The Angel in the Corner (3 page)

Then the editor looked up at her and smiled. It was a difficult smile, as if the muscles of his face rebelled against it, and Virginia was grateful that he had achieved it for her. Because he was a newspaper editor, and he was to be her employer for two weeks, and he had smiled encouragingly at her, she felt a rush of admiration for him, and pledged herself to please him.

‘Well, I’m sorry, Alice,’ the editor said quite pleasantly. ‘There’s nothing for you today. We go to press on Fridays, so things haven’t begun to warm up round here yet.’

Virginia felt blank with anticlimax. All she could think of to say was: ‘My name’s not Alice. It’s Virginia. Virginia Martin.’

‘No doubt it is,’ said the editor. ‘I call them all Alice. It saves remembering a new name each time. Come back tomorrow. You can make the Bovril, or something.’

‘But I –’

‘I told you.’ He began to be less pleasant. ‘There’s nothing for you today.’

Virginia went into the other room. The feeble lock on the door did not close properly, and the voice from the kennel yelled: ‘Shut that flaming door!’

She looked at the clock, from which a wire was looped into the ceiling light along with another wire from a lamp, in a perilous arrangement of plugs and knotted cords. It was only eleven o’clock. The important day had fallen away to nothing before it even began.

*

The entrance to the offices of
Lady Beautiful
was designed to impress. Thick carpets, pale polished woodwork, a faint aura of perfume, and an assortment of glossy girls in sweaters combined to give the impression that life was in truth the easy and glamorous thing that the stories and articles in the magazine would have its readers believe. The reception-room was like the cover of
Lady Beautiful
, a lovely and shining thing designed to attract the eye and dispose the mind in favour of what lay beyond.

Virginia nodded to those of the girls she knew – they were always changing in the reception-room – and walked through the wide satiny door to what lay beyond. The carpeted corridor continued to breathe elegance and success, but Virginia knew that if she were to open any of the doors on either side, it would be like passing from a grand restaurant through the swing-door into the kitchen. As the doors opened and shut to the comings and goings of men and women, most of whom smiled at Virginia, she could see the desks and typewriters and filing-cabinets and drawing-boards, and ceiling-high piles of back issues of the magazine. She longed for the day when she would be behind one of those doors, sitting at one of those desks, using one of those constantly-ringing telephones.

It was not that Virginia had a consuming passion to work on a women’s magazine. She had set her sights on it because there was a chance for her in this place, and she might as well succeed here as anywhere else. Her lively ambition was catholic in its
aims. If something other than journalism had come her way, she would have grasped it with the same eagerness. It did not matter where she succeeded in life, as long as she did succeed, and in her young arrogance, she knew that she would. She had luck. Things went well for her, just as Tiny had always said that they would; only Tiny had not called it luck. She had said it was the angel.

Her mother’s secretary greeted her in the neat little office which guarded the door to what the staff called the throne room. Grace was a smooth, discreet girl, unobtrusive in her efficiency. Virginia wondered whether she ever let herself go at home, and said wild and foolish things and went without her girdle. When she saw her in the office, she was always correct, from her parting to her rubber heel-tips, never speaking a word out of place, unruffled by crisis or triumph, accepting with the same half-smile both Helen’s splashes of twinkling
camaraderie
and irritable flings of temperament.

She picked up the telephone. ‘Virginia is here. May she come in, Mrs Martin?’ she asked, in her voice which could not help being tactful, even when there was nothing to be tactful about. Virginia could hear her mother replying at voluble length.

‘She says Yes.’ Grace replaced the receiver with a slight, well-bred smile.

The throne room was as large as the reception-room, and quite as exquisite. Armchairs and a sofa stood at tastefully planned angles on the carpet, as if it were a drawing-room. The curtains were off-white, tasselled with gold, and on the walls hung lavishly-framed reproductions of the classic paintings of beautiful women.

Helen’s desk, a sarcophagus of carved and moulded walnut, stood in the exact centre of the carpet, with a padded swivel-chair, from which Helen could see and be seen by anyone anywhere in the room. She had picked up a telephone as soon as she finished talking to Grace, and Virginia wondered whether it was so that she could wave her daughter to a chair with the gesture of a gracious, but busy woman. There were two other women in the room, with notebooks on their knees. It was evidently a conference, which was what any conversation between more than two people was called.

‘Do that, Robert darling,’ her mother said into the telephone. ‘A million thanks. I am in your debt for ever.’ She rang off, and swivelled round with a push of her thickset legs to where Virginia sat on the ledge above the radiator. ‘What can I do for you, dear heart,’ she said, slipping into the affectionate mother-and-daughter relationship, as if it were a
peignoir
. She could just as easily slip it off.

‘I came to see if you would take me to lunch.’

‘Lunch? My dearest child, I’m much too busy. Marigold and Judy and I have barely broken the back of the knitting pages.’

Judy, the elder of the two women, stood up, honest and square, and so unrelievedly plain that it was a miracle she had ever been taken on to
Lady Beautiful
. However, Virginia knew that she was more use there than a dozen of the fetching girls whom her mother hailed as geniuses one week and fired the next.

‘We can finish this afternoon,’ she said, wanting lunch herself. ‘There’s plenty of time.’

Helen frowned, as Judy and Marigold moved towards the door. She did not like her staff to leave the room until she dismissed them.

‘Please come,’ Virginia said. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve got a job.’ She had not meant to say it here in front of the others, who would exclaim, and want to hear more; but, as often happened, she had blundered into telling something she had planned to recount in a quiet moment, over a corner table, with all her words for it prepared.

As she feared, the two women stopped on their way to the door. They knew and liked Virginia well enough to be interested in what she did. ‘A job!’ Marigold said. ‘How exciting. What is it – on a paper?’

‘Yes. Well, not exactly. At least, it’s on a paper, but it’s not a job really, just part of the college training.’

‘What a good idea,’ Marigold said, her clever face crinkled into an encouraging smile. ‘What’s the paper?’

‘Well,’ Virginia knew how the words were going to sound and be received in this pretentious room, ‘it’s called the
Northgate Gazette.’

‘The
Northgate Gazette.’
Her mother cocked her head as if she had not heard aright, and sounded out the words as if they were a foreign language. ‘That sounds quite enchanting. Tell us more. Stand still, Jinny, and don’t fidget about the room. Tell us about it. First, what is Northgate?’ She put inverted commas round the name, as if it were a word Virginia had made up.

Virginia glanced at the others. ‘It’s a suburb. One of the outer suburbs.’

Seeing Helen’s critically-raised eyebrows, Judy wanted to say something that would enable her indirectly to oppose Helen. ‘That’s grand for you, Jinny,’ she said, clasping her notebook to her wide chest. ‘It will be a wonderful experience. You’re reporting for them, is that it? What’s their circulation? Some of these local papers have a huge readership.’

‘This isn’t very big, I don’t think,’ Virginia admitted, ‘judging from the size of the staff.’ She had to be honest with Judy, but when she saw the amused look on her mother’s face she began to exaggerate stubbornly, until the
Northgate Gazette
began to look like a rival to the
Manchester Guardian
.

Helen was neither deceived nor impressed. ‘A job is a job, I suppose,’ she said. ‘It will keep you in nylons, at least. What are they paying you?’

‘I told you, it’s only part of the training. They don’t pay anything.’

‘
I
see.’ Helen’s patronizing lilt closed the subject. When they went out to lunch Helen did not ask any more about the
Northgate Gazette
, and Virginia did not want to talk about it.

*

Later that day, as Virginia turned into the archway at the entrance to the mews, a man turned into it from the opposite direction. He was wearing a black overcoat and a new black hat, which had not yet accommodated itself to his small head. It was the man she had met the other night, the doctor who had stopped working on his car to look at her.

‘Hullo.’ His face had been set, as if he were thinking while he walked, but it dissolved into a smile when he saw her. ‘Going home?’

‘Yes.’

‘So am I.’

They could think of nothing more to say until they reached his doorway. He did not immediately take out his key, and she thought that he was trying to think of something to say to detain her.

‘Do you have a job?’ he asked. ‘I mean, are you on your way home from work?’

Virginia told him briefly about the college and the
Northgate Gazette
. He had tolerant brown eyes and a slightly crooked mouth, which tipped his whole face a little to one side when he smiled. She thought that he might be quite good-looking without the overbearing hat, which sat too low on his head, with the brim too straight, like the hat of a wooden figure from Noah’s Ark.

‘So you got your first job today,’ the doctor said. ‘Don’t you think this calls for a celebration? Would you – no, darn it, there’s Robert. I was going to ask you if you would come up and have a drink, but the chap I live with is working on a paper. We’ve only got one room, and he can’t bear it if I ask people in.’

‘Come up to our flat then,’ Virginia said. Why not? Helen would not mind. She never minded seeing a personable man.

Panting a little to keep up the pace which was Virginia’s normal rate of going upstairs, the man told her that his name was Felix Allen, and emboldened by talking to her swiftly-climbing back, he added breathlessly that he had hoped he would see her again after the other night.

When they went into the flat, and he took off his coat and hat and sat rather gracefully on the sofa in his well-fitting striped doctor’s suit, she saw that he was indeed quite attractive in an unsensational way. His hair was educated by good barbering, and he looked very clean. His crooked smile gave his face a slightly whimsical air, which made the things he said seem more witty than they were.

Virginia guessed that he was neither whimsical or witty, but really quite earnest. He had a quiet, deep voice, which must work wonders with his female patients. She imagined him sitting at bedsides and soothing neurotic women out of thinking
that they were going to die, until their bulging eyes relaxed into dog-like devotion, and they murmured that they did not know where they would be without him.

Helen had not come home yet. The front door of the flat opened directly into the living-room, and when she entered in a flurry of furs, with a cross, tired face, she halted at the sight of Virginia and the nice-looking man and the cocktail glasses, and changed her expression swiftly to charmed surprise.

‘This is a neighbour of ours,’ Virginia said. ‘Doctor Allen.’

‘A doctor. Well, well.’ Helen sounded as if that were the one kind of man she wanted to see. She let her gloved hand linger in his for a moment. ‘How strange that we haven’t met before.’

‘I’ve only just come to live here,’ he said. ‘I met your daughter the other night. I beg your pardon. Have I made a mistake? Is it your daughter?’ He favoured Helen with his quizzical smile, and leaned a little forward, as if to see better. ‘You look more like sisters.’

Virginia wanted to run to a mirror to assure herself that this was not true. Was he being automatically suave, or did he really want to pay her mother a compliment? She bit at a nail. Damn Helen and the unaccountable way she had of making men say things like that.

Helen took off her hat, patted her smooth cap of hair, in which the grey streak was cunningly arranged to look as if she rather than nature intended it, and announced that she had had a desperate day and was exhausted.

Virginia went to pour her mother a drink, but Felix was there before her. They talked for a while. Helen did most of the talking, occasionally bringing Virginia into the conversation deliberately, as if she were the odd man out at the party.

She told Felix, as Virginia knew she would, that it was always fascinating to meet a doctor, because you felt that he knew so much about you. Virginia had heard her say this before to doctors, and had watched the variously baffled ways with which they dealt with it.

Felix did not attempt to deal with it. He sat looking quiet and friendly. Helen asked him what was his particular line, and when he said it was gynaecology, her eyes took on the glazed,
Narcissus look with which women recognize an opportunity to talk about their insides.

Terrified that she was going to tell him about her fallopian tubes, Virginia got up and created a diversion with the cocktail shaker.

‘I’ve had three,’ Felix said. ‘I think I need something to eat How about letting me take you out to dinner?’

He was looking directly at Virginia, who was standing over him with the shaker, but a cadence of chunky bracelets from the chair behind made her involuntarily look over her shoulder, and Felix took this as a reminder that his invitation should include Helen. Or had he meant to ask her anyway? Hearing Helen’s feigned: ‘Oh, you don’t want to take me,’ and his gallant assurance that he did, Virginia felt disgustedly young. She vowed that she would have nothing more to do with men in their middle thirties until Helen was old enough to have given up the struggle.