The Angel in the Corner (5 page)

‘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.’

‘I’m supposed to interview her,’ Virginia said, ‘for my newspaper. Which is her room?’

‘You born yesterday?’ The man shuffled his cracked patent-leather shoes in a tiny dance step, without moving his shoulders from the wall. ‘You’ve got a hope. You think she wants it splashed on the front page that she’s coming down to appearing in a tenth-rate show like this? She’s only doing it because she’s practically down and out. But she’s keeping it dark. She’s always thinking she’s going to make a big come-back up West. You know what these old-timers are. She doesn’t know she’s finished. They never do. Anyway,’ he added casually, dropping his cigarette and turning his foot on it, ‘she’s gone home.’

‘Oh, no!’ Virginia was aghast. ‘I can’t go back to the office and say I haven’t seen her. This was a sort of trial for me. The first big job I’ve been sent on. I can’t mess it up like this.’

‘I used to feel like that once,’ the man said. He looked at the end of his cigarette and gave a short laugh. ‘Thought I’d die of shame if I bungled a step. Now I dance like a bull’s foot most of the time, but I don’t care as long as I can hang on to the job. Time was though, when I –’

Virginia cut him short. Nice as he was, and with a life, no doubt, seamed by tragic disillusionment, she had no time to get
nostalgic with him. ‘Do something for me,’ she said. ‘Tell me where that woman lives, and I’ll get her at home. I’ll make her see me. I won’t be beaten by her.’

The man winked at her. ‘As it happens, I know,’ he said. ‘She’d have me shot for telling you, but if you won’t let on, and since I’ve a daughter myself – here, got a pencil? Ambassador Hotel, Lulgate Square. That’s somewhere in Paddington, I think. Look, kid, she won’t see you. She’s a bitch on wheels. I’m telling you.’

‘What do you bet she won’t? Get the
Northgate Gazette
on Saturday and see if I didn’t get my story!’

*

Lulgate Square was across the Paddington railway tracks, between the Harrow Road and Edgware Road. The tall Edwardian houses, with stone steps rising over the basement entrance, had been built in the Square’s palmier days, when servants toiled up and down the many stairs, and nursemaids walked prim children in the little railed garden between the houses. Now the paint and plaster had fallen in lumps and not been replaced, and the rows of bells and name-cards by the doorway of each house showed that they were no longer family homes.

The spear-tipped area railings still remained, but the little garden was fenced with wire, since the railings had long ago been taken away for scrap metal, and had not been renewed after the war. The wire gate was padlocked, but many children and dogs had climbed in over the sagging fence and reduced the grass to a dust-patch and the shrubbery to a few straggled bushes, dying slowly under the layers of soot and sulphur from the railway.

Two houses at one corner of the square had been shattered by a bomb, and had never been rebuilt. No one had thought it worthwhile to repair war damage which had only hastened the decay already begun long before the Germans made a target of Paddington Station. The bomb-site showed the foundations of old cellars, like bones exposed in an open grave. There were rusted tanks and cisterns in there, broken shoes, and saucepans
and rags, and a blackened little bath lying on its side among the caked earth and weeds. On the high, blank wall of the house which stood next to this desolate plot, there showed quite clearly the marks of fireplaces and the steeply zigzagging staircase.

The house from which the buildings had been torn away was the Ambassador Hotel. The name was painted on the fanlight above the door. There were five bells of different sizes, but none of the cards tacked beside them said Miller. After a while, Virginia rang the bell marked Caretaker. She heard a jangling far away in the house, and presently a woman in slippers and a flowered overall looked out of the basement door, and squinted up at Virginia on the steps.

‘Doug’s out,’ the woman said, ‘if it’s him you want.’

‘I’m looking for Miss Miller. Miss Doris Miller. I thought she lived here.’

‘Are you from the furniture company?’ the woman asked, drawing in her mouth. ‘You’re not? Oh, well then, her bell’s the third one up. The name’s Porritt. That’s her married name, you see.’

Virginia thanked her, and the woman rubbed her hands and observed that it was cold enough to have a white Christmas yet, and went back into the basement.

As Virginia reached for the Porritt bell, the front door opened and a woman with a shopping-bag came out, leaving the door ajar so that Virginia could go inside. Here was a stroke of luck. She had been wondering how she could get in if Doris Miller felt too misanthropic to answer the bell. She calculated that the third bell up must indicate the first floor, climbed the stairs, and came to a halt on a small landing with two doors. The voices of a man and a woman could be heard behind one of them. Doris Miller was evidently at home in domestic bliss with Mr Porritt.

Virginia’s knock was answered by Mr Porritt, in a colourless cardigan and baggy tweed trousers. The room went back to the right at an angle, where the foot of a brass bed, hung with clothing, stuck out. Virginia could not see Miss Miller on the bed, but could hear her impatient voice: ‘Who is it, George? What do they want? I’m resting.’

‘What do you want? She’s resting,’ George repeated obediently. He was a paunchy man, with a square head of grey hair and a resigned blue eye.

‘I’m from the
Northgate Gazette,’
Virginia said. ‘I was supposed to interview Miss Miller at the theatre, but I’m afraid I missed her there, so I thought, if she could spare me a few moments –’

‘Go away,’ said the voice from the bed. ‘Get out of here. I’m not seeing anyone from the press.’

‘Go away,’ repeated George, softening the words. ‘She’s not seeing anyone from the press.’

‘But Mr Askey promised. He arranged for me to see you.’ Virginia pitched her voice to reach round the corner of the room.

There was a grunt and a creaking of springs, and a foot could be seen kicking under the tumbled blankets at the foot of the bed. ‘Mr Askey can go to hell, and so can you.’ The voice was less distinct, as if it had gone to ground.

George did not like to repeat this. He smiled uncertainly, and Virginia smiled back, even more uncertainly.

‘Has she gone?’ The blankets heaved again, and the voice was clearer, as if Doris Miller had sat up in the bed.

‘Please let me talk to you just for a moment.’ Virginia took a step forward into the room. She could not step farther without treading on Mr Porritt’s stockinged feet. ‘I want to write something that will be good publicity for you. You can see it before it’s printed, if you like.’

‘Get the hell out of here!’ Miss Miller cried. ‘How dare you come here bothering me, making fun of me. Don’t think I don’t know your kind. The press. I’ve had some. All they want to do is tear your guts out.’

‘No, honestly, I –’

‘Go away, or I’ll call the police.’

‘Go away or we’ll call the police,’ George said half-heartedly.

‘Don’t just stand there, George. Go and call them! No, wait a minute – what did she say the paper was? The
Northgate Gazette.
Go downstairs and ring up the editor and tell him what I think of him for sending this woman here to meddle in
my business. She’s trying to make trouble for me, but I’ll make worse trouble for her.’

‘You can’t afford, you know,’ Virginia said, trying to keep calm, ‘not to work with the press. Every actress needs publicity.’

‘I’ll get all the publicity I want my own way,’ Miss Miller retorted, ‘and that won’t be from some twopenny-halfpenny scandal sheet in the back end of nowhere. George, get down to that telephone and lay it on hot. And you get going, or I’ll get up and kick you down the stairs myself.’

‘Get going,’ George said, looking at Virginia sadly, ‘or she’ll kick you down the stairs.’

Virginia backed on to the landing, and lowered her voice. ‘You won’t really telephone the editor?’

‘I’ll have to,’ George said. ‘You heard what she said. Just got to get my shoes.’ Virginia went dejectedly down the stairs. In the hall, she saw the telephone hanging on the wall, with a box for money below it. She thought of cutting the wires, but what good would that do? She could not cut the wires of all the telephone boxes in Paddington.

*

When Virginia went into the reporters’ room, Reggie was alone, looking very pleased with himself.

‘In there.’ He poked his thick thumb towards the dog-kennel. ‘The old man’s waiting to see you.’

‘A big help you turned out to be.’ The editor sat leaning back with his hands on the edge of the desk, his pill boxes and medicine bottles ranged before him like boy scouts. ‘I’ve had Doris Miller’s husband on my tail, and the theatre too. It seems you were very rude and insulting. Quite a credit to the
Gazette.’

‘But I wasn’t! I swear it.’

‘You must have been, or she would have talked to you. You must have been damned rude for an actress to kick you out. I’ve never known one yet who didn’t crave to see her name in print.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Virginia said. ‘She thinks it’s a
terrible come-down to have to do pantomime at the Hurleigh Empire. She’s afraid that if we do a story on it, one of the dailies will pick it up and make fun of her. She thinks it will spoil her chances of a come-back. Poor old soul, you can’t help feeling sorry for her, in a way.’

‘Better start feeling sorry for yourself,’ the editor said sourly. ‘And for me. You may not think the story was worth much. She’s a has-been, I know, but she’s the nearest approach to a star we ever get in this backwater. Of course we should write her up. You’ve made a mess of it, and made me look a fool, and more of a fool for giving you the chance. I tell you, if old man Deems wants to send any more of his half-wits round here, I’ll tell him where he can put them. I’ve tried to make this rag into a decent newspaper, and I can’t have the people who represent it going about insulting everybody right and left.’

‘You won’t believe that I didn’t, will you?’

He shook his head. ‘The subject is closed. I’m through with you.’

‘Can’t I even stay till the end of the week?’

He rocked the front legs of his chair down to the floor. ‘How can I let you, you idiot, with that big oaf in there crowing his head off at me for taking the wrong chance on you? He thinks I only tried to help you because I – Oh, well, skip it.’ He rubbed his head and muttered: ‘But when it comes to being called a dirty old man –’

‘I’d better go then,’ Virginia said. She wondered whether he would manage his smile for her, but his face remained seamed with displeasure.

As she turned, he suddenly stood up, and stretched out his hand across the bottles and pill boxes. ‘Come and see me when you’re editing the woman’s page of the
Sunday Express,’
he said, ‘if you ever remember we exist.’ He shook hands gravely, and Virginia went out.

As she shut the door, Reggie lunged forward, with a jeering remark ready in his mouth. Virginia pushed him out of the way and went down into the High Street, which had become so familiar in the last week, but was now already a part of her past.

When Virginia arrived home at the flat, she discovered that part of the turmoil inside her was a gnawing hunger. All the way home in the train she had brooded and fretted, and gone over and over all the small, distasteful scenes of the day which had led to her downfall. Emotion always stimulated her appetite. She felt ravenous. She went straight to the kitchen, found bread and butter and the end of a ham, and went into the living-room, chewing on the thick sandwich, thinking, with unfocused eyes.

She was startled to find Helen sitting at her little walnut escritoire, writing letters.

‘Do I have to account to you for all my movements?’ Helen said, when Virginia asked why she was there. ‘I am not a stenographer, chained to the office from nine to five. I might ask what you are doing here. I thought you were running around the suburbs being an ace reporter.’

‘I was.’ Virginia sat down, too dispirited to invent a story. ‘They threw me out.’

‘Dear heart, no!’ Helen rose and swung round to sit with Virginia, all in one swift movement of whirling skirt and jingling jewellery. At first, while Virginia told her glumly what had happened, she was too sympathetic. Virginia did not want that. She did not want pity and soothing nonsense, as if she were a child weeping over a broken toy. She wanted fighting support, a rugged belief in her, which would help her own stamina, and push her ahead again.

‘You’re very sweet, Helen,’ she said, getting up and brushing crumbs off her skirt. ‘It’s nice of you to be so concerned, when I know you thought the whole thing was ridiculous anyway. But you’re making me feel worse. I feel awful.’ She went to the window, and looked down into the mews, where the first small flakes of snow were feathering the cobbles.

‘I’m a failure.’ She said this hoping to be contradicted, but her mother, turning off her sympathy as swiftly as she had turned it on, said crisply: ‘All right then, so you’re a failure. You’ve fallen down on this, but what are you wailing about? It isn’t the end of your career, and if it were, there are plenty of other things in life besides newspapers.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Virginia said, wondering how many
girls were saying that to their mothers at this moment. ‘I know there are other things, but since I had decided on this particular one, I just had to be good at it. Look, it’s snowing.’