The Angel in the Corner (6 page)

‘I shall have to buy boots,’ Helen said absently. ‘Grey suede this year, I think. And I do understand, even if I am your mother. I know you’ve always thought that you could do anything you turned your hand to, and mostly you could. Rather sickeningly successful. I’ll admit to you now, Jinny, though I held my peace at the time, that it used quite to embarrass me with the other mothers on Speech Day at the school, that in anything at which you’d happened to try, you came out top. Look how you won the tennis tournament, although you had taken up tennis long after most of the other girls. Well, he who exalteth himself shall be humbled, somebody said somewhere.’

‘Oh, Helen.
Christ
said it.’

‘I know, I know. Don’t always talk to me as if I were a heathen, just because old Tiny pumped you full of sentimental twaddle when you were at an impressionable age.
My
God, I’m thankful to say, is not to be found in hymn singing and pretty pictures. My God is in the air around me, the streets, the sky, the open fields. I like to think that my religion is in the life I lead,’ she said simply, pleased with the phrase.

‘That’s the sort of facile thing everyone says who can’t be bothered to go to church,’ Virginia said. ‘You didn’t bother to bring me up to believe in religion, and now I haven’t got any. I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t know where to start. I just know the things that Tiny told me, about angels, and Now I lay me down to sleep. They’re childish, but at least she made me believe in them.’

‘There is no need to get bitter with me,’ Helen said, ‘just because you’re disappointed with yourself today. You’re not often disappointed, I must say, but you’ve found out now what it is to fail at something, and I have no doubt the experience will be a salutary lesson for you.’

‘Please don’t preach at me,’ Virginia said. ‘I came home to get some help.’

‘No, you didn’t, because you didn’t think I would be here, you came to get a sandwich,’ Helen said triumphantly. She
went back to her desk, lifted and shook her hand to run the bracelets up her arm, and began to write again.

‘I’m going down to the college,’ Virginia said. ‘Don’t wait supper for me. Or are you going out?’

‘Yes, I’m going out,’ Helen said without looking round. ‘And don’t ask me with whom, because I shan’t tell you. I have a new boy-friend.’

Could it be Felix? Oh, the rat. But presumably it could be. He might have decided that there were choicer pickings to be had from ripe fruit. The back of Helen’s head, and the clipped nape of her neck looked very smug.

It was the last evening class of the course. Virginia did not have to attend it, and the Latimer College seemed trivial and useless now that she had been in and out of a newspaper job; but some mulish element in her dejection forced her to make the worst of a bad day.

Before the class was over, she was disconcerted to find that the heaviness on her chest was moving into her throat, up through her face, and trying to squeeze itself out of her eyes in tears. She stared at Miss Thompson, and Miss Thompson wavered and blurred. Virginia hardly ever cried. She had found that by straining her eyes wide open and thinking of something else, she could usually avoid it. It did not work now. A tear spilled out of her eye, and slid down her cheek. She turned her face quickly away from Mr Benberg, sought for a handkerchief, found none, and had to use the back of her hand.

After the class was over, the students said farewell to Miss Thompson and to each other, with the illusory regret of people who have been brought together by chance, and are not likely to see each other again. As Virginia walked despondently along the dark passage that led to the basement stairs, there was a touch on her sleeve. It was Mr Benberg, in a bright bue belted overcoat, multi-coloured woollen gloves, and a limp-brimmed hat turned down all the way round.

Forgive me,’ he said. ‘We’ve said good-bye, I know, and you’re anxious to be away, but I had to say – well – you were crying in there.’

‘No. Yes, I was.’ She hoped that his kindly look would not make her cry again.

‘What’s wrong?.’ He matched his step to hers as they went down the long passage, which smelled of unwashed floor and wet raincoats.

‘Everything. I did everything wrong today, and they threw me out of the newspaper office.’

She thought that he would tell her that there were other fish in the sea, but he seemed to understand. ‘Going back to your mother?’ he asked.

‘No, she’s out.’

‘People shouldn’t be alone when they feel low. Don’t go home. Come back with me, do please, and have something to eat, and meet my wife. I’ve told her so much about you.’

‘That’s very kind of you, but I –’ Virginia began. Then she changed her mind. Her own company was dreary at the moment. The company of Mr and Mrs Benberg was not likely to be stimulating, but perhaps it was better than being alone.

*

Mrs Benberg had a steak and kidney pudding waiting in its steaming cloth, and there was enough for Virginia, and still some left over for the small brown dog which lay on the ledge under the table.

‘Disappointment doesn’t take the edge off your appetite, I’m glad to see,’ Mrs Benberg observed, slicing treacle tart. She served it with flourishes and large gestures. She was a big woman, bigger both in height and breadth than her husband, and everything she did and said was expansive, and a little wild. Her hair was wild, like a frayed rope, and pins scattered out of it when she energetically nodded or shook her head. Her clothes were strange and disordered, as if she had put her hands into drawers with her eyes closed, and put on whatever came out in a dark room.

Mr Benberg was entirely and happily dependent on her. She undressed him like a baby, stirred his tea, and put salt and pepper on his plate for him. He was a quiet man, surrounded and washed over by his wife’s vitality, like a stone in a torrent. He did not mind. He appeared content to be submerged beneath a personality that was livelier and noisier than his. Anxious at
first about Virginia’s visit, his lip twitched more than usual, but as the meal progressed, and Virginia’s smile returned, the spasms came less frequently, and his mouth settled to rest.

In the little dining-room, stuffed full of furniture, books, old magazines, and curly china ornaments, Mrs Benberg charged the air like a dynamo. Everything except Mr Benberg was abundant, like herself. The food was bounteous, overflowing the dishes and the plates on to which she piled it. Thick slices of bread tumbled off the board, and the crammed fruit dish spilled grapes and nuts on to the tablecloth. The monstrous, overgrown plants, which stood in every corner, were bursting out of their pots with the energy they drew from Mrs Benberg through the watering-can.

Virginia began to feel better before she was half-way through the rich steak and kidney pudding. Mr Benberg was so cordial, with his long, mild face and his nervous mouth. Mrs Benberg was so welcoming and enthusiastic, and so crazily affectionate, jumping up at unexpected moments to plant a smacking kiss upon Virginia, and tell her that she was a great girl. ‘Top hole, oh, absolutely the tops,’ she cried, loosely slangy. ‘If only Jim were here, eh, Father?’

Jim, in the uniform of an officer in the Merchant Navy, looked down at them cheerily from an embossed silver frame on the dresser. He looked nothing like his father. The exuberant blood of Mrs Benberg coursed in his veins. His cheeks were bursting with rude health, his eyes twinkled, and his hair sprang up from his head as if all the brilliantine in the world would never tame it. His mother kissed the picture wetly after she had shown it to Virginia, and then kissed Mr Benberg, to show that there was no favouritism.

‘Feeling better, aren’t you, love?’ she said, watching Virginia grow more relaxed, watching, it almost seemed, with her bright, erratic eyes, the thoughts in Virginia’s head clearing and sorting themselves out, and casting away the depression.

‘You had a bad time today,’ Mrs Benberg said, pouring strong, dark tea from a fat teapot into outsize cups. ‘But it’s nothing to fret over. A lovely young girl like you – why should you worry about such a potty concern? To the devil with them, I say. Who cares for the
Northgate Gazette
?’ She waved the
teapot over her head like a banner, sprinkling brown drops on her hair, and Mr Benberg called out thinly: ‘Hurray!’

‘You’re destined for higher things than that,’ Mrs Benberg said, dumping the teapot, and suddenly drawing her thick brows darkly down so that her eyes were glittering slits. ‘Don’t argue with me. I’m prophetic. I see these things, don’t I, Father? I see great things for you, love, money, success, fame –’

‘A tall, dark stranger?’ Virginia laughed, realizing that she had not laughed all day.

‘Ah,’ said Mrs Benberg, ‘that we don’t know. Sex is the great mystery of life. Even the prophetic eye can’t always fathom it out. However, drink up your tea, and let’s have a look at the shape of the leaves.’

‘I
know where I’m going,’
she sang, in a rowdy, cracked voice, as she stared into Virginia’s half-pint cup.
‘And I know who’s going with me
– Not a thing. I must be off form tonight.’ She got up suddenly, scattering hairpins and paper napkins. I
know who I love, but the dear knows who I’ll marry.’
She sang gaily to herself as she swept out to the kitchen with a pile of toppling plates.

She continued to sing raucously in the kitchen, running gallons of scalding water into the sink, and making mountains of suds, while Virginia went with Mr Benberg to look at his manuscripts. The house was very small, but one of the ground-floor rooms had been dedicated for use as Mr Benberg’s study. Mrs Benberg was just as earnest about his writing as he was, and equally convinced that he would one day be acknowledged as the greatest writer in the world.

There was a fine desk in the study, an expensive typewriter, and a literary-looking chair with a leather seat and brass studs, which Mrs Benberg had given her husband on his last birthday. The rest of the space was taken up by a gigantic wardrobe, which housed camphor-laden clothes at the top, and the neat stacks of manuscripts in the bottom drawer.

‘Here they are,’ Mr Benberg said, a slight croon coming into his voice, as he opened the drawer and reverently handled the thick piles of typescript, tied with pink tape from the insurance office.

He took one pile out, and cradled it, smiling. ‘All these
words,’ he said. ‘All my nights and nights of words, taking meaning, taking shape, growing and flowering to fulfilment. Here it is.’ He held the manuscript a little away from him and beamed at it. ‘It does me good just to look at it.’

‘Have you really got twelve books in there?’

‘I have. Twelve finished novels, which the world has never seen.’

‘Some day,’ Mrs Benberg appeared suddenly in the doorway, with a dish-towel round her waist and her arms covered in suds to the elbow, ‘some day the world will know and acclaim, and then you, Virginia, will be able to say: “I knew him before you did. I saw his works in manuscript,” and people will shake you by the hand. Go on, read a little. Father won’t mind.’

Mr Benberg put the bundle of pages down on the desk, and Virginia sat down and began to read, while the Benbergs stood by, he clasping his hands and watching her closely, she wiping a plate round and round with a sodden cloth.

At first, Virginia’s eye was caught by the beauty of the words in which Mr Benberg had framed his immortal thoughts. The phrases were lyrical, the choice of words romantic.

‘But this is lovely!’ she said, looking up at the end of the first page. ‘It’s beautiful writing. Surely someone would want to publish this.’

Mrs Benberg put her wet arm round her husband’s waist, and they stood there, nodding and smiling and watching Virginia confidently. She had read several pages before she realized that she had no idea what the book was about. Thinking that she had been inattentive, she went back and read some of the paragraphs again, but they still conveyed nothing. She had read some half dozen pages without grasping anything. There was nothing to grasp. The whole thing was meaningless. It was merely a florid collection of lyrical phrases and bell-like words, woven together lovingly, but with no thought for their meaning. There were no characters in the book, and no recognizable scene or incident. It was just, as Mr Benberg had said, words. Words carefully set down for the sheer joy of the individual sound of each one, but with no sense in the juxtaposition of one to the other. It was not difficult to understand why no one would publish Mr Benberg’s books.

She looked up. ‘What did I tell you?’ Mrs Benberg crowed. ‘Isn’t it staggering?’

‘Yes,’ Virginia said. ‘Yes, it certainly is. I – I am quite stunned.’ She was at a loss what to say, but this seemed to satisfy them They were not asking for her opinion. They were merely expecting her to confirm theirs. Mr Benberg straightened the pages, retied the tape, and put the bundle tenderly back among its baffling fellows in the drawer.

They went into the sitting-room, and drank cherry brandy in tumblers before a blazing fire. Jim stood on the mantelpiece in a tortoiseshell frame, beaming on his parents. How happy they were! Mr Benberg with his kindliness, and the beloved illusion that brought him such joy night after night as he typed his beautiful nonsense, Mrs Benberg with her great moonstruck heart, and her magnificent zest for life.

Virginia was happy too, sitting there untroubled and warm, with the two of them so generously glad to have her. Strangely, although Mr Benberg was only an ineffectual dreamer, and Mrs Benberg seemed at times as mad as a hatter, they had managed to give her the help she had looked for in vain from her mother. Mrs Benberg’s enthusiasm was catching. Her optimism restored Virginia’s belief in herself and enabled her to see the day’s setback as a mere stumble on a staircase that she was bound to ascend.

Mrs Benberg raised her glass. The cherry brandy was touched with points of fire from the flames in the roaring grate. ‘A toast!’ she cried. ‘To your health, Virginia, and jolly good luck to you!’ She threw back her untidy head, tossed down the brandy, gasped in satisfaction, then settled back in her chair and suddenly picked up a length of orange wool from the table beside her and began to knit furiously.