The Angel in the Corner (2 page)

He smiled back. Virginia was tall, not willowy, but healthily supple, with a wide mouth and thick, dark hair plunging over her high forehead. She was feminine enough, and slight in her bones, and yet there was something rugged about her. Although she was only twenty, and had seen nothing of life, she looked as if some day, if she had to, she would be able to stand a lot of abuse.

The man saw some of these things dimly, resisted a desire to shine his torch directly on her, and said: ‘Hullo.’ He liked her vivid look. Even in the pale coat, she gave the impression of colour in the half-darkness. You could pass thirty girls in coats like that on the street, but only turn to look back at this one.

Virginia replied amiably, and stopped walking when the man asked if she lived in the mews. He told her that he had just come to live in a flat above the garage with a friend who was also a doctor, and they stood for a moment and eyed each other speculatively, before the man said: ‘Hm,’ which might mean anything, and Virginia said: ‘Oh, well,’ and walked on.

The man had looked about thirty-five. Refreshing after the coltish boys at the college. Life was full of the excitement of brief contacts. Always something new. Virginia walked down to Oxford Street to catch her bus. The tall houses, cramped yet dignified, like duchesses in an Ascot crowd, were dark and abandoned, for most of them were offices. Although it was early, there were few people about, and those who were in the street hurried along it to get out of the cold. At the corner of Oxford Street, the man selling newspapers wore a Russian cap with fur ear-pieces, given to him by an American soldier, but his coat was threadbare, and his mittens had more than finger-holes in them.

The light and bustle of the Tottenham Court Road were stimulating after the dark reaches of Bloomsbury. The people here were mostly out for the evening, not just hurrying home. Coloured men in dashing hats walked with white girls unhurriedly, as if they were parading, not going anywhere in particular. Outside the cinema, a small crowd was marshalled into line, as meek and chilly as if they were waiting for bread. Virginia felt fleetingly sorry for them, reminded herself that they were not forced to go to the cinema, and ran across the road just in time to jump on her bus as it moved forward with the change of lights.

Virginia was taking the extra evening classes at the college because she wanted to complete the course as quickly as possible. She was almost certain that she could get on to the women’s magazine of which her mother was the editor. Her mother did not know about this yet. When Virginia had started
to study journalism, Helen had said: ‘Don’t expect me to get you an easy job in the office. For your own good, and of what else must I think, you’ll have to find work for yourself, the way I did. In any case, I don’t approve of parents and children in the same organization.’

Virginia had replied that she would not dream of asking her mother for any favours; but she did not add that the managing editor, who liked her better than he liked her mother, had half promised to find her an opening when she was ready.

The Earl’s Court Road looked as uninviting as it has always done, and as it presumably always will, a depressing thoroughfare of fairly respectable poverty, down which the buses hurry, as if anxious to reach the more adventurous air of the river. The college was three terrace houses turned into one building, with the same peeling paint and smutted ledges as its neighbours.

In the basement where the evening classes were held, Virginia kept her coat on, for it was cold. She sat next to Mr Benberg, one of the older students, who wore a raincoat with the collar turned up. He had a long, grey face with weak eyes, and a recurring downward twitch to one side of his mouth, which interrupted any lifting of his expression and brought it back to bondage.

Mr Benberg worked during the day in an insurance office. He had no intention of trying to change it for a newspaper office, but he came down the Earl’s Court Road each night in pursuit of a secret dream of being the greatest writer in the world. He was not very good at the work. His efforts and failures to please Miss Thompson were tragic, although neither he nor she saw the tragedy.

Miss Thompson, with her acid jokes and her hair which looked like the dying foliage of an autumn plant, was talking tonight about newspaper make-up, and criticizing, as despairingly as any school-teacher, the homework of her grown-up class.

‘It is quite clear,’ she said, coming round from behind the high desk, which was a mistake, since her figure was better above the waist than below it, ‘it is quite clear that none of you, at this moment, is ready to make up the front page of a national daily.’

Her voice spelled sinus trouble. She finished her sentence with a high little hum at the back of her nose, and looked round for laughs. She got only one, from Bobby, a printer’s apprentice, who saw himself going all the way, like Lord Beaverbrook. He laughed at all Miss Thompson’s jokes, to show that he was following the trend, but the others merely sighed and waited for Miss Thompson to stop wasting time and get on with the business before the pubs were shut, or the last train left.

For their homework, the class had been given a selection of photographs and columns of newsprint with the headlines cut off, which they were to paste on to a large sheet of paper, as if making up the front page of a newspaper.

Mr Benberg did not change his expression when Miss Thompson, announcing that she would show the class a perfect example of how not to make up a newspaper, held up his page. Mr Benberg, who had been following the proceedings mildly, twitching his lip, and tapping his fingers to some rhythm in his head, continued to look mild while Miss Thompson tore the page to pieces, first figuratively and then actually, dropping the pieces into the wastepaper basket and dusting off her hands.

‘Never mind.’ Virginia reached over and patted Mr Benberg’s cold, dry hand. ‘I thought it was good.’

He turned his gentle eyes on her. ‘I didn’t. She was right, I dare say. It doesn’t matter.’ They were talking softly, under cover of Miss Thompson’s droned dictation about type faces, which Virginia had already taken down, and Mr Benberg did not care to.

Mr Benberg leaned closer to Virginia and whispered more tensely, like a conspirator coming to the crux of a plot: ‘It’s the words that count. Let someone else worry about how to print them. Words, words …’ He tapped a pencil on his knee, making little pock-marks in the grey flannel. ‘Words … springing alive out of your head, like Athene from the head of Zeus. Words … so insignificant on their own, so powerful when fused together by the miracle of man’s brain. Look here, Miss Martin, I tell you. There’s nothing in the world as romantic as words.’ His weak eyes were glistening. He twisted the pencil round in his hands as if he were tightening a tourniquet.

‘You really want to be a writer, don’t you?’ Virginia tried not to stare at the corner of his jumping mouth.

‘Want to be? I am one. In the bureau drawer at home, I’ve the manuscripts of twelve novels – unpublished, of course – and I’m half-way through my thirteenth now. Oh –’ he glanced round quickly at the scribbling class. ‘That’s a secret. No one knows, except my dear wife, of course. I shouldn’t have told you. I don’t why I did, but you’re – well, anyway, I don’t think you’ll betray me.’

‘Of course not.’ Virginia was puzzled. ‘Why do you come here?’

‘I’m looking for the clue. There must be something I’ve overlooked, or my books would be published. I thought I might find it here.’ Mr Benberg looked round anxiously, as if expecting to catch it lurking in a corner of the draughty basement.

*

At the college a few days later, jovial Mr Deems stopped Virginia in the corridor. ‘Greetings, my young friend, and congratulations,’ he said.

‘Oh, good. Have I won the Christmas hamper?’

‘Better yet. You have won, by your honest efforts, a two-weeks’ stint on the staff of the
Northgate Gazette
. Not a job, you understand. Just a part of your training. They oblige us – for favours returned, of course – but they oblige. Lovely people. You start today.’

‘Now?’

‘When else? You should be there now, my young friend.’ He looked at his watch, shook his fat wrist violently, glanced at it again, and scuttled away down the corridor like an egg with legs.

*

The lovely people lived two flights up above a bank on the corner of the High Street of Northgate, which is a western suburb of London. Its name is the only illogical thing about Northgate. In every other respect, it adheres logically to the
standards set for it by the other outer suburbs which jostle each other in a rough circle round the metropolis, joined to its mother-life by the umbilical cords of the underground railway. Virginia had seen its like many times before, and yet today as she walked from the station, it did not look familiar or dull. It looked like fresh and promising country, where anything might happen.

She was a reporter. She was The Press. Any moment now, something might happen, and she would be on the spot to get the story. Any one of these women, pushing their babies so arrogantly into the road under the very wheels of cars, might find herself knocked down, to reappear as a headline on the front page. ‘ACCIDENT ON PEDESTRIAN CROSSING. NORTHGATE WOMAN GRAVELY HURT. By Our Special Correspondent.’ Any one of these shops might yield a smash-and-grab raider, backing out of the door with pistol cocked, then running for his life, with Virginia after him. At any moment, a top window might fling up, and a woman’s head look out with a wild cry of: ‘Fire!’

The citizens of Northgate went calmly about their dull Monday-morning business, unaware that an ace reporter walked in their midst, waiting for them to make news.

Virginia climbed the two flights up to the offices of the
Northgate Gazette,
undaunted by the narrowness of the wooden stairway and the smell from the lavatory half-way up. This was a place where work came first and appearances second.

At the top of the stairs, a door with a pane of glass, opaque with dirt as well as frosting, said: ‘Inquiries’. Virginia stepped in. There was not far to step. Immediately in front of the door, a linoleum-covered counter ran from wall to wall, leaving a space only a few feet wide in which the inquirer could stand. You had to lean on the counter, or lean back against the wall. Virginia leaned on the counter. Opposite her, leaning on a table, was a fatigued girl with greasy hair and two cardigans thrown over her thin shoulders. On the wall at her side was a small switchboard, with a few wires lying on its edge, not plugged in anywhere.

She looked at Virginia without interest. Then she picked up a pencil and asked: ‘Small ad., dear?’

‘Oh, no,’ Virginia said. ‘I’ve come to work here. I’m from the Latimer College.’

‘Oh, one of those.’ The girl looked resigned. ‘You can go inside, I suppose.’ She jerked her head towards the door at her back, from behind which came the sound of a stumbling typewriter. ‘Lift the flap.’

Virginia looked at the counter. At one end, the solid front was cut away beneath a flap covered with the same mottled linoleum. At that moment the door to the back room opened, and a boorish young man in a muffler and heavy shoes clumped out, lifted the flap, ducked under, pushed past Virginia and went outside. The hole in the counter was apparently the only entrance to the offices of the
Northgate Gazette.
Bending her long back, Virginia went through it, hesitated at the farther door, glancing at the girl, then went through it and stood in the inner sanctum itself.

Rather, the outer sanctum, for within this room, boxed into a corner with plywood reaching three-quarters of the way to the ceiling, there was a dog-kennel of an office, with a door bearing the word Editor, and some disrespectful newspaper cartoons tacked on to it. The flimsy walls of the kennel were decorated with pencilled telephone numbers and memoranda. Up at the top, in black, indelible letters, someone had written: ‘What a lousy life!’

There was one long, littered table in the room, which was thick with the stale air of cigarette smoke and windows closed to keep the winter at bay. At the far side of the table, a stringy man with a woebegone face typed inexpertly, screwing up his eyes against the cigarette which dangled from his lip. At one end, a round-faced boy in round spectacles corrected galley proofs with impatient flicks of his pencil.

Virginia stood awkwardly, wondering whether two weeks would be enough to make her feel at home in this ungenial room. Where would she sit? There was only one empty chair, which must belong to the young man with big feet. The soft wood of the table was scarred with names and pictures inked and carved into it. She would write her name there, and in years hence, people would come to see the place where her career had started.

The stringy man looked up from his typewriter. ‘How did she get in here?’ he asked the boy.

‘Under the flap,’ Virginia said. ‘I’m from the Latimer College. I’m to work here for two weeks.’

‘Oh,’ said the man, going back to his typing, ‘one of those.’

‘You’d better see the old man,’ the boy said, more kindly. He nodded at the door with the cartoons.

‘What shall I – shall I just go in?’ Virginia was accustomed to the office of
Lady Beautiful
where it would be unforgivable, if not impossible, for any outsider to penetrate the phalanx of immaculate receptionists and secretaries, who guarded the elegant secrets of her mother’s office.

‘Sure,’ said the boy, in passable American. ‘Help yourself.’

Virginia opened the kennel door, which was very light, and opened with disconcerting speed. Inside, at a desk which took up most of the space, was a middle-aged man, with deep indigestion lines running from his bony nose to his mouth, and a long, shining bald head, with a pair of black-rimmed spectacles slung up on it.

‘I’m from the Latimer College.’ Virginia began her piece once more.

‘Oh,’ said the editor, crossing something out, ‘one of those.’

The lovely people did not seem glad to see her. Virginia wondered what could be the favours for which they so grudgingly obliged Mr Deems.