonders if she has done the right thing. But no, Theo backs down. She is saved! Or is she….

Many years later, Theo reflects back on his successful author. He finds her pitiable. Only her husband, a minor artist ruined by Angel’s adoration, would agree, although he tries not to think about it, as it embarrasses him. At first this seems an extraordinary idea - she is so wealthy and fêted - but Theo is surely right. Angel is a lonely woman, cut off from both the world and herself by a lack of sympathetic feeling. It’s not just the loneliness. To have remained a child for one’s entire life. Imagine this. It is to be deprived of all that gives life value; Angel has no interest in art, in literature, in politics; while the riches of intuitive sympathy are lost to her; that love for Esmé just another of her imaginary fictions. How she adores him! Alas, she doesn’t understand her man. He has no love for his wife (except, perhaps, in those few seconds, when he proposed, in the derelict conservatory of Paradise House). She doesn’t like sex – that loss of control and identity - and is happy when it stops. A child in the company of grown-ups. A lighthouse alone on its own rock. Even when old she still has long black hair; a perfect symbol for the eternal teenager; Angel a kind of doll. But age will not be denied. She grows older. A child’s brain trapped inside an adult’s body. A form of torture, its pain she inflicts on others.

She is a tyrant. If aunt, mother, Theo Gilbright, had been stronger and more resistant, could they have tamed her? A bit. Forced to engage with the world on its own terms. But Angelica Deverell would never have been a nice person. Too egocentric for that. Lacking the humour and intelligence to offset what is a debilitating defect, she would blame the world for her own failings. Without success she’d end up the cloistered eccentric she indeed becomes, although, forced to yield far more to society’s influence, she’d hate it that much more. Even with her wealth others will insist in barging in, offering their own opinions, refusing to listen to her advice. How she hates the rebuff! Her responses are vitriolic. But when success ends and decline comes, her ability to dominate diminishes, and she retreats from all company, even from her own gardener, strong willed as she. With money and fame she can buy people and make them do things. Without such artificial aids she is powerless; Esmé falls for another woman, Marvell lets the garden go wild. The house a perfect symbol of her collapse.

He remembered other ruined houses he had sometimes discovered in the depths of the country, often blackened and burnt out, or just abandoned, and he had found them fearful and haunting places. At Paradise House, the neglect had started long ago. With Nora gone, no one would come to take on the prodigious burden of its decay. It would be engulfed in the valley, closed over and smothered by the encroaching branches: out-of-doors would creep indoors; first, ivy thrusting into crevices, feeling its way through broken windows and crumbling stone: bats would fly in through the empty fanlight and hang themselves from cornices in the hall; fungus branch from the walls in fantastic brackets; soft cobwebs drape the shutters. The tenacious vegetation of that lush valley would have its way there in the end.

Angel has only two modes – aggressive and passive - both extreme. If she can’t get her way she withdraws into herself; able to pretend the world outside does not exist. The house, requiring too much effort to maintain, is left to rot and ruin. But she has been lucky; wealth insulates her from life’s most terrible abuses. Mad eccentricity is not the worst thing that can happen to a woman.

She is awful. Yet she has the power to make people like her. Her wealth of course a factor, as is her fame: Nora needs a woman to worship, and is prepared to sacrifice her whole life to serve a “genius”; Esmé momentarily wanted material comfort. It’s not just money. She has her own gifts. Such social isolation makes her an original, and always there are people who collect the odd and the rare: Clive, who likes “a character”, is attracted by her eccentricities. There is something more. Angel exudes an immense energy; revealed in her writing, it is exhibited in her domineering will. Some find this compelling: they are natural servants and worshippers. Theo Gilbright is more complex, for him Angel’s power is a fragile thing; thus he tries to keep it intact, fearful that without it she will break. He protects this pitiful creature.

If only he had! Theo thought, feeling tired and unable to decide how to behave. It was necessary for him to say something, but he could not sort out words in any useful order. He could see a picture instead: Esmé and the girl in the grey velvet hat. The long-ago betrayal set against the tea-time sounds of cup against saucer, laughter, social voices. He had forgotten, for so much had happened since, so much that had mattered to him more. After Esmé’s death the betrayal had seemed to become a fainter threat, and then gone out of his head altogether.

“He didn’t ever have leave,” Angel said desperately.

Nora ducked her head and brought her necklace up over her chin in a nervous movement: the string broke and jet beads scattered into her lap and rolled across the floor. Eagerly, and in spite of the pain from her swollen foot, she went down on her knees to gather them up, glad of something to do.

“Did he have leave?” Angel asked. “Did he, without telling me? Then he came home after all; he told lies to me and pretended that he was so badly treated and that they couldn’t spare him? And came back to England, to someone else. Did he?”  She suddenly shouted at Nora who, now on all fours, looked up in terror.

Oh, please, good Lord, Theo began to pray.

“No,” said Nora, seeming to repeat a lesson she had off by heart. “No, of course not. So untrue.” She shook her head vigorously.

“Then what?” Angel sank down into a chair and began tremblingly to cry. “I can’t ask him,” she sobbed. “He can’t explain to me.”

“But he could explain,” Theo said.  “Something simple and reassuring it would be, I’ve no doubt. Leave he did not have.”

“Certainly not,” said Nora.

“There are the words,” said Angel.

“If we can read them,’ Theo said.  “Such a cramped-up sway-back illiterate hand, and the ink all faded away.”

“But ‘leave’ it says.”

‘I think this is some old letter from before the time of your knowing Esmé.” Theo could be grateful that the letter was undated – if not for much else. “You mustn’t begin to grieve now about Esmé’s wild oats. It is so long ago, and not concerned with you at all.”

He looked very knowing when he spoke of wild oats, though he had never sown any himself. “Would Esmé have kept such a letter for a moment if it could have been what you suggest?”

“I can’t ask him: I can’t ask him what it means.”

“I don’t suppose you ever remember him opening that book in all the time you were married.”

“I am sure that he did not,” said Nora.  She dropped a handful of beads into a glass goblet on the chimney-piece.

“He was always interested in moths,” said Angel.

“Oh, when he was a boy; yes,” Nora agreed.

“But it says ‘leave’. You can’t explain that away. That last leave, those are the words. So there was more than one, then?” Her voice rose waveringly to a shriek.

“Esmé never had leave,” Theo said quietly.  “So there is a mystery here.”

”How could you know if he did or didn’t?”

“Yes, I could know,” Theo insisted. He covered his eyes with his hand and tried to think. “I am the one who would know; but it is so long ago and my memory plays tricks on me. But that I put in a word for him, I do recall – his C.O. was some vague relation of Hermione’s, I believe. Oh, I didn’t do it for Esmé’s sake, so much as for yours. I knew that you suffered from that separation.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?”  Angel looked suspicious, but expectant, too, as if she were ready to believe that he could rescue her.

“I waited for the reply to come: when it did, I was disappointed; said nothing; soon forgot the matter.”

Nora was staring at him wither her mouth half-open, and he tried to shake this expression of disbelief off her face by pretending to see another bead under chair.

“Then why does it say ‘leave’, if there was no such thing?” Angel had clutched at the straw he had offered and was going to use it if she could to rebuild the fortress; but as she backed away from the truth she felt compelled to repeat that question over and over, like a child saying ‘good night, good night,’ fearfully mounting a dark staircase, staving off peril with words.

“What it said I couldn’t tell from such blotted and faded handwriting,” said Theo. “From what I know to be true, though – of the facts of the case as I remember them, of Esmé himself, his character, his love of you – I am sure that it must be another word altogether.”

“It looks like another word to me, certainly,” Nora said without thinking.

“Well, shall I throw the letter away?” Theo asked. “You can soon forget it. Your memory of Esmé will answer it; if he cannot himself.”

“Yes,” Angel said.  “Thank you, Theo,” she added.

Does she believe me or not?  he wondered. If she did not just yet, in time she would. He tossed the letter on to the fire, as Esmé should have done many years ago. When he did so, Angel looked away…

The afternoon went tediously by, with Nora fussing and Angel pre-occupied. Just to drink a cup of tea broke into the boredom wonderfully. Then that was done and there was only dinner to hope for. Angel was beginning to accept what Theo had told her: how, he could only marvel at. But he could see that there were moments when the facts as they seemed indisputably to be, leapt at her: the truth took her by the throat; then her hand would fly up to her cheek and her eyes stare. Her suffering at such moments was too sharp to be endured: she could not live with such a kind of truth. With Theo’s help and Nora’s acquiescence she had begun, oyster-like, to coat over, to conceal what could not be borne as it was. The letter was not mentioned again.

It is a wonderful insight: power has its own weakness from which it must be protected. Theo believes that Angel will breakdown if exposed to the truth. Yet this seems unlikely; Angel’s powers of fantasy surely sufficient to seal any psychic wound, thus the relative ease she ignored those terrible reviews of her early books. Theo is projecting his own feelings and sense of reality onto a woman who doesn’t have them (to those outside Angel’s imaginary universe it must appear as if she’s living inside a crystal globe, to shatter at a touch). Maybe Theo’s right, on this occasion; Esmé the only person Angel has cared for, even if she has created a love that did not exist. But Theo, Nora, and Esmé, have been forever acting as guardians at the gates of falsehood and illusion; never to let those fearful truths in, believing they would destroy her. Power’s weakness - its unreality - is also its strength, the servants to do anything to keep those fragile foundations in good repair. Perhaps they need them; their own dependence depends upon it.

There is a more radical interpretation of Theo’s concern. Power itself needs protection. His image of Angel, and his feelings for her, are conflated with the force of her personality. An integral part of their relationship is the force she exudes. Her tyrannical nature is her character, and so for him to maintain the relationship, for him to continue to like Angel, he must continue to uphold these characteristics; essential to her as the long black hair and her writing style. A servant needs their mistress to remain imperious. Aunt Lottie’s own identity depends on the authority of her aristocratic lady; her own sense of superiority comes from serving a superior person; she to lose everything if her mistress becomes soft.4 Theo shares some of this attitude, although the psychological effects are more complicated, because of his pity, his belief in her vulnerability. Yet, when power goes so does Angel…like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz she melts down into nothing. Angelica Deverell is 100% power. Remove the power and there is nothing left. In her decline, unable to impose her will, Angel can only abuse those close to her. She becomes a purely passive person, waiting for some deus ex machina, Nora’s uncle’s inheritance, to save her. Unable to engage with the world she is now at its mercy. The danger of absolute power – it is all or nothing - is that a time comes when, unless you are very lucky, it vanishes.

“We must try to be brave now. In time we shall get used to it, you know.” She felt that some such remark was asked of her, but her lips trembled as she made it.  Her wintry grief budded into small hard tears again.

Marvell looked grim. He tried steadfastly to ignore her words, which seemed aimed to break him. There is nothing left to get used to, he thought, as he took up the empty basket and went out.

Puff! Even the servants leave.

Review: Angel

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1. Humanity divided into two species: servants and enemies; enemies those strong enough to be independent. 

2. The great novel about such a character: Crusoe’s Daughter, by Jane Gardam.

3. It may reflect a change in public literacy: are more ill-educated people reading books? Angel strangely reflecting this change, the publisher behind the times….

4. Brilliantly done at the end of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.