The Angel in the Corner

by Monica Dickens

  It was like that at the beginning of all marriages, Virginia supposed. That was why wives clung to their old girl-friends, or made new ones among the new neighbours, or irritated their husbands by continually wanting to run to their parents. If Helen had been in London, Virginia would not have run to her; but if she only knew where her father was, she would go to him.

  She had thought about him many times since that unexpected, tantalizing moment of seeing him outside the old house on the hill. What had happened to him? Where had he gone, with his dear, disfigured wife and the little boy, and the baby? Had he really been in difficulties, as the solicitor had said, and if so, how had he got out of them?

  The more Virginia had thought of him after her rebellion against Helen, the more she understood how much she had missed in growing up without her father. She had found him for a moment, for just long enough to realize that she needed him, and then he was almost immediately lost to her; but the need remained. She did not need advice or money from him. He probably would have been able to give neither; but he would have been someone to talk to.

  If it was only money she needed, she could write to Spenser, and he would send it at once, probably double what she asked; but Virginia had promised herself never to ask him. She would not give Helen the satisfaction of seeing her disparaging predictions fulfilled.

  On the surface, Helen was reconciled with Virginia. After Virginia had written to her three times, Helen had at last replied, and they now exchanged letters fairly regularly, dispassionate letters that were not like those between a mother and daughter. Helen wrote about all the parties, and the travelling, and the clothes and the people and the theatres, but she never mentioned Virginia’s marriage. Virginia wrote about people and events at the office, and things that were happening in London, but she never mentioned Joe.

  At Sloane Square, Virginia took a bus to the turning off the King’s Road that led to home. Soon it would not be home any longer. She was out of a job and out of a home, and now – it seemed that everything was happening at once – on the floor of the passage where Mollie had thrown it downstairs, was a telegram from Tiny’s sister, saying that the old nurse was dying, and asking Virginia to come at once.

  *

  ‘Bit late to start out for Epsom,’ Joe said. ‘Go tomorrow. I’m taking you out to dinner tonight, to make up for what I did to you yesterday.’ He touched Virginia’s mouth with his fingers. The lip was still swollen. ‘You should put ice on it,’ he said, as detachedly as if he had not caused the damage himself.

  ‘It’s all right. And you don’t have to take me out to dinner to make me forget about it.’ The bruised lip made her smile crooked. ‘I’ve forgotten. But I’ll take the dinner anyway. Tomorrow. I must go to Tiny tonight. She must be very ill for her sister to send a wire. They’re both of them frightened of things like telegrams. Tomorrow might be too late.’

  ‘If she’s as ill as all that, she won’t know you, so what’s the point of going?’

  ‘I must. She was my nanny. She was wonderful to me. You don’t understand about nannies, because you never had one. But people who’ve had nannies never forget them, not all their lives. When you’re little, it’s like having something – well, not better than a mother, but something more your own than a mother. Mothers have husbands. They have friends. They go out to parties, or to a job, like Helen. Nannies never go anywhere. The old ones, like Tiny, have no interests except you.

  You take everything from them, greedily, because you adore them. They’re safe and comfortable and always the same, but you don’t stay the same. You grow up, and suddenly you’re not their baby any more. That’s a nanny’s tragedy.’

  *

  She found Tiny in the bed that was so much too wide and high for the little room under the roof of her sister’s cottage. Tiny was conscious, but drowsy. Virginia kissed her, feeling the familiar creased velvet of her skin, and held her dry, crooked hand for a time while the old woman talked quite sensibly, asking her why she was out so late, and whether she had had her dinner, and why she was so thin.

  After a while, she mumbled herself into a doze. Virginia went downstairs. Hilda, the sister, was in the low front room, looking sceptically at a television set which Tiny had bought with her savings, although for a long time she had been too feeble to come downstairs and watch it.

  ‘She doesn’t seem so bad,’ Virginia said. ‘I thought she would be much more ill than this.’

  ‘Well, she rallies now and then, dear. Bother that thing!’ Hilda jumped up to turn off the television. She was even smaller than Tiny, but more active and wiry, her fingers always moving, her head constantly nodding, so that she had to have a little chain on her pince-nez to catch them when they slipped off her short nose. ‘I hate these clever plays. That B.B.C. will clever itself right out of existence one of these days. So Rosa talked to you? I thought she’d be able for it. She picked up quite a bit when I told her I’d sent the telegram. She knew you would come.’

  ‘Should you have told her? She ought not to know how bad she is.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell her. She knows all right. Bless you, Rosa’s not afraid of dying. She’s always asking the doctor how long she’s got, just as if she had a train to catch. It’s quite a joke between them.’

  ‘Is she really dying?’

  Hilda raised her hands and let them plop on to her knees. ‘Who knows? Who can say when any one of us will go? Except our dear Lord Himself.’ She looked at the picture above the mantelpiece, a large and crudely-coloured painting of the Sacred Heart. ‘But the doctor told me this morning she hasn’t long to last. That’s why I sent for you. I knew you’d never forgive me if you didn’t see her before –’ For the first time, her small, tight face trembled, and Virginia knew how lonely she would be without the burden of an invalid sister to care for. Then she drew her mouth into a busy smile and said: ‘And nor would Rosa neither. She’d come back and tell me what she thought about it. When I told her this morning I was going to send the wire, she said: “You do that, Hilda. You get my Jinny here, and then you can send for Father O’Hagan. I’m not ready for him and his holy water until I’ve seen my Jinny.”’

  When Virginia went upstairs again, bending her head to go into the bedroom, Tiny was still asleep. She lay propped on the pillows with her mouth open and her knees drawn up. Her small, humped figure did not reach more than half-way down the big bed, which had been Hilda’s marriage bed until her husband died.

  The sheets were clean, the pillow-cases were beautifully embroidered, and a silk counterpane, laundered out of all colour, was spread over the blanket, with the corners precisely turned. Tiny herself looked as clean as a newly-bathed child, her frail skin luminous, her scalp showing pink through her soft white hair. The little room was fresh and neat, with the furniture polished and exactly in place on the bright rug, starched doileys under every ornament, and a stiff white runner under a row of photographs on the dressing-table.

  There were photographs everywhere. What little wall space there was below the sloping ceiling was as closely covered with pictures as an Italian votive chapel. Helen as a schoolgirl, sharp-eyed and imperious; Helen’s parents, faded to sepia; Helen’s brother, who had died of pneumonia when he was a child; Helen’s wedding to Harold, with Helen in a low-waisted dress and corrugated hair, and Harold lean and grim.

  There was a picture of the red-brick Chiswick house where Tiny had nursed Helen, and one of the ugly house on the hill, leaning at an odd angle against a dark sky, its stone wall blotting out the foreground. There were pictures of Virginia at every stage from babyhood, and all the photographs that Virginia had sent since Tiny left them.

  The last one was of herself and Joe, taken at a race-meeting. The wind was blowing Virginia’s hair sideways. She was clutching her coat and laughing. Joe had his arm through hers, with his head up and his white teeth showing in an exuberant smile. Virginia went over to look at the picture. There was a crowd moving in the background, and one woman had seen Joe’
s friend with the camera, and had stopped to make a doltish face at it. Virginia and Joe looked very gay against the bovine, preoccupied crowd. It had been a happy day, carefree and loving, one of the days when Virginia and Joe both felt that there was nothing in the world they wanted more than each other.

  A movement of the bedclothes made her look round. Tiny was awake, moistening her dry lips with a little munching movement, blinking her misted eyes.

  ‘You still here?’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have dozed off. Mustn’t waste your time.’

  ‘I’ve been looking at the pictures,’ Virginia said. ‘How did you like this one?’

  ‘Nice.’ Tiny nodded her head. ‘I said to Hilda, I always knew you’d marry someone with a bit of life in him.’

  ‘I’ll have to bring Joe down to see you,’ Virginia said, doubting that she could ever persuade Joe to come.

  ‘No time now.’ Tiny moved her head gently from side to side on the pillow. ‘That doctor knows. He won’t tell me, but he knows.’

  Virginia went to the bed and took Tiny’s hand. The fingers were bent into the palm like a claw. ‘Don’t go yet, Tiny. I thought you were going to stay and look after my children.’

  ‘No, thank you. I don’t want no more babies. I’ve stayed long enough to see you settled and happy. That’s enough. Are you happy, dearie?’ She turned her moist, loose-lidded eyes without moving her head.

  ‘Very happy.’ Virginia squeezed the crumpled hand.

  ‘That old angel still looking out for you?’ Tiny said more sharply, as if she were ready to tell the angel his business if he were negligent.

  ‘The angel?’ Virginia looked blank. How could he be looking out for her when everything was going wrong?

  ‘It’s ups and downs,’ Tiny said. ‘I know what life is. Just don’t forget he’s there, that’s all.’

  Virginia was a little girl again, in bed in the dark nursery, afraid of nightmares. The comfort of Tiny’s simple belief was calming her, lightening the haunted darkness with the promise that everything would be all right.

  ‘Where’s your angel, Tiny?’ She smiled to find herself talking as she and Tiny used to when she was a child, and the angels were accepted facts.

  ‘Over there by the washstand,’ Tiny said comfortably. ‘Waiting for me.’

  Chapter 11

  ‘No thank you,’ said the stout woman with the face of a bulldog. ‘If I can’t take it home to try it on, I don’t want it. I don’t feel like taking my clothes off today.’

  ‘I’m sorry, madam,’ Virginia said, and Miss Sunderland paused in her sorting of brassières, and listened without looking, her underslung jaw slightly agape. ‘We never send anything out on approval.’

  Miss Sunderland nodded, and closed her jaw.

  ‘Peter Robinson’s do,’ the woman snapped.

  ‘This isn’t Peter Robinson’s.’

  The woman looked at Virginia to see if she were trying to be rude, then pushed out her chin at the rest of the shop, and said: ‘That’s all too evident,’ and went out.

  Virginia folded the corset, replaced it in its long, narrow box, and put it back in place on the shelf. Although she had lost the sale, she could not help feeling relieved that the stout woman had not felt like removing her clothes in the small stuffy fitting-room at the far end of the shop. Quite often they wanted you to hook them up, or scoop them into brassières, or help them struggle their soft, fat hips into girdles a size too small. Virginia was beginning to feel a revulsion for all female flesh.

  Miss Sunderland, who was in charge of the corset counter, did not seem to mind these things. To her, corsetry was an art, and she was never so spry as when she had successfully moulded some flabby woman into a one-piece boned foundation, which left her scarcely able to walk, but actually looking all one piece, instead of two slack masses of flesh connected by a dubious waistline.

  Miss Sunderland was a plank of a woman with a long face, and snuff-coloured hair parted in the middle and looped back at the sides like dusty curtains. She had stiff, shapeless legs and long, flat feet, and a skittish manner which fitted ill with her appearance. When she was excited, she would jump up and down and clap her hands, the tape measure round her neck bobbing, and her great slabs of feet striking the floor with springless thuds.

  She was excited when she sold an expensive corset, or when Mr Jacobs gave her a holiday, or when someone said that there was a chance of the Queen driving down Edgware Road, because they had seen the gates of the Marble Arch open at lunch-time. The many years which she had spent working for a firm of corset manufacturers seemed to have arrested her emotional maturity. Most of her adult life had been dedicated to whalebone and rubber and embossed pink satin. ‘I know corsets, you see,’ she would say. ‘I know my corsets.’ But that was about all she did know.

  After her years at the corset factory, it was quite a comedown for her to be working in the lingerie shop off the Edgware Road, where the corset department was only a counter and a bank of shelves and drawers half-way down on one side. The shop also sold underwear, nightdresses, stockings, blouses, dressing gowns, bed-jackets, and everything for the boudoir except the things that customers expected it to have.

  Women were always dashing in and asking for elastic or buttons or ribbon. If Mr Jacobs was not spying sideways through the glass door for custom, the first person they encountered was Stella, slab-faced at the stocking counter.

  ‘Oh, no, we don’t stock those,’ Stella would say, as if they had asked for firearms; and the customer would halt in her tracks dumbfounded, because it looked just the kind of shop where you would find elastic and buttons and ribbon.

  But – ‘Don’t give me haberdashery,’ Mr Jacobs would say to Miss Snelling at the cash desk. ‘I never want to get into that line.’ And so women continued to turn in hopefully for pins and crochet needles and glove stretchers, and to be phlegmatically turned away by Stella. Sometimes their eye was caught as they turned by a lacy pair of briefs or a ribboned camisole on the opposite counter, and they would stay to turn their fruitless visit into acquisition.

  Virginia had been one of the women who came for buttons and stayed for something else. She had been on one of her disheartening excursions round the smaller estate agents and the glass cases in front of newsagents, looking for a cheap flat or rooms where she and Joe could live. On that morning, she was more disheartened than ever, because Joe had gone to Sandown Park with Ed Morris, instead of to an interview at a bakery, and if he did not get a job soon, it would be a question not only of where were they going to live, but what were they going to live on.

  When she passed the lingerie shop, sandwiched between a chemist and a café in a side street off the Edgware Road, Virginia remembered that she needed buttons for Joe’s shirts. This was just the place to get small white buttons. She went in, was repulsed by Stella, walked out again in surprise, and saw in a corner of the window by a spreading fan of nylon stockings, a card which announced a vacancy for a Young Lady Assistant.

  Without thinking twice, Virginia turned and went back into the shop and talked Mr Jacobs into giving her the job.

  It was not difficult to pick up the work on the corset counter. Miss Sunderland knew everything there was to know, and was hungrily delighted to instruct. At the corset factory, she had trained many young girls. Here in Etta Lee’s, which was what Mr Jacobs’ shop was called, the girls did not want to learn about corsetry. Stella, Miss Sunderland’s last assistant, would not be told anything, and had become so aggressive when Miss Sunderland tried to explain about inflatable brassières that she had been moved away to hosiery and the sentry post by the door.

  After two weeks at Etta Lee’s, Virginia felt as though she had been selling suspender belts and panty girdles all her life, and was doomed to spend the rest of life doing it. Miss Sunderland was delighted with her progress. ‘I never saw anyone to pick it up so quickly!’ she said, crowing like a baby with a daisy chain after Virginia had found the one garment in the shop that would fit a wom
an whose hips stood out almost at right angles to her waist. ‘You really are a clever one, Ginger.’ She had called Virginia this as soon as she heard her name, and the rest of the staff adopted it. ‘I expect it’s because you’re educated,’ Miss Sunderland added, lowering her voice and glancing round the shop, as if it were indelicate. ‘I never had much schooling myself, but it doesn’t matter, you see, if you specialize. I know my corsets. That I will say. I know my corsets.’

  Miss Sunderland told Mr Jacobs that Virginia was getting on so well that she should not be counted as an apprentice any longer; but Mr Jacobs, who would never admit to a profit, said: ‘No use talking to me about raises. Business is terrible. I don’t know where we shall end at this rate.’

  Apart from being suspicious of the sound of Mr Jacobs, who had once brought Virginia home as far as Sloane Square in his black Austin, with the rail at the back for dressing-gowns, Joe raised no objection to her job. He could not afford to. He was still hanging around with Ed Morris, making a pound here and there, doing no work on his book, convincing himself that he was looking for a job, but putting off the moment of finding it.

  After the bulldog woman had tramped out of the shop, so obviously, from her back view, in need of a new corset that Miss Sunderland sorrowed more for her loss than for Mr Jacobs’, it was time for Virginia to go to lunch. Betty from the stockroom went with her.

  ‘Found a place yet, Ginger?’ she asked, when they were perched at a counter with sandwiches.

  ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’ Virginia said. ‘We have to get out of the Chelsea place in another week, and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere. Now that I’m working, there’s so little time to look.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have took the job until you’d found somewhere,’ Betty said. She was a washed-out blonde, with a peering frown persistently cutting her white forehead, as if she had picked up someone else’s spectacles in mistake for her own.

  ‘If I hadn’t,’ Virginia said, ‘we couldn’t have lived anywhere.’