The Angel in the Corner (21 page)

‘She’s not so bad, compared to some of the landladies I’ve had. We’ll have to keep in with her in case we ever can’t pay the rent, but I hope she doesn’t come crashing down here every time we – where were we, Jin?’

‘In the kitchen. You were kissing me. Like this.’ She put her arms round his neck and kissed him lightly. ‘Not quite like that.’

‘Don’t, Joe. I want to hang out that white dress if I’m going to wear it tonight. Put that case on the bed for me, will you?’

He lifted the case, and opened it for her. Virginia came quickly across the room. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll do it.’ She shut down the lid so swiftly that she grazed the back of his hand.

‘What’s the matter? What’s in there that I can’t see?’

‘Nothing. What would there be? It’s just that it’s a mess. I packed in a hurry. I don’t want you to think your wife is untidy.’

She spoke quickly. She was covering something up. Well, let it go. He would find out what she was hiding. Perhaps it was a present for him, or the picture of some old boy-friend she couldn’t bear to leave behind. Old love letters. They would have some fun with those. After he had read them, he would scrounge some wood from Mollie, and they would light a fire, and have a ceremonial burning. The death of Virginia Martin. The birth of Joe Colonna’s wife, rising like Phoenix from the ashes.

Who said he couldn’t write a book? He would buy a typewriter next week. You could get one with only a small down payment.

*

What instinct had prompted Virginia not to tell Joe about Spenser’s wedding gift? When she had found the money at the flat, she did not think of hiding it from him. Then when she had seen Joe swinging the suitcases jauntily down the basement steps, so pleased with himself because he had given the taxi-driver a lordly tip out of the last small change in his pocket, Virginia had known that she would not tell him that he was carrying a bundle of five-pound notes.

Some instinct had warned her to be cautious, and after their disturbing talk in the kitchen, she was thankful that she had obeyed it. Even if he were going to write a book and make hundreds of pounds from it, as he believed, they would have to be careful, if he was not going to look for a job meanwhile.

The two of them could only just live on her earnings from the magazine. They must save the hundred pounds for emergencies, and Virginia did not think that Joe knew how to save.

She did not blame him for that. It was a part of his nature which he could not help, because it came from never having enough money. Poverty made one type of person over-cautious. The other type, Joe’s type, were made reckless by poverty. If money came to them, they wanted the immediate enjoyment of spending it without fear of what they would do when it was gone. They had been poor once; they could be poor again.

Virginia did not mind that Joe was like that. She had known it before she married him. She did not mind any more that he had given up his job at the club and was disinclined to look for another. Minding about it would not change him, so she had decided not to let herself mind, any more than she would let herself mind that he took it for granted that she would be glad to work for both of them.

She was glad to get back to the magazine office. She knew that as soon as she stepped into the splendid antechamber of
Lady Beautiful
, and was greeted with the full-lipped, toothy smiles of the girls who decorated it.

One of the girls was Nora, in a new poodle haircut and a cotton dress with a boned, pushed-up bodice. ‘Is it true you got married, Jinny?’ she asked at once.

‘How do you know?’

‘Didn’t you think it would be all round the office? What’s he like? We’re all dying of curiosity. Why didn’t you tell us about it?’

‘I didn’t know myself until just before it happened.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you were such a fast worker,’ Nora said admiringly. ‘Or else he was. What’s his name?’

‘Joe Colonna.’ Nora would have to know sooner or later.

‘Do I know him?’ Nora’s eyes were startled, but she affected not to recognize the name.

‘You ought to. You spent the evening at his flat. Oh – with me and Derek, of course.’ Virginia smiled. ‘But perhaps you and he never got as far as exchanging names.’

‘No.’ Nora patted her hair and spoke distantly. ‘No, I don’t recall that we did.’ She watched Virginia slyly, wondering how
much Virginia knew, and how much she minded about what she knew.

Virginia would have liked to say: ‘I know you spent the night there, but I’m prepared to forget it, if you are.’ However, even without the avid interest of the other two girls in the office, she could not say it to Nora. Nora’s immorality was conventional. She would think it the worst of taste. She would be more shocked at Virginia for saying it, than Virginia was shocked at Nora for having stayed with Joe.

‘Well,’ Nora said grudgingly, ‘congratulations, old kid. I hope you know what you’re doing. What are you doing here, for a start? I thought you’d chucked the job.’

‘Just another office rumour,’ Virginia said. ‘Of course I haven’t. People can get married and go on working, can’t they?’

‘Oh, surely, surely,’ Nora said. ‘Most of them have to these days, if they want to eat.’

Virginia said coldly: ‘I’m not starving, thank you. I just like working here.’

She pushed open the wide polished door, and walked down the passage past the office doors with their glimpses of activity, past the door through which, with any luck, she would soon be going in and out again, belonging as much as anyone.

She felt at home here. She had trained and worked for this. If only one of them was going to have a job, it was sensible that it should be her. She had a better chance than Joe. He did not seem to be trained for anything in particular. He had never stayed long enough in any one job to learn it properly. He could do many things sketchily, but none well. Perhaps writing would be his craft, and this book the stepping stone to achievement. She would do all she could to encourage and help him.

Miss Adelaide Small, the editor who had replaced Virginia’s mother, was a dry, business-like woman who wasted no words, and no sympathy on anyone who made a mistake. She told people what she thought of them concisely, whether what she thought was good or bad. The staff much preferred this to Helen’s elaborate speeches, which had wasted their time, and had come in the end to the same thing as Miss Small’s brisk pronouncements. Either you were right, or you were wrong.

‘So you want your job back?’ she shot at Virginia, as soon as
Grace had closed the door by her usual scrupulous method of hanging on to the handle on the other side, so that not even the click of the lock should disturb the editorial muse. ‘Well, you can’t have it. Frances is in your place on editorial. I’ve been waiting for a chance to move her up.’

‘Oh.’ Virginia stood before the great desk, feeling like a schoolgirl at the mercy of a headmistress. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Small. I know I shouldn’t have gone off like that without even coming to explain.’

‘You left a lot of work unfinished, if you remember.’ Miss Small’s handsome face was not stern. It was merely impassive, as if it were too well-organized to betray her thoughts by any change of expression.

‘I know. I’m sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t even ask you to let me come back. I’ll understand if you haven’t a place for me.’

‘Who said I hadn’t? Don’t put words into my mouth, Virginia. It’s a bad habit. It sometimes makes people change their minds about being nice.’

Virginia said nothing. Miss Small studied her for a few moments. Then she tightened her mouth into her controlled version of a smile, and said: ‘So you ran away to get married.’

‘I got married, yes, but I didn’t run away,’ Virginia said quickly. There was no reason why anyone at the office should know that.

‘Yes, you did. I’m not criticizing you. It’s none of my business. That’s what I told your mother when she wanted to waste my time discussing it over the telephone.’

‘My mother rang you up?’

‘Last Friday morning. She wanted to know if I knew where you were. I told her that I presumed you were on your honeymoon, in which case it was immaterial where you were. The poor woman had some wild idea of rescuing you “before it was too late”. I don’t remember her exact words, but it was all depressingly reminiscent of the kind of women’s magazines that used to be published before things like L.B. were thought of.’

‘How could she tell you all that? She hardly knows you.’

‘Had to tell someone, I suppose. You know what women are,’ Miss Small said, as if she were discussing another sex. ‘I had to call Grace on the other phone, and ask her to cut in with a long-distance
call. Callous, but after all, I am your editor, not your spiritual mentor.’

‘You mean you were my editor.’

‘No, no.’ Adelaide Small’s face crumpled into kindness, the lines deeply etched. ‘Don’t be so proud. I’ll take you on again. I like your work. You can’t have your old job,’ her face was once more business-like, ‘but I’ll fit you in under the beauty editor. She’s short of assistants. I take it your mother has gone to America, or you wouldn’t be in London.’

‘Yes. I called the airport. She must have left soon after she talked to you.’

‘Then I have not lived in vain,’ Miss Small said with satisfaction. ‘I told her to go. You were married by that time, so I told her not to make a fool of herself, but to go and get on with her own marriage, and leave yours alone.’

‘Oh, poor Helen. She doesn’t like to be talked to like that.’ Virginia thought that her mother must have been very desperate even to have listened to that kind of talk. Normally, if anyone told her that she was wrong, she either walked out of the room, or hung up the telephone.

‘I don’t care if she likes it or not. Excuse me, it’s your mother, of course. But if I got involved in the private lives of all my staff, I should be greyer than I am already, which would make me snow white. Well –’ she slapped a note-pad down on the desk, and stood up, needle thin in her dark linen suit. ‘Do you want to work with Jane Stuart, or don’t you?’

‘Of course I do. I can’t thank you enough for giving me another job.’

‘You’ll need it,’ Miss Small said grimly, ‘if your husband is as feckless as your mother says he is.’

‘How can she say that? She doesn’t even know him. He’s wonderful, Miss Small, and –’

‘They all say that.’

‘And,’ pursued Virginia, who was determined to say this, ‘I’m not working because I have to, but because I want to.’

‘Mm-hm.’ Adelaide Small accepted this without cynicism or disbelief. ‘Go and explain yourself to Jane. I have another appointment.’

As Virginia went to the door, Miss Small called after her:

‘That’s a nasty bruise on your arm, Virginia. You ought to put some witch-hazel on it.’

Virginia looked down at the discoloured marks of Joe’s hand which showed on her upper arm below the short sleeve of her dress.

‘I knocked it,’ she said.

‘I didn’t ask you how you did it. I said look after it. If it swells, you won’t be able to type.’

*

Virginia wore long sleeves to work until the bruise had faded. If anyone but Miss Small had noticed it, it would be all round the office that her husband was knocking her about. The unmarried girls were jealous of the ones who were married, and lost no opportunity for gossip. If you listened to them, you could hardly believe that there was a married woman on the staff who was not on the verge of divorce.

Jane Stuart actually was on the verge. She was separated from her husband, a commercial artist working at home, who resented her being out of the house all day on affairs of her own. Jane dreaded the domestic rut, and would not give up her career. According to office legend, there had been a furious battle, in the course of which Mr Stuart had said: ‘You can choose between me and the job.’ Jane had chosen the job.

She did not appear to regret the choice. She was supremely happy with her beauty page, and her readers’ letters, and her little excursions to salons and shops to find out what was new in the entrancing business of making women feel that they looked better than they did.

She passed on the news in phrases of ardent sincerity to her readers, who believed, with each new discovery, that they were going to be transformed into raving beauties overnight. When they were not, they did not abandon hope. They took notepaper, and confided to Jane Stuart all the problems of pimples, pallor, broken veins, big noses, small eyes, lank hair, and peeling finger-nails that were burdening their lives.

Virginia’s job was to read the letters, and make a preliminary decision on which should be answered by mail, and which were of enough interest to other readers to be answered in the magazine
itself. After a week with the letters, she began to wonder if there was a woman in the land whose life was not made hideous by some physical defect. Like a doctor who begins to imagine that he suffers from the diseases of his patients, Virginia found herself searching in the mirror to see whether she had whiteheads or blackheads or swollen ear lobes, or a lipstick that turned blue in the evening.

She worked on the letters in the mornings. In the afternoons, she took down Miss Stuart’s dictated answers. If the beauty editor had given as much care to her marriage as she did to her readers’ complexions, she would not now be working towards a lonely middle age. Her dictation was as conscientious as if she were giving advice on how to invest thousands of pounds, and she would often keep Virginia working late to answer the letters with the religious fidelity she considered was due to the readers for their belief in her.

‘They trust me,’ she would say. ‘It’s a great responsibility. If I told them to shave their heads and put bacon fat on their faces at night, I believe they would do it. Come, Virginia, I know it’s long after six, but we must put this poor lady in Tunbridge Wells out of her misery. How would you feel if you were waiting to be told how to close your open pores? You wouldn’t want to wait another day for an answer just because the typist was newly married and wanted to hurry home. I’ll make up your time another day,’ she would say, adjusting her spectacles, whose frames were decorated with gilt whorls, and which she took off and put on a hundred times a day, making as much play with them as a barrister in court.