The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [72]
‘Oh, poor Helen. She doesn’t like to be talked to like that.’ Virginia thought that her mother must have been very desperate even to have listened to that kind of talk. Normally, if anyone told her that she was wrong, she either walked out of the room, or hung up the telephone.
‘I don’t care if she likes it or not. Excuse me, it’s your mother, of course. But if I got involved in the private lives of all my staff, I should be greyer than I am already, which would make me snow white. Well –’ she slapped a note-pad down on the desk, and stood up, needle thin in her dark linen suit. ‘Do you want to work with Jane Stuart, or don’t you?’
‘Of course I do. I can’t thank you enough for giving me another job.’
‘You’ll need it,’ Miss Small said grimly, ‘if your husband is as feckless as your mother says he is.’
‘How can she say that? She doesn’t even know him. He’s wonderful, Miss Small, and –’
‘They all say that.’
‘And,’ pursued Virginia, who was determined to say this, ‘I’m not working because I have to, but because I want to.’
‘Mm-hm.’ Adelaide Small accepted this without cynicism or disbelief. ‘Go and explain yourself to Jane. I have another appointment.’
As Virginia went to the door, Miss Small called after her:
‘That’s a nasty bruise on your arm, Virginia. You ought to put some witch-hazel on it.’
Virginia looked down at the discoloured marks of Joe’s hand which showed on her upper arm below the short sleeve of her dress.
‘I knocked it,’ she said.
‘I didn’t ask you how you did it. I said look after it. If it swells, you won’t be able to type.’
*
Virginia wore long sleeves to work until the bruise had faded. If anyone but Miss Small had noticed it, it would be all round the office that her husband was knocking her about. The unmarried girls were jealous of the ones who were married, and lost no opportunity for gossip. If you listened to them, you could hardly believe that there was a married woman on the staff who was not on the verge of divorce.
Jane Stuart actually was on the verge. She was separated from her husband, a commercial artist working at home, who resented her being out of the house all day on affairs of her own. Jane dreaded the domestic rut, and would not give up her career. According to office legend, there had been a furious battle, in the course of which Mr Stuart had said: ‘You can choose between me and the job.’ Jane had chosen the job.
She did not appear to regret the choice. She was supremely happy with her beauty page, and her readers’ letters, and her little excursions to salons and shops to find out what was new in the entrancing business of making women feel that they looked better than they did.
She passed on the news in phrases of ardent sincerity to her readers, who believed, with each new discovery, that they were going to be transformed into raving beauties overnight. When they were not, they did not abandon hope. They took notepaper, and confided to Jane Stuart all the problems of pimples, pallor, broken veins, big noses, small eyes, lank hair, and peeling finger-nails that were burdening their lives.
Virginia’s job was to read the letters, and make a preliminary decision on which should be answered by mail, and which were of enough interest to other readers to be answered in the magazine itself. After a week with the letters, she began to wonder if there was a woman in the land whose life was not made hideous by some physical defect. Like a doctor who begins to imagine that he suffers from the diseases of his patients, Virginia found herself searching in the mirror to see whether she had whiteheads or blackheads or swollen ear lobes, or a lipstick that turned blue in the evening.
She worked on the letters in the mornings. In the afternoons, she took down Miss Stuart’s dictated answers. If the beauty editor had given as much care to her marriage as she did to her readers’ complexions, she would not now be working towards a lonely middle age.