The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [2]
On Helen’s side, their equality was tainted with rivalry. At forty-eight, she thought she was better-looking than Virginia was at twenty. As an unattached woman, she considered herself still in the running for any men who came along, even if they were nearer her daughter’s age than her own.
‘Your father,’ Helen continued, leaning stiffly back on the sofa, closing her eyes tightly, and recrossing her legs, for she was ‘resting’, which was more an active than a passive occupation, ‘your father, poor man, suffered from being the greatest egotist the world has ever known. What he really couldn’t stand was the fact that I was more successful in my career than he was.’
‘Were you?’ Virginia eyed her mother, thinking that if it were not for her legs, she was still a fairly well preserved woman. ‘We seemed to be quite well off in those days, and you didn’t have the position on the magazine that you do now.’
‘Ah, yes – in those days,’ her mother said darkly, flexing her fingers, and then raising them in the air to make the motions of drawing on gloves. ‘But how is he doing now? That’s the question. He was the sort of man whom one always saw as doomed to failure.’
Since she had become quite a person in the magazine world, and uplifted the souls of several thousand women every month with her limpid editorials on love, marriage, and what she called The Things That Count, Helen had taken to a certain artificial precision of speech. She always put in her whoms punctiliously, and could insert subjunctive clauses flowingly into her conversation, without pausing for breath.
‘I’m going out,’ Virginia said abruptly. She flung the broom into the kitchen cupboard, and came back to her mother wearing a camel hair coat drawn tightly round her enviable waist. Helen opened her eyes and calculated how much smaller the waist was than her own. She shut her eyes again at the deduction, and asked, ‘Where are you going?’
‘To work, of course. You know I have an evening class today.’ Virginia was studying journalism at a college on the other side of London. When asked whether she hoped one day to be a magazine editor like her mother, she was apt to reply that if she were, it would only be on the way up to something better.
Eager and confident, Virginia was full of a limitless ambition, which arose from her vitality and her youthful belief that the world was hers for the asking. She had experienced, by normal standards, an unhappy childhood, her parents divorced, her mother sending her away to an illiberal school and not knowing what to do with her in the holidays; but it had not quenched her enthusiasm for life.
She ran down the stairs outside the flat, and went eagerly out into the pungent London darkness. The flat was in a mews off a Bloomsbury street, converted from a garage, which had been converted from a stable. Some of the buildings were still garages. As Virginia walked over the cobbles to the arch of the mews, she greeted with a smile a man who was working on the engine of his car by the light of a street lamp and a torch. She did not know him, but he looked troubled, as if he did not know as much about the engine as he should.
He smiled back. Virginia was tall, not willowy, but healthily supple, with a wide mouth and thick, dark hair plunging over her high forehead. She was feminine enough, and slight in her bones, and yet there was something rugged about her. Although she was only twenty, and had seen nothing of life, she looked as if some day, if she had to, she would be able to stand a lot of abuse.
The man saw some of these things dimly, resisted a desire to shine his torch directly on her, and said: ‘Hullo.’ He liked her vivid look. Even in the pale coat, she gave the impression of colour in the half-darkness. You could pass thirty girls in coats like that on the street, but only turn to look back at this one.
Virginia replied amiably, and stopped walking when the man asked if she lived in the mews. He told her that he had just come to live in a flat above the garage with a friend who was also a doctor,