The Angel in the Corner (24 page)

‘Joe, it’s awful. He’s making a terrible noise. I never knew drunk people sounded like that.’ Virginia was into the room and talking before she realized that Joe was not alone.

‘They don’t usually,’ Joe said. ‘But this one’s got D.T.s. Jin, this is Ed Morris, a business friend of mine.’

‘Pleased to meet you, my dear.’ Mr Morris, who was a short, rubbery man in a pink shirt and pale trousers, sprang out of the chair and grasped Virginia’s hand, hurting her fingers with his large jewelled ring. ‘Bit late to offer my felicitations, but I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you before. Now I see why Joe keeps you away from his friends.’ His eyes bulged a little as he looked at her.

‘Don’t trust a one of you,’ Joe said easily. He put his hands on Virginia’s waist and spun her round. ‘Isn’t she something?’

Virginia felt like a prize heifer in an auction ring. ‘Joe,’ she said uncomfortably, ‘I think you ought to go up and see if Mollie needs you. She shouldn’t be alone with Paul when he’s like that.’

‘Landlord got ‘em again?’ Ed Morris said, rubbing his hands cheerfully. ‘I know how to deal with that. Let’s all go up. Make a party of it.’

‘Gentlemen are requested to wear strait-jackets.’ Joe laughed, and he and Ed Morris, enjoying their own wit, encouraged each other to make some more crude jokes about Paul. Ed’s accent was fairly rough, and Virginia noticed that Joe slipped with him into a more careless way of speech.

‘Don’t laugh about it,’ she said, frowning at Joe. ‘It isn’t funny to Mollie, I promise you. I wish you’d go up. She may need a man to help her with Paul.’

‘She needs a man all right, but not for that.’ Joe winked at Ed. ‘Don’t worry about old Mollie. She can cope with it. She’s had enough practice.’

‘Aren’t you going up, then?’

‘Of course not. Don’t panic, Jin. This is just routine stuff. Happens all the time.’ Virginia took a book and sat by the table to read until Mr
Morris left. He and Joe were talking about things that meant nothing to her, and about people she did not know.

‘Who was that man?’ she asked, when Mr Morris had gone, blowing her a kiss, and hopping up the steps as if his legs were springs. ‘Why were you trying to show off?’

‘I wasn’t. Don’t get nasty with me, just because you did your girl guide act, and I wouldn’t play boy scout. Ed and I were just having a bit of fun, that’s all. Since when have you got so serious?’ He sat on the bed and swung his feet up on to the cover which attempted to make it look like a divan. ‘God, I’m tired. I haven’t done a thing all day, and I’m as tired as a dog.’ He put a cushion under his head, punched it and settled down. ‘Ed’s a good chap,’ he said with his eyes half closed. ‘You’ll like him when you know him better.’

‘Do you see him often? What did you mean, he was a business friend? What business? Don’t tell me he’s anything to do with that publisher.’

‘He’s in a much better racket than that. He’s a bookie. He’s the man I work for on and off, taking bets on commission.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘Well, don’t make that face about it. You knew I was doing that at the club. I never made a secret of it.’

‘I didn’t know you were still doing it.’

‘Can’t afford not to, when I get the chance. We’re not millionaires.’

Virginia pulled down her mouth. ‘Don’t I know it? Joe, don’t mind me asking this, but do you – do you ever make any bets yourself?’

‘I take bets. Take them for people who want to put money on with Ed.’

‘You know what I mean. Do you ever put any money on a horse yourself?’

‘I’m not such a mug. Unless of course it’s a dead cert.’ He closed his eyes and turned his face to the wall, as if he were going to sleep.

Virginia went to the cupboard under the stairs and pulled out the suitcase with the broken lock, not caring how much noise she made. They had not touched any of Spenser’s money since Joe bought the typewriter. No need to count it really. She
counted it. Six of the five-pound notes were gone. There was only forty-five pounds left.

She went back into the room and stood by the bed. ‘Joe,’ she said, ‘wake up, if you’re asleep. If you’re shamming, open your eyes.’

‘What’s the matter?’ He looked up at her with clear, wide eyes, but she knew that he had heard her go to the cupboard.

‘You know what. How could you do it, Joe? How could you do it, when we need the money so badly?’

‘I was going to double it for you.’ He looked away. ‘I would have done more than that. Got some amazing odds at the last minute. But the wrong horse won. It wasn’t my fault.’

Virginia sat on the bed beside him and put her face in her hands. ‘Not your fault, not your fault.… How can you be such a child?’

He sat up and took her hands from her face. She was not crying. She was too defeated for tears.

‘I couldn’t help it,’ he said, holding her wrists, and pulling her towards him so that her head was against his shoulder. ‘I shouldn’t have taken the money, I know, but I couldn’t help it when I got a chance like that, I was only trying to do the best thing with it.’

‘We can’t go on like this,’ she said. ‘The money’s nearly all gone. Pretty soon we’ll have nothing, except what I get. It’s hateful to be so poor.’

‘You wouldn’t have to be,’ he said hopefully, ‘if only you’d take my advice and write to that stepfather of yours.’

‘Don’t say that. You know I never would. I’ve told you, it’s the last thing I would ever do.’

‘I know, my love, I know.’ He stroked her hair. ‘You’re proud and good and brave, and I’m a swine. I let you down every time. I’m sorry,’ he kept murmuring. ‘I’m sorry.’

Then he put his arms round her and held her tightly. They sat without speaking. They were very close. There was no excitement in the contact of their bodies, only a great tenderness between them, born of her hopeless pity for his folly, and his shame at having failed her.

*

The next day, Joe went out to look for a job. He found work in a factory, drilling identical holes in endless strips of steel. He hated the long journey to Croydon, he hated the work, he hated the food in the canteen, and most of all he hated the foreman, a lugubrious old hand with an instinctive grudge against all newcomers.

‘Don’t mind old Frank,’ the men in the machine-shop told Joe. ‘He never throws you a decent word till you’ve been in the place a couple of weeks. You make a mistake in answering him back though, mate. He doesn’t like that, old Frank doesn’t. Just take it easy. He’ll soon lay off you then.’

Joe, however, continued to answer back every time the foreman criticized his work, or told him he was taking too long at the tea break, or caught him knocking off two minutes early. Other men knocked off early and got away with it. Joe was always the one who got pulled up on the way to the washroom, and sent back to his machine. By the time he got there, the whistle would blow, and the other men who had been quietly edging towards the washroom door would be at their basins before him.

It seemed that Frank was always picking on him. He would appear at Joe’s side with his gloomy moustache hanging over his lip and his faded eyes mournful. ‘Get a move on, Joe. You’re making a bottleneck. Look at all the work piled up behind you. I never had a man who was so slow on this drill.’

Joe, who had never done this work before, was proud of the way he had picked it up. No one could tell him he was slow. He could do anything as fast as anybody. ‘Lay off me, Mr Fuller, for Christ’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘I’m doing my work. I’m not going to get my hands caught in this bloody machine for you or anyone else.’

‘You watch your language,’ Frank said in his creaking, sorrowful voice, ‘or I’ll have you in the office. Don’t think they wouldn’t fire you on my say so. We can get a dozen better than you any day of the week.’

Joe bit his lip and said no more for a while. As much as he disliked the job, he did not want to lose it yet. Virginia was proud of him because of it. When he first came back from the employment office and said that he had found work, and
watched her spreading beam of delight, he had been half afraid that he would wipe the wide smile off her face when he told her what the job was. She might not like to be the wife of a factory hand; but to his surprise, she took it in her stride as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to tell her. She accepted it as easily as if she had lived in a mill town all her life, and appeared to take pride and pleasure in washing out his overalls and getting up early to feed him and get him off for the train.

He was earning more than she was too. That was the way it should be, although she still insisted on paying the rent and the housekeeping expenses out of her own salary. She had never asked for his pay packet. He knew that many of the men had to hand theirs over as soon as they came home on Friday, and woe betide them if the seal was not intact. But Virginia was not like that. She did not even ask him how much he was earning.

She came to him sometimes and asked him for money to buy extra food, or stockings for herself, or stuff to put on her face. It was flattering when she did that. Joe enjoyed putting his hand in his pocket and pulling out the wad of notes, and peeling one off. It made him feel like somebody. He had not felt like somebody for a long time, not since the publisher had written so encouragingly about the book, which had somehow come unstuck since then, and had lain untouched in its drawer for weeks.

Perhaps there was something in this idea of being a respectable husband with a steady job. Who would have thought that he would end up like this? Joe marvelled sometimes at the picture of himself as a solid breadwinner, trudging off to the station in the yellow morning light.

What was Virginia trying to do to him? No, be fair to her. It was his doing. He cared enough about her to want to make her happy. This job on the drill was a dead loss, and he was going to black Frank’s eye for him some day, but he would stick to it until he found something better. It was worth it to have Jin so pleased with him, and making so much fuss of him when he came home, treating him like the lord and master he should be if this marriage was going to amount to anything more than a lot of glorious tumbles in bed.

Almost worth it. When Joe had been at the factory for six weeks, Frank told him dolefully that it was time he learned to use a drill properly, and Joe struck him full in his wet moustache and walked out.

How was he going to tell Virginia? She would be disappointed. He would tell her that the factory was laying people off, but she would still be disappointed. Well, let her be. It wasn’t his fault. No man could be expected to take that kind of stuff day after day from an old man who would have been laid off long ago if he had not toadied to the management.

The job was nothing, anyway. Miles below what he could get if he chose. He would never have taken it if Virginia had not pushed him into it after he lost that bet. Joe worked himself round to thinking that it was Virginia’s fault that he had ever gone into a factory. Thus he did not mind so much telling her that he had got himself out of it.

He told her belligerently, prepared to shut her up if she made a fuss about it. She did not make a fuss. He should have known that she would not. Her eyes opened wide, and she looked at him in silence for a moment, as was her habit when coping with any shock he threw at her. Then she smiled and said: ‘Well, that’s no tragedy. It’s not the only factory in London, and you never liked the work they put you on. There are lots of other places. You’ll get something better next time.’ She spread the evening paper on the table. ‘Come on, let’s have a look and see what else there is.’

Joe pulled the paper from under her hands and crumpled it up. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I’m not getting another factory job. I’ve had that. Do you think that’s the best I can do? I thought you were so ambitious for me.’

‘I am, darling. I know you can get anywhere you want to. But in the meantime – well, I didn’t think you minded the work so much, and we were so happy, both with our jobs, and not having to worry about money. I thought you –’

‘You think too much about what’s good for me and what isn’t,’ Joe said sulkily. ‘And about money too. That’s because you’ve never wanted for it. Why do you worry all the time about money? There’s always some around if you know how to pick it up. You worried yourself sick when that apology for a
horse lost some of your savings, but didn’t I go out next day and start earning ten quid a week? I could do it again, any day I want, but I’m not going to kill myself for it next time. I’ll look around for a while and see what turns up.’

‘I’m not worrying,’ Virginia said cheerfully. ‘I’m glad about it in a way, because it will give you more time to get on with your book. The publishers sounded a bit impatient in their last letter. You ought to send them something more in case they lose interest. How much more have you done? You never tell me anything about it. How is it coming?’

‘Oh hell, Jin, don’t nag me about it. You can’t drive an author to work. I’ll get down to it when I’ve had a bit of rest. I haven’t been in the mood lately, even if I’d had the time. It’ll get done, if you’ll only leave me alone.’

It was all there in the locked drawer, waiting for him to take up the story again. He could pick it up any time, and once he got over that sticky bit, he could probably finish it in three weeks, if he kept at it and had enough whisky on hand. No hurry. He might start on it after Sandown. The meeting was next week, and he could go along with Ed. Good thing he had had the sense to smack poor old Frank in the face before Sandown.

*

Virginia was trying to make Joe go with her to a party which was being given by
Lady Beautiful
. It was to be a large party, with dinner and dancing in a private ballroom at a smart hotel. All the office staff would be there, together with outside contributors, advertisers, artists, fashion designers, hairdressers, beauty experts – what a crew! Joe could not see himself there. He had not got a dinner jacket.

‘That’s no excuse,’ Virginia said. ‘You can hire one. Lots of people do.’

‘Not those sort of people. It wouldn’t fit me, and they’d say: “There goes Virginia’s husband in a rented tuxedo. Poor girl. Isn’t it sad for her?”’