‘We sail on the eleventh of next month,’ Helen announced one morning, as she was lying face down on her bed being pummelled by a strong-armed masseuse called Lotta. ‘The Elizabeth, of course. Spenser is seeing to the reservations today. Well, what’s the matter?’ She turned her head sideways, as Virginia said nothing. ‘Why do you stand there with that pudding face? It’s no shock to you. You knew we were going.’
‘But not just yet. I didn’t know it would be just yet. I’m not ready.’
‘Well then, you had better make haste and be ready. Lotta, you’re murdering me. You know I can’t bear to be touched there. If it’s clothes you want, Jinny, Spenser will let you buy anything you want, although you would do much better to wait until we get to the States. There’s not a thing in London I would be seen dead in. If I hadn’t bought things in Paris and Rome, I wouldn’t be able to show myself on the streets.’
‘Turn, please,’ Lotta said. ‘On the side. Thank you, madame.’ She worked on Helen’s thickening flesh with a wooden face, as disinterestedly as a baker kneading dough, her mind far away.
‘Be careful,’ Helen said. ‘This is supposed to be relaxation, not medieval torture. You’ll tell them at the office, of course, Jinny. You had better leave at the end of the month, though I really can’t think why you don’t leave now.’
‘I don’t want to. I like working for the magazine.’
‘Everyone to his taste,’ Helen said, with the air of one who has long outgrown such childish things. ‘I’m going to pack up the flat as soon as possible, whenever I can get those dreadful people at the warehouse to apply themselves to the job. We’ll go to a hotel. The Connaught, probably. It’s the only place nowadays. We should have gone straight there when we came back from Europe. It’s been dreadful living here cramped up like this.’
‘Spenser likes it,’ Virginia said. ‘He’s tired of living in hotels. He likes London, too. I believe he would stay on a bit longer if you encouraged him.’
‘Oh, what nonsense, of course he can’t. He’s finished what he came to do over here, and he has to get back. You seem to forget that he’s a business man, and a very important one, as you’ll find out when we get to the States. So don’t think that you can prolong the agony that way, just because you don’t want to leave this man you’re running to all the time. John, Jack, whatever his name is. I don’t like the sound of him. Have you any daughters, Lotta?’
Lotta brought herself back from wherever her mind was, and smiled. ‘Two, madame.’
‘Do they ever conduct hole-and-corner affairs with unspeakable men whom they won’t bring home to meet their parents?’
‘They are only eight and ten years old.’
‘I see.’ Helen lost interest in Lotta’s family. ‘Where are you going tonight, Jinny?’
‘I don’t know. I might meet Joe.’
‘Well, tell him from me that this is his swan song.’ She flopped over on to her back as Lotta finished the massage, and lay comfortably on her pillows, softening towards Virginia. ‘I’m sorry, dear heart,’ she said. ‘It was nice for you to have someone to amuse you while I was away, but you’re starting a new life now. There will be plenty of young men in America, and one of them, you’ll see, will turn out to be a husband. There will be men on the boat, too, there always are. You won’t give this Joe creature another thought.’
*
Virginia went down to the theatre club in South Kensington to find Joe. It was an odd little place, a post-war phenomenon born of the price of West End theatre seats, with pretensions to culture that belied the fact that the back room was often used for poker games, and had for a time housed a roulette wheel, until there was a scare about a police raid.
There had been no raid, but the roulette wheel did not come back. William and Henry, who owned the club, were cautious, and they were doing well enough with the tiny, pretentious theatre, and the bar, and the little restaurant where everything was fried in oil and garlic to give the illusion of a continental cuisine. If those who used the club for convenience rather than culture wanted a poker game in the back room, or if Joe wanted to negotiate bets there, that was their own affair.
William and Henry were usually called William and Mary. Mary did not mind. He was an elderly homosexual, who had corrupted a few boys in his time, but was comparatively harmless now. His fangs were drawn, he declared sadly, and was content with looking perverted enough to provide a thrill for those who came to the club half fearfully, like tourists visiting the innocent show-places of Montmartre.
It is true that some of the plays that were performed in the theatre were noticeably salacious, but only because that was the only means the authors knew to achieve dramatic effect. The plays were usually ‘advanced’, which is to say that they were too advanced for any West End manager with an eye on his box-office. How much the audience enjoyed them is hard to say. The more abstruse the play the louder they applauded it, assuming that if they could not understand it, it must be very intellectual indeed, and why did they belong to the club if not to prove that they were intellectuals?
The theatre held about fifty people, on folding chairs that often made more noise than the actors. The performance was sometimes on the level of village hall drama, and sometimes surprisingly talented. It was never certain who was going to produce or act, because no salary was paid for the privilege. It was up to William and Mary to persuade any unemployed talent they could find that a spell at the club was just the experience they needed.
Mary, who had been vaguely on the stage a long time before, performed occasionally, when there was a Restoration play, which allowed him to wear a wig and display the calves of his legs. When he was not acting, he played the piano in a corner of the combined restaurant and bar, the pouches under his eyes shaking gently to the simple rhythm of his grubby little songs.
The customers at the painted tables would stamp their feet and call for their favourites, to show their guests that they were initiates. ‘Give us Banana Lil!’ they would shout. ‘Come on, Mary, good old Mary, do the one about the lamp-lighter.’
‘Shocking character,’ they would tell their guests nonchalantly. ‘Queer as a three-pound note, but he’s a lot of fun.’
When the show in the theatre was over, many of the audience would come through to the restaurant, eager for beer and inadequately-fried sausages, to mingle rather condescendingly with those club members who did not seek Thespian culture, and to listen to Mary’s songs and buy him drinks, until the top of the piano was filled with empty glasses.
Mary provided the club’s local colour. William, with gleaming spectacles and a round head of neatly-brushed hair, was a more stable figure in the background. He dressed soberly and kept the accounts straight, and the cook reasonably hygienic, and the barman moderately sober.
Joe had come into the club one night with a friend called Jackson, who was wanted by the police. It was in the days of the roulette wheel. Jackson had disappeared early, after a warning telephone call from one of his scouts, but Joe had stayed on and lost all the money he had with him, and his watch and cuff-links as well.
As he was out of a job at the time, William, who was the kindest of men, put him temporarily on the pay-roll, tolerating Joe’s irregular attendance as long as he would do any job that was necessary while he was on the premises.
Sometimes Joe helped the cook. Sometimes he worked behind the scenes of the theatre, or had a walking-on part, or took the money at the door, or was sent out to do the marketing. He was the barman at the moment, since William had failed to prevent the last bartender from pouring part of every cocktail he made into a jug and drinking the mixture in the men’s room.
Virginia found Joe behind the bar, reading the evening paper with his feet up on a crate of ginger ale. It was early yet, and there were only a few people in the restaurant, the solitary desperadoes who turned in for a drink on their way home from work. Mary was sitting at a corner table writing letters with a quill pen. He looked up as Virginia came in, an
d gave her the smile which could not help being a leer, even when it was only meant to be friendly.
‘Joe,’ he called across the room, in his cracked lisp, ‘the missus is here.’
As Virginia was the first girl who had been seen in Joe’s company for so long at a time, it was the club joke that he was as fettered as if he were married.
Joe lowered the paper, but did not put down his feet. ‘Hullo, Jin,’ he said, without surprise. She came to the club on most nights when he was working there. It did not matter. She could not be coy and elusive with Joe. That would have bored him. Sometimes she made herself stay away, to prove that she did not need him, but she always came back quite soon. He was pleased to see her, but he would not say that he had missed her.
Sometimes when she came, he would be in the back room, where women were not encouraged to go. Mary would tell her: ‘Go home. You’re wasting your time,’ but the good-hearted William would interrupt the poker game to tell Joe that Virginia was waiting for him.
Occasionally, when he was winning, Joe came out almost at once. More often Virginia waited in vain, helping William and the half-caste girl Betty to serve the food, so that she would not appear too obviously abandoned, until it grew late, and she had to go away without seeing Joe.
Virginia went behind the bar and began to polish glasses for Joe, who hated to do that. He sat with one arm on the bar and watched her. He was wearing a white shirt without a tie. In the open neck of the shirt, the trunk of his throat was dark and strong.
‘Joe,’ she said, still busy with the cloth, ‘the missus is going to give you your freedom.’ She tried to make it sound like a joke, because she did not like saying it.
‘Tired of me?’ he asked casually, knowing that she was not.
‘Helen says we’re sailing on the eleventh of May. I shan’t be seeing you much longer.’
‘Just as well for you,’ he said, getting up to make a drink for a man who had signalled from one of the tables. ‘Ending this is probably the most sensible thing you’ve done. You never should have started it.’
‘I started it?’ She followed him to the other end of the bar, where he was bending to get ice. ‘How can you lie like that?’
‘Did I ask you to come back to my room?’ He grinned at her over the cocktail shaker. ‘It was you who came, with your cooked-up tale of wanting to be hypnotized.’
‘But I did. I’ve told you a thousand times. You don’t understand. You’ll never understand about the dream. I don’t understand it any more myself. It seems so far away. I begin to wonder if I ever saw – what I thought I saw.’
‘Lots of people wonder that, after they’ve seen mice running up the walls. You were tight, my love.’ It was only occasionally, when he said words like ‘tight’ that his accent was just perceptibly wrong. Virginia did not mind that. She liked the way he talked, unselfconsciously, without precision. ‘Here,’ he said, handing her the glass. ‘Take this to that chap in the corner, and see that he pays for it. His credit’s poor.’
‘Not that I wasn’t quite pleased,’ he said when she returned, ‘that you had thought of an excuse to come back. Of course I didn’t know you were going to behave the way you did.’
‘I didn’t know you were going to kiss me.’
‘What did you think I would do? How odd you are, Jin. You’re worlds apart from me. The only sensible thing about you is that you know it. Don’t think I don’t know why you’ve never taken me home since your mother came back. Here, let’s have a drink. We’ll have one on the house.’
‘No, you won’t.’ Mary came up to the bar, with his quill pen sticking out behind his ear like a plumage of a bedraggled hen. ‘You’ll pay for it, even if the experience is a novelty.’
‘I can’t. I haven’t any money.’
‘I’ll pay,’ Virginia said quickly, opening her bag. ‘How much is it?’ she asked Joe, embarrassed because Mary was looking on.
‘Six bob,’ Joe said, not in the least embarrassed. He swept the money into his palm and dropped it into the cash drawer. He raised his glass. ‘Your mother,’ he said. ‘Here’s to her. Not that I want to meet the old girl,’ he added, mixing a drink for Mary.
‘Perhaps she doesn’t want to meet you, dear,’ Mary said, entering cheerfully into the discussion. ‘Miss Jinny may be smarter than we know. If I were a girl, which rumour has it that I am, I would think twice before I took a lusty boy like you to meet my mother.’ He put on his debauched face.
‘Don’t try to seduce me, you dirty old man,’ Joe said. ‘I’m not a customer.’
‘I’m sorry. I forgot.’ Mary took his drink and wandered over to the piano, where he began to pick out a tune with one finger.
‘You … do … something to me,’ Virginia sang. ‘That’s the tune you tried to make Nora sing. Remember?’
‘The silly little bitch didn’t know it. I’d been humming it all day, and then you came. Queer that.’ He listened to the piano for a moment, and then said: ‘Oh, hell, don’t let’s get sentimental. I can’t stand that. Look Jin, you’ll have to go. I don’t want you around tonight. I’ve got a couple of men coming in to see me on business.’
‘What kind of business?’
‘Nothing to do with you. There might be a little money in it though. If there is, I’ll take you out one day soon. Dinner, if you like. Anywhere you want to go. That satisfy you? All right, be a good girl and run along. I’m going to be busy.’
*
That was just the way he was nowadays. He could not understand himself. He had never known a girl like Virginia. She was no use to him, or he to her, and yet he could not shake free of her. Every time he tried to push her off, he found himself offering her something nice, so that she would not be disgusted with him.
Well, she was going away soon, and he would be free again. Damn it, but he was going to miss her. She had no right to make him miss her.
After he had haggled with the two men in the back room over a little deal that involved persuading a disqualified doctor to report knife wounds as dog bites, Joe drank quite a lot that evening. Some of the drinks were paid for by club members. Some he took for himself. He did not care whether William and Mary liked it or not. He would not be here much longer. As soon as Virginia had gone, he was going up to Glasgow to see a man about a job at a greyhound track. Why wait until she had gone? The greyhounds lured him, and Glasgow was a tough, exciting place to be. Better than fiddling away his time here playing flunkey to a lot of highbrows and pansies. But he knew that he would not leave until Virginia left him.
He went away from the club before eleven, leaving William to look after the bar. Joe was nowhere near being intoxicated, but he had drunk enough to feel restless. He could not stand the club and Mary’s simpering, smutty songs any longer. He went up to Bloomsbury, and walked into the mews where Virginia lived, with his hands in his pockets, kicking at a stone.
The lights were on in the front room, and the curtains were not drawn. Joe stood in the shallow gutter that ran down the centre of the mews, and looked up, whistling under his breath. Virginia passed across the window in silhouette between him and the light, and he clenched his hands in his pockets, feeling her on the skin of them. Was she alone? The window was closed, and he could hear nothing. He stood there for a few minutes, feeling shut out, feeling like a boy outside a sweetshop window. Then his fingers touched the key that was still in his pocket, and he pulled it out, pushed open the outside door of the building, and went up the stairs.
Outside the flat, he stood in the hall and listened to the voices. When he opened the door, they all stopped talking, and the silence cut across the conversation like a knife.
They were in evening dress. They were all staring at him. For a second, the tableau was motionless, fixed like a stereoscopic picture on Joe’s eyes. The big man in the loose dinner jacket, cradling a goblet of brandy. The woman in the fancy green dress, her hand flown up to the pearls at her neck, as if Joe had come to steal them. Virginia sitting on the arm of a ch
air in a flowing black dress with her hair brushed back from her ears, cool and lovely, his girl – untouchable.
In a moment Virginia had risen and come quickly to him with her hands out, and the frozen tableau was broken up into sound and movement. Virginia stood between him and the other two, smiling at him. Her mother and the man in the dinner jacket were saying something that he could not hear.
‘Jin, I haven’t even got a tie on.’ He tried to laugh, aware of her scent, and the softness of the carpet under his feet, and the comfortable feminine decoration of the room. ‘I didn’t know you’d be all dressed up.’
‘We’ve been out to dinner. It doesn’t matter.’ She took his hand. ‘Come in. Don’t stand there.’ She had recovered herself rapidly. ‘Helen,’ she said, leading him forward as if he were a dog, ‘this is Joe Colonna. My mother, Joe, and this is my stepfather, Mr Eldredge.’
‘How do you do, Mr Colonna?’ Virginia’s mother said, pronouncing the words meticulously. ‘Forgive me if I appear boorishly inquisitive, but may I ask how you got in?’
‘The door wasn’t shut properly,’ Virginia said quickly. ‘I came in last, I remember. You know you have to push it hard to catch the lock.’
‘Do you?’ Helen turned her face to Virginia, but continued to look at Joe out of the sides of her eyes.
Having looked Joe over carefully, Mr Eldredge pushed himself out of his chair and held out his hand. ‘Glad to know you, Mr Colonna,’ he said huskily. ‘Nice of you to come and see us. We’ve heard something about you from Jinny here. Not too much. You know what girls are with their parents, but it’s good to have the chance to know you. What can I get you to drink?’
Joe hesitated. What would be the right thing to ask for?
The Angel in the Corner Page 12