The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [4]
For their homework, the class had been given a selection of photographs and columns of newsprint with the headlines cut off, which they were to paste on to a large sheet of paper, as if making up the front page of a newspaper.
Mr Benberg did not change his expression when Miss Thompson, announcing that she would show the class a perfect example of how not to make up a newspaper, held up his page. Mr Benberg, who had been following the proceedings mildly, twitching his lip, and tapping his fingers to some rhythm in his head, continued to look mild while Miss Thompson tore the page to pieces, first figuratively and then actually, dropping the pieces into the wastepaper basket and dusting off her hands.
‘Never mind.’ Virginia reached over and patted Mr Benberg’s cold, dry hand. ‘I thought it was good.’
He turned his gentle eyes on her. ‘I didn’t. She was right, I dare say. It doesn’t matter.’ They were talking softly, under cover of Miss Thompson’s droned dictation about type faces, which Virginia had already taken down, and Mr Benberg did not care to.
Mr Benberg leaned closer to Virginia and whispered more tensely, like a conspirator coming to the crux of a plot: ‘It’s the words that count. Let someone else worry about how to print them. Words, words …’ He tapped a pencil on his knee, making little pock-marks in the grey flannel. ‘Words … springing alive out of your head, like Athene from the head of Zeus. Words … so insignificant on their own, so powerful when fused together by the miracle of man’s brain. Look here, Miss Martin, I tell you. There’s nothing in the world as romantic as words.’ His weak eyes were glistening. He twisted the pencil round in his hands as if he were tightening a tourniquet.
‘You really want to be a writer, don’t you?’ Virginia tried not to stare at the corner of his jumping mouth.
‘Want to be? I am one. In the bureau drawer at home, I’ve the manuscripts of twelve novels – unpublished, of course – and I’m half-way through my thirteenth now. Oh –’ he glanced round quickly at the scribbling class. ‘That’s a secret. No one knows, except my dear wife, of course. I shouldn’t have told you. I don’t why I did, but you’re – well, anyway, I don’t think you’ll betray me.’
‘Of course not.’ Virginia was puzzled. ‘Why do you come here?’
‘I’m looking for the clue. There must be something I’ve overlooked, or my books would be published. I thought I might find it here.’ Mr Benberg looked round anxiously, as if expecting to catch it lurking in a corner of the draughty basement.
*
At the college a few days later, jovial Mr Deems stopped Virginia in the corridor. ‘Greetings, my young friend, and congratulations,’ he said.
‘Oh, good. Have I won the Christmas hamper?’
‘Better yet. You have won, by your honest efforts, a two-weeks’ stint on the staff of the Northgate Gazette. Not a job, you understand. Just a part of your training. They oblige us – for favours returned, of course – but they oblige. Lovely people. You start today.’
‘Now?’
‘When else? You should be there now, my young friend.’ He looked at his watch, shook his fat wrist violently, glanced at it again, and scuttled away down the corridor like an egg with legs.
*
The lovely people lived two flights up above a bank on the corner of the High Street of Northgate, which is a western suburb of London. Its name is the only illogical thing about Northgate. In every other respect, it adheres logically to the standards set for it by the other outer suburbs which jostle each other in a rough circle round the metropolis, joined to its mother-life by the umbilical cords of the underground railway. Virginia had seen its like many times before, and yet today as she walked from the station, it did not look familiar or dull.