The Angel in the Corner

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Your young man doesn’t seem much help,’ Betty said, peering to see if Virginia’s sandwiches looked better than hers. She had a tactless tongue, but it came from an honest heart, not from a desire to do mischief.

  ‘It’s not his fault,’ Virginia said defensively. ‘Jobs aren’t so easy to find these days. Anyway, he’s writing a book. That’s much more important.’

  ‘I dare say, if anyone publishes it.’

  ‘They will. They’ve promised to.’ Virginia would not allow herself to give up hope that Joe would ever finish the book. He did not talk about it any more, and she did not ask him about it, although she was distressed by the sight of the expensive typewriter collecting dust on the top of the cupboard.

  ‘I just thought,’ Betty said, with her mouth full of dry sandwich that was only buttered on one side. ‘I wonder if they ever rented my sister’s flat. She moved out last week. Gone to Stockton, her and her husband. My mother could find out for you. She knows the man who lets. It’s not much, mind,’ she added, as Virginia began to get excited. ‘Not what you’ve been used to, I dare say, but it would be handy for the shop, and it’s cheap, and the building’s not too bad, though I wouldn’t say as much for the neighbourhood.’

  ‘What’s the matter with the neighbourhood?’ Virginia asked. ‘Not that I mind. I think I’d take it even if it was in a slum.’

  ‘Well, it is really,’ Betty said. ‘Very poor.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I wouldn’t live there, mind, but my sister didn’t care. She’s a bit shimmy herself.’

  Virginia understood what Betty meant when she saw the flat. It was two tiny rooms at the corner of a blackened building, with a kitchen even smaller than the one in the Chelsea basement. Betty’s sister had left it in a state of indescribable filth, and Virginia did not attempt to describe it to Joe. She merely took him there, and stood in the doorway between the two rooms, watching him while he looked round, making a face at the smell.

  ‘We can’t live here, Jin,’ he said. ‘This is awful.’

  ‘We must, until we can find something better. Mollie will turn us out. It’s no good imagining she won’t, just by not thinking about it. She doesn’t even speak to me any more if I meet her in the street. We’ve got to live somewhere. We’ll be happy here, darling. We’ll be together. That’s all that matters.’ She put her arms round him, and tried to rub the despondency from his mouth with her cheek. ‘I’ll clean it up. I’ll come every evening after work, and wash and scrub. I’ll soon get rid of the smell and all this foulness.’ She kicked at the sea of dirty paper and rags and old tins which surged about their feet. ‘You can do some painting. You told me you’d worked with a painter once. It would be fun working on it together.’

  ‘The landlord ought to paint it,’ Joe said. ‘Tell him we won’t take it unless he redecorates it.’

  ‘How can you say that? Anyone would think I was the one who had been poor, not you. You don’t say those things to those kind of people; not about places like this, and at the rent he’s asking. We’re lucky to get it, don’t you see? We can’t make a fuss about it.’

  ‘I do make a fuss.’ Joe went to the grease-stained alcove which was the kitchen, and lifted up one of the burner rings, which was caked half an inch thick with blackened food. ‘I hate this place.’

  ‘You won’t,’ Virginia said. ‘I’m going to cable Helen and ask her to cable the warehouse to let me take out some of the furniture. She won’t mind. She’s much mellower now. She’s been put on the New York Social Register. We can have my bed, and as much of my bedroom furniture as will go into that rabbit hutch.’ She looked through the doorway at the bedroom, with its small dirty window and its walls scribbled over by Betty’s sister’s baby. ‘And we’ll take some rugs and the kitchen table and some chairs – oh, it will be fine. It will be our own. We’ll be by ourselves. No Mollie coming down all the time to make trouble, and no Paul getting drunk.’

  ‘The neighbours will do that,’ Joe said, ‘from what I’ve seen of them.’

  ‘Let them. We shan’t care. This will be our own place. The basement was always Mollie’s. This will be our first real home. We’ll be happy.’ She found that she was clenching her fists, insisting on their happiness, willing him to believe in it.

  Joe looked out of the window at the street full of children, at the house opposite, one of a tenement row, where a woman in a scarlet wrapper sat at an upstairs window, doing nothing, and another woman with her head tied up in a scarf furiously whitened steps, and screamed at one of the children.

  ‘How can you be happy with me?’ He put his hands in his pockets and sat limply on the cracked and peeling window-sill. ‘I’m a washout. You never should have married me.’

  ‘Oh, stop it.’ Virginia pulled him to his feet and pulled his hands out of his pockets. She hated to see him slouching and despondent. She liked to see him upright and pleased with himself, which was the way nature meant him to be. ‘I married you because I loved you. Do you hear? I love you.’

  ‘God help you,’ he said, looking round the filthy room. ‘Look where it’s got you.’

  ‘I like it,’ she lied. ‘It’s ours. Let’s have a baby, Joe. There would be room. Betty’s sister had one – six, I should think, judging by the mess. We’ll have a baby.’

  ‘My God,’ he said, ‘what next?’ But he began to grin, tickled by the idea of himself and Virginia and a baby in the tiny flat above the raucous street. He laughed aloud. ‘You’re a wonderful girl, Jin.’ He hugged her with his old exuberance, tightening his grip until he could make her squeal. ‘Don’t leave me.’

  Leave him? The thought had never entered her head. It disturbed her now, but he was making a joke of it, and so she said lightly, as he freed her: ‘Let me have a baby, then I won’t. I don’t want another child growing up without its father.’ That was true, but it was not the reason why she would never leave him. She had staked everything on the adventure of this marriage. There was no turning back.

  *

  Weston House, which held Joe and Virginia’s flat and thirty others, was a squat fortress of stone slabs rising from the crisscross of narrow streets between Edgware Road and Lisson Grove. It was about fifty years old, and like every other building for acres round, it was indelibly marked by the sooty brand of Paddington and Marylebone stations. The stone slabs might once have been grey, or even white. Now they were pitted and black with a coating of grime that rubbed off on the clothes of scuffling children who knocked against its walls.

  Some of the tenants pugnaciously cleaned the inside and the outside of the windows; some, making a pact with the railway, cleaned only the inside; some surrendered completely and cleaned neither side. The windows of the Ropers’ flat on the ground floor had rude words written in the grime outside, which Mrs Roper could read back to front as she sat and rocked the baby, and let the hours slide by with no work done.

  Virginia, attacking the squalid legacy of Betty’s sister with energy, cleaned the inside of her windows on the third floor, and made Joe clean the outside. He sat on the sill with the window pushed into his stomach to hold him, and swabbed sketchily at the glass, making faces through it at Virginia, while the woman in the scarlet wrapper watched from her window in the house opposite.

  Her name was Mrs Baggott. She was a widow, who lived alone with a parrot. That much was known, although no one could remember Mr Baggott, and no one could remember seeing or hearing the parrot. She spent most of her days and a great part of the night by the window, uncurtained, but closed both in summer and winter. It was said that she knew everything that went on in the street, and once when the American Military Police were looking for a deserter, they went to Mrs Baggott, and either she or the parrot or chance directed them to the room where the coloured soldier was hiding.

  It was a Saturday afternoon when the moving-van brought Virginia’s furniture, and not only Mrs Baggott, but most of her neighbours on that side of the street were at their windows or on their steps to see the few pieces of furniture
carried out of the van, and up the stone stairs which wound like a dark entrail up the middle of Weston House.

  There were faces at the windows of the flats too, some leaning blatantly over the sill, some lurking behind the sooted panes. While the two men were trying to get the bed through the narrow front door of the flat, other front doors opened along the passage. Heads looked out, stared, and were withdrawn as they saw Virginia outside the flat in a pair of slacks pushing and giving advice and hindering, while Joe shouted impractical directions from the other side.

  There was a great deal of curiosity about them at first. Virginia did not think that she looked different from the other young women who went in and out of the flats, to and from the shops, or their jobs. She did not think that Joe looked very different from the other men of his age, except that he was better-looking and wore his clothes with a better grace, even when it was only a sweater and an old pair of slacks. Nevertheless, they were newcomers, and therefore queer enough to be stared at.

  People stared at Virginia when she met them on the stairs, and if two women were talking in the street when she went by they would stop talking and stare until she had passed. When she and Joe went out together, there always seemed to be someone watching. Defiantly, she would take Joe’s arm and press closer to him, because she had noticed that although the courting pairs walked entwined, the married couples walked a little distance apart, as if they had quarrelled, or were shy of their relationship.

  After a while, Virginia began to say ‘Hullo’ to anyone who stared. She wanted to get to know them. It felt wrong to be living among them, and to see them every day and know their clothes and their habits, and to hear through the thin walls of the flats all the noises they made, without knowing who they were.

  Some of the people did not answer. Their stare changed from curiosity to surprise, as if a word was the last thing they expected to hear coming from Virginia’s mouth. Some of them answered grudgingly, and hurried away, unwilling to commit themselves too far with this stranger. Only Mrs Batey was friendly right from the start. She lived on the same floor as Virginia, in one of the larger flats at the end of the passage. Although she had five children to keep her busy, she usually managed to be looking out of her door when Virginia left for work in the morning, or returned in the evening.

  She was a flushed, sloppy woman, with turned-over feet and a figure which Miss Sunderland would have given her eyes to corset. She had a large, loose smile, with many teeth missing, and a cheerful voice which was never much less than a shout. In the evening, she would yell a greeting down the echoing stone passage, and if Virginia went closer to stop her yelling, she would often find herself scooped into the Bateys’ dishevelled flat and set down at the kitchen table with tea and buns before she could find a way out.

  The Batey children were all table high and grinning, except the baby, who was permanently in an uncushioned perambulator in the middle of the kitchen floor, tied in by a chewed dog leash. When Virginia could not eat the buns, she fed them to the children, who begged round her like shameless little dogs. When the baby screamed and strained at the leash to make the pram rock, one of the children would pick a piece of bun off the floor and cram it into his mouth like a comforter.

  The children were all fat and filthy and surprisingly healthy. Virginia was clean and thin, and therefore, by Mrs Batey’s standards, unhealthy. She treated her like an extra child, and tried to fill her out on starches. Scarcely an evening went by without Mrs Batey’s thunderous knock on Virginia’s door, and Mrs Batey’s exuberant entrance, sure of her welcome, with a plate of cakes or biscuits, or a paper full of home-made toffee.

  If a curtain wanted altering, Mrs Batey would tear it off its hooks and take it away to her own flat to shorten it with a crooked hem, which Virginia would have to unpick late at night when there was no fear of Mrs Batey coming in and catching her. If she saw a pile of clothes waiting to be ironed, Mrs Batey would scoop them up too, and bear them off to the devastation of her flat-irons, sprinkling them so enthusiastically that they often returned damper than when they left home.

  If she did not like the look or sound of the old gas stove, Mrs Batey would bring in her husband, who was a gas-fitter, driving him before her like a hostage, and standing over him while he took the stove to pieces before Virginia had a chance to cook supper, and left it dismantled overnight until he could bring a spare part.

  Since Mrs Batey was the only friend she had in the flats, Virginia put up no defence against her ministrations, but Joe began to mutter under his breath as soon as her shining red face appeared round the door. Mrs Batey took no notice. She was used to men, and had long ago discounted them, except as the begetters of children. Women were what mattered. Women were the ones who made the wheels go round. If she had her way, there would be only women in the government. ‘Then you’d see the price of bacon come down!’

  Unlike most mothers, she favoured her daughters over her sons, and when she was in Virginia’s flat, she gave her conversation and the warmth of her heart only to Virginia, and ignored Joe, except to push him aside if he was in her way when she was heading for something that needed tackling.

  She was a great one for tackling. She would tackle anything.

  ‘I’ll tackle it,’ she would say, if a window needed putty, or a broken sugar basin needed glue. She took far more pride in Virginia’s flat than she did in her own, which had lapsed beyond redemption.

  ‘Nosey old bitch,’ Joe said, when she had gone away with his socks to darn. ‘Why can’t you keep her out of here? She only comes in out of curiosity, to see what we’re up to. Why are you so nice to her, Jin? You weren’t half as nice to Mollie, and she wasn’t half as much nuisance.’

  ‘She wasn’t half as nice. Mrs Batey is friendly. I like her. She’s the only one who has tried to be friendly. The other people all look so suspicious. They look at me as if I didn’t belong here.’

  ‘You don’t,’ Joe said. ‘Not yet. I’ve lived in this sort of place before. When you first come, you’re a stranger for weeks, sometimes for ever, if they don’t like you. You can’t expect to jump right in and make friends with everyone right away. They don’t trust you. Why should they?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you, if you lived here, and I moved in as a new tenant?’

  ‘I’d be hammering on your door with my tongue hanging out,’ he said, ‘but that’s different. Making a woman doesn’t take as long as making friends, not in a place like this. Or anywhere, for that matter. But in this place, it takes longer to make friends. Why worry about it? We’ll be out of here long before these people give themselves a chance to find out what they’re missing.’

  He was wrong. The weeks went by into winter, and it was very cold in the flat, with only a small gas fire in the sitting-room and no heating in the bedroom, but Virginia and Joe stayed on.

  What else could they do? The rent was low, but it was all they could afford. Joe had been in and out of two or three temporary jobs, but he was no nearer to being the success Virginia had promised herself he should be. He had sold the typewriter to pay a debt, and as far as she knew, he had destroyed what he had written of the book. When she asked him about it, he said: ‘If it was published, everyone would know I’d been in prison, and how would you like that?’

  ‘You could use another name.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Why should I sweat my guts out to write a book if nobody’s going to know I wrote it?’

  Virginia accepted this, just as she accepted the realization that Etta Lee’s and the flat at Weston House were no longer a stop-gap until something better came along, but a regular pattern of life. A different pattern to any she had known, but one to which her rugged youth enabled her to adapt herself without discouragement. Weston House was dirty and tawdry and lacking in all the refinements and many of the essentials of comfort. The street was alive with poverty – but it was alive. Shame and tragedy and failure were here, but so was courage; and the easy, unsubtle humour that relished the sound of a laugh;
and the insidious, gossiping fellowship of women caught in the same boat, with small hope of leaving it for something better. Virginia was in the same boat, and the women began to accept her. The women’s tongues ruled the neighbourhood. They could make or break a character. The men merely lived there, and took little part in the dramas and intrigues and confidences with which the women painted some colour into life.

  Gradually, Virginia began to know her neighbours. She was no longer a stranger. Other new tenants came and were stared at, and Virginia, from her vantage point of resident, found that she was just as curious about them as people had been about her. Imperceptibly she became part of the life of the flats, belonging to it just as surely as the Bateys and old Mr McElligott and the Ropers and the flashy Dales and poor Miss Few, and all the other couples and families and widows and spinsters and lonely old men who made up the population of Weston House.

  She began to know some of the people who lived across the street, although in winter there was not the same pavement and doorstep camaraderie that the summer brought forth. She never got to know Mrs Baggott. Nobody did, because Mrs Baggott never came down from her eyrie to speak to anyone. She had not been seen for years, except dimly from the waist up, as she kept watch in her shapeless red garment at the window. No one was ever allowed into the two top-floor rooms she shared with the legendary parrot, who was reputed to talk like a human, although how he had acquired this reputation no one could say, since no one had ever heard him.

  Mrs Fagg, who lived on the ground floor of the same house, and was the only woman on the street who whitened her steps every day in rain, sun, or fog, bought Mrs Baggott’s groceries, leaving them outside her door, and picking up the money that Mrs Baggott left there. Jacky, the Ropers’ eldest boy, who had a newspaper round, took up the paper and the milk; but he had never seen Mrs Baggott, except once when he looked through the keyhole and saw her glaucous eye looking into his from the other side.