"My friends call me Angel."
It had been her favourite line, delivered with a slight tilt of the head and a playful smile intended to lay bare the lie, to seed the notion that she was - if they played their cards right - anything but angelic. She had stood before her bathroom mirror and rehearsed, her smile fed by a panoply of memories harvested from the past rather than any anticipation of her immediate future.
And now, having made the decision to get off the tube two stops earlier than she needed to, and standing by the door as the train pulled into Green Park station, she saw fragments of that same reflection whisked away by the bright lights of the platform. Such mirrors offered by the Underground were fleeting and rarely flattering.
Her favourite mirror adorned the large mahogany chest of drawers in her bedroom; a gift from many years ago which would make a suitable heirloom had she someone to whom she might pass it. Its wooden frame - a little like the rest of the piece - was beginning to show its age with slight discolouration and uneven patina. And even though the mirror itself was beginning to bloom a little under the glass in the corners nearest the window, it had always been faithful to her - as it had been that morning when she sat before it once again to apply her rouge. It was an almost religious certainty her old and trusted friend offered, one which allowed her to dismiss the windows of the Victoria line with such ease.
She left the station to the northern side of Piccadilly more out of choice than habit - even though both former and latter had become so closely intertwined across the years. Angela had always been quite clear-cut about Piccadilly: one could only walk along its north or south side, not both; crossing half way was an endeavour bordering on pointlessness. Her preference for the northern side arose through trial and error during the days of her youth, later confirmed through sheer practicality. She had come to navigate by landmarks towards which she initially felt she might have an affinity, and after that, to those where she had actually established some kind of connection. She preferred, for example, to be able to see and admire The Ritz and Fortnum’s when walking, eschewing immediate proximity in favour of taking them in. Hence north over south. In the case of the RA the opposite was true, proximity winning. Indeed, though she admired its interior (with the exception of one room in particular), she despised the external facade with a passion, so getting past without having to look at it was a victory of sorts. In terms of practically (or habit), all those years ago she had found herself most often around Berkeley Square, and so that too made leaving Green Park on the northern side of Piccadilly the only option that made any sense.
Standing on the edge of the Berkeley Street pavement, waiting at the lights on for the green man, Angela looked away up the street trying to transport herself into her past as if the surrounding throng and the hubbub of speeding traffic were not there. There was an Audi showroom just behind her and, about half-way up the road, she could make out where they sold the most expensive Range Rovers. Yet momentarily she was projecting herself beyond these to where Berkeley Square itself started and the Jaguar showroom stood.
How old had she been when she first went in there? Twenty-one perhaps? Twenty-two? They had let her sit in the front seat of their pride a joy - an E-Type that had ostensibly not been for sale - and even though its red leather clashed dreadfully with the peach of her light summer frock, she swore she had never been happier. Dicky Johnson bought the car outright, there and then, in spite of what the Manager had said. Dicky told her he had never seen anything so beautiful, her sitting behind the wheel of an E-Type. Jaguars still meant something in those days; they were special. And of all the cars in which she had ever sat, that memory was the most precious.
Over the course of the next few years she went back into that showroom on more than one occasion. Once, after yet another sale had been concluded in her presence, the Manager (Charlie, as she came to know him) gave her a large bunch of flowers. She was his "Good Luck Charm"; that was what he had said. Cars were different now - Jaguars especially. Someone once described them to her as "a Ford in a skirt". She had thought that terribly unfair. Charlie - who was probably close to retirement by now - would have hated it. But perhaps - as the green man suddenly appeared and she was thrust out into the road - it was just another sign of how times had changed.
Ahead of her, two girls walked, their long straight hair hanging outside short black leather jackets. Leaning their heads slightly towards each other, they were laughing conspiratorially. It was the laugh of youth, of blind confidence. They were wearing tight black leggings and shoes whose inappropriately high heels only accentuated the movement of their buttocks beneath the straining lycra. Angela watched the hypnotic and rhythmic motion for a moment. She could see how men were drawn to such explicit displays. Of course, in her youth she’d had to work harder. Such a rhythm could only be suggested and not made explicit beneath the sorts of fabric available then. It was easier in the spring or summer when lighter dresses would cling more readily, but nevertheless there was still the walk to perfect, the cadence to master. It was a skill she had learned and believed she still possessed, and as if to prove it to herself, for a few steps exaggerated her sashay. "This is how you do it, girls", she thought to herself.
Across the road The Ritz whispered to her, magnetically drawing her gaze away from the young women, on through its pavement arches, and then - in her mind’s eye at least - beyond its windows and into bright golden rooms. For an instant her recollection made her feel as if she were there once again, being ushered through its splendid doors by footmen in pristine uniforms, and then into rooms where the carpets felt three inches deep. The pavement upon which she now trod was suddenly soft and full of spring, and she recalled Lord A*** who had been the first beau to introduce her to the refinements of High Tea. She knew she had blushed far too often, bewildered by the silver, the smallness of the sandwiches, the brightness of the cutlery. They had treated her like a lady - only because of her companion - but she had revelled in it. Determined not to let him down, she had watched his every move, copied him faithfully, took cake when he did so, sipped tea as he sipped tea. At one point he had laughed at her antics, which only made her blush even more, causing his Lordship to take her hand and kiss it in spite of himself.
She shook herself mentally and the pavement became hard once again, her heels clicking in a distinctively satisfactory manner as she walked. The two girls had disappeared - presumably up Dover Street or into some shop or other - and Angela tried to concentrate on making progress. It was a studied kind of disinterestedness she tried to practice; giving the air of being nonchalant, relaxed, of not caring in the least who saw her or what they thought of her - whilst all the time the entirely opposite was true.
Ahead, just across Old Bond Street, the facade of the Royal Academy loomed obliquely in front of her, its dark grey mass as formidable to her as it had always been. Today it was sheathed in scaffolding - either for cleaning or repair or the preparation of materials that would allow it to boast of yet another exhibition, another triumph, another season. She checked her watch in an involuntary movement to re-locate herself in time, not so much the time of day but - if it were possible - the time of year and the proximity of the Summer Exhibition. Even though it was still a long way from June, she knew from her only exposure to the process, that preparations started so much earlier, and that even in April the cogs of the RA machine would be turning.
She had met Jack when he was tutoring a Life Drawing class in Wimbledon, and even now could only think of their meeting as fate. A few weeks earlier she had cried off work in the perfumery section of Debenham’s in order to go racing at Sandown Park with two of her girl friends. As bad luck would have it, she was spotted by one of the less pleasant junior managers from mens’ wear, and the following day when she returned to the store she had been summarily dismissed. Part of her was secretly pleased to see the back of the store; she had not set foot in another Debenham’s since. It was like a badge of honour. Having never been that good with money, she soon came to realise how much she had been living hand-to-mouth, and how much she needed a job. She could survive for perhaps a week, maybe two, but that was all. As she searched for permanent work, a young woman not yet twenty, she had spotted an advertisement in a Newsagent’s window seeking models to sit for an art class. It was only two evenings a week and it paid next to nothing, but Angela was in no place to be choosy.
What struck her most about him - initially, and even now in remembrance - was the way he taught and the way he drew. In a few seconds his hand could move across the surface of a sheet of paper to leave behind, as if by magic, foundations of perfection. His lines were fluid, full of energy and motion, challenging the eye to follow them, to dance with him. And he seemed to achieve all of this unconsciously and without calculation. Oh, he dressed casually like an artist and wore his hair long, but his eyes, just the hazel side of brown, had a depth and intensity that only truly fired when he was at work. But of this he was largely innocent.
Jack’s class was almost entirely comprised of women. As Angela sat in the middle of the circle, a stole or cape draped around her (she was never truly naked!), she watched as they called to him, sought his advice, needed their imperfect attempts corrected. One evening, after they had finished, Angela suggested to him that some of them deliberately made mistakes to ensure they captured their paid-for share of his attention.
The ladies assumed that she and Jack were an item. At the end of the second week, he asked her if she would sit for him. Once again he wanted to try for the Summer Exhibition and had been searching for a subject that could inspire him sufficiently to bring out his best. Even though he did not regard portraiture to be his forte, he told her that she might just be that subject. Would she mind just one sitting, just to see?
Even though Angela knew Jack’s request had been nothing but professional, her first visit to his study - a converted back bedroom in a top floor flat near Putney Bridge - was one she undertook with some trepidation. He had arranged a seat for her in the middle of the room and simply asked her to sit in it and look out of the window. For an hour he drew rough sketches. His hand flew, his eyes fixed upon both her and the paper; and yet it as if she wasn’t there at all. When he moved away from his easel five sketches lay at his feet.
She remembered the way he had said "Coffee?" before leaving the room. It was another diffident connection that could as easily have been addressed to the postman. She had walked over to where the sketches lay on the floor and stared at them. There she was, captured in duplicate, her image and form portrayed in a way she had never thought possible. She was hugging herself as he returned with their drinks. He put them down on a small side-table laden with brushes and tubes of paint, and came to stand next to her. Even then she could tell he wasn’t happy. Though she had never seen anything quite like it - nothing quite like herself depicted in such a way - she knew that it was not good enough. Not for Jack.
Perhaps it had been that sudden sense of needing to help him, to offer him more, that had prompted her to kiss him. Whether she was walking past the RA, or shopping in the supermarket, or sitting on a bus, it was a memory that still made her smile. He had been taken aback for a moment, but that was all. A hour later he returned to the bedroom with his sketch pad and drew her as she lay there, tired, newly satisfied, somehow more complete, and she watched as his eyes fired again. Later, with his fingers made multi-coloured by the pastels he had been using, he smiled and turned the pad towards her. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. And Jack was still smiling. They were getting somewhere.
Two days later, she’d had an interview as a receptionist in a legal firm in the city and landed the job. The following Monday, after spending the entire weekend with Jack, sitting for him, walking along the river and on Wimbledon Common, she started work. She had expected to find it easy, but the environment was a pressurised one; a lot was expected of her. She struggled at first, and the days wore her out. Jack was forced to run his art classes with another model - and to work on refining his piece for the RA without his muse.
On the third Wednesday - Angela remembered it as a dark and foreboding day - the Head of Chambers asked her if she would accompany one of the firm’s most important clients, H*** R***, to a social event the following evening. He was, it was explained, only in London for a few days and the reception concerned had come up at short notice and he didn’t want to go alone. She had been flattered; after all, she had been with the company less than a month. She knew they could have chosen any of the other Secretaries or Personal Assistants - but she also knew that she was the prettiest by far.
The firm gave her an allowance to buy herself a new dress and it was in this, a shimmering blue full length gown, that she greeted H*** when he arrived at her flat to take her into town. The taxi ride was short enough, but strained. Had she been with Jack or someone she knew well - someone with enough of a common background - she would have found it easier to make small talk; but H***, impeccably attired in his dinner suit, seemed from a completely different world.
Once they were in the hotel (a hotel she would be walking past very shortly, in fact) she became swept up in the grandeur of the event. The meal itself was formal and a little stiff for her liking - after all, wasn’t she a girl who was dating an artist and liked horse racing and dancing?! - but the splendour of the ballroom, the brightness of the silver, the sound of the small orchestra playing in one corner, all contributed to the newness and magic of the evening.
After dessert and coffee, H*** rose and very properly asked her to dance. On reflection - on perpetual reflection - she knew she should have politely declined. But even though her head was beginning to swim a little because of all the champagne she’d had poured for her, she felt obliged to accept; after all, wasn’t she there as a representative of her company? A little while later, as the twirling on the polished ballroom floor seemed to gain pace, she swayed a little too far and almost stumbled. At that, and to one or two nearby gasps, H*** swept her up and in her relief that she had been rescued, she closed her eyes.
When she next opened her eyes she found herself lying under the expansive and soft covers of a large bed. She knew she was naked. In front of her she saw H*** fixing his tie at the mirror by the door. Sensing her movement, he looked at her in the mirror, a slight play on his lips not quite making it to a smile. From his jacket pocket he pulled out his wallet and then, without a further word, took something from it, dropped it onto the dressing table, and left the room. She had lain there for a few minutes, almost paralysed, and then, holding the bedclothes tightly about her as if the room was full of people she didn’t want to see her, moved to the side of the bed and stood up. She could see it was money H*** had left there, and undoubtedly it was intended for her. Instantly she felt angry and cheapened. How dare he! And then she suddenly realised that the notes he had left were not five pound notes but fifty pound notes, and the bundle she was instantly counting in her hands was not only the most cash she had ever seen, but the most money she had ever possessed.
Old Bond Street had initially triggered the memory: that and the combination of the Royal Academy and Fortnum and Mason’s just across the other side of Piccadilly. Angela had always wanted to be able to shop on Old Bond Street. Influenced by her mother, she had grown up having it represent something legendary, as if it inferred a quality on the people who shopped there. Unconsciously perhaps, in her early youth it came to represent what could only be regarded as an unattainable goal.
She chose not to return to work the following day, nor any day after that. How could she? She had been compromised totally. They had all been compromised in a way; her, the firm, H***. She knew almost immediately - perhaps even before he had left the room - that she was of little consequence to him. She knew he would probably never think of her again, and that the episode would fade into a vague memory of a long-ago London triumph to be shared at all-male dinner parties.
And instead of immediately going back to Jack, she returned the following Tuesday to the Meridien - there, just ahead of her now - and stared at its facade from the other side of the road. It was just a big inconsequential building. London was full of them. In that moment, she dismissed it as irrelevant and headed up Old Bond Street where, with a very small portion of her new largesse, she bought a simple t-shirt from one of its boutique stores. That would be her trophy. And then, on a less of an impulse, she walked back to Fortnum’s and ordered a small hamper as a surprise gift for her mother.
Since that day, both Old Bond Street and Fortnum’s had enjoyed her patronage on multiple occasions. She had - against one measure at least - ‘arrived’, and that felt good. Now, crossing Sackville Street and Swallow Street and striding confidently past the threshold of the Meridien once again, she remembered those initial forays into a world from which she had assumed she would always be excluded. Doing so aroused a degree of pride she would now never exchange - even though, at the time, it had come at a terrible cost.
She next saw Jack the day following her shopping spree, the Wednesday. He immediately sensed that something had happened, that something significant had changed. She had tried to deny it, then to be vague about it. He knew of the planned evening at the Meridien, and faced with her evasion and in the absence of anything concrete, allowed himself to speculate and draw conclusions. On one level these were close enough, on another…
As a taxi hooted its horn somewhere nearby and caused her to jump slightly, Angela wondered if she had ever truly measured the price she’d paid. What if Jack had been a boy she could have really loved? What if they could have had a future together? That Wednesday they had argued and she had left him. It was an inconclusive parting as far as she had been concerned. In those days she still believed in the healing properties of time, and she recalled feeling confident - perhaps in a way she never had previously - that she would always be able to go back to him.
Two months later, as the Summer Exhibition opened, Angela walked confidently into the courtyard of the RA, joined the queue, and waited patiently to buy her ticket. She had heard from someone who still modelled for Jack’s drawing class that this year he had finally been accepted. She was convinced she knew what he had submitted, and had built a scenario where she would find his portrait of her, where people in the gallery would recognise her standing beside it and gasp, and then Jack would suddenly appear and they would fall into each other’s arms to the smiles and applause of the RA’s patrons. Wasn’t that how it was supposed to work? She smiled at her naivety even now, at her last vestige of innocence.
The exhibition was relatively quiet; she had chosen the time to visit carefully. Purchasing an exhibition guide (an expense which would have been impossible to contemplate just a few weeks previously), she found his name and made her way to the room in which his painting was hung. He had named it ‘Call Me Angel’. As she entered the small, darkly painted space, she did so with the image of that pastel drawing in her mind. That was what she was expecting to see transferred into oils and made even more spectacularly beautiful.
There were perhaps two or three dozen paintings in the room. She scanned them quickly, but her painting was not there. She wondered if there had been a mistake, so she checked the catalogue again. Chamber Seventeen, it said, and that was where she was. And then, returning the guide to her bag, she caught a glimpse of his painting. It was not the pastel image made heavenly, but one of the rough early sketches turned into a dark, menacing, nightmarish, evil thing. The woman who stared back at her - a woman unmistakably her - was hard and harsh. It was the face of a woman who you might cross the street to avoid. There was no love in the painting, only hatred. Had she been able to study it, she would have seen the quality in the work; that Jack had indeed painted it brilliantly, and finally found a subject which had forged passion with talent and given birth to something remarkable.
But it had killed something too. It had destroyed Angela’s dream, her fantasy. As she turned on her heel and walked quickly, head bowed, from Chamber Seventeen all the way to the exit and back onto Piccadilly, she left not only Jack behind but unwittingly any future aspiration for love too. She had not seen it then - and might not recognise it even now - but perhaps Jack had seen something of the new Angela, an element of the woman who glanced up at the statue of Eros as she reached the Circus itself.
Had she walked this way after her disastrous visit to the RA? She struggled to remember. If she had, Angela was certain she would not have consciously understood how, in those few preceding tumultuous days, she had experienced the polarities of love - nor how doing so had forced her to align her future to one of them. If Eros was to be her Pole Star (and in her heart-of-hearts, she knew instinctively this was her fate), then her direction of travel, as certain as her footfall on the Piccadilly pavement, would frame the meaning of love in such a way as to lead to Dicky Johnson and Lord A***. And yes, back to Old Bond Street, and Charlie’s showroom, and Fortnum and Mason’s more than once.
Waiting for the traffic to pause, she reflected - as she often seemed to recently - how those heady cash-rich early months had allowed her to move out of the cramped flat, funded through her late father’s limited estate, which she had chosen primarily to be free from her mother’s clutches. Out and into something larger and more central. And how, since then, she had relocated not once but twice until she had become comfortably holed-up in her attic apartment in Pimlico, settled in a building which demanded respect and, she trusted, conferred a kind of respectability on its residents.
It was a respectability that had become increasingly important to her as she had grown older. To a certain extent age conferred it of course, bestowing something upon her that the young could only aspire to - assuming they could recognise it at all. Yet there had been a peak, a zenith, beyond which, as age became ever more vital, other things began to feel a little less ‘reliable’. She had been forced to abandon her carefree nature in terms of the clothes she chose to wear. Some colours were suddenly a challenge, and it had become impossible to carry off just about anything. Achieving the desired effect began to take a little more planning, a little more craft. She knew that there was something essential that she would never lose - it just became a touch harder to find it, and increasingly difficult to mine.
As she moved across the Circus, she was as certain as she could ever be that she still had ‘it’, that undefinable thing. After all, hadn’t she shown those girls in the leather jackets - and anyone else who had been looking - that she still had what it took?! But somewhere there was a line drawn she had been forced to cross, much in the same way as she now crossed to the other side of Piccadilly and left Eros behind her; a journey that in her prime she would never have contemplated making. Time had eroded many boundaries.
The one building which epitomised the decline of Shaftesbury Avenue was The Trocadero. As she hurried past it, conscious it had taken longer to get here than she had anticipated, she wondered if it had ever been successful at anything. Although not a site she had ever frequented, Angela knew it had tried its hand at a number of things, adopted various disguises. For her it had always failed - and it was a failure proving inevitable and endless. Not only that, but its foundering had been very public with the building unused - almost derelict - for large swathes of time, like a wound that could not be healed. Perhaps it was not the building itself; indeed, she knew little enough about architecture to make any kind of pronouncement in terms of ‘merit’, or style, or functionality. Yet it seemed a construction which sat uneasily in its environment, not through any fault of its own but because of where it was. To walk in this part of London - this side of the Circus - was to accept grime and dirt, to condone an absence of colour from life.
Oh there were bright spots of course, and colour too if you knew where to look; yet this was colour in the practical and not emotional sense. It was colour that lacked subtlety, more often than not too vibrant and too harsh. She had an attachment to the more royal hues of Piccadilly and its local spurs. Those streets held promise and opportunity, and were representative of something more acceptable. But here, where the bundles of cardboard and rags in doorways started, there was little that was positive, little hope.
Ahead, the lights of the Lyric Theatre were starting to glow brightly now that the sun was beginning to fade. There was colour, she thought. The Lyric remained one of her favourite London venues - in spite of its Shaftesbury Avenue location! - and it was there she had first been introduced to the capital’s theatre, held spellbound by spotlights and aura and a youthful Michael Gambon before his big break on television. Perhaps it was because the Lyric had been her first cultural experience that no other theatre had been able to come close to it. Perhaps it had been because that evening had been so special, enhanced for other reasons… She shook her head slightly and smiled to herself, unable to recall who it had been who had taken her there.
As she headed towards Wardour Street and the uniqueness that is Chinatown came into view, Angela checked her watch. She would be perhaps ten minutes late; but that was acceptable wasn’t it, even these days when it was no longer quite so fashionable to run slightly behind schedule? There was colour in Chinatown too, provided you liked red - and Chinese food. She struggled with the brashness of both. She knew places like Wong Kai’s or the Noodle Factory were popular, but preferred to offer her patronage in a more subtle and refined way.
Mind you, this was becoming increasingly difficult, all things considered. It had been fine to be choosy and ever so slightly snobbish a few years ago; those years when she never needed to contemplate going anywhere near the Circus, when her boundaries were framed, almost literally, by outposts like the Meridien and Berkeley Square; by Burlington Arcade, Curzon Street, Park Lane and Pall Mall. Park Lane! She smiled to herself again, allowing her mood to lighten a little as it had become darker and sullen in the last few minutes. In her pomp she would have navigated along the expensive side of a Monopoly board, and no mistake!
And then, suddenly it seemed, there she was, already across Dean Street and turning the corner into Frith Street. She paused to validate the address she had written on a slip of paper and kept in her coat pocket so that she would not need to risk opening her purse in such savage surroundings. She knew the building numbers well enough now, and that she was heading towards the Soho Square end of the street. She checked her watch. Perhaps closer to fifteen minutes late, if she was being generous. It wouldn’t be a problem, she was sure. It never seemed to be.
A short while later she stood in front of a nondescript, darkly painted door. There was - as there seemed to be with all doors these days - a small panel of buttons and associated nameplates. She knew the number (not the name) from her little slip of paper.
She pressed the appropriate button on the intercom.
After a short pause, a click, then a man’s voice, tired and lacking joy.
"Hello?" Was that a promising voice? A kind voice?
"It’s Angela," she said - and she rehearsed in her head, "My friends call me Angel".
The door buzzed open.