The Angel in the Corner (7 page)

‘Things will go well with you, love,’ she said, her eyes swivelling to follow the points of the long, thick needles. ‘Things will come to you. I feel that. I’m prophetic, did I tell you? Father knows. I see more than I should sometimes, don’t I, old friend?’ She chuckled over her knitting, wagging her head.

‘I’ve always felt that I might be lucky,’ Virginia said, leaning forward to stroke the harsh fur of the little brown dog, who lay with distended stomach on the hearthrug. It was almost on
her lips to tell them what Tiny used to say about the guardian angel. Involuntarily, she glanced into the corner where a flourishing begonia tumbled its myriad little pink bells in a waterfall of blossom. She felt so safe in this room that it was possible to imagine that her angel stood there with calmly folded wings and a serene face, approving of her choice of friends.

Mrs Benberg flung down her knitting, and several stitches slid off the end of the fat needle. ‘Luck!’ she said scornfully. ‘There is no such thing as luck. Luck is a reward, not a chance gift. It’s only for those who fight for it. The people who say they’re unlucky don’t know that. They think they have been badly done by, when really they’ve done badly by themselves. But I tell you,’ she dropped her voice to a Biblical chant, ‘To him that hath shall be given. You know what that means, I suppose?’ She leaned forward with her skirt straining over her spread knees, and stared at Virginia with glowing eyes.

‘Yes, I think so. It always sounded unfair to me.’

‘Not unfair! Not, not! Why, it’s the very plum-stone and essence of fairness. It doesn’t mean that the rich people are going to get more money, and the poor are going to lose their pennies. Ridiculous notion. What it means is this. It means: to him that hath the courage to stand up to life shall be given chances, but to him that hath not the courage shall be taken away even those chances which he hath.’

She got up and walked about the room, making the furniture tremble. She was excited by what she had said. She grunted to herself, and made jerky upward movements of her hands. Then she stopped in her tracks, the light went out of her face, and she grew calm. ‘Time to let the dog out, Father,’ she said mildly. ‘It’s after ten.’

Virginia said that she must go home, and Mr Benberg and the dog took her into the frosted garden and let her out of the little creaking gate. He stood by the gate and waved, and Mrs Benberg waved strenuously from the front door, and called gaily after Virginia until she was out of earshot.

Virginia rode home on a bus through streets that were at first unfamiliar to her. The Benbergs lived far out in the northwest of London, at the end of one of those long roads, once a coaching way out of the city, and now winding and narrowing
and broadening past changing stretches of small factories, garages, houses, shops, school railings, and the long, dirty wall of a gasworks. The bus stopped and started, picked people up outside cinemas, let them down to hurry away round the corners of dark side-roads, and pursued its interminable course again unhurriedly, as if the driver were not anxious to get home to his wife.

As the bus moved in and out of the different boroughs, the street lighting changed. Here there were concrete poles, swan-necked and hideous, flooding the road with a shadowless blue light that turned the people on the pavements into ghosts, stark-faced, with dead lips. Then the bus passed into the shadows, as the fluorescent lights gave place to old-fashioned lamps, which cast pools of dim yellow light through the leafless plane trees, and left wide patches of darkness, where the few late walkers trod like poachers, mysterious, up to no good.

Then again the roadway was lit by globes of orange light, hanging in pairs like giant fruit along the middle of the road. Half asleep in her seat, Virginia grew alert to realize that she knew these lights, or some just like them. Memory opened, and she saw again the men on the high red trolleys, hanging up the lights, while she and Tiny, out shopping for vegetables, paused among the staring people on the pavement, and stared upwards with them.

She heard the disapproving things that the people were saying: ‘Hideous, that’s what it is.’

‘Great overblown Belisha beacons, I call them. Why can’t they leave things as they were?’

‘That’s the Council for you. Always something new. And who’s to pay for it? That’s what I’d like to know.’

‘Who always pays? Just wait and see if the rates don’t go up!’

Virginia remembered that there was talk about the lights for quite a while, but presently the lights became part of the High Street, and after a time they were not new any more, but already old-fashioned compared to the glaring illuminations that other councils were erecting in other parts of London.

She looked out along the glowing edge of the pavement, and saw that it was not only the orange lights that were familiar,
but the pavement itself. Here was that imposing double pillar-box, with an oval top, and one slot for Country and one for London and Abroad. Here was that same draper’s shop, with the gilt lettering and the cards of hooks and eyes hanging on the door, unchanged amid a row of shops that had been modernized. Here was the post office, with the clock slipped a little to one side, so that twelve o’clock pointed to the magnetic north, and here was that very vegetable shop with the green awning, under which she had stood with Tiny and watched the men on the trolley putting up the lights.

This was the corner where the dogs lifted their legs against the bins of potatoes. This was her own corner, where you turned to plod up the hill for home.

She had never returned to the cold, unfriendly house since she and her mother had left it nine years ago. When she was still seeing her father, once during every school holiday, he did not live there. He had let the house, and Helen used frequently to regret that her disgust with the house had made her so hasty in relinquishing it, since she might now be getting the rent herself.

Virginia stood up and reached for the wire of the bell. When the bus stopped, she walked back to the corner, and then up the hill past the dark houses to the one with the shrubby garden which had once been her playground. It was very cold. She remembered that it had always been colder at the top of the hill than down in the busy High Street. The snow lay in a crust along the garden wall, and made two white skull-caps on the stone balls on either side of the gate.

She had no idea how she would get home. There might not be another bus, and taxis did not cruise at night in this part of London. She began to regret having jumped so hastily off the warm, lighted bus. She had seen the house now, and that was all there was to it. Standing by the gate, with her hand on its cold iron scrolls, she felt no emotion except the remembrance of how she had always been glad to go out of the house, and never very pleased to come back to it.

The house looked just the same; too big, too square, too unimaginative in its arrangement of windows and chimneys. She turned away and began to walk down the hill, slippery
with freezing snow. As she reached the first corner by the house where the old lady with the cats had lived, a taxi climbed past her with its engine knocking, and stopped just beyond.

She turned, thinking that she might be able to ride back in it, and saw that it had stopped outside her old home. A man and a woman got out, she with a fur coat and a scarf over her head, the man lean and leggy, unfolding himself with difficulty from the taxi.

The woman hurried up the steps to the front door. The man paid the taxi, lifting the skirt of his overcoat, and squinting for change under the lamp light. As Virginia went forward to hail the driver, she saw that the man was her father.

‘But I tell you, Helen, I saw him. Why won’t you believe it?’

‘The whole thing is too impossible. You must have been crazy trailing up there in all that snow and cold. No wonder you started imagining things.’

‘I didn’t imagine anything. I saw him.’ Helen’s refusal to believe that Virginia had seen her father made her wish that she had said nothing about it. For a time she had not meant to, but then she had rashly come out with it in the unsuitable setting of the fitting-room at Helen’s dressmaker’s, where Helen was busy buying her a new suit for Christmas.

While Virginia stood in her slip, waiting for the fitter, she had been overtaken by an impulsive mixture of tactlessness and honesty, and had told Helen suddenly: ‘I saw my father last night.’

Helen argued, sitting upright on a brocade stool in the corner, her feet neatly crossed, and her slender rolled umbrella between her knees.

‘He would never go back to that barrack of a house,’ she said. ‘When last I heard of him, several years ago, he was still living in that depressing flat by the river. A man on his own, why would he want to go and rattle about in a house that size? Absurd as he is, he was never absurd in that way. He was always practical, if nothing else. I could have killed him at times for being so practical, when what I wanted from him was a little imagination. Just a spark, that was all I asked, but it wasn’t there in his soul. The man could not produce it. Not that he tried, I might add.’

Virginia closed her ears. She was tired of her mother’s postmortems, from which, after all these years, Helen still derived a certain macabre pleasure.

To check her in mid-grievance, Virginia told the rest of the story. ‘He isn’t a man on his own. I haven’t told you. There was a woman with him.’

Helen frowned. ‘Don’t be absurd. You’re inventing. I never heard that he had married again.’

‘Why should you? You never took any interest in what he did. You’ve told me often enough you wanted to lose touch completely.’

‘Perhaps it wasn’t his wife,’ Helen said, her displeased face brightening a little to the hope of scandal.

‘I think it was. They looked married. They looked – well, you know how people look.’

‘Just because you saw them together doesn’t prove – oh, here’s Miss Rainier. Good afternoon, Miss Rainier. What a long time you’ve been.’

Miss Rainier, whose father and brother had died in the Maquis, and who had been violated by three German soldiers in one night, came in humbly, her nose puffed from a cold, the worn tape-measure hanging round her neck like a chain of bondage. She took measurements swiftly and expertly, clucking at the admirable size of Virginia’s waist, turning her with gentle hands, excusing herself, implying her apologies for the crude necessity of a customer having to be appraised by anyone as inferior as herself.

Helen fidgeted on the stool, telling Virginia to stand still, fussing at Miss Rainier and giving sharp little commands about the suit, manifesting her annoyance at what Virginia had told her.

When Miss Rainier had left, effacing herself with a duck of the head through the curtain, Helen asked the question that had been tormenting her all through the fitting. ‘Jinny – did you speak to him?’

‘No, I didn’t. I waited until he had gone through the gate before I grabbed the taxi. He didn’t see me. Would you have minded if he had?’

‘You know I would. You know we agreed you shouldn’t see him again, and he agreed to it too. Not unwillingly, I am constrained to add. Don’t give me that silly, quizzical look. It wasn’t any hardship to you not to see him. I used to have to positively drive you there. Positively to drive you there,’ she said, amending the split infinitive.

‘I was a child then.’ Virginia pulled her skirt over her head. ‘I was embarrassed by him’

‘He would embarrass you still, with that caustic, derogatory
manner. Please, Jinny, if you care anything at all about me, don’t get any ideas about things being different now that you’re grown up. Why should I share you with him? He walked out on you. He didn’t want you. You’re mine. I brought you up, cared for you, was everything to you. You’re all I’ve got, dear heart. Don’t let me down.’ She became a little impassioned in the stuffy, pin-strewn fitting-room.

Virginia had finished dressing and was ready to leave. She did not like to see her mother losing, or pretending to lose, her grip. Loving entreaty sat discrepantly on that hard-shelled face.

‘Don’t get excited, Helen,’ she said easily. ‘I’m not going to see him again. I don’t want to.’

*

But did she want to? The last time she had seen her father was when she was twelve, and when she heard that it was the last time, she had not minded. Afterwards, as she grew older, she began to mind a little. It was so arbitrary to be suddenly cut off from one of your parents. It was so unnatural, so unsatisfactory to have a father alive and not to know anything about him. Other girls had fathers. If they did not, their fathers had died, and they accepted that as irrevocable. If their parents were divorced, they saw their fathers occasionally, going on exciting trips to Edinburgh, or Paris, or even, like Martha Broome, to the south of France, where she had been smuggled into the casino under age and had met a prince.

Even the unexciting, awkward trips to the flat would have been better than nothing. At least she could have told her friends at the beginning of the term: ‘I went to see my father. He gave me a bag.’ Or a scarf, or a bracelet. Except that Harold Martin had never given her anything, not once on any of the visits she made to him after the divorce. This had disappointed her at the time, but later she had wondered whether he was only trying to be fair to her mother by not bribing Virginia to like him.

She did not like him very much on these visits. He was reasonably familiar to her because he was her father, but he had never tried to get close to her even when they were living in the same house. He was withdrawing rapidly now into a
stranger, and Virginia could do nothing but back away too, step for step with him.

He had always behaved at home as if he mistrusted her, irritably waiting for her to say or do the wrong thing. Now when Virginia saw him only rarely, he was as uneasy with her as she was with him. He did not know how to treat her, and so she did not know how to behave.

Sometimes during those difficult afternoons they spent together, she behaved badly, out of embarrassment. She would boast, or use puerile slang expressions from school, or fidget and make faces, and spill her tea on his carpet. She always meant to behave impeccably. She would dream, during the journey to the flat, of the visit turning into a miracle, with her and her father on the top of the world together. When it did not turn out like that, she would find herself doing all the things which irritated him.