The Angel in the Corner

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Thank you.’ A pause. ‘I am well.’

  ‘Business good?’

  Mr Allen considered this. His cautious eyes wandered round the unhomely drawing-room, where the chairs stood round the walls, in the wrong places for easy conversation. His gaze crept over the pelmet of the curtains, the straight, unrestful sofa, the little table with the glasses and the bottle of sherry and the half-bottle of gin.

  When his eyes returned to Felix, he’answered: ‘Satisfactory. And you?’

  ‘I’ve been very busy.’ Felix did not talk quickly, but in contrast to his father, it sounded as if he were gabbling. ‘The days are as hectic as usual, and I’ve been out most nights. Up all last night, as a matter of fact. A very unusual case. I’d like to hear what you think of it.’

  Virginia guessed that he always came prepared with some special case in which he might interest his father, to flatter the old man, and give them something to talk about.

  Mr Allen insinuated his hands into his trouser pockets, and rocked slowly back and forth from heels to toes. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘Come and sit with me, Miss Martin, if the men are going to talk surgery,’ Mrs Allen said. Virginia would have liked to hear about the unusual case, but Felix’s mother, walking as if she were at the head of a stately procession, led her over to a window, where two hard-backed chairs stood formally in a draught.

  ‘May I offer you a glass of sherry?’ she said regally. ‘Or perhaps you would prefer gin.’ The way in which she said ‘gin’ made Virginia answer: ‘Sherry will be fine, thank you.’ In any case, she could see nothing on the little table to go with the gin.

  Mrs Allen had sat down. She rose all in one piece with a straight back, not using the arms of the chair.

  ‘Please don’t trouble. Let me get it,’ Virginia said.

  ‘Thank you.’ Mrs Allen sat down again in the same unbending movement, without looking back at the chair. ‘You may bring me a small glass too, if you will.’

  Virginia went over to the table, feeling the frigid gaze on her back. She tried to pour the sherry neatly and gracefully, but a few drops spilled on the shiny surface of the table. She mopped it with her finger, and had to wipe the finger on her skirt, because she dared not lick it.

  She handed the sherry, sat down, and waited to be talked to. You did not start a conversation with Mrs Allen. If you tried, she answered shortly and changed the subject. She liked to ask the questions, and you had to answer. In a surprisingly short time, and without asking anything inquisitive, or appearing remotely interested, she had managed to find out quite a lot about Virginia.

  While he was talking to his father, Felix kept looking at Virginia, wondering how she was faring. She smiled back at him reassuringly, and tried to look gay. It was bad enough for him to have such an uncomfortable mother, without being made aware of how she affected other people.

  Felix did not ask for a drink until his father offered him one. They went to the table. Mr Allen accepted a straight gin, and sipped at it deliberately, without flinching.

  ‘Is there any vermouth, or anything, Mother?’ Felix asked. ‘I’m afraid I can’t drink like Dad.’

  ‘I believe there may be some orange juice in the kitchen,’ Mrs Allen said vaguely, as if the kitchen were as unattainable as Mars. ‘No, don’t go for it. It’s bad for Florence. Ring the bell, please.’

  Felix rang the bell at the side of the fireplace, which housed a simulated log fire with a flickering electric glow, which gave very little heat and bore no resemblance to flames. After a long time, a maid appeared, an elderly woman as rigid as her mistress, who looked as though she had long ago lost whatever interest in life she might once have had.

  There was another long wait while she fetched the bottle of orange squash, carrying the tall bottle in on a small tray, a feat which required some skill and a funereal tread.

  Felix drank his gin and orange without pleasure. He looked at the small bottle of gin. Virginia knew that he needed another drink, but he did not take one, although he offered Virginia another sherry.

  Virginia looked at Mrs Allen. Her glass was almost untasted. ‘No, thank you,’ she said, despising her cowardice, and wondering how she was going to keep awake.

  Felix’s brother and his wife were late. Mrs Allen would not start dinner without them, and the wait was interminable. From time to time, the door opened noiselessly, and Florence looked in with mute inquiry. ‘Keep the roast warm,’ Mrs Allen would say. ‘We will wait.’ She looked as though she could wait indefinitely before she felt anything as stimulating as hunger.

  Eventually the brother Edward arrived, puffing apologies for a faulty car, and bringing with him a wife in a blue crêpe dinner dress, who touched cheeks with Mrs Allen as if they had not been in the same family for years. She was a negative, pasty-faced woman, who obviously had dropped no stone into the turgid waters when she married into the Allen family.

  Edward was older than Felix, a stout man with bulging eyes and a heavy breath, who would drink nothing and eat scarcely anything, because his life was organized to terror of his heart.

  ‘Nothing the matter with him, actually,’ Felix whispered to Virginia, while Mr Allen was dissecting the roast beef so slowly that it was cold before Florence handed it to anyone. ‘He’s read too many magazine articles, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you look better, Eddie,’ he told his brother. Edward shook his head unbelievingly, patted his chest, and continued to look askance at the food on the other plates, and at the bottle of Algerian wine, which Florence carried round the table, pouring half a glass to each, well trained in how to make it go round.

  After dinner, Mrs Allen took Virginia and Edward’s wife into the bedroom, where the dressing-table was covered with little pin-boxes and photographs in silver frames, and on the double bed were laid out the high-necked nightgown and the striped pyjamas, striking a shockingly intimate note.

  It was impossible to think of Felix’s mother and father undressing and lying down in the same bed. Impossible to think that they could ever have conceived Edward and Felix, and that Mrs Allen had given birth to them. She must have closed her eyes and blanked out her mind.

  In the drawing-room, Mrs Allen announced that they would play bridge until it was time to drink the punch at midnight. Virigina looked at the clock with a sinking heart. It was only ten-thirty.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t play bridge,’ she said.

  ‘Not play bridge?’ Mrs Allen’s long face was uncomprehending. ‘How extraordinary, Miss Martin.’

  ‘Please call me Virginia,’ Virginia said for the tenth time. Mrs Allen bowed stiffly and continued to call her Miss Martin.

  ‘If Virginia is not going to play, I won’t either,’ Felix said. His family looked at him, weighing the implications of this remark. ‘Dad can make up the four. I’m really too tired to play. You don’t mind, do you, Dad?’

  Mr Allen debated this, and finally admitted that he supposed not. The tables and chairs were set up. Mrs Allen moved at once to a chair and took up the cards avidly, showing enthusiasm for the first time. Bridge was her passion in life, her only passion. She spent every afternoon at a bridge club, and nearly every evening at a bridge table with such people as shared her passion, if not her friendship.

  The other three sat down without eagerness or aversion. Mrs Allen shuffled the cards like lightning in her bony hands, and skimmed them round the table. They began to play as grimly as if they were strangers. They did not talk, and discuss, and bicker mildly, as families do when they play bridge. When it was necessary to speak, they spoke in monosyllables. Mr Allen was very slow at the game, rearranging his fan of cards over and over, deliberating for minutes on end before he made a bid, while the others waited with their eyes on their own cards, not impatiently, but in a vacuum, as if they had suspended thought and action.

  Virginia sat on the sofa with Felix, and they looked at copies of the Illustrated London News and the Geographical Magazine. From the flat next door
came faintly the sound of music, and people laughing.

  ‘The Bernsteins are at it again.’ Mrs Allen nodded significantly to her husband.

  ‘What’s that? At what? Oh, yes – yes. The Bernsteins.’

  ‘Your bid, Dad,’ Edward droned. He belched resonantly, but did not beg anyone’s pardon. He considered the belch permissible to him as a sufferer. Everyone should find it as welcome as he did.

  ‘I’m sorry, Virginia,’ Felix said in a low voice. ‘This is rather dull for you. I’m sure you wish you hadn’t come. I’d forgotten how dull it was,’ he admitted, ‘until I brought you here. I’ve got used to it, but you seem to – somehow show it up.’

  Virginia did not know what to say. She was torn between wanting him to be loyal to his parents, and wanting him to be human enough to chafe at them.

  ‘Don’t apologize,’ she said. ‘You’re always trying to find something to apologize about. Remember? We nearly quarrelled about that the other night.’

  This little attempt at an intimate joke fell flatly between them, and was lost in the hard-grained cushions of Mrs Allen’s sofa. It was difficult to talk responsively in the leaden atmosphere. The air seemed thick with a deadly torpor that forced itself between them and kept them apart.

  ‘I wish I could have taken you out instead,’ Felix said, ‘but they would have been so hurt if I hadn’t come. New Year’s Eve is one of their big nights.’

  Neither Mr nor Mrs Allen looked sensitive enough to be hurt by anything more subtle than a steam-roller, and if this was a big night, imagination boggled at their ordinary ones; but Virginia said: ‘Of course. I know what it is with families.’ She had always regretted not having a family, but now she thought that perhaps she was lucky.

  ‘If I thought we could leave without –’ Felix began, but Mrs Allen looked round from the table with a slight frown.

  ‘What are you two whispering about over there?’

  ‘Nothing, Mother. We didn’t want to disturb your game.’

  ‘Well, please don’t whisper like that. It’s so common.’ Mrs Allen made deliberate markings on the score-card, printing the figures as precisely as if it were a bank ledger.

  When the telephone rang, Felix got up hopefully.

  ‘Let Florence go,’ his mother said, without looking up from the game.

  ‘Isn’t she in bed?’

  ‘She doesn’t go to bed until we do.’

  ‘It’s probably for me.’

  ‘If it is, she will tell you.’

  Florence stood in the doorway and looked at them all before she said: ‘It’s for you, Mr Felix.’

  Felix came back into the drawing-room, trying to look regretful. ‘I’m sorry, Mother – Dad. That was the hospital. That ovarian cyst woman doesn’t look too good. They think we may have to do a laparotomy.’

  Virginia panicked. Was he going to leave her here?

  ‘You’d better come too, Virginia,’ he said. ‘I’ll drop you at a taxi rank.’

  ‘Miss Martin can stay here,’ Mrs Allen said. ‘Edward and Beryl can take her home.’

  ‘No,’ said Felix, and Virginia could have hugged him for standing up to his mother. ‘It’s out of their way. Get your coat, Virginia. I’ve got to hurry.’

  Mrs Allen scarcely looked up from her game to shake Virginia’s hand stiffly and offer Felix her cheek. ‘I’m sorry that you had to spoil the party,’ she told him, as if she suspected him of inventing the woman with the ovarian cyst.

  ‘Did you invent her?’ Virginia asked, when they were outside the door of the flat.

  ‘God, no, though I’m sure she wishes I had, the way she feels. Here, what on earth –?’

  Like a bird released from a cage, Virginia had started to run and swoop down the long corridor, jumping up to touch the lights in the low ceiling, running back and making him run too, dragging him with flapping overcoat towards the lift. It was so good to be free! All the stale boredom of the last three hours was bursting within her to be let out, swept away, in great gusts of physical energy.

  ‘Oh, Felix,’ she said, clutching his arm, as they went out into the raw, clouded night of Finchley Road. ‘Smell that air! I wish you weren’t in a hurry, and we could walk. Oh, doesn’t the air smell good!’

  ‘Smells like fog to me,’ he said a little dourly, as he started the car.

  ‘Don’t be offended. I didn’t mean it like that. You know I had a lovely time, but oh, it’s New Year’s Eve, and – look, Felix! Look at those people!‘

  As they passed the Underground station, a group of revellers burst from the depth in paper hats, waving rattles, punching each other, shouting and singing their way across the road in a straggling line, ignoring cars. The sight was so invigorating after her three hours in the tomb that Virginia leaned out of the window to laugh and shout at the tipsy people. They shouted back, and one of the men broke away and tried to run after the car. He fell flat on his face and lay in the middle of the road, kicking his legs and trying to raise his paper crown.

  ‘London on New Year’s Eve.’ Virginia drew in her head. ‘I wouldn’t be anywhere else. Oh, I love London. There’s nowhere in the world so solid and so crazy at the same time. Look, Felix – look at that taxi! The man’s trying to climb on the roof. Look – they’re having a party in that house. What a huge room – and thousands of people. It looks such fun from outside, but probably if you were in there, it wouldn’t be much fun at all.’

  It was exciting to drive through London on New Year’s Eve. As they came to Oxford Street and crossed into Regent Street, the excitement increased. There were more people in the streets, all at once a crowd of them, all going the same way in a jostling mob, shouting and cheering as if it were the end of the war all over again.

  The traffic became thicker and slowed to a crawl. Men and girls in open cars stood up and screamed at strangers. People threw things, threw laughter at each other, as they were borne along on the tide of hypnotized gaiety towards the magnet which gathers to itself the fervour of London’s gala days – Piccadilly Circus, with the policemen part of the comedy, and the bonfires already burning at the corner of the Haymarket.

  Felix had driven into the congestion before he realized that he could not get out of it. Traffic was almost at a standstill. The mass of cars stopped for five minutes, moved for five seconds, then stopped again. Horns blared, but chiefly to make noise. No one was going anywhere. They were out to ride on the roofs of taxis, to lean out of sports cars and squirt each other with syphons, to cheer and add to the hullabaloo of the rowdiest evening of the year.

  Felix fretted and peered, and tried to draw out of line to turn into a side-street, but he was solidly wedged. He backed until he struck the bumper of the car behind him, and a man in a yellow cap got out of it and came to shake his fist at Felix through the closed window. Felix spun his wheel, paying no attention, but he still could not get round the car in front. He struck that one too, and the tail-light fell off, for it was very old; but it was full of young men with bottles of beer, who were shaking the car up so much from the inside that they did not feel the bump.

  A strange man in a college muffler suddenly climbed into the back of the car, slapped Felix on the back, kissed Virginia clumsily, climbed out of the other door and into the car alongside, where he was received with female shrieks.

  They had almost reached Piccadilly Circus now. Virginia could see the people skirmishing round the pedestal of Eros, the turbulent sea of shouting faces, vivid under the neon signs, the young men climbing up the lamp-posts, the policemen with linked arms forming cordons here and there from habit, although in this heaving ocean of equality there was nobody who need be guarded from anyone else.

  The cars could go no further. ‘It will be midnight in a few minutes.’ Virginia turned to Felix with shining eyes. ‘Let’s get out and stand with the crowd. They’ll sing Auld Lang Syne.’ Felix would sway with her, pressed close against her, excited, caught up in the boisterous harmony of the people. They would kiss. Everyone kisse
d in the streets on New Year’s Eve.

  ‘Come on.’ She caught at his arm. She was half-way out of the car when he pulled her back.

  ‘Are you crazy? I’m supposed to be at the hospital. I’ve got to get out of this. I’d better leave the car and start running.’

  ‘I’ll run with you.’

  ‘You’ll have to stay with the car.’ It was the first time he had ordered her to do anything. She was almost surprised into obeying him, but she did not want to be left alone to play chauffeur to the shiny black car. She saw a policeman and shouted to him. Like all Londoners, she believed that a policeman was the answer to everything.

  This one did not disillusion her. There was much calling and waving and shouts of: ‘Doctor here! Let the doctor through! Easy a bit. Right hand down. Steady as you go!’ The policeman got Felix out to the other side of the road, and held back the cars there while he drove up it on the wrong side and turned off.

  Virginia hated to leave the crowds, but she had felt important. People had stared at them, and demanded: ‘What’s that fellow doing? Oh, a doctor. Come on, you chaps, what’s the matter with you? Let the doctor through. Emergency.’

  If the woman with the ovarian cyst was still capable of feeling anything, she should feel flattered that the common surge towards midnight in Piccadilly had been held up and disrupted on her behalf.

  The streets rapidly grew emptier as they drove away from the lights and noise. Felix drove fast, his face intent. Without looking at her, he put his hand on Virginia’s knee.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Another time. I’ll see the New Year in with you next year in Piccadilly Circus, or anywhere you want.’

  As they crossed Parliament Square, the yellow harvest moon of Big Ben showed that it was nearly the hour. Virginia turned on the wireless. A choir was singing the last hymn of the Watch-Night Service.

  Felix stopped the car outside the hospital. ‘Take the car home,’ he said. ‘You’ll never get a taxi tonight. I’ll get back all right.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you, if you like.’