The Angel in the Corner
MONICA DICKENS
Chapter 1
It was cold outside, and the winter afternoon was dropping darkly down to tea-time. In the nursery, the coal fire was a solid orange glow, capped with sticky black. Woollen underwear and towels were drying on the high brass fireguard, and the old nurse sat in the low chair, fumbling a darn with arthritic fingers.
Virginia was at the table, doing homework. When the flowered china clock on the mantelpiece struck the half hour, the nurse looked up and said a little crabbily, for she distrusted studying: ‘Time to put the books away, and set out the tea things.’
Virginia looked over her shoulder at the darkness gathering outside the window, and slid quickly off her chair to draw the curtains. Once she had seen a face looking in, and although it was only her father, she had not forgotten the terror of seeing it there in the shadows beyond the glass, like the face of a drowned man, washed over by the sea.
‘Tiny.’ She went to the chair of the bunchy old woman, who had nursed first her mother as a baby, and then herself. ‘Don’t forget what I told you about not dying.’
In the ugly, chilly house, half shut up to save expense, and restless with the noise of her mother’s heels, always in a hurry to go out somewhere, and her father’s petulant voice, the nursery was her refuge, and quiet, unchanging Tiny her best friend.
‘I’ll try dear,’ Tiny said, in the same comfortable tone with which she added: ‘Get the cups and plates out.’
As Virginia went to the chipped, oddly proportioned cupboard, which had held nursery china and toys for so long that it did not look ugly any more, the door from the hallway opened, and Virginia’s mother came in quickly, as she always moved. She was a firm-bodied, brisk woman, with dark, darting eyes and a disgruntled mouth. She shut the door behind her, and leaning against it, moved her mouth into a grin, although
her eyes, looking everywhere about the room, had no smile in them.
‘Well, Tiny,’ she said, with an abrupt, strident laugh. ‘It’s happened. Just as I told you it would. You didn’t believe me, but you were wrong, you see, as usual.’
Virginia stood still by the cupboard, with a pink patterned plate in her hand. The old woman by the fire raised her eyes, screwing up the reddened, crêpey lids.
‘He’s left me.’ Again the unnatural laugh, mocking at emotion. ‘He’s gone. Never coming back. Never coming back, don’t you understand?’ She raised her voice irritably, in an attempt to ruffle the nurse into some reaction.
‘Mr Harold?’
‘Who else? Mr Harold. My beloved husband. Your father, Jinny.’ She narrowed her eyes at the schoolgirl, who still had not moved.
‘Miss Helen – please. Not like this.’ The nurse was shaking. She nodded towards Virginia. ‘Tell me about it later.’
‘Why not now?’ Virginia’s mother sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. ‘She has to know about it sooner or later. She’s ten. I’m not going to hide things from her, or feed her with fairy stories that will make it easier for her and more difficult for me. Jinny!’ She turned her sleek, black head sharply. ‘Don’t stand there like a piece of furniture. Say something.’
Virginia came forward with the plate in her hand. ‘Daddy’s gone?’
‘Yes, dear heart, and why should you care? He was never much use to you, and you can’t pretend you haven’t said you hated him.’
‘Hating,’ Virginia said, taking a breath, ‘is like a pain. But then, loving can be, too. You don’t always know which is which.’
‘Oh, don’t talk to me in clever riddles,’ her mother said. ‘It’s that school. You’ve been doing too much homework.’ She got up and took the exercise books off the table, moving about restlessly, looking for something to use as an ash-tray.
She chose the fire. She came to stand sideways in front of it, leaning her hip on the fender, flicking ash at the coals.
‘Thank God I’ve got my job,’ she said. ‘I shan’t stay here. It’s
his
house. He can have it if he wants it. I’ve always hated it. Damn mausoleum.’ She sometimes swore in front of Virginia when Tiny was there, because she knew that it shocked the nurse. ‘It was always much too big, anyway. We’ll get a flat – Kensington, perhaps, or Bloomsbury, near the office. Much better for the two of us.’
‘Three,’ Virginia said quickly, but the nurse shook her head, as if she knew what was coming.
‘Tiny will go to her sister,’ Virginia’s mother said. ‘You know she’s been wanting to go for years, haven’t you, Tiny one? You and I, Jinny, will find ourselves a nice little flat, and be happy as two pigeons in a roost – probably happier than we’ve ever been. What do you say – on our own, eh?’ She held out her hand to the child, but Virginia backed away. She held on to the edge of the table, fighting the pricking sobs in her throat. She would not cry until her mother had left the room.
*
After her mother’s heels had gone tapping through the hall to keep a dinner engagement – ‘just as if it was an ordinary night!’ the nurse exclaimed to herself – Virginia wept again in bed. The nurse came up, her humped shadow preceding her up the stairway wall. It was more familiar to Virginia to hear the nurse’s creaking steps than her mother’s swift feet. For as long as she could remember, it had been Tiny coming up at sleep time, Tiny with the stories and kisses, Tiny with the illicit chocolate, Tiny with the hot lemonade for coughs.
Tiny sat on the bed, breathing heavily after the climb, trying to thread a bent pin back into her sparse knot of hair. Her arms were so stiff and fat now, and her chest so sunk into her lap, that it was difficult for her to reach her head.
‘Who will do your hair for you when I’m not there?’ Virginia asked, with a child’s quick recovery from voiceless sobs.
‘Why, my sister, of course. She’s younger than me, you know. She still has all her powers.’
‘Will she let me come and stay with you?’
‘Will Hilda? Of course she will. You’ll have to take the couch, though.’
‘I mean, will Mummy let me?’ Virginia said gloomily. ‘I don’t
know what it will be like, living with her. Does she know how to look after children?’
‘If she doesn’t,’ the nurse said sadly, ‘it’s time she found out.’ She put her hands on her knees and got up from the bed. She was not much taller standing up than she was sitting down. ‘You’ll be all right, dearie,’ she said more briskly. ‘You’ll see. Things will turn out.’ Wretched as she was at this sudden ending of an era, ending of her nursery days, ending of the only life she could remember, she was tough enough not to make it worse for the child by mourning with her. ‘And there’s still the angel, don’t forget.’ She nodded towards the corner of the room, where a street lamp threw a barred patch of light.
‘Will he go with me?’
‘I’ve told you often enough. He has to go with you, in every room, to watch out for the corners of life.’
Virginia sighed. ‘I wish I knew what he looked like.’
‘Chances are you never will,’ the nurse said, going to the door, ‘because you believe he’s there. It’s only when you think you’re alone, that he might show up, to prove you wrong. It would depend though. I don’t know. Angels are funny people – if you’ll pardon the liberty.’ She bobbed her head towards the corner of the room, where she had taught Virginia to believe that her angel stood to guard her.
‘You’re So terribly noisy, Jinny,’ Helen Martin complained. ‘Why are you always so noisy? You don’t get it from me, but your father could shout loud enough in temper, in which, I feel constrained to say, he frequently was.’
‘Stop picking on the poor man.’ Virginia continued to bang the broom against the skirting-board as she swept. ‘It’s done with. Let the past bury its dead, Helen.’ Now that she was grown up, she called her mother that. They treated each other as equals. On Virginia’s side, that meant a certain indiscipline, a thinly-veiled disrespect, but a guarded friendship that had somehow evolved from the difficult years when they struggled as mother and child together.
On Helen’s side, their equality was tainted with rivalry. At forty-eight, she thought she was better-looking than Virginia was at twenty. As an unattached woman, she considered herself still in the running for any men who came along, even if they were nearer her daughter’s age than her own.
‘Your father,’ Helen continued, leaning stiffly back on the sofa, closing her eyes tightly, and recrossing her legs, for she was ‘resting’, which was more an active than a passive occupation, ‘your father, poor man, suffered from being the greatest egotist the world has ever known. What he really couldn’t stand was the fact that I was more successful in my career than he was.’
‘Were you?’ Virginia eyed her mother, thinking that if it were not for her legs, she was still a fairly well preserved woman. ‘We seemed to be quite well off in those days, and you didn’t have the position on the magazine that you do now.’
‘Ah, yes –
in those days,’
her mother said darkly, flexing her fingers, and then raising them in the air to make the motions of drawing on gloves. ‘But how is he doing now? That’s the question. He was the sort of man whom one always saw as doomed to failure.’
Since she had become quite a person in the magazine world, and uplifted the souls of several thousand women every month
with her limpid editorials on love, marriage, and what she called The Things That Count, Helen had taken to a certain artificial precision of speech. She always put in her whoms punctiliously, and could insert subjunctive clauses flowingly into her conversation, without pausing for breath.
‘I’m going out,’ Virginia said abruptly. She flung the broom into the kitchen cupboard, and came back to her mother wearing a camel hair coat drawn tightly round her enviable waist. Helen opened her eyes and calculated how much smaller the waist was than her own. She shut her eyes again at the deduction, and asked, ‘Where are you going?’
‘To work, of course. You know I have an evening class today.’ Virginia was studying journalism at a college on the other side of London. When asked whether she hoped one day to be a magazine editor like her mother, she was apt to reply that if she were, it would only be on the way up to something better.
Eager and confident, Virginia was full of a limitless ambition, which arose from her vitality and her youthful belief that the world was hers for the asking. She had experienced, by normal standards, an unhappy childhood, her parents divorced, her mother sending her away to an illiberal school and not knowing what to do with her in the holidays; but it had not quenched her enthusiasm for life.
She ran down the stairs outside the flat, and went eagerly out into the pungent London darkness. The flat was in a mews off a Bloomsbury street, converted from a garage, which had been converted from a stable. Some of the buildings were still garages. As Virginia walked over the cobbles to the arch of the mews, she greeted with a smile a man who was working on the engine of his car by the light of a street lamp and a torch. She did not know him, but he looked troubled, as if he did not know as much about the engine as he should.