The Angel in the Corner Read Online Free Page B

mouth, which tipped his whole face a little to one side when he smiled. She thought that he might be quite good-looking without the overbearing hat, which sat too low on his head, with the brim too straight, like the hat of a wooden figure from Noah’s Ark.
    ‘So you got your first job today,’ the doctor said. ‘Don’t you think this calls for a celebration? Would you – no, darn it, there’s Robert. I was going to ask you if you would come up and have a drink, but the chap I live with is working on a paper. We’ve only got one room, and he can’t bear it if I ask people in.’
    ‘Come up to our flat then,’ Virginia said. Why not? Helen would not mind. She never minded seeing a personable man.
    Panting a little to keep up the pace which was Virginia’s normal rate of going upstairs, the man told her that his name was Felix Allen, and emboldened by talking to her swiftly-climbing back, he added breathlessly that he had hoped he would see her again after the other night.
    When they went into the flat, and he took off his coat and hat and sat rather gracefully on the sofa in his well-fitting striped doctor’s suit, she saw that he was indeed quite attractive in an unsensational way. His hair was educated by good barbering, and he looked very clean. His crooked smile gave his face a slightly whimsical air, which made the things he said seem more witty than they were.
    Virginia guessed that he was neither whimsical or witty, but really quite earnest. He had a quiet, deep voice, which must work wonders with his female patients. She imagined him sitting at bedsides and soothing neurotic women out of thinkingthat they were going to die, until their bulging eyes relaxed into dog-like devotion, and they murmured that they did not know where they would be without him.
    Helen had not come home yet. The front door of the flat opened directly into the living-room, and when she entered in a flurry of furs, with a cross, tired face, she halted at the sight of Virginia and the nice-looking man and the cocktail glasses, and changed her expression swiftly to charmed surprise.
    ‘This is a neighbour of ours,’ Virginia said. ‘Doctor Allen.’
    ‘A doctor. Well, well.’ Helen sounded as if that were the one kind of man she wanted to see. She let her gloved hand linger in his for a moment. ‘How strange that we haven’t met before.’
    ‘I’ve only just come to live here,’ he said. ‘I met your daughter the other night. I beg your pardon. Have I made a mistake? Is it your daughter?’ He favoured Helen with his quizzical smile, and leaned a little forward, as if to see better. ‘You look more like sisters.’
    Virginia wanted to run to a mirror to assure herself that this was not true. Was he being automatically suave, or did he really want to pay her mother a compliment? She bit at a nail. Damn Helen and the unaccountable way she had of making men say things like that.
    Helen took off her hat, patted her smooth cap of hair, in which the grey streak was cunningly arranged to look as if she rather than nature intended it, and announced that she had had a desperate day and was exhausted.
    Virginia went to pour her mother a drink, but Felix was there before her. They talked for a while. Helen did most of the talking, occasionally bringing Virginia into the conversation deliberately, as if she were the odd man out at the party.
    She told Felix, as Virginia knew she would, that it was always fascinating to meet a doctor, because you felt that he knew so much about you. Virginia had heard her say this before to doctors, and had watched the variously baffled ways with which they dealt with it.
    Felix did not attempt to deal with it. He sat looking quiet and friendly. Helen asked him what was his particular line, and when he said it was gynaecology, her eyes took on the glazed,Narcissus look with which women recognize an opportunity to talk about their insides.
    Terrified that she was going to tell him about her fallopian