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

necessity of a customer having to be appraised by anyone as inferior as herself.
    Helen fidgeted on the stool, telling Virginia to stand still, fussing at Miss Rainier and giving sharp little commands about the suit, manifesting her annoyance at what Virginia had told her.
    When Miss Rainier had left, effacing herself with a duck of the head through the curtain, Helen asked the question that had been tormenting her all through the fitting. ‘Jinny – did you speak to him?’
    ‘No, I didn’t. I waited until he had gone through the gate before I grabbed the taxi. He didn’t see me. Would you have minded if he had?’
    ‘You know I would. You know we agreed you shouldn’t see him again, and he agreed to it too. Not unwillingly, I am constrained to add. Don’t give me that silly, quizzical look. It wasn’t any hardship to you not to see him. I used to have to positively drive you there. Positively to drive you there,’ she said, amending the split infinitive.
    ‘I was a child then.’ Virginia pulled her skirt over her head. ‘I was embarrassed by him’
    ‘He would embarrass you still, with that caustic, derogatorymanner. Please, Jinny, if you care anything at all about me, don’t get any ideas about things being different now that you’re grown up. Why should I share you with him? He walked out on you. He didn’t want you. You’re mine. I brought you up, cared for you, was everything to you. You’re all I’ve got, dear heart. Don’t let me down.’ She became a little impassioned in the stuffy, pin-strewn fitting-room.
    Virginia had finished dressing and was ready to leave. She did not like to see her mother losing, or pretending to lose, her grip. Loving entreaty sat discrepantly on that hard-shelled face.
    ‘Don’t get excited, Helen,’ she said easily. ‘I’m not going to see him again. I don’t want to.’
    *
    But did she want to? The last time she had seen her father was when she was twelve, and when she heard that it was the last time, she had not minded. Afterwards, as she grew older, she began to mind a little. It was so arbitrary to be suddenly cut off from one of your parents. It was so unnatural, so unsatisfactory to have a father alive and not to know anything about him. Other girls had fathers. If they did not, their fathers had died, and they accepted that as irrevocable. If their parents were divorced, they saw their fathers occasionally, going on exciting trips to Edinburgh, or Paris, or even, like Martha Broome, to the south of France, where she had been smuggled into the casino under age and had met a prince.
    Even the unexciting, awkward trips to the flat would have been better than nothing. At least she could have told her friends at the beginning of the term: ‘I went to see my father. He gave me a bag.’ Or a scarf, or a bracelet. Except that Harold Martin had never given her anything, not once on any of the visits she made to him after the divorce. This had disappointed her at the time, but later she had wondered whether he was only trying to be fair to her mother by not bribing Virginia to like him.
    She did not like him very much on these visits. He was reasonably familiar to her because he was her father, but he had never tried to get close to her even when they were living in the same house. He was withdrawing rapidly now into astranger, and Virginia could do nothing but back away too, step for step with him.
    He had always behaved at home as if he mistrusted her, irritably waiting for her to say or do the wrong thing. Now when Virginia saw him only rarely, he was as uneasy with her as she was with him. He did not know how to treat her, and so she did not know how to behave.
    Sometimes during those difficult afternoons they spent together, she behaved badly, out of embarrassment. She would boast, or use puerile slang expressions from school, or fidget and make faces, and spill her tea on his carpet. She always meant to behave impeccably. She would dream, during the journey