The Angel in the Corner (30 page)

Joe found himself watching Virginia more closely in the days
after she told him about the baby. Lately, he had not taken much notice of her, and all the time this thing had happened to her and he had not known it. Why had she waited for two months to tell him? Was she afraid of him? She did not behave as if she was. He had been brutal to her, but she did not flinch from him. When he was rough with her, she would often fight him back, if she could get her hands free.

Joe watched her and wondered about her, and saw for the first time how thin her face had become, how large her eyes and brilliant her mouth against the fine white skin. Her arms and legs were thinner too, and there were shadows under her collar-bones that had not been there when her shoulders bloomed so smoothly out of the exciting white dress. She looked somehow whittled down, stripped for action against whatever contingency life might bring. And now when Joe watched her more carefully, because she was carrying his baby, he saw that she was nearly always in an apron and with her sleeves rolled up, doggedly tackling the wretched flat as if she had never known any other kind of life. She had got into the habit of standing with her arms folded, resting one hip; the stance of the work-toughened women who gossiped on their doorsteps across the road.

It was her birthday. She was twenty-two, and Joe wanted to do something extravagant and wildly luxurious for her. He wanted to buy her jewels, champagne, an exotic dress in which she would not roll up her sleeves and fold her arms. He bought her a gaily-coloured silk scarf. It was all he could afford.

‘It’s real silk,’ he said nervously. ‘The best they had in the shop.’

‘It’s beautiful.’ She stroked the scarf and smiled at him with shining eyes. The present was much more than just a thirty-shilling scarf to her, because she thought he had forgotten her birthday. ‘You shouldn’t have spent so much, darling.’

‘I’ve saved a bit these last few days by not going to the pub,’ he said, trying to sound casual. ‘You know how it is. Now that I’m a father – respectable chap, and all that.’ He laughed self-consciously. He seldom felt embarrassed with her, but her shining pleasure in the birthday present had thrown him out of his stride and made him feel ashamed that it was so little.

‘Oh, Jin!’ He suddenly threw his arms round her and held her fiercely against him. ‘I wish I could have given you something tremendous. I wish I could give you what you want most in the world.’

They were both very much in love that night. It was like the first days of their marriage, when they could not be together in a room without touching each other constantly, and when they went without supper because they began to make love before the supper was cooked, and rose at midnight to eat whatever they could find, sitting close together and talking their thoughts with the complete mental abandonment that is possible after complete physical abandonment.

All next day, Joe could not get Virginia out of his mind. He kept seeing the picture she made in her bright red coat, with her hair blown back by the wind that whipped up the dingy street as he leaned out of the window to watch her go. Before she reached the comer, she had turned to look up at the flats. Why had she done that? On other mornings he was never out of bed to wave to her. Did she guess that he would wave today, or did she look back every morning in case he was at the window?

‘I wish I could give you what you want most in the world,’ he had said last night, and he had meant it. What did she want most in the world? Well, there was one thing he could do for her. Joe dressed quickly, ate all the eggs he could find in the cupboard to give himself strength, ran whistling down the stone stairs, touched his hat impertinently to Mrs Baggott, and found himself a job in a snack bar in the Edgware Road.

*

‘I’ll say this much for your husband,’ Betty said, as she watched Joe deftly slapping a sandwich together. ‘He certainly knows his job.’

‘He’s done this sort of work before,’ Virginia said. ‘He’s rather good at messing about with food.’

‘Mm-hm.’ Betty squinted at Joe’s back through her thick glasses. ‘I should have thought he could have found something a bit better.’

Betty’s fiancé was an undersized but brainy boy who was
articled to a solicitor. Her candid comparisons between the law and a snack bar made Virginia wish that she did not have to take Betty to the place where Joe worked. But she liked to go there herself in her lunch hour, and it was impossible to shake Betty out of the tacit assumption that since they went to lunch at the same time, they must eat their lunch together.

‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ Betty sometimes said. ‘I’m tired of everything they serve at the Excelsior.’

‘I’d rather go there,’ Virginia would say. ‘But you needn’t come if you don’t want to.’

‘Oh, I’ll come with you, Ginger, even if it means the Excelsior. But I wonder Joe doesn’t think it a bit funny that you go there every day.’

‘Why should he? He would think it funny if I didn’t go.’

‘Oh, well. I just thought.’ Betty wandered up the Edgware Road, maddeningly slow in the cold wind, knocking into people as she veered short-sightedly off her course. ‘I just thought he might not like to feel that you were checking up on him.’

‘But I’m not!’

Or was she? It was natural for her to go to the Excelsior for lunch. She was glad that Joe worked in a place where she could go every day; but she had to admit that she was glad not only because it gave her a chance to see him, but because she could reassure herself that he had not yet walked out of the job, as he had walked impatiently out of so many others.

He did not seem to mind this job as much as some of the others he had tried. He liked to make sandwiches and cut wedges of pie, and wear the white jacket and the little square white hat which sat so jauntily on the back of his glossy head. He was much more cheerful than he had been at other times when he was working. Most men are at odds with themselves when they are out of work. Joe was usually at odds with himself when he was tied down to the routine of a job.

The cheerfulness was partly due to a new scheme that he was concocting with Jack Corelli. Jack was speaking for the Communists at the moment, and although his impassioned oratory against the evils of capitalism drew big crowds at Marble Arch, and kept a policeman hovering near, he had never been more
capitalistically minded himself. He had his eye on a little restaurant in St John’s Wood that was going cheap. He and Joe were going to buy it, work up a tremendous business among the residents of the neighbouring flats, sell out at a profit, and start a showier place nearby, to which they would lure away the customers from the restaurant they had sold.

The only thing that was hindering the plan at the moment was that they did not have the money to buy the little restaurant.

‘To think of that stepfather of yours with all those dollars,’ Joe said wistfully. ‘You’d think he could spare us a few.’

‘He probably would, if I asked him,’ Virginia said.

‘Why don’t you then?’ asked Jack, fitting a cigarette into a chromium holder. ‘It’s not very charitable of you, my dear Virginia, to keep all that money to yourself.’

‘But I haven’t got any of it! And I don’t want it. I’ll never ask Spenser for help. I’ve told Joe that hundreds of times. You can’t understand that, because you don’t know the whole story, and anyway, you’ve got no principles. So you keep out of this, Jack. It’s none of your business.’

‘Sorry, sorry.’ Jack removed the long cigarette-holder from his mouth with a flourish, and funnelled two jets of smoke down his nose. ‘Very sorry, I’m sure,’ he said in the affected voice with which he thought he was imitating the way Virginia spoke. ‘We’re only trying to help you. Doing our best for the little woman, so she can be in the chips. It seems strange that you wouldn’t want to help our honest effort.’

‘Oh, leave her alone,’ Joe said. ‘I know how she feels about it. She’s got scruples. You and I don’t understand that. We’ve never been able to afford them. We’ll get the money all right. I’ve got a hunch something big is going to come up for me soon.’ He winked at Jack. Jack frowned, and just perceptibly shook his narrow, lizard-like head, and Virginia guessed with apprehension that they were up to something.

One evening when she went to the Excelsior on her way home from work to see if it was one of Joe’s nights to leave early, she found him talking to a cadaverous man in a tightly-belted raincoat. Joe was wiping down the counter in front of the man, and making the casual remarks he might have made to any customer, but there was something about the way the man
looked at Joe that made Virginia think that this was not an ordinary exchange of pleasantries.

When Joe saw her, he came at once to the end of the counter where she sat. ‘You didn’t need to come tonight, Jin,’ he said, not smiling as he usually did when he saw her perching there. ‘You know it isn’t my early night.’

‘You didn’t tell me. You were asleep when I left this morning. I came on the chance that we could go to a cinema and have some supper out.’

‘Not tonight. I’m not off till eight-thirty. You go home and get some rest. Sweetheart,’ he added, because she looked disappointed. ‘And don’t wait up for me, because I might be a bit late. I’ve got a date after work. Business.’

‘Something for Ed? I wish you’d stop that, Joe. You don’t need to be mixed up with him now that you’re working here.’

‘I’ll choose who I’m mixed up with,’ he said, leaning forward on the counter as he lowered his voice. ‘It happens to be nothing to do with Ed, but you keep your nose out of it, anyway.’

The woman who had come to take the empty stool next to Virginia heard this last remark and looked interested, so Joe stood upright and nodded to Virginia, and went to take an order at the other end of the counter.

Another day, when Virginia and Betty went to the Excelsior at lunch-time, the cadaverous man was there again. He was not talking to Joe, who was busy with the noon-time rush. He was drinking a milk shake and reading a newspaper. He was there again another day, and although he was again reading a newspaper, Virginia still had the impression that he was watching Joe.

‘Who is that man?’ she asked that night. ‘That man who’s always at the Excelsior, drinking milk shakes.’

‘What man?’ he said. ‘Dozens of people come there nearly every day, and dozens of them have milk shakes.’

‘I know, but this man looks as if he knew you. And I’ve seen you talking to him.’

‘Since when can’t I talk to customers? I talk to the women too. How do you like that?’ Joe had been edgy these last few days. He seemed to have something on his mind besides the
plans for the restaurant. The restaurant, in fact, was seldom discussed. Jack had not come swaggering into the flat for many days, and if he and Joe were on the street at the same time they walked on opposite sides. It seemed as if they were trying to avoid being seen together.

‘Joe, you know who I mean. The man in the raincoat. His hair is cut very short, and he has a long jaw. His head looks like a skull.’

‘No doubt he has a skull under his head, like most people,’ Joe said. ‘I’ve no idea who you’re talking about.’

‘All right. I’m fanciful, I expect. Mrs Batey says you get fanciful when you’re pregnant.’ She dropped the subject of the cadaverous man, but she still worried about him. She saw him again in the Excelsior at lunch-time, and Betty asked in her loud, clear voice: ‘Why do you keep looking at that man over there? Do you know him?’

Joe told Virginia that he had been given a Saturday off, and was going to a race-meeting in the Midlands. She asked if she could go with him.

‘How could you? You couldn’t get off.’

‘I might, if I ask Mr Jacobs. He’s very kind. He treats me almost as if I were sacred now.’

‘Well, you can’t come. It would be too tiring for you, the journey and everything. I didn’t know you liked going to the races all that much, anyway.’

‘I don’t particularly. I just felt I didn’t want to spend the week-end here alone.’

‘Alone! My God, no one could be alone in this tower of Babel. You’ll be all right. You know everybody here. If you’re scared at night, go across the passage. The gas-fitter will defend your honour.’

Joe was going to be away two nights. He said that he was going with Ed Morris on Friday evening. Ed would put him up at a hotel, and they would be back on Sunday. On Friday morning, Virginia said suddenly: ‘Please don’t go.’

‘Don’t be silly, darling. I’ve promised Ed. He doesn’t like driving alone. Besides, I have a feeling I’m going to make some money this trip. There’s a couple of horses that can’t miss.’

When Virginia came home that evening, he had already
gone. His coat was not behind the door, and when she went down to look in the basement storeroom she saw that her small suitcase was not there.

All Sunday she waited in the flat, but he did not come. In the evening she roasted a piece of beef, because she thought he would be hungry when he came back. Joe was always hungry when he came home from anywhere. She kept the food warming for him until after midnight, and then she turned off the oven and went to bed. It was the first time they had ever been apart. It was cold in the bed without Joe, and Virginia got up again to put on a sweater and a pair of his socks.

When she went to the shop on Monday morning, she left a note on the table to welcome him home. When she got back that night, the note was still there, untouched.

He could not telephone her at the flat, but he knew that the Dales had a telephone and would give her a message. Or he could have sent a telegram. How could he not let her know what he was doing? Even Joe could not be as casual as that. Unless there had been an accident. Her mind went over all the possibilities, and by the end of the evening she had Joe laid out on a mortuary slab and herself creeping in to identify him, just as Mrs Fagg had crept into the station waiting-room to identify what was left of Mr Fagg.

She was too worried to go across the passage for Mrs Batey’s comfort. Mrs Batey would click her teeth and say that it was all you could expect from a man, which would be no comfort at all. She would tell her that no news was good news, and that if there had been an accident, she would have heard about it all too soon. That would be no comfort either. Virginia knew all that, but if she could not make herself believe it, Mrs Batey was never going to convince her.