The Angel in the Corner

by Monica Dickens

  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.

  Felix, who appeared to be fairly sophisticated, took them to a club in Knightsbridge, where the only illumination was from candles on the tables and the intermittent flames of crêpes suzettes. There was a three-piece, dark-skinned orchestra and a handkerchief of dance floor. After the smoked salmon, Felix danced with Virginia. She was disappointed to find that she was a little too tall for him, and wished that she had not been so foolish as to change her working shoes for high heels before they came out. When he danced with Helen after the tournedos rossini, their heads were at the right levels. Helen talked excessively to him all through the dance, but he smiled, and did not seem to mind. Virginia finished her glass of wine, and then drank up her mother’s, since the waiter did not come to pour her any more.

  Tackling, with a forced smile, the difficult feat of trying to look as if you are having a good time when you are sitting alone, she watched Helen moving slowly in Felix’s arms among the other couples, and tried to imagine what she was talking about with so many little flicks of her head and circular waves of the hand that lay on his pin-stripe shoulder. What did a mother talk about to a man who was really her daughter’s friend? Was she talking like a mother, discussing Virginia fondly, and being a little maternal with Felix, so as to draw him into the family? Not a chance. Helen was having a good time. She looked like a woman dancing with a man, not like a mother dancing with her daughter’s boy-friend.

  Could Helen be her mother? She was so restless that it was impossible to imagine her ever being in such a bovine state as pregnancy. Virginia looked at her dispassionately, appraising the well-kept figure and the square face, whose ageing skin and captious lines were successfully disguised by candlelight under the careful make-up. Out of doors, in daylight, cosmetics could not do much more for Helen. It would not be very long before even kind lighting would be too cruel to mask the legacy of the discontented years.

  Virginia tried to imagine how Felix felt. She remembered from childhood the odd feeling of being jammed up against the firmly-bouncing bosom of the dance mistress. Dancing with Helen would feel like that. Virginia imagined herself as Felix, and felt the supported, rubbery resilience pressed against her chest. But of course it would not feel revolting to him. It would feel pleasant. That was why men held you closely when they were dancing, so that even though they were comparative strangers, they could experience, with perfect propriety, a sensation normally reserved for intimates.

  That was why Felix held Helen so close; closer, it seemed to Virginia, peering through the candle shadows, than he had held Helen’s daughter when they danced. Or was Helen holding him? Virginia knew that ever since her father had walked out, her mother had been looking for a man, had found several temporary ones, and at forty-eight, had not yet abandoned the search.

  Back at the table, Felix talked with impartial politeness to Virginia and her mother. In the taxi going home, he sat on the little seat opposite them with his knees discreetly drawn away, and spent most of the journey with his head turned to the window, watching the streets.

  They stood on the cobbles outside the entrance to the flat. The ping of the taxi meter and the small rattle of its engine sounded very loud in the deserted mews.

  ‘I hope I’ll see you again before too long,’ Felix said.

  Virginia opened her mouth to answer, but Helen said quickly: ‘Of course. Please do feel free to come up to the flat whenever your industrious friend turns you out. Thank you so much for a very charming evening. It was extraordinarily kind of you. The club is delightful, and you were the best of hosts.’

  When her mother had finished being debonair, Virginia tried to express her thanks, but Helen had used up all the phrases.

  ‘It’s for me to thank you,’ Felix said. ‘You were good to come out with me. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed myself so much.’

  He lifted the unbecoming hat to the two of them standing in the doorway. Which one was he looking at – Virginia or Helen?

  *

  ‘A nice evening, didn’t you think?’ Helen said the next morning, when Virginia brought the tray to her bed.

  ‘Yes, it was all right.’

  ‘A charming man, I thought, and clever too. Did you know he was on the staff at Westminster? They don’t give those posts to just anybody, though one might be forgiven for thinking that they did, judging by the treatment one gets in some hospitals.’ She slit an envelope with her little brass paper-cutter. ‘Of course, he’s much too old for you.’ She said it in a detached, superior way, as if it were indisputable.

  Virginia put her hands in her coat pockets and stuck her head forward. ‘Maybe. But he’s much too young for you,’ she said.

  Helen looked up. The hair-net and lack of make-up gave her a peeled look. ‘But, dear heart,’ she said, refusing to take offence, ‘don’t
be absurd. As if I would dream … He’s your boy-friend, I thought.’

  ‘He’s no one’s boy-friend,’ Virginia said abruptly, going to the door,. ‘I’ll probably never see him again.’

  The first person she saw in the mews was Felix, getting out his car. It was a new but sober car, prosperous enough for a successful young specialist, but not as dashing as it could have been if he was going to spend that much money.

  It was a raw, grey morning. The cracks between the cobble-stones were puttied with dirty ice, and in the sharp wind, Felix’s face looked small and pinched under the mushroom of a hat. When he offered to drive Virginia to the station, she said that she wanted to walk. He stepped forward to persuade her, but she went quickly away from him, her heels ringing on the frosty cobbles. It was too cold to bother with a man just now, and her mother might look out of the window and see her getting into the car, and think that she was being sly.

  Chapter 3

  As the week drew to its close, things began to hum a little more busily at the Northgate Gazette, but Reggie Porter, the young boor with the big feet, who liked Virginia no better than she liked him, saw to it that she was not included in the hum. She spent most of her time, at his uncivil bequest, running to and from the printers with pages of copy or galley proofs, and on press day, which she had thought would be the high-spot of the week, she spent all afternoon hurrying through the windy streets with pages of wet newsprint. She wanted to ask many questions, but the other reporters were too busy to answer, and the editor was having his weekly press-day bout of indigestion, and seemed to have forgotten who she was and why she was there.

  The printers were housed in a shabby wooden building in a yard off a side-street two blocks away. They had many other matters on hand besides the Northgate Gazette, and to reach Mr Couliss, who was her liaison there, Virginia had to step round and over piles of posters and pamphlets, and little mean-looking magazines devoted to such eclectic subjects as nudism and muscle culture.

  Mr Couliss was short and full of spittle, in a greasy-backed waistcoat and gym shoes, and he grew quite racy with her as she came and went on press day. If she asked him a question about the printing of the paper, he would run his tongue over his lips and say: ‘You don’t want to bother your head about things like that, a nice little dish like you.’

  Virginia, wishing to fall in with the way of things, had started off by being quite pert and chummy with him, but, as the day advanced, and his jokes advanced with it to a grosser degree of innuendo, she wished that she had kept her distance from the start.

  When Mr Couliss, frothing a little, informed her that she was a hot number, and that he was game for a bit of fun too, any time she liked to try him, she slammed back through the counter flap into the office, and told Reggie that she did not want to run any more errands to the printers.

  ‘No doubt,’ he said, ‘you’d like to sit in the old man’s office on your big, fat fanny and run the show. Old Couliss made a pass at you, I suppose.’ Reggie put his hands in his trouser pockets and stuck his stomach out, pursing his thick lips with a worldly air. ‘You women are all the same. Lead a man on as far as you dare, and then turn round and run screaming for help if he takes you up on it.’

  ‘As if I would,’ Virginia said disgustedly. ‘He’s a horrible little man, and he’s got a mind as foul as some of that trash he prints down there.’

  ‘By which I suppose you mean the Gazette?’ Reggie rocked back on his heels and lowered his head at her like a bull.

  ‘I didn’t, but you can take it that way if you like.’

  ‘You may go home. You may leave,’ Reggie said grandly, his thick, throaty voice spoiling the high-toned effect for which he was trying. ‘Get out of here, and don’t come back next week neither.’

  ‘On the contrary.’ The editor came out of his kennel with a bottle of tablets in his hand, looking for a glass of water. ‘I want Alice in early Monday. I’ve got a top job for you, girl. Interview with Doris Miller. She’s opening in panto at the Empire. Not quite our district, but near enough for us to cover, and beat the Courier on their own ground. I’ve a good contact at the theatre, and I’ve got it lined up for you to go and see her. Exclusive. Thought I’d try you out.’

  ‘Now look here.’ Reggie blustered up to him like an unsubtle boxer coming out of the corner of a ring. ‘You can’t do that. You can’t go over our heads and send that girl out on a job like that. She don’t know anything.’

  ‘We’ll find out whether she does.’ The editor poured some souring milk into a cup, and swallowed two tablets, his face grey with the discomfort within.

  *

  Virginia sat in the dusty stalls of the theatre where Doris Miller was in the toils of a last-minute, scrappy dress rehearsal. She felt neglected and anxious. She had been allowed into the theatre, although Mr Askey, the editor’s contact, was not there, and no one could say where he had gone or when he would be back. She had been shown into a seat by an elderly man in a fisherman’s sweater and dirty plimsolls, and told to sit still and keep quiet.

  Virginia sat still and quiet for a long time in the fusty gloom of the dilapidated theatre. There was nothing else she could do. The time went by, and Mr Askey did not come, and she fretted about the interview and what the editor would say if she did not return with her story soon. He had given her this chance partly to annoy Reggie Porter, but partly, she believed, because he did think quite well of her, and wanted to see what she could do. She must do well, or she would let him down as well as herself. He was a cranky, disgruntled man, but she admired him, because he was an editor, and she liked him, because he had been nicer to her than he need have been.

  On the stage, lit by all the harsher lights in the electrician’s repertory, a dozen girls with goose-flesh on their thick thighs went dispiritedly through their paces, were shouted at to stop, and stood about dough-faced, rubbing their arms, until they were jerked into action again by the agitated voice of the producer.

  At intervals, Miss Doris Miller came wearily on to the stage in different changes of costume. She was a sharp-featured henna-head, with the powder thick on the pouches under her eyes, an old-fashioned hour-glass figure, and legs that tapered like cones into wondrously slim ankles and tiny feet. Since she was the principal boy, her costumes consisted of various tunics and jerkins over the long, pyramidal stretch of black nylon tights. The tights were the most expensive part of her costume. If a stage-hand brushed past her with a piece of scenery, she would clap her hands to her thighs and shriek out: ‘Mind my tights, you clumsy sod!‘

  Each time the principal boy left the stage, Virginia wondered whether she could get up and go through the pass-door at the side of the stage, and beard her in her dressing-room for the promised interview. Each time, just when she had mustered enough nerve to do it, Doris Miller, who only had to change from the waist up, was back on the stage again in a new outfit, and Virginia had lost her chance. The little old man in the fisherman’s jersey went in and out of the pass-door all the time, grumbling to himself. Virginia moved to the end of the row so that she could tackle him as he went by.

  ‘What can I do?’ Virginia appealed to him. ‘I must see Miss Miller. Does she know I’m here? The interview was all arranged. Do you think I could go backstage and find her?’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ the old man said. ‘Backstage is like a mad-house, and Miss Miller don’t talk to anyone. My, what a temper! I wish you’d have seen her just now. Created bloody murder when she heard there was a chap from the Courier at the stage-door. And language! Had him thrown out, block and tackle.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ Virginia’s spirits rose to the challenge. Although she could not understand why Doris Miller was so squeamish about the publicity she surely needed, the eviction of the Courier was a good chance for its rival, the Gazette. She must take the chance.

  ‘Side by side!’ squeaked the chorus, their thin voices falling away from the note as they kicked their way breathlessly offstage, arms on each other’s shoul
ders. Virginia waited until the producer was watching the Lancashire comedian in one of his Dame costumes, and slipped excitedly through the pass-door to the chaotic world backstage.

  She found her way past ropes and pieces of scenery and gimcrack boats and coaches to a narrow stone passage-way, which led to a twisting flight of green stone stairs. Flattening herself against the wall as an avalanche of sturdy girls in feathers and cockatoo bustles clattered past her with darned woollen shawls over their shoulders, she climbed the stairs to an upper passage where the dressing-rooms were. She walked along the scarred and peeling doors, which appeared to be always kicked open, and looked at the half-obliterated numbers. There were no names on any of them.

  A man came out of one of the rooms in a tail-coat with frayed satin lapels, his dickey and clip-on white bow-tie stained with ochre grease-paint. When Virginia inquired for Doris Miller’s room, he asked: ‘You her daughter?’

  ‘I? No, of course not.’

  ‘Well, kid, I just thought. She’s got a grown-up daughter, I know. Sings in cabaret up West. But I don’t suppose she’d let her come down here. She doesn’t like to be seen with her, they say. Made the girl take a different name, so no one would know she had a daughter that old.’ He lit a cigarette and leaned against the scribbled wall, holding the cigarette downwards into the palm of his nicotine-stained hand.

  ‘What’s she like?’

  The man seemed friendly. His painted smile was wide, showing chipped, badly-spaced teeth. ‘The daughter? Bit of all right, from her pictures.’

  ‘No, I mean Miss Miller.’

  ‘Her. Oh, kid, she’s a sow. One of the original pigs. I’ve met some cows in my time, but never such a horse-faced goat as our Doris.’