The Angel in the Corner (41 page)

‘Nothing, except to say that you should have told me. Why didn’t you, Joe? Were you afraid?’

‘Afraid?’ He tossed back his hair. ‘I’m not afraid of anyone.’

‘It explains so much. The doctor took it for granted, I suppose, that it was pneumonia, because he knew she had it, but I’ve never been able to understand how she could have been better, and then suddenly snuffed out like that.’

‘Now you know. I killed her.’

‘Don’t say that.’ Virginia got up quickly and went to him. Her head was aching from the blow of his hand. She felt dizzy and uncertain of herself, but she knew that she had to straighten this out now, because they could not go on with the bitterness of it between them. ‘It wasn’t your fault. Joe, please don’t look like that. Don’t be wretched about it. I can see what you must have been through, thinking it was your fault, but it could have happened to anybody.’

‘If they were drunk enough,’ he said bitterly. ‘Stop making excuses for me. Of course it was my fault. I probably broke the poor little beggar’s neck, only that lousy doctor was too sure of himself to notice it. You can tell the police that. Oh, yes, you’ll have to tell them. They’ll get me for murder – manslaughter at the best. Have poor little Jenny dug up and argued over. You read about it in the papers. “Baby exhumed. Father charged.” ’ He laughed bleakly. ‘Make a lovely little scandal, won’t it? Hellish good for trade. This will be the only pub in London.’

‘How could you think I would ever tell anyone? This is between you and me, Joe, and I’ll never talk about it even to you, if you don’t want. Talking about it won’t bring Jenny back. It’s best forgotten.’

She held out her hand, but he pushed her away. ‘Grow up,’ he said. ‘Stop forgiving me. Stop being so bloody noble, and talk like a human being. Curse me. Accuse me, as you’ll accuse me all your life. Every time you look at me, you’ll think: That
man killed my baby! That’s what I think of myself every time I look in the glass. How do you think I like living with that? How will you like living with me now that you know?’

He was breathless and shaking. He clenched and unclenched his hands, and his eyes were dark pits of anguish. He stood looking at her for a moment while the tap dripped unconcernedly into the silence. Then suddenly he sagged, his arms hung limply, and his face crumpled. ‘Jin –’ he said, and she thought that he was going to cry. ‘You’ll go on with me, won’t you? This isn’t the end? I can’t live with myself if you don’t go on with me.’ He reached out for her. His drunken face was weak and quivering, his hands clutched at the air. She could not touch him when he looked like that.

‘Of course I’ll go on with you,’ she said. The words sounded empty and hopeless.

‘Come here.’ He lurched towards her. ‘Come here when I tell you. Don’t back away like that, damn you – come here! You belong to me. You’re my wife, that’s all you’ll ever be. God damn you, don’t look so disgusted. You think you’re too good for me, don’t you. I could kill you when you look at me like that, you damn ladylike –’ He grabbed the hatchet and threw it at her.

In a split second she saw it coming, and raised her hands too late. She felt no pain as it struck her. She fell across a chair and rolled to the floor, and as she lay there with her arm tangled in the overturned chair, she felt the warm blood tickling her face like a feather. The blood was in her eyes and she could not see, but she heard Joe stumble past her, and heard the shot and the crashing bottles. Then silence, until Lennie’s screams brought people running, and the Olive Branch was full of noise and voices.

It was the kind of story that makes the front page of the newspapers: a one-day sensation, read with pleasurable horror and easily forgotten. After Mrs Benberg read the story, she had spent all the following days at the hospital, making a nuisance of herself until she was allowed to see Virginia. She continued to make herself a nuisance to the hospital staff, coming at all the wrong times, with vast quantities of unsuitable food, until she was finally allowed to take Virginia home with her.

‘Don’t tell my mother. Please don’t let anyone tell my mother what’s happened,’ Virginia had begged. ‘I don’t want to see her … and listen to her. Not yet.’ That was the only thing she had asked. For the rest, she had submitted without protest to everything that was arranged for her, and she now lay listlessly on the narrow, humpy bed, among the boyish relics of Jim’s schooldays in the small front bedroom of Mrs Benberg’s house.

Life had stopped. Whatever future there might be was indiscernible, hidden round a corner which she had not the energy to negotiate. She might as well be here as anywhere else. The meaningless days and nights ran into each other, and although the doctor said that she could get up, it did not seem to matter whether she got out of bed again or not.

Jim was home on leave, relegated to the downstairs settee and perfectly happy about it. Like his mother and father, he could not do enough for Virginia. He was in and out of her room all day with a joke, or a present, or flowers, or an armful of magazines. ‘Something to cheer you up,’ he would say, darting his chubby, beaming face round the door, with his curly hair on end and his cheeks on fire from the wind in the street.

He could not cheer her up, but at least he could give her his bedroom. He was proud of that. ‘Think nothing of it,’ he said, when Virginia apologized for keeping him out of his bed. ‘Of course you’re not spoiling my leave. As a matter of fact, it’s simply made this leave for me, having you here. I’m falling in
love with you,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I never met a girl like you, and I don’t suppose I ever shall again, so I might as well make the most of having you here.’

Like his parents, he was devotedly eager to help Virginia, and took as much pleasure as they did in doing it. Disaster brought out all that was best in the Benbergs. They rallied unswervingly to the challenge as if it were a crusade, and subordinated all their other interests to Virginia, around whose bed the life of the flimsy little house now revolved. For Jim, she was a sensational figure, unattainable, but an object of dazzled worship because she had taken part in the kind of drama for which his own cheery life would never be the stage.

When she heard Jim’s breezy tattoo on the door, Virginia always turned her face aside, and kept the right side against the pillow while she talked to him. She was ashamed of the hideous raw scar which ran from her temple almost to the angle of her jaw. She had looked at herself once in a mirror, and then she had asked Mrs Benberg to take the mirror away, so that she could not see the appalling stigma which she bore in memory of Joe.

She had wept when she looked in the mirror, but not only for her ruined face, and because the doctor would not predict how well the wound would heal. When she wept, weakly, hopelessly among the china animals and the schoolboy books and photographs in Jim’s room, her tears were for Joe, and for the terrible way his life had ended.

She knew that her mother would say that she was well out of it, because of what he had done to her. That was why she could not bear to see Helen. Even Spenser might say that. It was what everyone would say. Only Mrs Benberg understood that her marriage to Joe had held the enchantment of a dream as well as the horror of a nightmare, and that the awakening was not merciful, but bitterly sad.

Mrs Benberg was a tireless and enthusiastic nurse. She scoured the neighbouring shops for delicacies. Her spirited step on the stairs rattled the little house countless times a day as she ran up to see what she could do to make Virginia comfortable. Unlike Jim, who was always trying to tease a laugh out of Virginia, Mrs Benberg did not try to cheer her up. ‘What’s the
percentage?’ she said. ‘You’re wretched now. You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t, so it’s no use my trying to bully you into being happy. That will come later, and no doubt you’ll bully yourself into it without any help from me.’

Two or three times in the night, she would tiptoe heavily into Virginia’s room to see whether she was asleep. Often Virginia was awake, and Mrs Benberg would shuffle downstairs in her voluminous wrapper and furry slippers to heat some milk, and would sit in the frayed wicker armchair and talk about anything that came into her head until she had talked Virginia into drowsiness.

‘Shall I ever sleep well again, do you think?’ Virginia asked one night. ‘I haven’t slept properly since Jenny died.’

‘Don’t be neurotic,’ Mrs Benberg said. ‘Of course you will. You’ve had the peace knocked out of you for a while, but it will return in due season, like the income-tax demand.’

‘I can’t believe that anything will come back for me the way it was,’ Virginia said. ‘It’s all changed. I always thought I was so lucky. You always said that things would go well for me.’

‘So they have, in a way.’ Mrs Benberg shifted in the chair, which creaked protestingly at every movement of her large body. ‘You’re alive, aren’t you? Isn’t that something? Most people would have been killed, but not you. You’re too tough.’

‘I used to think I was. I’m not so sure now. I’m not sure of anything. You always think you’re immune, and that things like this only happen to other people. Then when they happen to you, it knocks the bottom out of your confidence. Tiny – my old nurse – she used to teach me that there was an angel looking out for me. I used to believe that. I don’t any more.’

‘Oh – angels.’ Mrs Benberg heaved herself out of the creaking chair and stood by the bed, vast as the Statue of Liberty in her long, faded wrapper. ‘Papist stuff. But I’ve an open mind. I’ve nothing against angels, for those who want to put their trust in them. If you believe in them, that makes them believable. If you don’t, not. It’s as simple as that. I can’t imagine that angels are so foolhardy as to waste their time fussing over people who don’t believe in them.’

‘I don’t believe in anything,’ Virginia said. ‘I feel as if there
was nothing left to depend on. I don’t know what is going to happen to me.’

‘I do,’ Mrs Benberg said cheerfully. ‘I see it all. But I’m not telling. You’ll find out for yourself in your own good time. At this moment, I see that you’ll go to sleep if I take my loud tongue and my big carcass out of here, and let you get some rest. I put something in your milk. Not poison. Something the doctor gave me.’ She winked at Virginia, then bent to kiss her, her heavy, untidily braided hair swinging over her shoulders like hunks of rope.

She turned off the light, and Virginia lay in the dark and waited for sleep. A street lamp shone into the room through the gap in the curtains which did not meet because Mrs Benberg had shrunk them by too many drastic washings with boiling water and soda. The lamp threw a broken patch of light into the corner of the room, just as the lamp outside the house on the hill had sent its patch of light into the corner of the room where she slept as a child. That was the corner towards which Tiny used to nod before she left the room. ‘You look after my Jinny, now,’ she would adjure the angel, which she had summoned as an antidote to nightmares.

Poor old Tiny. Had she been disappointed not to find her angel waiting for her outside the gate of Heaven when she climbed wearily up there at last? But if Tiny had found Heaven and a gate, and Saint Peter with a big golden key like the ones with which Royalty opened new buildings, and all the other things that Tiny had believed, then there would be an angel too. Everything or nothing, and Mrs Benberg had said that as long as you believed in things, that made them true for you. Was that what she had said? Something like that. …

Virginia felt dreamy and confused. The street lamp had sent her back into the memory of her old bedroom, and she could almost hear Tiny’s hobbling step in the passage outside, coming to listen whether Virginia was asleep. No, that was a firm, heavy step. Mrs Benberg listening at the door to reassure herself once more before she rolled into the big double bed alongside the snoring ridge that was Mr Benberg.

He was snoring now. Virginia could hear him across the passage. Her father had never snored like that. But his bedroom
was on the floor below; she would not have heard him. Yet sometimes, long after she had gone to bed, she had been able to hear his voice and her mother’s raised in argument. That was when they still shared a bedroom. When they went into separate bedrooms, Virginia used to hear first one door bang, then the other, then silence in the chill, unhappy house. Silence while she lay and watched the patch of lamplight and fought against sleep because she was afraid of nightmares.

She put her hand to her cheek and touched the tender, raised flesh. That nightmare was a reality, a million years away from childish dreams and fears. When she was a child, lying in bed wanting sleep and fearing sleep, she used to say to herself:
Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom His love commits me here, ever this night be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide.
She said it like a parrot, without finding any meaning in the words. There was just the impression of an angel, and those soft, white wings like a swan.

Angel of God
.… She stared at the patch of yellow light, and the light was the evening sun, and the corner was a wall, the wall of the garden where the tangled roses dropped their petals like tears on to the weeds. The peach tree waited with its arms outspread. The quiet garden waited with Virginia, as the tide of contentment flowed gently over her and the last piercing rays of the sun bathed her face with the light that held behind it the promise she had come so far to seek.

As the sun sank, the bright light mellowed, and was diffused into an atmosphere through which, with an instant’s clearness, she saw her angel smiling before her. The smile … the face.… With a lifting of the heart as if she were swept forward on wings, she reached out with a cry and became one with the vision.

The door flew open and the light snapped on. Mrs Benberg stood dishevelled in the doorway. Virginia was sitting up in bed with her arms flung out on the quilt in front of her. ‘What happened?’ she asked, staring at Mrs Benberg.

‘You called out. You must have been dreaming.’

‘No. I don’t know. Yes … a dream.’ But how could a mere dream leave you with this warmth and peace, this assurance of a quiet word spoken to dispel anxiety for ever?