The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [93]
After two weeks at Etta Lee’s, Virginia felt as though she had been selling suspender belts and panty girdles all her life, and was doomed to spend the rest of life doing it. Miss Sunderland was delighted with her progress. ‘I never saw anyone to pick it up so quickly!’ she said, crowing like a baby with a daisy chain after Virginia had found the one garment in the shop that would fit a woman whose hips stood out almost at right angles to her waist. ‘You really are a clever one, Ginger.’ She had called Virginia this as soon as she heard her name, and the rest of the staff adopted it. ‘I expect it’s because you’re educated,’ Miss Sunderland added, lowering her voice and glancing round the shop, as if it were indelicate. ‘I never had much schooling myself, but it doesn’t matter, you see, if you specialize. I know my corsets. That I will say. I know my corsets.’
Miss Sunderland told Mr Jacobs that Virginia was getting on so well that she should not be counted as an apprentice any longer; but Mr Jacobs, who would never admit to a profit, said: ‘No use talking to me about raises. Business is terrible. I don’t know where we shall end at this rate.’
Apart from being suspicious of the sound of Mr Jacobs, who had once brought Virginia home as far as Sloane Square in his black Austin, with the rail at the back for dressing-gowns, Joe raised no objection to her job. He could not afford to. He was still hanging around with Ed Morris, making a pound here and there, doing no work on his book, convincing himself that he was looking for a job, but putting off the moment of finding it.
After the bulldog woman had tramped out of the shop, so obviously, from her back view, in need of a new corset that Miss Sunderland sorrowed more for her loss than for Mr Jacobs’, it was time for Virginia to go to lunch. Betty from the stockroom went with her.
‘Found a place yet, Ginger?’ she asked, when they were perched at a counter with sandwiches.
‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’ Virginia said. ‘We have to get out of the Chelsea place in another week, and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere. Now that I’m working, there’s so little time to look.’
‘You shouldn’t have took the job until you’d found somewhere,’ Betty said. She was a washed-out blonde, with a peering frown persistently cutting her white forehead, as if she had picked up someone else’s spectacles in mistake for her own.
‘If I hadn’t,’ Virginia said, ‘we couldn’t have lived anywhere.’
‘Your young man doesn’t seem much help,’ Betty said, peering to see if Virginia’s sandwiches looked better than hers. She had a tactless tongue, but it came from an honest heart, not from a desire to do mischief.
‘It’s not his fault,’ Virginia said defensively. ‘Jobs aren’t so easy to find these days. Anyway, he’s writing a book. That’s much more important.’
‘I dare say, if anyone publishes it.’
‘They will. They’ve promised to.’ Virginia would not allow herself to give up hope that Joe would ever finish the book. He did not talk about it any more, and she did not ask him about it, although she was distressed by the sight of the expensive typewriter collecting dust on the top of the cupboard.
‘I just thought,’ Betty said, with her mouth full of dry sandwich that was only buttered on one side. ‘I wonder if they ever rented my sister’s flat. She moved out last week. Gone to Stockton, her and her husband. My mother could find out for you. She knows the man who lets. It’s not much, mind,’ she added, as Virginia began to get excited. ‘Not what you’ve been used to, I dare say, but it would be handy for the shop, and it’s cheap, and the building’s not too bad, though I wouldn’t say as much for the neighbourhood.’
‘What’s the matter with the neighbourhood?’ Virginia asked. ‘Not that I mind. I think I’d take it even if it was in a slum.’
‘Well, it is really,’ Betty said. ‘Very poor.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I wouldn’t live there, mind, but my sister didn’t care. She’s a bit shimmy herself.