The Angel in the Corner Read Online Free

Beautiful
, a lovely and shining thing designed to attract the eye and dispose the mind in favour of what lay beyond.
    Virginia nodded to those of the girls she knew – they were always changing in the reception-room – and walked through the wide satiny door to what lay beyond. The carpeted corridor continued to breathe elegance and success, but Virginia knew that if she were to open any of the doors on either side, it would be like passing from a grand restaurant through the swing-door into the kitchen. As the doors opened and shut to the comings and goings of men and women, most of whom smiled at Virginia, she could see the desks and typewriters and filing-cabinets and drawing-boards, and ceiling-high piles of back issues of the magazine. She longed for the day when she would be behind one of those doors, sitting at one of those desks, using one of those constantly-ringing telephones.
    It was not that Virginia had a consuming passion to work on a women’s magazine. She had set her sights on it because there was a chance for her in this place, and she might as well succeed here as anywhere else. Her lively ambition was catholic in itsaims. If something other than journalism had come her way, she would have grasped it with the same eagerness. It did not matter where she succeeded in life, as long as she did succeed, and in her young arrogance, she knew that she would. She had luck. Things went well for her, just as Tiny had always said that they would; only Tiny had not called it luck. She had said it was the angel.
    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