The Angel in the Corner

by Monica Dickens

  ‘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 In the bureau drawer at home, I’ve the manuscripts of twelve novels – unpublished, of course – and I’m half-way through my thirteenth now.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.

  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.