The Angel in the Corner

by Monica Dickens

  Nora squealed, and kicked her feet up. ‘Are you there, Jinny?’ she asked, still looking at Joe. ‘Don’t go away, anyone. I’m afraid I’m going to be seduced.’

  ‘That shouldn’t frighten you,’ Joe said in his normal voice. Then intoning again: ‘Be quiet now. Be quiet. You are going to sleep … to sleep … You are asleep. You will do exactly what I tell you. Look at me. Look at my eye. My eye will tell you. You will do exactly what I tell you.’

  Joe had seen hypnotism acts on the stage, and knew that part of the routine was to repeat a few words over and over again. He did not expect it to have any effect on Nora, although she was eminently suggestible.

  The room was very quiet. A log shifted in the rustling flames. Virginia was leaning forward on the divan at Joe’s side. He could hear her breathing, and faintly trace her perfume.

  ‘Nora,’ he said, ‘Nora. You are asleep. Do what I tell you. Raise your right hand.’ Nora raised it too quickly. ‘Stand up.’ She stood up, tightening her lips against a smile. ‘Bark like a dog.’ Nora’s yaps trembled with suppressed giggles.

  Joe ordered her to do a few simple things, and then told her to sing You Do Something To Me. It was the first song he thought of. It had been running in his head all day.

  ‘I can’t.’ Nora opened her other eye and put her hands on her hips. ‘I don’t know the words.’

  Joe lowered the key and laughed, shaking his head to relieve the strain of staring.

  ‘Oh, you silly thing,’ Virginia said. ‘You weren’t hypnotized at all. You were pretending.’

  ‘No, no, I wasn’t. Honestly I wasn’t.’ Nora was determined to have been hypnotized. ‘I wasn’t trying to do what he said. I just had to. It was the funniest feeling. I feel funny all over. Feel me. I’m trembling.’ She put out her hand to Joe. ‘Honestly, darling, you are. Fancy you being able to do that. You’ve got powers. I’d be afraid to be in a dark room with you.’

  Joe did not take her up on that. He turned to Virginia. ‘Let me try it with you; I might have more luck. Nora’s too jittery. She won’t concentrate.’

  ‘But I did! How can you say that? I was hypnotized. I really was. It wasn’t my fault I didn’t know the song. Try me again, Joey. I’ll bet you could make me do anything.’

  ‘No.’ He took Virginia’s hand, and put her in the chair. ‘Jinny’s turn.’

  ‘I’m going to get myself a drink then. I feel funny. My nerves need steadying.’ Nora went to the table at the other end of the room, and made a great deal of noise with the bottle and glasses, angry at being pushed from the centre of the stage.

  ‘Shut up over there,’ Joe said. ‘I must have quiet. Close your eye, Jinny. The left one. Now look at me. Look through the key. Do you see my eye? Look at my eye.’

  Virginia sat upright and still, staring at him without a sound. ‘Look at me,’ Joe said. He was enjoying himself. He felt masterful. ‘Look at me, and you will go to sleep. You are going to sleep … to sleep … You can’t do anything but look at me. You can’t do anything but go to sleep. You are going to sleep.… You will do exactly what I tell you. Can you hear me? Can you hear what I am telling you?’

  Virginia did not answer.

  ‘Raise your right hand.’

  Virginia remained perfectly still, only her chest moving gently up and down.

  ‘She’s not trying,’ Derek grumbled. ‘Don’t spoil it, Jinny.’

  ‘Ssh!’ Joe waved a hand at him. ‘She’s going to sleep. You are going to sleep, Virginia. To sleep …’ Through the key, his eye saw her eye, brown pupil and green iris, broken by a triangle of light from the fire.

  Something had happened. The other eye was open, and both were staring at him, and through him. He lowered the key, and her eyes did not move. She still sat upright, and yet her body was relaxed. Her hands lay limply in her lap. Her ankles were no longer crossed, but turned loosely, with one foot on its side.

  God, did he really possess hypnotic powers after all? Joe was thrilled and afraid at the same time. He waved his hands in front of Virginia’s frozen face. She did not move.

  *

  Virginia was walking down a long, dark passage. At the end of it was a small circle of light, like the hole in a key. It grew larger, and the light brightened. As she drew near to it, she saw that the hole was a little door within a larger door. She stepped over the sill, and was in the garden, in sunshine.

  It was evening. The sun was low, shining directly in front of her. She was in a kitchen garden. There was a brick wall all round it, with fruit trees trained in formal shapes against the brick. Little paths with miniature box hedges ran up and down the garden, and in the plots between the paths, lettuces were growing, and raspberry bushes, and in the far corner, roses.

  The garden looked neglected. The lettuces were going to seed in dry spires. The raspberries were straggling and tangled. When she walked towards the roses, she saw that the big flower-heads were wilting, and dropping pale petals on to the weeds that covered the ground.

  Instead of being desolate in its neglect, the small garden held between its walls a hush of content. She knew that she had come here from a long way away, and that in the corner beyond the overblown roses was what she had come to see. The sun struck over the wall at that corner. It shone full in her face, and as its lower edge reached the bricks, and the shadow of the wall crept out over her feet, she was conscious of a deepening joy. Her happiness grew as the sun sank lower. She was drowning in the well of peace within the garden walls.

  The sun had almost disappeared, and she knew that when its burning rim slipped below the wall, in the corner where the peach tree spread its arms, she would see what she was looking for.

  She could feel it now, could feel its blessed presence, as the branches of the peach tree spread like wings. It was the answer to everything. It was – she reached out with a cry, as someone pulled her roughly back by the shoulder, and Derek was shouting in her ear: ‘Wake up, Jinny! For God’s sake, wake up!’

  She leaned against the back of the chair and looked at him.

  ‘God,’ he said, pushing back his hair, ‘you had me scared. What happened to you?’

  ‘She was faking,’ Nora said scornfully. ‘What a silly trick to play. You had the boys all excited. Joe thought he’d started something he couldn’t stop.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I knew what I was doing. You really were asleep, weren’t you?’

  Virginia wanted to cry. She had been within reach of something lovely, and now it was gone. She could hardly remember where she had been. A garden, was it? It was slipping away from her. What was it she was going to see?

  She looked round at their faces: Derek still flustered, and sobered with alarm, Nora laughing at her, the strange man Joe leaning against the mantelpiece with his hands in his pockets and something like triumph on his face.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing happened. I didn’t feel anything. I must have dozed off for a moment. I am rather tired. It’s late, Derek, I think I’d better go home.’

  Joe did not say anything. Derek looked a question at Nora.

  ‘You two go on,’ Nora said quickly, ‘if Jinny wants to. It’s early yet. I’ll stay a little while so as not to break up Joey’s party.’

  *

  In the days that followed, Virginia could not get the dream out of her mind. Was it a dream? She seemed to have fallen asleep, and yet no dream had ever seemed so real. Real at the time, but faded now beyond recovery. All she could remember was the feeling of reality, and of the deep and drowning peace. Vaguely, there was a garden, rose petals on the ground, the spread branches of a peach tree, and that haunting sense of having been within grasp of something she had travelled all her life to see.

  If only she could get back there again! Every night, she tried to recapture the dream, thinking herself back into the garden as she lay in bed; but she could not dream. She could not even fall asleep.

  How had it happened? Did that man really have something to do with it – that st
range, conceited man with the dark face that kept coming into her mind as she lay awake and struggled to sleep?

  She drifted through her work by day, and fretted through the nights, thankful that Helen had gone away, and could not question why Virginia was out of bed making coffee when she should have been asleep.

  Joe. Joe Colonna. The last kind of man to be a friend for Derek. The kind of man you met unexpectedly, remembered for a while, but did not meet again. What had he done? What power did he have to open the door into the haunted garden? A garden haunted by content, a garden where it was not impossible to believe that you could see an angel.

  It was childishness. It was imagination. It was the wine and the whisky and the wood-smoke in that stuffy basement room. She held out, telling herself these things, for three days. Then she did what she had known all the time that she would do.

  *

  Joe had decided that he would wait for a week, and then telephone Virginia. He would telephone her at the office, where she could not talk freely or for long. She would have to make up Ler mind quickly, with less time to think of an excuse.

  He did not have to wait for a week. A few days after the supper party, a letter came. The handwriting was large and semi-legible. The notepaper was thick and good.

  ‘Please telephone me as soon as possible,’ she had written. ‘I want you to do something for me.’

  Joe allowed her to wait a day, then he rang the number of the magazine.

  ‘Editorial.’ Her voice sounded business-like. When she knew who it was, she said: ‘Oh.’ He heard her take a breath. ‘I can’t talk now,’ she said quickly. ‘I wish you had called me at the flat. I’ll have to explain when I see you. Can I see you?’

  ‘Why not?’ He saw himself grinning in the mirror that was set into the telephone box above the slots for money. ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight if you can. It’s important. There’s something I – oh, look, I’ll have to ring off.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting,’ he said, as he heard her put down the receiver with an agitated clatter.

  *

  Joe had lighted the fire again. He had made the room look as it had looked the other night, with the pink lamp on the table, and the other end of the room lit only by the shifting flames.

  When Virginia came in, she went straight to the fire, looked into it for a moment, then turned and said with the defiance of nervousness: ‘I want you to hypnotize me again.’

  Joe laughed, and came over to her slowly. ‘That’s a good one,’ he said. ‘What do you think I am – Svengali?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you are. You’ll think I’m idiotic, but something happened the other night, and it wasn’t finished. I want to finish it.’

  ‘You’re right, it wasn’t finished,’ he said, staring at her coolly. ‘It only just began.’

  ‘How do you know?’ She frowned. ‘I don’t think you know quite what you did, but somehow it worked, and I want you to do it again.’ She sat down facing the fire with her head up, gripping the arms of the chair, as if she were going to be electrocuted. ‘Do it quickly, and let’s get it over.’

  ‘Get it over? What’s the hurry? Let’s have a drink and talk. Then if you still want to play games – we’ll see.’

  ‘I don’t want a drink. I had too much the other night. That may have been the trouble. Please do it again. Come over here, in front of the fire. Do what you did before, and see if you can put me to sleep.’

  ‘Why do you want me to hypnotize you?’ Joe stood in front of her, standing easily, with his hands in his pockets and his well-shaped head on one side. ‘I didn’t think you liked it very much the other night. You looked like death.’

  ‘I had a dream. I can’t forget it. You see, I was – oh, I can’t tell you. It sounds absurd. But I have to get back into the dream again. Haven’t you ever come out of a marvellous dream, and fought against waking up, trying to fall back in again? I’ve tried to get back every night, but nothing happened. I thought perhaps you could do it for me.’

  Joe shrugged his shoulders. ‘Funny way to pass an evening, but if you insist, I’ll try. I’ll need a key though. Mine isn’t a Yale.’

  ‘Give me my bag.’ Virginia did not want to move now that she was in the chair. There were two keys to the flat in her purse. She gave one to Joe and settled back in the chair, closing one eye and staring fixedly with the other.

  Joe started the same rigmarole which he had acted before. Virginia stared at his eye through the hole in the key, trying to recapture that swooning sense of drifting right away from the room. When it happened before, it had not been a gradual loss of consciousness, like going naturally to sleep. It had been a sudden, obliterating removal from sight into sensation.

  Nothing happened. Joe stared at her, and droned obediently on, but Virginia could still see and hear, and feel the worn arms of the chair under her gripping hands. She was still acutely conscious of everything: the fire, the ugly picture on the wall beside it, Joe’s glossy black hair, his red, open-necked shirt, and his brown hand holding the key.

  She blinked, and shifted her position. ‘It didn’t work. What do we do now?’

  ‘Give it up?’

  ‘Oh, no. Try something else. What other ways do you know?’

  ‘We could try without the light.’ He went to the other end of the room and turned off the lamp. The fire was burning without flames, and Virginia waited in the faintly-glowing darkness until he stood in front of her again.

  ‘Now I won’t be able to see your eye,’ she said.

  ‘You won’t have to. Shut both eyes, and I’ll do it with my voice.’

  She shut her eyes, seeing the shape of him behind the lids.

  ‘You are going to sleep … to sleep …’ She had never felt so wide awake. Why didn’t it work? She could not get away from the room.

  She stiffened herself, trying to think of nothing, trying to force herself into vacancy. Desperately she sought for the garden, but it was nowhere, not behind her eyes, not in his voice, not in the faint whisper and tick of the fire.

  She opened her eyes, and saw that he was grinning at her. ‘I can’t –’ she began, and then he was on top of her, forcing her against the back of the chair, extinguishing all sensation with the brutality of his mouth.

  Her numb resistance was more effective than if she had tried to push him away.

  He stood up. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Virginia got up quickly and went to the other end of the room to turn on the light. ‘Where’s my coat?’ she said. ‘I want to go.’

  He stood in front of the fire. ‘What’s up? Isn’t that what you came for?’ He laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you really thought I could hypnotize you. It was only a joke. I don’t know the first thing about it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so? Why did you let me come here?’

  ‘Think it out for yourself.’

  It was not until she got home and let herself into the flat that Virginia realized that she had left the second front door key with him.

  *

  When he came, several days later, it was almost a relief. She was frightened when she heard the key turn in the lock, but it was an end of the wondering whether he would come, and the wanting him to come, and the dreading that he would.

  Chapter 8

  Helen came back from Europe looking slightly different from when she had gone away as the triumphant bride of Spenser Eldredge. Marriage to a rich and devoted man suited her taste well enough, but it did not suit her looks as well as being an independent woman with a living to earn.

  She had only been gone for three months, but already she was a trifle stouter, a trifle less exact in her knowledge of how to look her best. She brought back trunkfuls of new clothes. Some of the Italian ones were too exaggerated, and some of the French ones were too youthful, as if Spenser’s idea of her as a girl had hypnotized her into agreeing with him.

  As the editor of Lady Beautiful, she had always looked finely groomed. Hers was the kind of
appearance that makes you aware not so much of the end result as the effort involved in achieving it. The effort was now even more apparent, and more important to her. She took twice as long to dress now that she had no work to fill her day. She kept Spenser out of the bedroom for twice as long as her night-time toilet had taken when she and Virginia were alone at the flat together. She would not go to any party without first visiting the hairdresser, and if the manicurist painted her nails the wrong colour, her evening was ruined.

  She was becoming spoiled, and it showed in her face. There were new lines and a pampered puffiness which Virginia had not seen before. She was extremely impatient of anyone who crossed her desires, and inclined, after her luxury tour of Europe, to find fault with the way things were done in England.

  The assistants in the shops were fools. Deliveries were hopeless, because they did not satisfy her instant whim. She could not get a meal to her satisfaction, and taxi-drivers conspired against her by all having fares when it was raining. She grumbled at the weather, and at Spenser, who bore it placidly, and at Virginia, who bore it not at all.

  After the first meeting, with its natural gladness of reunion, she and Virginia quarrelled more than they ever had before she went away. Virginia’s life was a whirlpool which centred round Joe, but she struggled to keep her head above water, and to appear as if she had nothing on her mind. She tried to be pleasant, but Helen was so demanding, so captious, so indifferent to Virginia’s interests – even to her interest in the magazine, now that Helen was no longer at the helm of Lady Beautiful – that scarcely a day went by without a battle.

  Spenser, who craved domestic harmony, tried to referee the battles, but to no purpose. His wife jumped on him if he seemed to be taking Virginia’s side; but if he agreed with Helen, she was liable to snub him with: ‘Why do you always echo everything I say? It’s most irritating.’

  If Helen was already so difficult after only three months of being a rich man’s wife, what would she be like in America, as she settled egotistically down into her life of idle luxury? There were many servants in the Long Island house, Virginia knew. There would be parties, clothes, jewellery, furs; everything that Helen wanted, including, Virginia began to imagine, as she noted her mother’s frequent failures to appreciate poor Spenser, a possible sycophantic boy-friend or two when Spenser was away on business trips.