No Place for an Angel

Elizabeth Spencer

NO
PLACE
for an
ANGEL

A NOVEL

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

New York · London

To Tonny and Cynthia Vartan

Contents

BLOOD SPORTS

DANGEROUS JOURNEYS

ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR

WHERE PATHS DIVIDE

THE GREY WORLD

Blood Sports

“
W
hy, Barry Day!”

He had just said something designed to shock her, but Irene only laughed instead, and a minute later could not remember it, for she was half-asleep. Lying on the warm summer grass, listening to the lively running of the stream, with her eyes closed, letting the sun brown her face and throat, she could almost sense the journey and impulse of the turning earth beneath her back.

The young man, whose fate it was to be always nervous and detached, sat a few feet away with elbows carelessly at rest across his knees. Now he picked up a small stick and broke it in two; now he threw rocks, doubtless left along the bank by the stream's spring overflow, into the water, skipping the flat ones with a snap of his wrist, the way he must have done countless times when a boy, frowning, even then.

“I started the angel yesterday,” he said.

This was, Irene knew at once, an important disclosure. She did not answer or open her eyes. She was sensitive and critical, and she did not like discouraging him, but he got out of her anyway what she believed.

“Angels don't belong in America,” she finally said. “You should have done it in Rome.”

“There're a hell of a lot of them around on Christmas and Easter,” he said.

“That's all commercial. Angels, I tell you, never crossed the Atlantic in their lives. God crossed, but He left the angels.”

At that he hurled a rather large stone, and in the recurring silence must have thought her really asleep, for he reached her left hand which lay stretched out toward him on the grass and covered it with his own. She did not stir, though it did cross her mind that her husband had warned her some time ago, “Of course, he'll fall in love with you.” “Then he'll just have to transfer it to somebody else,” she had returned. “Anyway, artists are always falling in love. They don't mean it—I mean they only do it to stimulate their work. It's like politicians marrying somebody who will make a good hostess.” This was one of her and Charles' Sunday morning breakfast talks, back in town. An ant, journeying uphill through the pleasant savannahs of her right forearm, lightly brushed with beige reeds of hair, stung her; she drew her hand away from Barry to destroy it.

“God,” she said, sitting up, “I may have lain in an ant bed.” But she hadn't. She glanced at him, wondering when her husband and the other couple who had come out with them, the Giffords, would return with the sandwiches. Barry looked straight in front of him, tensely forgetting rocks and sticks. “I don't blame you for being cross,” she said, “but you must remember I don't know anything about art. Nor angels either. How should I be able to say?”

“It's just that I knew what you would say before you said it. And then I've built my own trap, you see. I think you must be always right. This makes me angry.”

She found it easy to laugh, chuckle rather. She was a strongly built woman, who just, by some exercise of pride or taste, missed being too heavy, and she was at least five years older than Barry Day, who, at the close of a dissatisfied silence, turned to her and pulled her toward him. He was as strong as some thin wild animal, who has to scavenge and fight several times a day, a fox maybe. He held her by the shoulder; his mouth bumped clumsily against her own; their teeth cracked together.

Far from being startled, she kept on laughing. It was such a happy, perfect day; did she have to let him worry her? She really could not put her mind on him.

He pulled away from the moment's harsh tussle—he would do an angel if he wanted to, he inwardly vowed—and retrieved one battered loafer from the grass. Irene combed her hair. She was cross, and said nothing. He had told her once that the artist was always isolated—that must have been one winter evening. Well, if he has to act like a wild man, let him be isolated, she thought. It's not my problem. All around her, softly surrounding them, mildly falling away toward its own identity, the New England countryside slept in the Sunday sunlight. They were the only people within the frame. But a red barn trimmed in white showed just at the notch of two hills, and farther away still to the left, down where the road wound which had taken Charles and the Giffords away, some cows grazed uphill along a warm, green slope.

You know, I always meant to tell you, Barry Day is not my name.”

They had known him well for three years now, she and Charles, had been acquainted with him since 1951 which was all of seven years ago, and they had discussed him quite often, the way they did, piecing together shrewd guesses; they were sharp and quick and nothing much got by them.

“Then what, pray, is your name?” The scene around her became unreal, as though she had sat down in the middle of a painting. Those cows had not moved an inch for an hour; surely the stream made no noise.

“Now don't laugh. It's Bernard Desportes.”

“Why should I laugh?”

“It's too theatrical. I changed it after the war. It sounds, you see, too much like an artist. When you hear it you can almost see a whole damned gallery full of Desportes, all looking slightly like a cross between Matisse and early Van Gogh, with imitations of every other school cutting in for a flower here, a fish there.”

“You're making this up,” she said, doubtfully.

“No, not at all.”

“You let me know you for three years as a friend, and never once told me this—oh, honestly!”

“I never told Charles either. I've never told anyone. What difference does it make? Anyway, I'm telling you now.”

“I suppose you are.”

Why, she wondered, was it so hard to tell exactly where one stood in anything? She felt disagreeable and realized she was hungry. “I think they're never coming back with those sandwiches.”

But at that moment, in the curve of the road, Charles' black Mercury broke into view. Ruth Gifford sat on the front seat with a huge brown paper sack beside her, and when Clint Gifford got out of the back he carried cold drinks, dripping through their paper carton.

Charles was jubilant at his success and came down the path to them, shouting:

“I thought I remembered some little restaurant with a grocer in the back, it's been ages since we came here—remember, Irene, that other time? And sure enough, there it was, so we've got olives, we've got French mustard, we've anchovies, and pickles and homemade relish put up for the locals only, and we've got—yes, by God, I even remembered the can opener with the built-in bottle opener.” He waved the nickel-colored object in the air with a gesture of triumph.

There was certain to be a long sweating slow-moving ill-tempered on the parkway, so returning to New York Charles made them all stop in a town off the highway and go to a movie. It didn't matter that no one agreed with him on this being a good idea. Headstrong and argumentative, he said he would far rather look at Betty Grable than at some child vomiting on the pavement at his front bumper.

“Betty Grable hasn't been in the movies in years,” said Ruth Gifford. She did not try to eliminate the annoyance from her voice. She and Clint would have to ring up the apartment in New York to talk with the baby-sitter. This was the second time this week they had been delayed. But there was no stopping Charles; Barry saw that Irene was saying nothing, and knew she was not going to try. Of course, she didn't want to sit through a movie; she never went willingly to anything, even concerts. Charles read the map and drove with one hand on the wheel, one eye on the road. The Mercury went butting about the streets of an awkward, forsaken-looking Sunday town, Charles like a jeep-high Allied commander riding into a conquered village.

“Where's the movie, please!” he thundered out the window at a woman pushing a baby. She looked surprised and small. At times everyone looked small around Charles. He was big and bald, except for a blond fringe, with a strong, mobile mouth and pale grey eyes. When he played tennis, fished, or golfed, his shirttail was always pulled half out of his trousers; he had very little time for small people.