The Angel in the Corner (36 page)

Meanwhile, he joked with her husband, and got on the right side of him … just in case. No harm to Virginia; but Joe had been faithful to her ever since they were married. If he did not break out some time or other, he would begin to think he was getting queer.

Ella’s husband was jovial and friendly. All the people who came into the Olive Branch, unlike the morose beer-suckers in some public-houses, were friendly, accustomed to being on good terms with whoever was behind the bar, ready to buy you a drink if you kept them amused. And you could buy yourself a drink any time of the day, whenever you felt like it, and even fiddle one now and then off the record, if you were careful. It was a good life. It was the first time that Joe had been his own master, or been paid for doing work that he enjoyed. He was happy, confident, and once more full of the old bravado that had been knocked out of him by the squalid, penny-pinching months at Weston House.

When the baby was born, Joe stood drinks on the house for
everyone in the bar. The people in the public bar came across the passage to see what the noise was about, and they got free drinks too. Joe was in his element, the centre of attraction, congratulations, and crude masculine jokes. He had not meant the baby to be a girl, but there it was. He decided then and there in the bar to call her Jenny, his mother’s name, and he became very sentimental thinking about it. This was a great night for sentiment. People began to buy him drinks, and he leaned his elbow on the bar and thought tenderly of Virginia with her big, exhausted eyes, and her dark hair on her shoulders, clutching the dark, shrivelled baby to her, and begging the nurse not to take it away.

Ella was in the bar without her husband. She seemed amused by the occasion. At closing-time she was still there, looking at Joe, and he knew that it would have been easy to take her upstairs after Lennie had gone. But tonight he was sentimental. Tonight he was the husband and father to end all husbands and fathers, and Ella shrugged her bony shoulders and went out with the rest of the people into the little street that was so quiet until the Olive Branch let out its customers into the warm night.

*

For a while after Virginia came home, Joe was tender and considerate, delighted with Virginia, and proud of the tiny living thing he had created. Presently his delight in Virginia’s achievement was tempered by his realization of the baby’s-demands on her. His pride in his daughter was less intense when he discovered what it was like to have a new-born baby in the house.

From the start, Jenny was a nervous, difficult baby. She cried a lot, and did not want her feeds, and was always awake when she should have been asleep. Virginia worried about her all the time, and expected Joe to do the same, but after a while he did not want to listen to her worries any more.

‘It’s bad enough,’ he said, ‘to have the kid crying half the night, and you jumping in and out of bed, without having to talk about it all the time. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with her. Why don’t you believe that, and stop fussing?

You used to be such good fun, Jin. Now you’re degenerating into just a mother, like all the rest.’

‘I am a mother,’ Virginia said, and it still sounded odd to say it. ‘How can I help worrying? If she just wouldn’t cry so much, it wouldn’t be so bad.’

‘You’re telling me,’ Joe said bitterly. The baby’s crying was increasingly on his nerves. Sometimes when he was in the bar, he would listen to the piteous, penetrating sound from above for as long as he could stand, and then he would run up the stairs and shout angrily at Virginia: ‘For God’s sake, can’t you keep that child quiet? You’ll drive everybody out of here before you’re done with it!’

People in the bar would make jokes about the child’s crying, which could plainly be heard when there was not a noisy crowd. ‘Safety-pin trouble?’ they would ask, raising their eyes to the ceiling, or: ‘Why don’t you go up and slap the poor little brute on the back?’ – manufacturing a belch.

‘The kid’s all right,’ Joe would say curtly. Although these were the same people to whom he had boasted when Jenny was born, he now resented their domestic allusions, which seemed to minimize him into the figure of a henpecked father, pacing the floor in the small hours with a yelling baby.

Before the baby was born, Virginia was always waiting quietly for him to come upstairs after the bar closed. Now she nearly always seemed to be busy with the baby. Sometimes when he was upstairs after closing-time, he would grow so irritated by the sight of Virginia anxiously trying to make the baby feed at her breast, that he would fling off downstairs and go out to a club, or spend the rest of the evening drinking by himself in the bar.

Weighing the baby to see how much she had taken, mixing the bottle to supplement the unsuccessful breast-feeding, Virginia would try to puzzle out why Joe felt like that. She had always understood that a man liked to see his wife feeding his baby. Joe hated to see it. He thought that Virginia would spoil her figure. He wanted her body to be all for him, not shared even with their baby. Although the conception of Jenny had satisfied his creative pride, he had never really wanted her. Virginia knew that. Now that Jenny was here, he was jealous of
her because she had turned Virginia into part wife, part mother, instead of all wife and lover.

Understanding this, Virginia tried to be extra loving to Joe, so that he should not feel left out of this mysterious, unimagined intimacy between herself and Jenny. She had never known anything like the tenderness she felt towards the restless, difficult child, with the fuzz of black hair and the speck of nose and the mouth that folded so sweetly in slumber, and protested so violently much of the time she was awake. When Virginia held her in her arms, and the tiny, groping hands clutched at her, it seemed almost as though, by the very fact of her beloved existence, the baby were protecting her, instead of she protecting the baby.

Since she could not discuss the baby’s ups and downs with Joe, Virginia discussed them with Lennie, who was always ready to listen. If Joe went out during the day, Lennie would often stump up the stairs to hang over the crib and gaze with wonder at the tiny child. He bought impossible presents for her, and would nearly break his heart trying to make the feeble hand grasp a tin trumpet or a golliwog. When Virginia let him pick Jenny up, he would sit motionless on the low chair, his feet carefully planted, his short leg trembling a little, his pointed, freckled face absorbed, holding his breath in tenderness and wonder at the feeling it gave him to have the baby in his arms.

Joe came home one afternoon and found him holding the baby like this while Virginia was downstairs in the kitchen. Jenny had been quiet, staring at Lennie with calmly unfocused eyes. When Virginia heard her cry, she ran upstairs to find that Joe had snatched her away, and was holding her awkwardly, while he snapped at Lennie to get downstairs where he belonged.

Virginia took the baby from him. ‘Just when we had got her quiet,’ she said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t be so rough with her.’

‘If I can’t even hold my own kid,’ Joe said, ‘I’d better go downstairs and let this pet nursemaid of yours move in up here.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’ Virginia frowned at him. Lennie was looking from one to the other, fidgeting and embarrassed.

‘You’d better go down,’ Virginia told him. ‘Thanks for helping me.’

Lennie looked at the sobbing baby, and made a little hopeless gesture towards her, as if his hands longed to hold her again. She would often stop crying for him when she would not stop for Virginia.

‘Do what you’re told,’ Joe said curtly. ‘Get downstairs and stay there. I don’t want you up here again.’

‘Yes, Mr Colonna.’ Lennie did not look at him. ‘How about the milk then, Mrs C.?’ he asked. ‘You didn’t bring it up. Shall I –’

‘Get out, I told you!’ Joe looked as though he would hit him. ‘You’re working for me, not my wife. Now get downstairs and do your work, before you find yourself out of a job.’

Lennie took one last anxious look at Virginia and the baby, and scuttled out of the room.

‘You shouldn’t be so rough with him,’ Virginia said, as they heard the irregular thump of Lennie’s feet hurrying down the steep stairs. ‘You scare him when you’re like that.’

‘I’ll do more than scare him before I’m through,’ Joe said. ‘He drives me crazy always toadying round you. I won’t have him coming up here any more – understand?’

‘You’ve said that before,’ Virginia said, rocking the baby and looking at Joe calmly over the top of the soft, wispy hair, ‘but I can’t stop him coming up here. He’s been so good to me, and he does love Jenny.’

‘Let him have a baby of his own and love that, and leave mine alone,’ Joe said.

‘Oh, he will. He’s engaged to a girl called Nancy, didn’t you know that? They’re going to be married as soon as Nancy can pluck up the courage to tell her parents. Apparently they don’t like poor Lennie.’

‘Well, neither do I. I don’t trust that little weasel. He’s the only fly in the ointment around here, as far as I’m concerned.’

‘You would never have learned to run this place without him,’ Virginia said.

‘Who says I wouldn’t? Nothing to it. I can run this pub with one hand tied behind my back. I don’t need that snivelling cripple to tell me my business. It was different for the chap
before. He wasn’t married, but you and I could do this place on our own. You could do the cleaning and the glasses, and you could manage the Public all right.’

‘But I couldn’t leave Jenny for so long.’ It was the first thing that Virginia thought of, but she knew, even as she said it, that it would annoy him.

‘Always the damn baby! Who are you married to – the baby or me? Listen, if I want you downstairs, you’ll come downstairs, and if I want to get rid of young Lennie, I’ll get rid of him. I’m going to speak to the chap from the brewery next time he comes.’

‘Joe – you couldn’t do that! Why, Lennie would die if he couldn’t work here. The Olive Branch is his life.’

‘Well, keep him downstairs then, or I swear I’ll get him fired.’

‘You couldn’t be so mean.’

‘I could. You’ve no idea how mean I could be to anyone who starts messing about with my wife.’

‘Messing about – how ridiculous. As if poor Lennie would ever think of anything like that.’

‘That’s what they all say. He’s just a poor, simple boy. He wouldn’t think of anything like that. And then one day you come home, and the poor simple boy’s pants are on the floor, and the poor simple boy is in bed with –’

‘Oh, stop it,’ Virginia said wearily. The baby was quiet now, and she went to the crib and laid her down. Instantly, Jenny began to cry again. ‘Why do you have to be like this?’ she asked, with her back to him, leaning over the crib. ‘We’re so happy here, and everything has turned out so well. We’ve got our chance at last. Why do you have to spoil it by picking quarrels about nothing?’

‘God knows.’ Virginia turned, and saw that his face was not angry any more, but a little sad. ‘It’s just that I see red when I think anyone is trying to muscle in on my property.’

‘Lennie isn’t trying to muscle in. He’s fond of me, I know, but only as if I was his mother. His mother isn’t very nice to him.’

‘I’ve heard that one before, too,’ Joe said, with a grin. ‘ “He loves me like a son,” and the first thing you know, there’s incest brewing. Keep him downstairs, Jin,’ he said more seriously.
‘He can stay, if that keeps you happy; but he must stay downstairs.’

‘All right,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you want. I want to keep you happy too, you see. I hate it when you’re so belligerent.’

‘You don’t hate
it
. You hate me. Isn’t that more like it?’

‘No, darling.’ Virginia went to him, and stood close to him.

‘I love you. You know that.’

‘Yes.’ He let out his breath on a long sigh. ‘If I thought you didn’t, I’d kill you.’ He kissed her fiercely, while the baby whimpered and fretted in the crib behind them.

*

‘That child will never stand the winter,’ Mrs Batey said, crossing her arms in front of her, lifting up her bosom and letting it drop again. She had come to visit Virginia, bringing with her a huge, cracked leather shopping bag in case she saw any bargains in Marylebone High Street. Mrs Batey never went on an expedition without taking the bag for possible booty. Even the short trip from Weston House to the Olive Branch was an expedition, and might yield a cut-price cauliflower or a set of pig’s feet.

In the bag was a dented sponge-cake with the jam oozing out, which she had made for Virginia. ‘Not that you need it as much as you used, love,’ she said, looking round the little upstairs room with its bright curtains and pink walls and gay nursery rugs on the floor. ‘My stars, you have fallen on your feet, and no mistake. A bit different to dear old Weston House. Not that I grudge it to you, love. You deserve it, every bit of it, and perhaps that husband of yours deserves his luck too, if any man ever deserves anything. Running a pub! Edgar will eat his heart out with envy when I tell him about it. “Wouldn’t do for you,” I’ll tell him. “You’d drink up all the profits before a week was out.”’

Jenny had been sleeping when Mrs Batey came, but the raucous laugh induced by the thought of Edgar running a public-house woke her up, and as so often, she announced her awakening by a fretful cry.

Mrs Batey tiptoed weightily to the crib, and leaned over it for a long time making chirping and sucking sounds, before
she straightened herself up and announced in the voice of an expert: ‘That child will never stand the winter.’

She did not mean it unkindly. She did not mean to frighten Virginia. It was just a piece of news that was worth giving out because it was sensational.

‘What nonsense,’ Virginia said, trying not to mind. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her. She has a cold now, that’s why she looks so pale.’

‘Well, you watch her, that’s all,’ Mrs Batey said. ‘I’ve seen them come, and I’ve seen them go, and they sometimes go quicker than they come, that’s where it is. I lost my first, you know, at four months. That’s a bad time for the little ones, with winter coming on.’

‘Jenny isn’t much more than four months old,’ Virginia said. ‘Please don’t talk like that, Mrs Batey. I don’t like it.’