The Angel in the Corner (17 page)

‘Now you will say, I suppose, that he fought for my life, and I should be grateful to him. Well, I’ll surprise you by saying that I am.’ Helen looked complacent. ‘Thank you, dear heart, for telling us the life story of Mr – Colonna, is it? Yes, I see. The Italian name. What was his father doing over here?’

‘He was a waiter,’ Virginia said sullenly. ‘He married an Irish chambermaid who worked at the same hotel. There, now I’ve told you. You can mock at that.’

‘I don’t choose to mock,’ Helen said. ‘I think it’s very nice of you to tell me, considering that you imagine, quite mistakenly, that I am snobbish. As for the young man, well, surely, it’s a very fine thing that he was able to make something of himself
with so few advantages. There were many officers in the war who started with even less.’

‘Oh,’ said Spenser, blundering into the wrong question, ‘was he an officer?’

‘He could have been,’ Virginia said. ‘He was a sergeant, actually, but his commanding officer thought so much of him that he wanted Joe to take an officer’s training course. It was only bad luck that he couldn’t. Just before he was to go up for selection, his mother was terribly ill. They wouldn’t let him go to see her, so he went absent without leave, and of course that lost him his chance.’

‘I thought you told me that his mother died before the war.’ Helen’s eyes were crafty.

Virginia was flustered, forgetting now exactly how the story went, refusing to doubt that Joe had told her the truth. ‘Oh, well, I may have got it wrong, but anyway, it was something like that. Let’s go to bed. I’m tired of this. Poor Joe, it isn’t fair to pull him to pieces as soon as he’s out of the room.’

‘I agree.’ Spenser got up. ‘Let’s all go to bed.’

Helen remained sitting in her chair. ‘I’m not pulling anyone to pieces,’ she said. ‘I am merely showing a perfectly natural interest in someone who – listen, Jinny.’ She suddenly sounded more sincere. ‘I’ve been away for three months, with no idea what you’ve been doing. A man comes in here, and he has a key to the flat. Don’t deny it. I know he did. I heard the lock turn. What conclusions do you think I have to draw?’

‘I don’t know.’ Virginia shrugged her shoulders, trying to be calm. ‘Think what you like.’

‘I think this.’ Helen spoke with icy clearness. ‘I think you are sleeping with him.’

‘Oh, now look, for heaven’s sake –’ Spenser was red in the face. ‘You can’t talk to your daughter like that.’

‘Perhaps
you
should, but if you won’t, I must. Tell me the truth, Jinny. Are you?’

Virginia looked her squarely in the face. ‘No,’ she said.

Helen looked at her with equal directness. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said calmly.

*

The following evening, Virginia and Helen went with Spenser to a party at the American embassy. Virginia did not want to go. If she did not go to the club tonight, Joe might think that she was angry about his visit to the flat. She wanted to find out whether he was angry with her for the embarrassment it had caused him, and to show him that nothing was changed between them.

Since last night, she had a new feeling about Joe. She felt a responsibility towards him, the beginnings of a stubborn loyalty, which she was afraid would endure long after she had gone away from him for ever.

When she told Spenser that she did not feel well, he was so disappointed that she had to agree to go to the party. Spenser was very proud of knowing the American ambassador. He wanted his family to appreciate the acquaintance. He also wanted to show off to anyone he knew at the party the family he had acquired in England.

He introduced her to several people, but Virginia could not find much to say to any of them. To please Spenser, she was wearing one of his presents to her, a full-skirted white dress, which left her shoulders bare, and accented her young bosom; but she would much rather have been behind the bar of the club in a skirt and sweater.

This was how it would be in America. Dressing up nearly every night in the costly clothes that Spenser would buy for her, making trivial conversation with easy-mannered people for whom she could raise no enthusiasm. Perhaps she would look interestingly sad when she went to America, and people would guess that she had left her heart in England.

She did not think that she was in love with Joe, and yet, what was love, if it were not this compulsory attachment, which she had not sought and could not unloose?

Helen was enjoying herself, in a dress unbecomingly unusual enough to attract attention. She talked fluently to Spenser’s friends, and wittily enough to make him proud of her. Virginia stayed close to her mother in the crowd, since she did not know anyone else, but Helen hardly spoke to her.

When Spenser wandered off for a while, Helen worked busily on a man from the United Nations, who talked a lot of charming
nonsense, and wore a tartan dinner jacket and tie, like a man in a magazine advertisement. Virginia half listened to their conversation, letting her mind wander.

‘I understand,’ said the man in the tartan tuxedo, ‘that you’re planning to go to the States pretty soon. Mr Eldredge has one of the finest estates on Long Island, I hear.’

‘I hear that too,’ Helen said. ‘You must be sure to come and see us when you get back to New York.’

‘I will indeed,’ he said, ‘but perhaps you and Mr Eldredge and your charming daughter would have dinner with me one night before you sail.’

‘That’s very kind of you, but we’re leaving in two days’ time.’

Virginia’s mind came back to the party in an instant. She swung round to look at her mother, but Helen was talking lightly on, as if she had not said anything unusual.

The man from the United Nations went away to get Helen a drink. Helen was turning to talk to someone else, but Virginia grabbed her arm and pulled her round.

‘Why did you say that?’ she demanded.

‘Say what? Oh, dear, have I made a
gaffe?’

‘We’re sailing next month. Why did you say we were leaving in two days’ time?’

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Helen said casually. ‘I meant to. Spenser has changed his mind. He doesn’t want to go by sea, and his New York office needs him, so we’re flying over on Friday. You’ll have to start packing tomorrow.’

‘I know why you’ve done this.’ Virginia kept her voice low, but the words were as vehement as if she had shouted them. ‘It’s because of Joe, isn’t it? You want to get me away.’

If Helen had denied it, it was possible that Virginia might have believed her. But Helen was so sure of herself, so certain that she could make people do what she wanted, that she said: ‘What do you think? Of course.’

The man in the tartan dinner jacket came back with the drinks, and Helen turned to him with a smile, as if she and Virginia had been discussing no more than the weather.

Virginia moved away from her into the crowd, hurried to
get her fur cape, and went out into Grosvenor Square to take a taxi to the club.

Mary gave a wolf whistle when he saw her in the dazzling white dress. ‘How lovely you look,’ William said. ‘I never knew you were so beautiful.’ His spectacles gleamed as brightly as the glass he was polishing behind the bar.

‘Where’s Joe?’

‘He isn’t in tonight,’ William said. ‘I thought he was probably with you, but you look as if you’d been keeping finer company. What’s the matter, my dear? You look upset. Is something wrong?’

‘No, it’s all right,’ Virginia said breathlessly. ‘I just want to see him about something.’

Mary looked over the top of the piano. ‘You’ll have to go down to Victoria then, if you want to see him,’ he said, still playing the accompaniment to his song. ‘I heard him say last night he was going to a wrestling match.’

‘Where is it, do you know?’

‘Yes, but I won’t tell you. It’s no place for a nice girl like you to go, especially looking like that.’ He took up the words of the song again.

‘You must tell me.’ Virginia went to the piano. ‘I have to see him. It’s very important.’

Mary gave her his lewd smile and continued to sing softly, caressing the suggestive lyric with his slippery lips as if it were great poetry.

‘Oh, please,’ Virginia said across the empty glasses on the top of the piano. Mary shook his head.

Virginia turned back to William. ‘Do you know?’

‘Don’t tell her,’ Mary said. ‘She shouldn’t be chasing after that character. He’s no good for her, and if she appears in that den of thieves looking like that, the wrestling won’t all be in the ring.’

Some of the people sitting at nearby tables had been listening to the conversation. They laughed, enjoying the scene, and Mary winked at them and chuckled.

‘Don’t laugh at her,’ William said. ‘The poor girl is in trouble of some kind, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am. Please help me.’

‘I thought so.’ William nodded. ‘It’s not for me to say what you should or shouldn’t do. If you really want to find Joe, here –’ he was drawing a rough map on a bar chit. ‘This is where the place is. I don’t say whether Joe will be glad to see you, but that’s your affair. And for heaven’s sake keep that fur done up round your neck.’ He was staring at her bosom.

‘Oh, yes.’ Virginia drew her cape round her shoulders. ‘Thanks so much. You’re very kind.’

‘I try to be,’ William said. ‘We are all put into this world to help each other,’ he added sententiously, and Mary made a rude, sardonic noise.

Virginia took a taxi to Victoria, and then walked behind the station to find the street marked on William’s map. She could not bring herself to ask the taxi driver to take her to the door of the Vauxhall Sporting Club.

The side-streets were dark and dirty, with small shuttered shops, and shabby houses hiding their lights behind torn blinds. She passed one or two men who stared at her with their heads down, and three youths arm in arm, who gave her the expected whistle. In the doorway of the club, more youths were lounging. They were not talking. They were apparently not waiting for anything. They were merely leaning against the wall in a vacuum of time, staring at nothing with vacant eyes. As Virginia approached, their eyes turned to her as if they were threaded on one string, followed her to the doorway, and remained staring emptily, while she hesitated, not liking to enter the dim corridor.

The name of the club was written over the door in faded paint, but Virginia asked: ‘Is this the Vauxhall Sporting Club?’ The youths said nothing for a moment. Then one of them nudged another and he nodded.

‘Is it all right if I go in? I mean, do you have to be a member?’ This was too much for them. They looked at her as if she were speaking Chinese.

‘Oh, well – thank you,’ Virginia said nervously, and walked into the passage. Behind her, the youths broke out in a volley of guffaws.

As Virginia went down the passage, she could hear a
gradually increasing roar of sound. When she reached the thick curtain which hung at the end, she could distinguish individual shouts against the background clamour. It was a bestial noise, mindless, cruel. She had heard it when she went to a boxing match: a male crowd noise, split here and there by women’s shrieks, quite different from the more genial open-air crowd noise of a football match.

There was a chair and table at the end of the passage, with a saucer full of cigarette stubs, but no one sat there. The heavy curtain swayed, as if someone knocked against it on the other side. As it parted slightly in the middle, Virginia saw the yellow light fogged with smoke, men’s backs, and a Laocoon-like glimpse of a struggling naked torso beyond them.

There was nothing to do but go in. She slipped inside and stood with her back to the dusty curtain, hoping that she would not be noticed before she could see Joe. There were no benches round the ring. The men, and a few women in the front, were standing up, jostling one another, swaying together in surges of excitement, waving their arms, or flinging out a stiffened finger as they shouted instruction or abuse at the wrestlers.

The two men in the ring were squat, vast shouldered, and hairy. They circled each other like snarling baboons, then were suddenly locked together, and rolled to the ground in a deliberate motion that looked more like a joint effort than a battle. Their short legs strived and twisted, their arms embraced, their heads beat the ground, and the black hair on their backs was matted with running sweat.

Watching in startled fascination, Virginia forgot for a moment to look for Joe. She caught her breath as one man picked up the other and hurled him to the ground with a thud that made the hoarse crowd yell and stamp their feet. Virginia could not take her eyes from the ring. She was leaning forward with her mouth open, and a little cry escaped her as an arm like the trunk of a small tree was twisted and bent back, while its owner screamed and gnashed his teeth.

The man standing in front of her looked round. He nudged his neighbour, who turned round too.

‘What are you doing here, little girl?’ the first one said. ‘Lost
the way to the Ritz?’ He was a mean-looking man with a face like a knife, and Virginia felt afraid. She stood on tiptoe, searching the crowd for Joe.

‘Looking for someone?’ the man asked, shifting a match from one corner of his mouth to the other.

‘Yes. Joe Colonna. Do you know him?’

‘Never heard of him,’ the man said. ‘Come and stand here by me. You’ll see better.’ He put out an arm to pull her forward. Virginia twisted out of his grasp, and moved away on the edge of the crowd, peering over heads and between shoulders. She could not see Joe anywhere.

Several men said things to her, or whistled. A woman with hair like a wet black retriever made some joke which Virginia could not hear, but those who could hear it laughed and stared at Virginia as she passed, then lost interest and turned again to hurl their comments at the struggling monsters in the ring.

One of the wrestlers was howling like a dog. Virginia stopped to look between two men. She thought he was being killed. Someone pushed her, and she staggered against a burly man in a tight, shiny blue suit. She clutched at him to avoid falling, and gasped as the wrestler howled again.

The man pushed her upright. ‘Don’t worry about George,’ he said. ‘He always does that. It’s part of his act. Hullo,’ he looked at her more closely. ‘Where did you come from? You shouldn’t be here on your own.’ He frowned, bringing his hairline almost down to his eyebrows. His face was squashed together, as if there were a heavy weight on the top of his head.