The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [16]
‘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.’
‘I shall have to buy boots,’ Helen said absently. ‘Grey suede this year, I think. And I do understand, even if I am your mother. I know you’ve always thought that you could do anything you turned your hand to, and mostly you could. Rather sickeningly successful. I’ll admit to you now, Jinny, though I held my peace at the time, that it used quite to embarrass me with the other mothers on Speech Day at the school, that in anything at which you’d happened to try, you came out top. Look how you won the tennis tournament, although you had taken up tennis long after most of the other girls. Well, he who exalteth himself shall be humbled, somebody said somewhere.’
‘Oh, Helen. Christ said it.’
‘I know, I know. Don’t always talk to me as if I were a heathen, just because old Tiny pumped you full of sentimental twaddle when you were at an impressionable age. My God, I’m thankful to say, is not to