‘I am doing nothing wrong! We are only sitting, only talking.’ She looks to Mr Hancock.
‘That’s so,’ he says. ‘I meant nothing by it.’
‘You give them your society!’ he spits. ‘That is how it starts, you told me so yourself.’ He turns again to Mr Hancock. ‘You fool. What do you think she can do for you?’
‘I am leaving.’ He backs from the room, hands raised. ‘I am leaving, think no more of me.’
‘And what have you to say for yourself?’ Mrs Neal cries. ‘Sending me no word – troubles that I was by no means prepared for – you who abandoned me!’ She has begun to gabble now. ‘So what can you blame me? Another soul to hear my unhappiness –’ she darts a glance over her shoulder to Mr Hancock on the landing – ‘which cannot be borne alone. Listen to me, sir, you and I have a great deal to discuss …’
As Mr Hancock retreats, the door to Mrs Neal’s apartment slams. On the street he looks up again: her windows show nothing, but he thinks he hears her voice, talking anxiously on.
TWENTY
‘It should not have been like this,’ she says, composing herself, for if she is not conciliatory all must be lost. ‘I had plans to celebrate your return, Georgie, you ought to have sent me word you were coming.’
He throws himself onto the sopha and it shuttles back some six inches with his weight. ‘And give you warning?’ he mutters, but the retort has no spirit to it. Something is amiss, she thinks. This is a knowledge she has held concealed from herself for some time; there is no disowning it now.
She comes to sit beside him but he looks up at her with such a peculiar expression that she stops short. ‘What is wrong?’ she asks, but before he can draw breath she stumbles on, ‘If it is about the bills, I already know.’ She takes her place next to him, but she feels at once that the small ways in which he holds his body and responds to her movements have changed. She cannot say it, but she knows. Still she blunders, ‘But it will be all right. I am not angry. It was just a horrid – a very slight – shock. If you had warned me, I would hardly have been upset at all …’
‘I am giving you up,’ he says.
‘No,’ she says.
‘It is hardly your choice,’ he snorts. ‘If I am leaving, I am leaving. It is merely a case of my walking out of the room.’
‘But I …’ She wishes now that she had not let Mr Hancock quit the room. Then he would have had no polite opportunity to say these words, or if he had exploded it would have been for another reason swiftly explained away; all would have stayed just as it was. ‘About the money,’ she ventures, ‘we can find a way.’
He is shaking his head, and snorting as if she were absurd. She has never known such coldness from him. ‘There is no other way than this. Do not reason with me; you will look a fool.’
‘But how can you leave me?’ she demands. She would like to choose the safety of rage, but she needs his favour too much to show anything but the most even emotions. She takes a breath, and touches her hand to his cuff: ‘I am as good as your wife.’
Her fingers tremble there for one aching second, then two. It is all the sensation she has; she is praying that it may stay there for ever. But he draws his arm away.
‘No,’ he says. ‘You are my mistress. And you are immoderate in your spending, and intemperate in your demeanour, and in short you have ruined me. I cannot pay the debts you have run up.’
‘With your permission! It is your recklessness as much as anything …’
He stands. ‘I need a woman with a fortune, not one who will leech me dry.’
‘Please, George.’ She lowers her voice. ‘Talk to me. Is this your choice or your family’s? Do they wish you to marry someone else? For you know that is not insurmountable; nobody is faithful now-a-days; you need not relinquish me.’ He stares ahead, impassive; he has learned from Mrs Frost that Angelica cannot tolerate being ignored. She gabbles on, ‘I shall make no demands on you. I shall not be jealous. We might carry on as we did before.’
‘We might,’ he says. ‘If I were not sick of you.’
She can say nothing to this. Inside her there spreads a great emptiness, which is better perhaps than feeling. ‘Then I have no argument,’ she says carefully. ‘I suppose your family will pay your debts.’
‘As if it is any of your business.’
‘They ought also to pay mine. You promised to keep me and you bade me pass my bills to you; I had no knowledge at all that I was living on tick.’
‘They’re debts in your name, ain’t they? You take care of them. Do not tell me you have forgotten how.’
She does not remember what else he says. She is at one moment entirely numb, and also in agony, as if great fists were twisting at her viscera. She knows she follows him about the apartment while he collects the last of his possessions. Mrs Frost, returning from an errand, looks on impassively. It is she who sees him out; Angelica goes to the window and watches him as he strides the length of Dean Street. The flower-girls and drapers’ assistants and beribboned whores approach and lay their hands on him, or walk alongside him a little way, but he never looks back.
She watches until he is out of sight, with a blacking at the edges of her vision and a rush of cold all across her body, as if she were drowning. She might be lost at sea; there is a great cold void beneath her, and she fears she is not strong enough to avoid being sucked under. Am I dying? It may be so. She closes her eyes and swallows hard; then she pulls away from the window and says aloud, ‘No, no. This won’t do.’
And so to action. She goes at once to her dressing table, and whisks open one drawer after another, to seek within them their finest pieces: the necklace of millefiore medallions; her golden armlet; the earrings set with rubies. She takes out her patch-box and his snuff-box; she seizes the best of the candlesticks, and the books, and ransacks her box of lace to choose which cuffs and fichus she can best do without. She sighs mightily as she does so, for every scrap she seizes up is as delightful to behold as it was the day she chose it; the beauty of each stitched flower and star and swag is enough to make her ache. She had not tired of owning them yet; the glee that they are really hers has not abated, and yet she is packing them gently into a basket to be taken away.
‘Eliza,’ she calls, ‘help me.’ When Mrs Frost comes to the doorway she hands her the basket. ‘Pawn it,’ she says. ‘Sell it. Whatever is best. And this. And this.’
‘Is this necessary?’ asks Mrs Frost.
‘You keep the books! You tell me.’ She is rummaging through a drawer full of fans, throwing them onto the carpet one by one without looking at them. Then she starts on the linens. ‘They will call in their debts if they know he has left me, and I have no way of paying. It must be hundreds that I owe – thousands. There will be bailiffs.’ She wheels around, her skirts heaving: her composure flees her. ‘Must they find out? Perhaps they need not know.’ She paces the floor, twisting her fingers relentlessly, and her speech ascends and ascends into hectic gibberage as she continues, ‘Oh, perhaps if we ask him – a few weeks’ grace – to let nobody know he does not protect me – he might find it in his heart, if he understood – I shall go away for a while – the countryside? – where?’
Her agitation is such that Mrs Frost becomes almost afraid; she will do herself a mischief, she thinks, and, to still her, seizes her first by the shoulders and then wraps her in her arms. Her body is rigid; there is panic in its every fibre. ‘I think not,’ says Mrs Frost gently. ‘He will not help us any more. He is gone.’
Angelica clings to her for a short while and then breaks free, shaking herself down. ‘Well, then,’ she says with resolve. ‘If you do not want me to go to prison, you will help me.’