The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [30]
‘I start next week. In the correspondence department. Channelling the mail, you know, and sorting out the readers’ letters.’
‘Yes, yes, I know. You don’t have to tell me what my own correspondence department does.’
Helen was angry. Virginia had expected that. She had already made it clear that she did not want Virginia in the same office. One of her excuses was that the rest of the staff might feel obliged to favour her. Knowing how most of the staff felt about her mother, Virginia thought that they would be more likely to do the reverse.
Helen tapped her fingers on the side of the chair. ‘I don’t like you going behind my back like that,’ she began. Then she remembered Spenser, who was standing solidly on the carpet, taking it all in, appraising, with little pushing movements of his moist lower lip.
‘But of course,’ Helen added swiftly, and her body relaxed a little as she decided what line to take, ‘since it is all settled, I naturally could not be more delighted. I think it’s a pity though that you didn’t come to me about it. I could have put you into a much better job. One of the girls who helps on the beauty page is leaving. I’ve filled her place now, but if I had only known you wanted to work here, if you had only told me –’ She looked at Spenser with spread hands and raised shoulders, as if to enlist his sympathy for a mother whose daughter never told her anything.
‘Mom is always the last person to hear anything.’ Spenser readily answered the call to make one of his favourite jokes.
Virginia did not argue. What was the use? She had got her job, that was all that mattered, and she knew that she had got it by her own initiative, for Mr Owen had no love for her mother, and had helped Virginia in spite of the fact that she was her daughter, not because of it.
If Helen wanted to lie her way out of the situation to save her face with Eldredge, that was all right. Virginia would not spoil any little fling she might be having with him.
The fling, it appeared, was to include a champagne party at the Savoy on the following night, which was New Year’s Eve.
‘Such fun,’ Helen said, although Virginia had often heard her say that she detested mass merriment in restaurants. ‘You’re fixed up with a party, of course, Jinny?’
‘Not exactly,’ Virginia had refused Felix’s invitation because she had promised to take Helen out to dinner. ‘But something will turn up, I expect.’
‘Why don’t you come with us?’ Spenser asked. Whatever he thought about it, he was too polite, and perhaps kind as well, not to feel compelled to say this. Virginia liked him better, and wondered how she could as politely refuse.
Helen went to her desk, and began to look through papers in a random way. ‘That’s very kind of you, Spenser,’ she said, bending to look in a drawer, ‘but perhaps Jinny would rather be out with her own young friends than with us old fogies.’
‘Oh? Well, that might be so.’ Spenser took this literally.
‘She has dozens of friends. There’s sure to be something going on, isn’t there, Jinny?’
Returning home after her lunch with Mary, Virginia met Felix hurrying out of his doorway, as if a baby threatened to be born at any minute.
‘Happy New Year!’ he called to her.
‘It isn’t New Year’s Eve yet.’
‘It will be. I hope you and your mother enjoy yourselves.’
‘Helen can’t come out with me after all. Something else came up.’
‘Then you’ll come with me? Please do, Virginia. It won’t be very exciting, but if you’d care to, my parents would be delighted. My mother will love you.’
They always said that hopefully. It was embarrassing then if the mother did not take to you. It looked as though it were your fault.
*
Felix’s mother and father lived staidly, in a fair degree of unimaginative comfort in a large flat in St John’s Wood. To say that they lived would be extravagant. They existed, rather, in a prison of stagnant respectability more daunting than anything Virginia had imagined. She had guessed that they would not be exhilarating. People’s parents were often boring, or conventional, or foolish; but these two had