The Angel in the Corner (11 page)

‘London on New Year’s Eve.’ Virginia drew in her head. ‘I wouldn’t be anywhere else. Oh, I love London. There’s nowhere in the world so solid and so crazy at the same time. Look, Felix – look at that taxi! The man’s trying to climb on the roof. Look – they’re having a party in that house. What a huge room – and thousands of people. It looks such fun from outside, but probably if you were in there, it wouldn’t be much fun at all.’

It was exciting to drive through London on New Year’s Eve. As they came to Oxford Street and crossed into Regent Street, the excitement increased. There were more people in the streets, all at once a crowd of them, all going the same way in a jostling mob, shouting and cheering as if it were the end of the war all over again.

The traffic became thicker and slowed to a crawl. Men and girls in open cars stood up and screamed at strangers. People threw things, threw laughter at each other, as they were borne along on the tide of hypnotized gaiety towards the magnet which gathers to itself the fervour of London’s gala days – Piccadilly Circus, with the policemen part of the comedy, and the bonfires already burning at the corner of the Haymarket.

Felix had driven into the congestion before he realized that he could not get out of it. Traffic was almost at a standstill. The mass of cars stopped for five minutes, moved for five seconds, then stopped again. Horns blared, but chiefly to make noise. No one was going anywhere. They were out to ride on the roofs of taxis, to lean out of sports cars and squirt each other with syphons, to cheer and add to the hullabaloo of the rowdiest evening of the year.

Felix fretted and peered, and tried to draw out of line to turn into a side-street, but he was solidly wedged. He backed until he struck the bumper of the car behind him, and a man in a yellow cap got out of it and came to shake his fist at Felix through the closed window. Felix spun his wheel, paying no
attention, but he still could not get round the car in front. He struck that one too, and the tail-light fell off, for it was very old; but it was full of young men with bottles of beer, who were shaking the car up so much from the inside that they did not feel the bump.

A strange man in a college muffler suddenly climbed into the back of the car, slapped Felix on the back, kissed Virginia clumsily, climbed out of the other door and into the car alongside, where he was received with female shrieks.

They had almost reached Piccadilly Circus now. Virginia could see the people skirmishing round the pedestal of Eros, the turbulent sea of shouting faces, vivid under the neon signs, the young men climbing up the lamp-posts, the policemen with linked arms forming cordons here and there from habit, although in this heaving ocean of equality there was nobody who need be guarded from anyone else.

The cars could go no further. ‘It will be midnight in a few minutes.’ Virginia turned to Felix with shining eyes. ‘Let’s get out and stand with the crowd. They’ll sing
Auld Lang Syne.’
Felix would sway with her, pressed close against her, excited, caught up in the boisterous harmony of the people. They would kiss. Everyone kissed in the streets on New Year’s Eve.

‘Come on.’ She caught at his arm. She was half-way out of the car when he pulled her back.

‘Are you crazy? I’m supposed to be at the hospital. I’ve got to get out of this. I’d better leave the car and start running.’

‘I’ll run with you.’

‘You’ll have to stay with the car.’ It was the first time he had ordered her to do anything. She was almost surprised into obeying him, but she did not want to be left alone to play chauffeur to the shiny black car. She saw a policeman and shouted to him. Like all Londoners, she believed that a policeman was the answer to everything.

This one did not disillusion her. There was much calling and waving and shouts of: ‘Doctor here! Let the doctor through! Easy a bit. Right hand down. Steady as you go!’ The policeman got Felix out to the other side of the road, and held back the cars there while he drove up it on the wrong side and turned off.

Virginia hated to leave the crowds, but she had felt important.
People had stared at them, and demanded: ‘What’s that fellow doing? Oh, a doctor. Come on, you chaps, what’s the matter with you? Let the doctor through. Emergency.’

If the woman with the ovarian cyst was still capable of feeling anything, she should feel flattered that the common surge towards midnight in Piccadilly had been held up and disrupted on her behalf.

The streets rapidly grew emptier as they drove away from the lights and noise. Felix drove fast, his face intent. Without looking at her, he put his hand on Virginia’s knee.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Another time. I’ll see the New Year in with you next year in Piccadilly Circus, or anywhere you want.’

As they crossed Parliament Square, the yellow harvest moon of Big Ben showed that it was nearly the hour. Virginia turned on the wireless. A choir was singing the last hymn of the Watch-Night Service.

Felix stopped the car outside the hospital. ‘Take the car home,’ he said. ‘You’ll never get a taxi tonight. I’ll get back all right.’

‘I’ll wait for you, if you like.’

‘No, I might be a long time. But thanks for saying you would.’ He looked at her with a hesitant smile, and held out his hand. ‘Virginia, I –’

‘Hush. It’s midnight.’ She took his hand, and they heard above and behind them in the sky the first note of Big Ben, coming to them just a fraction of a second after its radio voice boomed out and filled the car.

‘Happy New Year,’ he said. Then his mouth was on hers, and her ears were full of the chimes and the echoes of the chimes, overlapping each other in widening circles of pulsating sound.

Virginia caught Helen red-handed. A few weeks after she started to work for
Lady Beautiful,
Miss Braithwaite, the department head, allowed her to go home earlier than usual, because she had a headache. Virginia went quickly into the flat, and straight to her bedroom. There, standing at the desk by the window was Helen. She was so startled that she turned round with the letter still in her hand.

Virginia shut the door and leaned against it. ‘Reading my letters again, Helen?’ She knew that her mother was capable of looking through her desk when she thought Virginia was out. That was why she had long ago ceased to keep a diary, and always hid or destroyed any letters that mattered.

‘How can you accuse me of that?’ Helen cried, her eyes shifting, seeking how to put the blame on Virginia. ‘What a terrible thing to say to your own mother! I came in here to dust your room, and this letter was lying out on the desk. I just this minute picked it up.’

‘Where’s the duster?’ Virginia asked. ‘Oh, well, never mind. I thought the letter was safe in that little drawer, but I see I shall have to find a new hiding-place.’

She threw her coat on the bed, and sat wearily down beside it, pushing back her hair, which the February wind had tumbled. ‘Since you have obviously read it,’ she said, ‘what do you think of it?’

‘Of course I haven’t read it.’ Helen threw the letter down. ‘I’m not interested in your love-letters.’

‘I don’t get so many love-letters that you could guess this was one without reading it,’ Virginia said patiently.

‘Well, of course, I couldn’t help seeing one or two phrases, and who it came from. That niggling little signature, with the prim little dots underneath, like a prescription.’ Helen grasped at something to deride. ‘And since you ask what I think of it, I think it’s quite absurd.’

‘Oh? Poor Felix. I thought it was a charming letter.’

Helen gave a little snort. ‘It would need to be – trying to get a girl half his age to marry him.’

‘Not quite half his age,’ Virginia said carefully. ‘Eighteen years younger, to be exact.’

‘But that’s much too big a gap! He admits that himself, right there in the letter. Oh, Jinny, it’s unthinkable. Don’t tell me you were even considering it.’

‘I don’t know why not.’ Virginia lay back on the bed, and talked to the ceiling. ‘It’s the best offer I’ve had so far. The only one, for that matter.’

‘But you’re barely twenty-one! And I wish you wouldn’t put your shoes on the bed. That counterpane was expensive. You shouldn’t be thinking of marrying anyone, and certainly not Felix.’ She pronounced his name with some contempt. She had disliked him ever since she realized that it was Virginia he was pursuing and not her.

‘Listen to me, Jinny.’ She stood by the bed with her arms folded, caressing her sleeves. ‘You think I don’t know anything about what is good for you. No daughter credits her mother with any sense. But allow me to tell you – you know nothing. Nothing, do you hear? You’re a child. No doubt you think you’re haying a very worldly love affair with the great obstetrician, but it’s a dream. You don’t know what love is.’

‘Don’t I?’ Virginia said. ‘What about Billy? Wasn’t I in love with him?’

‘Oh – Billy! My dear child, don’t be ridiculous. That was only calf love, and the intoxication of the Austrian Alps. You were both pitifully immature.’

‘How cold it was in the early morning, remember?’ Virginia closed her eyes. ‘And then when the sun came out, you wanted to peel off all your clothes and roll in the snow. But of course, Helen, you hardly ever went out of the hotel.’

Long days on the mountain with Billy in that thick white sweater which darkened his bronzed skin. Days of speed, and hilarious falls, and thick pea soup and hard bread in the huts, and the lights from the windows of the village shining softly on the trodden snow as you stacked your skis outside the
Gasthof,
and tramped your melting boots inside for the hot spiced wine.

‘I didn’t feel immature,’ she said, remembering the entrancement
of it, which had faded away like Billy’s sun-tan after they returned to London. ‘Children of divorced parents are supposed to be more mature, you know. It’s the emotional shock.’

‘Don’t throw that up at me.’ Helen frowned. ‘It’s most unfair to suggest that I have ever done anything but what was best for you. And now you threaten me with this – this
tragedy.’

‘Oh, really, Helen.’ Virginia swung her legs off the bed, and went to the dressing-table.

‘Yes, tragedy is what it will be if you marry Felix. The man is settled, set in his ways. His life is half over. Yours is only just beginning. He’s successful enough, I grant you. He has got where he wants to, but do you want that? How do you know what you want?’

She talked to Virginia’s back, with histrionic gestures, which Virginia could see in the mirror. ‘Please, Jinny, please; if you have any regard for me, please listen to what I tell you. Can’t you see I’m trying to help you?’

Virginia let her talk. She did not say that she had no intention of marrying Felix, and that she had already told him so, and listened in embarrassment to his humiliated apologies for having asked her. Poor Felix. It would be kinder to him to let Helen think that it was she and not Virginia who had put an end to the mild affair.

He had vowed that he would move away from the mews, and never see Virginia again. That was a pity, because Virginia liked him; but if it made him feel better to be dramatic about it, at least that would give Helen the pleasure of thinking that she had driven him away.

‘Dear heart.’ Helen put her hand on Virginia’s shoulder. ‘Don’t leave me yet. I need you. Don’t leave me for a man who could never make you happy. You and I have been so happy together.’

Did she really believe it? She bent forward and laid her cheek alongside her daughter’s, and they stared together into the mirror, the young sceptical eyes and the scheming anxious ones.

‘You’re all I’ve got, Jinny,’ Helen said, watching her own lips move sadly. ‘You’re all I’ve got.’

*

All I’ve got, indeed! Virginia walked up Endell Street in a fury, slapping her feet on the pavement and swinging her arms.

All I’ve got. I need you. Don’t leave me. I’m only thinking of your happiness. And all the time, she knew – she
knew
what she was planning to do without a thought for how it would affect Virginia.

Cooing there in the bedroom, putting on that fraudulent maternal act. If she had told about it then, the whole conversation could have been different. But no, she had to do it this way. She had to have her big scene, with Virginia nowhere in the picture, Virginia in the background, trying to smile and pretend that everything was wonderful.

It would be a long time before she could forget the scene in Helen’s office, the scene from which she was now storming away, trying to cover the hurt with anger.

It had been nearly time to leave the office. Miss Braithwaite had come to Virginia’s desk and said: ‘Your mother wants to see you before you go. You can run along now, if you like. Those few letters will keep until the morning.’ Miss Braithwaite was very kind. She fussed over the girls in the correspondence department as benevolently as a sitting hen.

‘But there will be a whole heap of new ones by the morning.’ Virginia slit another envelope, and began to read a letter from a lady in Bristol, challenging her mother’s last editorial on How to Live Graciously on Three Hundred Pounds a Year.

‘I know, dear, I know. If the letters didn’t come, that would be the time to start worrying. But tomorrow is another day. Don’t let’s try to set the world on fire tonight.’ Miss Braith-waite’s kind red face smiled like the setting sun. ‘Run along to your mother,’ she said, as if she were a nurse and Virginia a child.

Grace was not in the outer office. She was in the throne-room. So were a lot of other people; all the more senior members of the staff, standing about looking a little uncomfortable, and keeping an eye on Helen.

‘What is this – a party?’ Virginia did not go up to her mother. She waited on the outskirts of the ring of people that surrounded the editorial desk.

Helen stood up when she saw her. ‘There you are, Jinny.
We’re only waiting for you.’ She seemed excited, but in complete command of herself and the situation. ‘I am going to make a tiny speech,’ she gave a tuneful little laugh, half deprecatory, ‘if you will all bear with me for the briefest of moments.’ She clasped her hands at chest level, and looked round her audience with her head poised.