The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [7]
Her mother’s secretary greeted her in the neat little office which guarded the door to what the staff called the throne room. Grace was a smooth, discreet girl, unobtrusive in her efficiency. Virginia wondered whether she ever let herself go at home, and said wild and foolish things and went without her girdle. When she saw her in the office, she was always correct, from her parting to her rubber heel-tips, never speaking a word out of place, unruffled by crisis or triumph, accepting with the same half-smile both Helen’s splashes of twinkling camaraderie and irritable flings of temperament.
She picked up the telephone. ‘Virginia is here. May she come in, Mrs Martin?’ she asked, in her voice which could not help being tactful, even when there was nothing to be tactful about. Virginia could hear her mother replying at voluble length.
‘She says Yes.’ Grace replaced the receiver with a slight, well-bred smile.
The throne room was as large as the reception-room, and quite as exquisite. Armchairs and a sofa stood at tastefully planned angles on the carpet, as if it were a drawing-room. The curtains were off-white, tasselled with gold, and on the walls hung lavishly-framed reproductions of the classic paintings of beautiful women.
Helen’s desk, a sarcophagus of carved and moulded walnut, stood in the exact centre of the carpet, with a padded swivel-chair, from which Helen could see and be seen by anyone anywhere in the room. She had picked up a telephone as soon as she finished talking to Grace, and Virginia wondered whether it was so that she could wave her daughter to a chair with the gesture of a gracious, but busy woman. There were two other women in the room, with notebooks on their knees. It was evidently a conference, which was what any conversation between more than two people was called.
‘Do that, Robert darling,’ her mother said into the telephone. ‘A million thanks. I am in your debt for ever.’ She rang off, and swivelled round with a push of her thickset legs to where Virginia sat on the ledge above the radiator. ‘What can I do for you, dear heart,’ she said, slipping into the affectionate mother-and-daughter relationship, as if it were a peignoir. She could just as easily slip it off.
‘I came to see if you would take me to lunch.’
‘Lunch? My dearest child, I’m much too busy. Marigold and Judy and I have barely broken the back of the knitting pages.’
Judy, the elder of the two women, stood up, honest and square, and so unrelievedly plain that it was a miracle she had ever been taken on to Lady Beautiful. However, Virginia knew that she was more use there than a dozen of the fetching girls whom her mother hailed as geniuses one week and fired the next.
‘We can finish this afternoon,’ she said, wanting lunch herself. ‘There’s plenty of time.’
Helen frowned, as Judy and Marigold moved towards the door. She did not like her staff to leave the room until she dismissed them.
‘Please come,’ Virginia said. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve got a job.’ She had not meant to say it here in front of the others, who would exclaim, and want to hear more; but, as often happened, she had blundered into telling something she had planned to recount in a quiet moment, over a corner table, with all her words for it prepared.
As she feared, the two women stopped on their way to the door. They knew and liked Virginia well enough to be interested in what she did. ‘A job!’ Marigold said. ‘How exciting. What is it – on a paper?’
‘Yes. Well, not exactly. At least, it’s on a paper, but it’s not a job really, just part of the college training.’
‘What a good idea,’ Marigold said, her clever face crinkled into an encouraging