The Angel in the Corner (27 page)

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.’

‘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 woman 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.’

‘Your young man doesn’t seem much help,’ Betty said, peering to see if Virginia’s sandwiches looked better than hers. She had a tactless tongue, but it came from an honest heart, not from a desire to do mischief.

‘It’s not his fault,’ Virginia said defensively. ‘Jobs aren’t so easy to find these days. Anyway, he’s writing a book. That’s much more important.’

‘I dare say, if anyone publishes it.’

‘They will. They’ve promised to.’ Virginia would not allow
herself to give up hope that Joe would ever finish the book. He did not talk about it any more, and she did not ask him about it, although she was distressed by the sight of the expensive typewriter collecting dust on the top of the cupboard.

‘I just thought,’ Betty said, with her mouth full of dry sandwich that was only buttered on one side. ‘I wonder if they ever rented my sister’s flat. She moved out last week. Gone to Stockton, her and her husband. My mother could find out for you. She knows the man who lets. It’s not much, mind,’ she added, as Virginia began to get excited. ‘Not what you’ve been used to, I dare say, but it would be handy for the shop, and it’s cheap, and the building’s not too bad, though I wouldn’t say as much for the neighbourhood.’

‘What’s the matter with the neighbourhood?’ Virginia asked. ‘Not that I mind. I think I’d take it even if it was in a slum.’

‘Well, it is really,’ Betty said. ‘Very poor.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I wouldn’t live there, mind, but my sister didn’t care. She’s a bit shimmy herself.’

Virginia understood what Betty meant when she saw the flat. It was two tiny rooms at the corner of a blackened building, with a kitchen even smaller than the one in the Chelsea basement. Betty’s sister had left it in a state of indescribable filth, and Virginia did not attempt to describe it to Joe. She merely took him there, and stood in the doorway between the two rooms, watching him while he looked round, making a face at the smell.

‘We can’t live here, Jin,’ he said. ‘This is awful.’

‘We must, until we can find something better. Mollie will turn us out. It’s no good imagining she won’t, just by not thinking about it. She doesn’t even speak to me any more if I meet her in the street. We’ve got to live somewhere. We’ll be happy here, darling. We’ll be together. That’s all that matters.’ She put her arms round him, and tried to rub the despondency from his mouth with her cheek. ‘I’ll clean it up. I’ll come every evening after work, and wash and scrub. I’ll soon get rid of the smell and all this foulness.’ She kicked at the sea of dirty paper and rags and old tins which surged about their feet. ‘You can do some painting. You told me you’d worked with a painter once. It would be fun working on it together.’

‘The landlord ought to paint it,’ Joe said. ‘Tell him we won’t take it unless he redecorates it.’

‘How can you say that? Anyone would think I was the one who had been poor, not you. You don’t say those things to those kind of people; not about places like this, and at the rent he’s asking. We’re lucky to get it, don’t you see? We can’t make a fuss about it.’