Read Online The Angel in the Corner by Monica Dickens - Free Book Online Page A

lighted bus. She had seen the house now, and that was all there was to it. Standing by the gate, with her hand on its cold iron scrolls, she felt no emotion except the remembrance of how she had always been glad to go out of the house, and never very pleased to come back to it.
    The house looked just the same; too big, too square, too unimaginative in its arrangement of windows and chimneys. She turned away and began to walk down the hill, slipperywith freezing snow. As she reached the first corner by the house where the old lady with the cats had lived, a taxi climbed past her with its engine knocking, and stopped just beyond.
    She turned, thinking that she might be able to ride back in it, and saw that it had stopped outside her old home. A man and a woman got out, she with a fur coat and a scarf over her head, the man lean and leggy, unfolding himself with difficulty from the taxi.
    The woman hurried up the steps to the front door. The man paid the taxi, lifting the skirt of his overcoat, and squinting for change under the lamp light. As Virginia went forward to hail the driver, she saw that the man was her father.

Chapter 4
    ‘But I tell you, Helen, I saw him. Why won’t you believe it?’
    ‘The whole thing is too impossible. You must have been crazy trailing up there in all that snow and cold. No wonder you started imagining things.’
    ‘I didn’t imagine anything. I saw him.’ Helen’s refusal to believe that Virginia had seen her father made her wish that she had said nothing about it. For a time she had not meant to, but then she had rashly come out with it in the unsuitable setting of the fitting-room at Helen’s dressmaker’s, where Helen was busy buying her a new suit for Christmas.
    While Virginia stood in her slip, waiting for the fitter, she had been overtaken by an impulsive mixture of tactlessness and honesty, and had told Helen suddenly: ‘I saw my father last night.’
    Helen argued, sitting upright on a brocade stool in the corner, her feet neatly crossed, and her slender rolled umbrella between her knees.
    ‘He would never go back to that barrack of a house,’ she said. ‘When last I heard of him, several years ago, he was still living in that depressing flat by the river. A man on his own, why would he want to go and rattle about in a house that size? Absurd as he is, he was never absurd in that way. He was always practical, if nothing else. I could have killed him at times for being so practical, when what I wanted from him was a little imagination. Just a spark, that was all I asked, but it wasn’t there in his soul. The man could not produce it. Not that he tried, I might add.’
    Virginia closed her ears. She was tired of her mother’s postmortems, from which, after all these years, Helen still derived a certain macabre pleasure.
    To check her in mid-grievance, Virginia told the rest of the story. ‘He isn’t a man on his own. I haven’t told you. There was a woman with him.’
    Helen frowned. ‘Don’t be absurd. You’re inventing. I never heard that he had married again.’
    ‘Why should you? You never took any interest in what he did. You’ve told me often enough you wanted to lose touch completely.’
    ‘Perhaps it wasn’t his wife,’ Helen said, her displeased face brightening a little to the hope of scandal.
    ‘I think it was. They looked married. They looked – well, you know how people look.’
    ‘Just because you saw them together doesn’t prove – oh, here’s Miss Rainier. Good afternoon, Miss Rainier. What a long time you’ve been.’
    Miss Rainier, whose father and brother had died in the Maquis, and who had been violated by three German soldiers in one night, came in humbly, her nose puffed from a cold, the worn tape-measure hanging round her neck like a chain of bondage. She took measurements swiftly and expertly, clucking at the admirable size of Virginia’s waist, turning her with gentle hands, excusing herself, implying her apologies for the crude