The Angel in the Corner Read Online Free PDF Page A

tubes, Virginia got up and created a diversion with the cocktail shaker.
    ‘I’ve had three,’ Felix said. ‘I think I need something to eat How about letting me take you out to dinner?’
    He was looking directly at Virginia, who was standing over him with the shaker, but a cadence of chunky bracelets from the chair behind made her involuntarily look over her shoulder, and Felix took this as a reminder that his invitation should include Helen. Or had he meant to ask her anyway? Hearing Helen’s feigned: ‘Oh, you don’t want to take me,’ and his gallant assurance that he did, Virginia felt disgustedly young. She vowed that she would have nothing more to do with men in their middle thirties until Helen was old enough to have given up the struggle.
    Felix, who appeared to be fairly sophisticated, took them to a club in Knightsbridge, where the only illumination was from candles on the tables and the intermittent flames of
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. There was a three-piece, dark-skinned orchestra and a handkerchief of dance floor. After the smoked salmon, Felix danced with Virginia. She was disappointed to find that she was a little too tall for him, and wished that she had not been so foolish as to change her working shoes for high heels before they came out. When he danced with Helen after the
tournedos rossini
, their heads were at the right levels. Helen talked excessively to him all through the dance, but he smiled, and did not seem to mind. Virginia finished her glass of wine, and then drank up her mother’s, since the waiter did not come to pour her any more.
    Tackling, with a forced smile, the difficult feat of trying to look as if you are having a good time when you are sitting alone, she watched Helen moving slowly in Felix’s arms among the other couples, and tried to imagine what she was talking about with so many little flicks of her head and circular waves of the hand that lay on his pin-stripe shoulder. What did a mother talk about to a man who was really her daughter’s friend? Was she talking like a mother, discussing Virginiafondly, and being a little maternal with Felix, so as to draw him into the family? Not a chance. Helen was having a good time. She looked like a woman dancing with a man, not like a mother dancing with her daughter’s boy-friend.
    Could Helen be her mother? She was so restless that it was impossible to imagine her ever being in such a bovine state as pregnancy. Virginia looked at her dispassionately, appraising the well-kept figure and the square face, whose ageing skin and captious lines were successfully disguised by candlelight under the careful make-up. Out of doors, in daylight, cosmetics could not do much more for Helen. It would not be very long before even kind lighting would be too cruel to mask the legacy of the discontented years.
    Virginia tried to imagine how Felix felt. She remembered from childhood the odd feeling of being jammed up against the firmly-bouncing bosom of the dance mistress. Dancing with Helen would feel like that. Virginia imagined herself as Felix, and felt the supported, rubbery resilience pressed against her chest. But of course it would not feel revolting to him. It would feel pleasant. That was why men held you closely when they were dancing, so that even though they were comparative strangers, they could experience, with perfect propriety, a sensation normally reserved for intimates.
    That was why Felix held Helen so close; closer, it seemed to Virginia, peering through the candle shadows, than he had held Helen’s daughter when they danced. Or was Helen holding him? Virginia knew that ever since her father had walked out, her mother had been looking for a man, had found several temporary ones, and at forty-eight, had not yet abandoned the search.
    Back at the table, Felix talked with impartial politeness to Virginia and her mother. In the taxi going home, he sat on the little seat opposite them with his knees discreetly drawn away, and spent most