The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [106]
‘I get on Ginger’s nerves,’ she told Mr Jacobs ingenuously, as he came up to the counter. ‘Isn’t that terrible? Wouldn’t you think I’d know better at my age?’
Mr Jacobs murmured something soothing. He had his eyes beyond the door where he could see a woman vacillating at the shop-window. Virginia kept repeating that it was all right, and even found herself begging Miss Sunderland to start singing again, but Miss Sunderland was quite distraught. She handed over the next customer to Virginia, and stood back against the shelves, sucking her finger and looking humble. When it was time for her to go, she plodded out of the shop with her long neck bent, and none of the adventurous bounce with which she usually set out for Kensington High Street.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ Stella poked her thick chin towards the door, after Miss Sunderland had closed it gently and stood looking nervously up and down the pavement before she struck out for the bus-stop, as if she were afraid of being followed.
‘She’s all right.’ Virginia went past Stella to the window to re-corset a pink torso with one of the black mesh girdles that had just come in.
‘You don’t look so hot yourself,’ Stella said. ‘Feeling queer today? My mother always says it’s a living hell the whole nine months.’
Virginia’s baby was an inexhaustible subject of conversation for the whole staff of Etta Lee’s. Everyone had something to contribute. Rose, who was married to a traveller, had the advantage of two similar experiences of her own to recount. Mr Jacobs had four children at home, and had delivered the last one himself, and everyone else had a relation or friend on whose pregnancy they could draw for comment. Virginia often wished that she had kept the baby a secret. She had intended to, but Miss Sunderland was too figure-conscious not to notice the first fractional thickening of Virginia’s slender waist.
‘I’m all right,’ she said shortly to Stella, and stepped into the window with the black girdle. As she fitted it on to the slippery torso, so much narrower than any woman would be who bought the girdle, Virginia looked out at the street, where people hurried through the rain on their own affairs. One or two of them glanced at Virginia, their eye caught by movement in the window. A man in a soft green hat stopped and looked into the window for a few moments, and Virginia was not sure whether he was looking at her or at the lingerie. He lifted his hat and walked away. The gesture was comically social. Virginia thought after he had gone that she should have smiled and nodded. How funny they would have looked, exchanging civilities through the plate-glass window, with the headless dummy in its brassière and girdle for chaperone. It would be like the prisoner and his girl in Joe’s book, talking through the thick glass screen while the warder pretended not to listen.
Why did she have to think of prison now?
‘What’s on your mind?’ Mr Jacobs asked kindly as she stepped down from the window into the shop. ‘You look as if you were full of troubled thoughts.’
‘It’s the weather, I expect.’ Virginia manufactured a smile. ‘This rain is depressing.’
‘Well, you must keep a gay heart,