The Angel in the Corner (13 page)

‘Oh, no.’ Mr Cowmeadow shook his heavy head, which was insecurely balanced on a thin, pulsing neck. ‘I haven’t handled his affairs for quite some time. I have no idea where he might be. There was some bad luck, I believe, a few years ago. Lost his job, was it? Perhaps you know about that.’

‘I don’t know anything. I haven’t seen him since I was twelve. I found him quite by chance a few months ago, and now it looks as though I’ve lost him again.’

‘Oh, come,’ Mr Cowmeadow said. ‘It can’t be as bad as that.
No one can be lost. There are ways, you know, of tracing people.’

‘I don’t know now that I want to find him,’ Virginia said flatly. ‘Perhaps it was all a mistake. I should have let it alone.’

She felt suddenly defeated. The little office was airless, and smelled of cigarettes stubbed out in a metal ash-tray. Mr Cow-meadow looked rooted there, as if he had grown up behind his desk like a toadstool, and never known anything of the outside world. She did not want to be involved with him any more.

She went down the worn, narrow stairs, and walked aimlessly in the busy street. The excited determination that had sent her hurrying to her old home had all faded away in disappointment. She did not want to look for her father any more. He had deserted her, just as he had deserted her before. He was not the answer. There was no answer except to do what Helen wanted. If her father and his wife had been at the house, it would have been different. Her impulse would have been right, and to find them would have been the logical end of a journey.

People were going in and out of Saint Paul’s. Virginia climbed the steps, and went in to that unbroken bubble of peace within the restless city. The organist was practising chords. The cathedral was full of sound and of people walking about, and yet it seemed deserted. Virginia stood isolated at the end of the nave. The quiet groups of sightseers in the side aisles seemed miles away from her. The organist was in another world. She stood emptily in the tall solitude of space under the vaulting roof, and waited for her angel. Where was he now? Was it not true, after all, that you were never alone?

Joe Colonna went into the tiny, cluttered kitchen and stirred the spaghetti sauce. It smelled good. He tasted it. It was good, better than the one his father used to make. He crossed the passage into the one room which was his home in the Chelsea basement, and threw some more wood on the fire.

He was proud of that fireplace. All the other bed-sitting-rooms in which he had lived had electric fires, or gas stoves which popped and roared and dropped pieces of asbestos into the grate. The combination of a wood fire and an address in Chelsea were of proven value. The street was too far down the King’s Road, but it was still in Chelsea, and to be able to say: ‘I have a place in Chelsea’ was very different from saying: ‘I have a place in Fulham.’ The wood fire made something romantic out of the shabby basement room, with its covered bed that still looked more like a bed than a divan, and its window half below the pavement, where the feet passing beyond the area railings were on a level with your head.

Joe switched off the ceiling light and lit the lamp on the table by the window, which was laid for four. The leaping firelight made the other end of the room inviting. Derek’s girls would like this. Other girls had liked it. ‘Oh, a wood fire – how lovely!’ they cried, and in no time at all they were sitting on the floor with their shoes off, curled up and purring, thinking that they looked as attractive as the girls in films who were made love to in log cabins, with the camera trickily placed behind the flames.

Joe shook up the pillows on the divan, took a last look round the room, then put on his coat and went up the steep area steps to the street. He went into a wine shop in the King’s Road, and bought two bottles of cheap red wine and a bottle of whisky. After he had paid for them, he looked again into his wallet. There were no more pound notes in there, and this was only Wednesday. The girls would have to be satisfied with the red wine. He must make the whisky last.

Back in his room, he set the wine in front of the fire, and put
the whisky in the cupboard under the kitchen sink. When he stood up, he looked at himself in the shaving-mirror. Smooth, the new haircut. Thank God his hair lay back naturally, without his having to flatten the wave out of it with grease. Black hair, like his father, and he had given Joe his dark Italian eyes and high ridge of cheek-bone. Of his mother’s docile, pallid features there was no trace.

Joe was better-looking now at thirty than he was as a young man. He had been too slight then, too narrow in the face, and the army uniform had at first looked too clumsy for him. But the war, and the first disciplined life he had known had filled him out and toughened him. It had taken the softness from his mouth and the smoothness from his skin. It had weighted his immature shoulders with a man’s muscles, and his inexperienced mind with the conviction that for a man who had nothing behind him, there was always a war on, even when the world was at peace.

While he was studying himself in the small circle of mirror, he heard a car door slam in the street above, and then voices on the pavement. Girls’ voices. One was giggling. Joe stood at the back of the other room, so that he could not be seen, and watched them coming down the stone steps. Which one belonged to Derek? One of the girls was tall and clean-looking, with a clear, pale skin and very bright lipstick. The other was small, with a froth of short curls. She was the one who was giggling.

She was not Derek’s, Joe decided, as they came into the room and took off their coats. The short girl wore a tight, flaming red sweater, and had a small, greedy mouth. Derek went for the safe, amenable girls, who dressed inconspicuously, and did not demand too much from him.

The other girl though, Virginia – she did not look like Derek’s type either. She was sitting on the divan with her long legs crossed and her eyes and her big mouth smiling. She sat easily, as if she were at home, not primly and on her guard, as Derek’s other girls would have sat in the den of a strange man, whom Derek had undoubtedly described as dangerous.

Nora, the short girl, was sitting on the floor by the fire, and would take off her shoes any minute now. They drank the first
bottle of wine out of the thick, squat tumblers which were the only glasses Joe possessed. Derek, with his fair hair already flopping over his round face, sat on the bed beside Virginia and took her hand. Joe noticed that she immediately asked him for a cigarette, so as to have an excuse to take the hand away.

‘Come and sit by me, Joe.’ Nora pulled another cushion on to the floor, and patted it.

Oh, hell, Joe thought. She’s been told she’s for me, and she can’t even wait until after supper to show that she knows it. Towards the end of the evening, she would make some excuse, if Joe did not do it for her, to get Derek and Virginia out of the place without her. Making love to her would be too easy and too familiar. She was like a hundred other greedy little girls.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The spaghetti’s done. I don’t want to spoil it. It’s the only thing I can cook.’

‘You don’t need to cook anything else when you can make spaghetti like that,’ Derek said eagerly. ‘Wait till you taste it, girls. You never had anything like it.’

He admired Joe enormously. He could never quite understand how he had made friends with him, nor how he had managed to keep the friendship. Joe was the racy element in Derek’s otherwise trim existence, the spice which peppered his unad-venturous life, which was divided between the art department of
Lady Beautiful
and a cosy family circle in Buckhurst Hill.

Derek had been with the magazine for nearly eight years. Joe never seemed to be in the same job for more than two months at a time. He had been running some kind of fly-by-night club when Derek first met him. Derek had drunk ingenuously and passed out. His friends has deserted him. Joe had picked him up, allowed him to spend the night in his own room, and given him kippers for breakfast. It was not this room. Joe had lived in a variety of places since Derek had known him, and he had been in and out of a variety of jobs. Derek was not even sure what Joe was doing now. Something to do with a small theatre club, he thought, but he was not certain. Joe would not always tell you what he was doing.

‘Not that it’s anything shady,’ Derek had assured Virginia in the office when he had suggested this party. ‘There’s nothing
wrong
about Joe. He’s the salt of the earth; so do come. He
said he felt like cooking spaghetti, and he asked me to bring a couple of girls, so of course I thought of you.’ He squeezed Virginia’s hand behind a filing-case. She was working in the editorial office now. ‘I’ve asked that little girl, Nora, the new blonde in the reception-room. She looks like Joe’s type,’ he added, making it clear where Virginia stood if the party resolved into pairs.

The spaghetti was a great success. They all ate enormously, and the second bottle of wine was finished so quickly that Joe wished that he had bought another at the expense of his lunch tomorrow. He was pleased with himself about the supper, and strangely exhilarated, as if the rough Algerian wine had been champagne.

The exhilaration was not engendered by Nora, who was back by the fire again, trying to look like a kitten. It was the other girl – Virginia. She was candid and young and a bit too leggy, but there was something about her that was different from other innocent girls who moved like fillies and had skins like flowers. She looked – Joe puzzled to define his impression – she looked wide awake, as if she were waiting for something to happen. She looked as if she were on the brink of life, ready to plunge in.

This made Joe think: I’ll bet she looks good in a swim-suit. But the summer was a long way off. She would be gone from him long before that, back to her own clean and probably prosperous world, where people like Joe did not exist.

They played the gramophone and danced on a few square feet of worn carpet. When Joe danced with Nora, still without her shoes to make herself seem very small and cuddly, it was just as he had expected it would be. Her body pressing against his felt almost as familiar as if he were married to it.

When he danced with Virginia, it was different. She danced gracefully, much better than he did. Joe did not like anyone to do anything better than he could, so he stopped dancing with her quite soon; but the feel of her remained with him after they were apart. She had not nestled against him, and she had not held herself back. She had just felt so beautifully alive in his arms that he had a sudden impulse to tense his fingers and hurt her.

He went into the kitchen for the whisky, weakening in his resolve not to bring it out tonight. He needed it, if Nora was going to get what she was looking for.

They drank half the bottle of whisky. Derek was getting a little tight. His hair hung in his eyes like a sheep-dog. He put his arm round Virginia’s waist, and she was kind enough, and pleasantly uncaring enough, to let it stay there.

‘Let’s do hypnotism,’ Derek said. ‘Try it on the girls, Joe. You didn’t know he was a hypnotist, did you? He is.’ Derek nodded solemnly. ‘Best you ever saw. Remember that girl at Alexander’s, Joe? Boy, you put her right out. I never saw anything like it.’

Nora squealed with delight. ‘Oh, do let’s!’ She wriggled on the cushion.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Joe murmured, lying on the floor with his head in Nora’s lap. ‘Not tonight. I couldn’t.’

Hypnotizing the half-drunk girl at Alexander’s had been a joke. Joe had only pretended to know something about hypnotism, and the fact that the girl had gone off in an intoxicated swoon was nothing to do with him.

‘But you must!’ Nora pushed his shoulders upright. ‘Do me first. Hypnotize me. I’ll bet you could.’

‘All right.’ Joe stood up. It might be amusing, and at least it would focus Virginia’s attention on him. ‘I’ll do Jinny,’ he said. ‘She’s a better subject.’

‘No, she’s not. Do me. Please, please, darling Joey, do me.’ Nora jumped to her feet and hopped up and down. ‘You can do her after, if you like. I want to be first.’ She pouted at him.

Joe said: ‘O.K.,’ and pushed her in the chest, so that she sat back in the chair facing the fire.

‘I must have a key.’

‘A key?’ Nora wriggled in the chair. ‘What for? What are you going to do?’ She giggled. ‘Good-bye, all, in case I never come out of the trance.’

Joe took Derek’s front-door key from him. It was a Yale key, with a hole at the top. Standing in front of Nora, he held the key before his face, and ordered her to shut one eye, and look through the hole of the key into the pupil of his eye.

Virginia laughed. ‘It looks like a lorgnette.’

‘Be quiet,’ Joe said. ‘It’s not supposed to be funny. I can’t do it if anyone makes a noise.’

Part of the act was the building up of a sinister, staring silence, during which he gazed unblinkingly at Nora, who sat with one eye screwed up, gripping the arms of the chair.

‘Look at me,’ Joe ordered, in a deep, intoning voice. ‘Look at my eye. You can’t look anywhere but into my eye. You are going to sleep … to sleep … to sleep …’

Nora squealed, and kicked her feet up. ‘Are you there, Jinny?’ she asked, still looking at Joe. ‘Don’t go away, anyone. I’m afraid I’m going to be seduced.’

‘That shouldn’t frighten you,’ Joe said in his normal voice. Then intoning again: ‘Be quiet now. Be quiet. You are going to sleep … to sleep … You are asleep. You will do exactly what I tell you. Look at me. Look at my eye. My eye will tell you. You will do exactly what I tell you.’

Joe had seen hypnotism acts on the stage, and knew that part of the routine was to repeat a few words over and over again. He did not expect it to have any effect on Nora, although she was eminently suggestible.

The room was very quiet. A log shifted in the rustling flames. Virginia was leaning forward on the divan at Joe’s side. He could hear her breathing, and faintly trace her perfume.

‘Nora,’ he said, ‘Nora. You are asleep. Do what I tell you. Raise your right hand.’ Nora raised it too quickly. ‘Stand up.’ She stood up, tightening her lips against a smile. ‘Bark like a dog.’ Nora’s yaps trembled with suppressed giggles.