The Angel in the Corner (26 page)

‘Go on,’ Joe said. ‘Say it. Say what you think of me, and let’s get it over. I knocked you down. What are you going to say about that?’

‘I don’t know.’ Virginia rubbed the side of her mouth thoughtfully. ‘I never was knocked down before. I don’t know what to say, except don’t do it again.’ She looked at him candidly. ‘It hurts.’

Joe went to the bed and flung himself on it face downwards. That was the worst of getting drunk. One minute you wanted to hit out. The next minute you wanted to cry.

*

When Virginia got out of bed the next morning, Joe woke up, groaned, begged feebly for water, and rolled over on his side again. Virginia dressed, and made the best she could of her face, although the swollen side of her mouth and the small slit in her lip could not be disguised. She wondered if the girls would believe that she had run into a gate-post in the dark.

As she went to the door, Joe turned over and sat up, feeling the sides of his head. His hair was on end and his chin was black with stubble, but the brown skin was stretched so firmly over the prominent bones of his face that a hangover did not make him bloated and puffy. He looked rather appealingly gaunt and deep-eyed, like a starving Mediterranean poet.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘To work, of course.’

‘I told you you weren’t going back there.’

‘That was last night. You didn’t mean it. Look, I must go. I’m late already. I didn’t think you would want breakfast.’

‘God forbid.’ He made a face. ‘All right, you’ll have to go there, I suppose, to give in your notice, and work out whatever time you owe them. But that’s all. You’re through with it, understand? You’re through as a career girl. You can get down to being Mrs Joe Colonna.’

‘That’s fine,’ Virginia said. ‘And what will Mr and Mrs Colonna live on?’

‘Don’t worry. I’ve something in mind. Don’t think I have to be kept by you. What do you think I am – a pimp?’

‘It isn’t a question of keeping you. Whether you get a job or not – Joe, I can’t give up mine now! I’m beginning to get somewhere. It’s what I’ve worked for, done my training for. If I stay on and get some more experience, I’ll be able to get something better on a newspaper, or another magazine. It’s what I want. You can’t stop me doing it because of some stupid jealousy about Derek.’

‘It isn’t only Derek.’ He was sitting hunched in the bed, with his arms round his knees. ‘Though I hate his guts. I hate the whole set-up. I don’t like you being a journalist. You’re too damn independent. They call you Miss Martin. I know they do. I don’t like that.’

‘But don’t you see it’s best for both of us that I should get ahead?’

‘If anyone gets ahead in this family, it’s going to be me.’

‘Why not both of us? Why not me too?’

‘Don’t ask me why. It’s just the way I feel. Of course, if you don’t care about how I feel, go ahead and live your own life. Plenty of marriages have been successfully broken up that way.’

‘Don’t talk like that. It doesn’t make any difference to our marriage. If you would only be sensible –’ Virginia was going to argue, but then she suddenly hated the argument, and the sickening chain of arguments and jealousy and battles that lay before them if she chose to go her own way.

She sighed, and away with the breath of her sigh went all the things for which she had worked and planned. ‘All right then, darling.’ She could smile now, secure in her surrender. ‘If it makes you happy, of course I’ll give it up.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘Good girl.’ He lay back on the pillow. ‘That’s my girl,’ he murmured, and closed his eyes to sleep again. He had no idea of how much Virginia had just surrendered.

*

Was she right or wrong? What did it matter? She had done it. There was no going back on her promise. She had promised herself out of a job, and last night she had talked herself out of a home. What now?

Virginia was only twenty-one, and she needed someone to talk to. There was no one. In her absorption with Joe, and the completely different circumstances in which she lived with him, she had lost touch with all her friends, except the people in the office, and there was no one there in whom she could confide. Even the married ones would not understand. They did not have husbands like Joe. Jane Stuart’s husband had the same idea as Joe, but Jane would not understand. She had dealt with her husband’s ideas by leaving him.

Adelaide Small was the only one who knew that Virginia had made a runaway marriage. Could she tell Miss Small the truth about why she had to leave the magazine? Miss Small was
wise and honest. Would she be the one to whom Virginia could talk?

When Virginia went to the editor’s office, she was sandwiched in by Grace at the last minute, between two other interviews. Miss Small was very busy. She seemed preoccupied, scarcely looking at Virginia as she stood before the massive desk, and scarcely hearing the careful story that Virginia had prepared to explain her resignation. If she had queried it, or shown any interest, Virginia might have told her the truth. But Miss Small merely looked a little vexed, and said: ‘I’m to take it, I suppose, that you know your own mind this time, and won’t be turning up again looking for your job?’

She dismissed Virginia briskly as Marigold came in, with a smile for Virginia that changed to a questioning look as she saw her disappointed face.

‘Virginia is leaving us,’ Miss Small said, without looking up.

‘Oh? I’m sorry. It is true then – the good news that Derek’s been spreading around?’ Marigold’s eyes dropped instinctively from Virginia’s face to her figure.

Virginia shook her head. ‘No. It’s … other things.’ She could not embark again on the story she had given to Miss Small. She might not tell it right. As she left the office, Adelaide Small was already discussing with Marigold who should be moved into the editorial office in Virginia’s place.

Virginia walked part of the way home that evening, along the Mall, and round the Palace into Eaton Square. It was too warm to be shut up with a crowd on a bus. There were a lot of people walking to Victoria through St James’s Park. Many of them walked as though the paths were rails of habit, hurrying straight ahead without seeing the grass or the shining lake, where the waterfowl rode burnished in the slanting light.

Virginia too had walked this way many times in the summer, but tonight she did not feel that she belonged with the work-day crowd. She had another week to work at the office, but already she did not seem to belong there any more. People had been kindly disappointed to hear that she was leaving, and momentarily curious about her plans, but their thoughts could not follow her beyond the bounds of the magazine.

How useless to rely on getting help or advice from Miss
Small, or anyone else. People could be allies and even cronies when you worked together, but as soon as you went outside their world, they lost interest. There was no one to rely on but yourself. You were the only one who could decide what should happen to you. Advice was only of value to support your own decisions. You did not take it if it was not what you wanted to do, so where was the purpose of seeking it?

It was just that she wanted someone to talk to. The long terraces of Eaton Square would not have seemed so long if she were walking with someone, discussing her thoughts with someone who would abandon their own thoughts for long enough to listen to hers. There were so many things she could not talk to Joe about, and the chief of them was Joe himself.

It was like that at the beginning of all marriages, Virginia supposed. That was why wives clung to their old girl-friends, or made new ones among the new neighbours, or irritated their husbands by continually wanting to run to their parents. If Helen had been in London, Virginia would not have run to her; but if she only knew where her father was, she would go to him.

She had thought about him many times since that unexpected, tantalizing moment of seeing him outside the old house on the hill. What had happened to him? Where had he gone, with his dear, disfigured wife and the little boy, and the baby? Had he really been in difficulties, as the solicitor had said, and if so, how had he got out of them?

The more Virginia had thought of him after her rebellion against Helen, the more she understood how much she had missed in growing up without her father. She had found him for a moment, for just long enough to realize that she needed him, and then he was almost immediately lost to her; but the need remained. She did not need advice or money from him. He probably would have been able to give neither; but he would have been someone to talk to.

If it was only money she needed, she could write to Spenser, and he would send it at once, probably double what she asked; but Virginia had promised herself never to ask him. She would not give Helen the satisfaction of seeing her disparaging predictions fulfilled.

On the surface, Helen was reconciled with Virginia. After Virginia had written to her three times, Helen had at last replied, and they now exchanged letters fairly regularly, dispassionate letters that were not like those between a mother and daughter. Helen wrote about all the parties, and the travelling, and the clothes and the people and the theatres, but she never mentioned Virginia’s marriage. Virginia wrote about people and events at the office, and things that were happening in London, but she never mentioned Joe.

At Sloane Square, Virginia took a bus to the turning off the King’s Road that led to home. Soon it would not be home any longer. She was out of a job and out of a home, and now – it seemed that everything was happening at once – on the floor of the passage where Mollie had thrown it downstairs, was a telegram from Tiny’s sister, saying that the old nurse was dying, and asking Virginia to come at once.

*

‘Bit late to start out for Epsom,’ Joe said. ‘Go tomorrow. I’m taking you out to dinner tonight, to make up for what I did to you yesterday.’ He touched Virginia’s mouth with his fingers. The lip was still swollen. ‘You should put ice on it,’ he said, as detachedly as if he had not caused the damage himself.

‘It’s all right. And you don’t have to take me out to dinner to make me forget about it.’ The bruised lip made her smile crooked. ‘I’ve forgotten. But I’ll take the dinner anyway. Tomorrow. I must go to Tiny tonight. She must be very ill for her sister to send a wire. They’re both of them frightened of things like telegrams. Tomorrow might be too late.’

‘If she’s as ill as all that, she won’t know you, so what’s the point of going?’

‘I must. She was my nanny. She was wonderful to me. You don’t understand about nannies, because you never had one. But people who’ve had nannies never forget them, not all their lives. When you’re little, it’s like having something – well, not better than a mother, but something more your own than a mother. Mothers have husbands. They have friends. They go out to parties, or to a job, like Helen. Nannies never go anywhere. The old ones, like Tiny, have no interests except you.

You take everything from them, greedily, because you adore them. They’re safe and comfortable and always the same, but you don’t stay the same. You grow up, and suddenly you’re not their baby any more. That’s a nanny’s tragedy.’

*

She found Tiny in the bed that was so much too wide and high for the little room under the roof of her sister’s cottage. Tiny was conscious, but drowsy. Virginia kissed her, feeling the familiar creased velvet of her skin, and held her dry, crooked hand for a time while the old woman talked quite sensibly, asking her why she was out so late, and whether she had had her dinner, and why she was so thin.

After a while, she mumbled herself into a doze. Virginia went downstairs. Hilda, the sister, was in the low front room, looking sceptically at a television set which Tiny had bought with her savings, although for a long time she had been too feeble to come downstairs and watch it.

‘She doesn’t seem so bad,’ Virginia said. ‘I thought she would be much more ill than this.’

‘Well, she rallies now and then, dear. Bother that thing!’ Hilda jumped up to turn off the television. She was even smaller than Tiny, but more active and wiry, her fingers always moving, her head constantly nodding, so that she had to have a little chain on her pince-nez to catch them when they slipped off her short nose. ‘I hate these clever plays. That B.B.C. will clever itself right out of existence one of these days. So Rosa talked to you? I thought she’d be able for it. She picked up quite a bit when I told her I’d sent the telegram. She knew you would come.’

‘Should you have told her? She ought not to know how bad she is.’

‘You don’t have to tell her. She knows all right. Bless you, Rosa’s not afraid of dying. She’s always asking the doctor how long she’s got, just as if she had a train to catch. It’s quite a joke between them.’

‘Is she really dying?’

Hilda raised her hands and let them plop on to her knees. ‘Who knows? Who can say when any one of us will go? Except
our dear Lord Himself.’ She looked at the picture above the mantelpiece, a large and crudely-coloured painting of the Sacred Heart. ‘But the doctor told me this morning she hasn’t long to last. That’s why I sent for you. I knew you’d never forgive me if you didn’t see her before –’ For the first time, her small, tight face trembled, and Virginia knew how lonely she would be without the burden of an invalid sister to care for. Then she drew her mouth into a busy smile and said: ‘And nor would Rosa neither. She’d come back and tell me what she thought about it. When I told her this morning I was going to send the wire, she said: “You do that, Hilda. You get my Jinny here, and then you can send for Father O’Hagan. I’m not ready for him and his holy water until I’ve seen my Jinny.”’

When Virginia went upstairs again, bending her head to go into the bedroom, Tiny was still asleep. She lay propped on the pillows with her mouth open and her knees drawn up. Her small, humped figure did not reach more than half-way down the big bed, which had been Hilda’s marriage bed until her husband died.

The sheets were clean, the pillow-cases were beautifully embroidered, and a silk counterpane, laundered out of all colour, was spread over the blanket, with the corners precisely turned. Tiny herself looked as clean as a newly-bathed child, her frail skin luminous, her scalp showing pink through her soft white hair. The little room was fresh and neat, with the furniture polished and exactly in place on the bright rug, starched doileys under every ornament, and a stiff white runner under a row of photographs on the dressing-table.