The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [92]
Miss Sunderland was a plank of a woman with a long face, and snuff-coloured hair parted in the middle and looped back at the sides like dusty curtains. She had stiff, shapeless legs and long, flat feet, and a skittish manner which fitted ill with her appearance. When she was excited, she would jump up and down and clap her hands, the tape measure round her neck bobbing, and her great slabs of feet striking the floor with springless thuds.
She was excited when she sold an expensive corset, or when Mr Jacobs gave her a holiday, or when someone said that there was a chance of the Queen driving down Edgware Road, because they had seen the gates of the Marble Arch open at lunch-time. The many years which she had spent working for a firm of corset manufacturers seemed to have arrested her emotional maturity. Most of her adult life had been dedicated to whalebone and rubber and embossed pink satin. ‘I know corsets, you see,’ she would say. ‘I know my corsets.’ But that was about all she did know.
After her years at the corset factory, it was quite a comedown for her to be working in the lingerie shop off the Edgware Road, where the corset department was only a counter and a bank of shelves and drawers half-way down on one side. The shop also sold underwear, nightdresses, stockings, blouses, dressing gowns, bed-jackets, and everything for the boudoir except the things that customers expected it to have.
Women were always dashing in and asking for elastic or buttons or ribbon. If Mr Jacobs was not spying sideways through the glass door for custom, the first person they encountered was Stella, slab-faced at the stocking counter.
‘Oh, no, we don’t stock those,’ Stella would say, as if they had asked for firearms; and the customer would halt in her tracks dumbfounded, because it looked just the kind of shop where you would find elastic and buttons and ribbon.
But – ‘Don’t give me haberdashery,’ Mr Jacobs would say to Miss Snelling at the cash desk. ‘I never want to get into that line.’ And so women continued to turn in hopefully for pins and crochet needles and glove stretchers, and to be phlegmatically turned away by Stella. Sometimes their eye was caught as they turned by a lacy pair of briefs or a ribboned camisole on the opposite counter, and they would stay to turn their fruitless visit into acquisition.
Virginia had been one of the women who came for buttons and stayed for something else. She had been on one of her disheartening excursions round the smaller estate agents and the glass cases in front of newsagents, looking for a cheap flat or rooms where she and Joe could live. On that morning, she was more disheartened than ever, because Joe had gone to Sandown Park with Ed Morris, instead of to an interview at a bakery, and if he did not get a job soon, it would be a question not only of where were they going to live, but what were they going to live on.
When she passed the lingerie shop, sandwiched between a chemist and a café in a side street off the Edgware Road, Virginia remembered that she needed buttons for Joe’s shirts. This was just the place to get small white buttons. She went in, was repulsed by Stella, walked out again in surprise, and saw in a corner of the window by a spreading fan of nylon stockings, a card which announced a vacancy for a Young Lady Assistant.
Without thinking twice, Virginia turned and went back into the shop and talked Mr Jacobs into giving her the job.
It was not difficult to pick up the work on the corset counter. Miss Sunderland knew everything there was to know, and was hungrily delighted to instruct. At the corset factory, she had trained many young girls. Here in Etta Lee’s, which was what Mr Jacobs’ shop was called, the girls did not want to learn about corsetry. Stella, Miss Sunderland’s last assistant, would not be told anything, and had become so aggressive when Miss Sunderland