The speculations about Mrs Baggott were part of the neighbourhood folk-lore. Some said that she had a disfiguring disease, which would terrify anyone who saw her face. Some said that the disease was leprosy, and talked darkly of calling in the authorities. Others said that she had her dead husband still up there, or a hoard of precious jewels, or that she was in communication with the powers of darkness, through the parrot. Children were brought up on fables about Mrs Baggott, and threatened with her when they were naughty.
The American military policeman who had tramped up the stairs in his dazzling white belt and gaiters was the only person who had spoken to Mrs Baggott within memory. When he came down again, the crowd waiting for him outside Mrs Fagg’s house had planned to ask him what the old lady was like; but he looked so unapproachable under his severe white helmet, and his belt and gaiters were so inhumanly white, that they let him drive away in his shining jeep without daring to ask him anything.
These things and many others Virginia came to know as the winter went by and the noisy, dirty neighbourhood became part of her life. She knew about the railway accident that had killed Mrs Fagg’s husband, and word for word what Mrs Fagg had said when she was taken into the waiting-room of the little country station to identify him. She knew that Amy Lewis, who lived next door to Mrs Fagg, was in love with a married man. She had heard Amy’s side of it, a tearful rush of confidences one evening when Joe was out. She had heard, and so had most of the street, Amy’s father’s side of it, when he shouted after his daughter as she went out in her best dress to meet her lover.
Virginia knew that old Mrs Bugle’s children were trying to get her into an institution, that Mrs Pickett had been longer under an anaesthetic than anyone else at St Mary’s hospital, and that Mrs Roper often spent her evenings in the Five Horseshoes, leaving her children alone. The eldest Roper girl would sometimes carry the baby up the stairs, looking for someone who could stop it crying. Virginia had taken it in once or twice, but she could not quiet it or feed it, although it looked half starved, so she had taken it across to Mrs Batey, who could do anything with any baby, except keep it clean. Her own baby had his underwear taken off once a week in winter and then only just long enough to rush on a new set of vests and binders and petticoats, before the air could get at him.
Virginia knew that Ronnie Dale was in trouble over the payments on his flamboyant new motor cycle, and that his wife was eating her heart out for a beaver coat. She had seen the medal that Mr McElligott won in the war for pulling a man two stone heavier than himself from under a toppling wall. She had seen the photographs of Miss Few’s family, stately people, with an impressive house in the background. She had listened to Miss Few’s moist-eyed tales of the days when she had her own lady’s maid; although everyone knew, and had taken care to tell Virginia, that she had been the lady’s maid, and the stately people her employers.
Virginia knew every detail of Mrs Batey’s life history, peppered with confinements, and with the rousing battles which broke out periodically between her and Mr Batey, who was normally under her thumb, but could turn like a worm when he had taken drink, and had once been before the magistrates for trying to wrap his wife round a lamp-post.
‘Just like Edgar,’ Mrs Batey said cheerfully, ‘to do it when a copper was looking. That one never had any sense. I don’t know where he’d be without me to look after him. The magistrate said as much. “Mrs Batey,” he said, “if you hadn’t come to court and spoken for him, I’d have given him ten days.” “Big help that would be to me, your honour,” I said, “with four kids to feed.”’
All these things Virginia learned as the winter went by, and the end of the old year was swallowed up by the boisterous festivities of Christmas and of a very different New Year’s Eve from the one which had found her in Felix’s prosperous car, listening to the midnight stroke of Big Ben. The neighbourhood became her part of London. The people at Weston House became her friends, and even the dark, uncomfortable little flat on the third floor, where she fought to keep happiness as well as passion in her marriage to Joe, became dear to her, because it was home.
Joe never accepted Weston House as philosophically as Virginia did. He still grumbled and talked about getting away from it, although he would not do anything to make that possible. He found some objection to all the jobs Virginia suggested he might try, and such jobs as he did have from time to time barely kept him in drink and cigarettes.
He was not particularly affable to the neighbours, although they were the kind of people among whom he was brought up. But he had grown away from them, and he did not want to go back to their narrow, needy world. He had made friends with some of the men. Not the Mr Bateys and the Mr McElligotts and the colourless, compliant men who made up the majority, but the rebellious few, the vagabonds, who were either not tied down by a wife and family, like the smooth-tongued Jack Corelli, who would get on a box at Speakers’ Corner for anyone who paid him, or who were tied so loosely that they never felt the pull, like the roving Will Roper, who worked with a circus, and came home unexpectedly about four times a year, usually in the middle of the night.
Joe and Jack Corelli had brave schemes for making big money quickly. They never came to anything. They were doomed from the start by lack of funds or enterprise, but they kept Joe’s enthusiasm alive, and so Virginia did not discourage them. She neither liked nor trusted Jack Corelli, but she bore with him when he came to the flat with his violent shirts and his bombastic talk, just as Joe had to bear with Mrs Batey and the screaming Roper baby and Miss Few’s endless tales of dead grandeur. His method of bearing with them was usually to remove himself to the Five Horseshoes.
The Five Horseshoes, two corners down from Weston House, was a very respectable public house, with a décor of grained mustard paint and old port wine advertisements as depressing as any of its kind in London. Virginia did not object to it as a haunt of vice, but she soon became tired of going there herself, and she wished that Joe would get tired of it too.
The Five Horseshoes yielded him a little business for Ed Morris, and he was down there nearly every night, and part of the day too as far as Virginia knew. She walked to the shop in the morning to save the bus fare, and walked wearily back at night, and often, as in the days when she had worked at Lady Beautiful, she had no idea where Joe had been while she was away. But in those days he was not drinking so much. When he came home, he was usually sober, and avid to see her. Now he was not always sober. Although there were many times when his desire for her was as fierce as ever, and as powerful as ever to awaken her answering desire, there were times too when he came home only to pick a quarrel with her, as if he resented the fact that she was always there, waiting for him.
Yet, if she had not been there, he would have gone to look for her. Once when she had stayed late at the shop to help with the inventory, Joe had gone down to Etta Lee’s and found her in the stockroom with Mr Jacobs. She was standing on the step-ladder to reach the top shelf, and Joe had said that Mr Jacobs had only sent her up there for what he could see.
Fortunately for Virginia’s job, he had not said it in front of Mr Jacobs, who was a family man of propriety, and easily shocked. He had said it when they got home, and that was one of the times when he hit her. He hit her again two weeks later, for no better reason than that he was half drunk and discouraged, and infuriated by her refusal to be discouraged with him.
‘Why are you so damned long suffering?’ he flung at her. ‘Why don’t you pack up and get out of here? You don’t belong here. Why don’t you go back where you belong?’
‘I don’t belong anywhere but here,’ she said. He called her a bloody liar, and as if he were trying to make her a liar by treating her like one, he hit out at her and left her.
Virginia was sitting in a chair feeling sick when Mrs Batey came in. Joe had not shut the flat door properly, and Mrs Batey hurried through it with a green coat over her nightdress, because she had heard Joe’s angry voice, and the slam of the door, and the clatte
r of his feet on the stone stairs.
‘Go away, please.’ Virginia took her head out of her hands and looked up. ‘Please, Mrs Batey, if you’re nice to me, I shall cry.’
‘And why shouldn’t you cry, darling?’ Mrs Batey swooped on her and gathered Virginia into her arms, kneeling on the floor beside the chair, with the flannelette nightgown billowing round her legs. With a sigh that was an abandonment of stoicism, Virginia leaned her throbbing head against Mrs Batey’s soft, loose front, and they rocked slowly together, while Virginia wept for pain and shame, and Mrs Batey grieved gently for the sorrows of women.
After Joe had slammed out without looking to see how much he had hurt her, Virginia had only wanted to be alone. She was glad that Joe had gone. She did not want anyone there until she had got over this. If the door had been closed, she would not have let Mrs Batey in, but now that she had shuffled in unimpeded in the black quilted slippers with the pompons hanging by a thread, her enveloping presence was strangely comforting.
Helen had never held Virginia in this protective way and murmured the small sounds of comfort. On the rare occasions of Virginia’s childhood tears, Helen had tried to brisk her out of them. Only Tiny had ever hugged her like this and let her cry in peace.
Mrs Batey knew why she was crying without having to ask. She knew what a shouting husband and a weeping wife meant. To her, it was not shocking that Joe had hit Virginia. It was just one of those things about men which a woman must bear with, and which another woman could help her to bear, with sympathy, but without surprise or acrimony.
After a while, Mrs Batey got up, her knees cracking like walnuts, and went to make tea. Virginia stayed in her chair, because her head still hurt, and she did not trust her legs.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the back view of Mrs Batey, standing by the stove with her greasy hair hanging down her back and tied with a knot of old bandage. ‘I shouldn’t have done that. I never cry.’
‘No harm done,’ Mrs Batey said. ‘Is this the first time he’s treated you rough?’ When Virginia did not answer, she said serenely: ‘I dare say not. He looks a violent one. That’s why you went with him in the first place, I wouldn’t wonder.’
‘Not really.’ Virginia thought for a moment, back to the night when Joe had hypnotized her, back to the night when he had walked into the flat, and the night when she had gone in the white dress to find him in the little room behind the wrestling-hall. ‘It was – I think I fell in love with him.’
‘Oh – love.’ Mrs Batey tossed back her straggling hair and turned round with a cup of dark tea in each hand. ‘I don’t take much account of that, although they talk a lot about it. What is love when you think of it? It’s not much more than wanting to lie down with a man. Drink this, darling. It will do you good.’
‘It’s much more than that,’ Virginia said. ‘Perhaps you haven’t been in love, Mrs Batey?’
‘Not with Edgar, if that’s what you mean.’ Mrs Batey pursed her chapped lips to sip the hot tea. ‘Good thing I wasn’t, or I’d have shot myself from disappointment long ago. I’ve had my moments, though. Don’t think I haven’t. Don’t try to tell me I don’t know what love is.’
Virginia tried to look beyond the coarse, shining features and the spread flesh to see Mrs Batey as a girl, fresh and ardent and appealing.
‘It was in Wales,’ Mrs Batey said, her eyes softening. ‘I shall always think kindly of Wales. That’s why I voted Labour last time – though Edgar dared me to – because of Mr Bevan.’
When she had finished her tea and cursorily inspected the pattern of the leaves, she set down the cup and said: ‘I’d better clear out before your man comes back. Are you sure you’ll be all right now? You want to take it easy, mind, in your condition.’
‘I never told you about that,’ Virginia said quickly. ‘I haven’t told anyone yet.’
‘You don’t need to, darling. You can’t be that way as often as I’ve been without you can spot it right off in another woman.
Good luck to you, sweetheart, but you tell that villain who fathered it to keep his hands off you for a while. There’s things can go wrong. I know. And how would he like to be responsible for that!’ Mrs Batey gathered the green coat about her and went out, rejoicing in the triumph of maternity over the brute male.
*
When Virginia told Joe about the baby, he scarcely knew what to think. Although she swore that she felt well, he was overcome by a great wave of anxious tenderness, and wanted to do something for her, to show her how he felt. Then almost immediately he began to wonder how it would all end. It was dramatic and touching with the baby inside Virginia, but what about after it was born? What would life be like then?
A baby! Well he had done it this time all right. His baby. A son. Another Joe Colonna, dark-haired, with big brown eyes. But how would they keep it, when they could barely keep themselves? Virginia was so confident, so sure that everything would go well, but, my God, when people started having babies, it was the beginning of the downhill drag to slumminess. Look at the Bateys. Look at the Ropers. And some of the families in that rabbit-warren across the street. Kids everywhere. Noise and mess and no place for a man about the house. No wonder Will Roper cleared out as often as he could, and only came home for long enough to knock another one out.
Then Joe’s misgivings were replaced by tenderness again, and a wondering pride in the thing that had happened to Virginia. He did not go out for several evenings after she had told him. He stayed at home and cooked the supper, and waited on her, using the deft mannerisms with which he remembered his father had sometimes delighted his mother, putting a napkin over his arm at home, and behaving as if he were still at the restaurant. He tried to do her ironing, struggling with shirts and blouses and refusing to take advice from Virginia. She would have been happy to let him go on with it, but Mrs Batey marched in and swept the mangled clothes away from him with cries of horror.
Joe found himself watching Virginia more closely in the days after she told him about the baby. Lately, he had not taken much notice of her, and all the time this thing had happened to her and he had not known it. Why had she waited for two months to tell him? Was she afraid of him? She did not behave as if she was. He had been brutal to her, but she did not flinch from him. When he was rough with her, she would often fight him back, if she could get her hands free.
Joe watched her and wondered about her, and saw for the first time how thin her face had become, how large her eyes and brilliant her mouth against the fine white skin. Her arms and legs were thinner too, and there were shadows under her collar-bones that had not been there when her shoulders bloomed so smoothly out of the exciting white dress. She looked somehow whittled down, stripped for action against whatever contingency life might bring. And now when Joe watched her more carefully, because she was carrying his baby, he saw that she was nearly always in an apron and with her sleeves rolled up, doggedly tackling the wretched flat as if she had never known any other kind of life. She had got into the habit of standing with her arms folded, resting one hip; the stance of the work-toughened women who gossiped on their doorsteps across the road.
It was her birthday. She was twenty-two, and Joe wanted to do something extravagant and wildly luxurious for her. He wanted to buy her jewels, champagne, an exotic dress in which she would not roll up her sleeves and fold her arms. He bought her a gaily-coloured silk scarf. It was all he could afford.
‘It’s real silk,’ he said nervously. ‘The best they had in the shop.’
‘It’s beautiful.’ She stroked the scarf and smiled at him with shining eyes. The present was much more than just a thirty-shilling scarf to her, because she thought he had forgotten her birthday. ‘You shouldn’t have spent so much, darling.’
‘I’ve saved a bit these last few days by not going to the pub,’ he said, trying to sound casual. ‘You know how it is. Now that I’m a father – respectable chap, and all that.’ He laughed self-consciously. He seldom felt embarrassed with her, but her
shining pleasure in the birthday present had thrown him out of his stride and made him feel ashamed that it was so little.
‘Oh, Jin!’ He suddenly threw his arms round her and held her fiercely against him. ‘I wish I could have given you something tremendous. I wish I could give you what you want most in the world.’
They were both very much in love that night. It was like the first days of their marriage, when they could not be together in a room without touching each other constantly, and when they went without supper because they began to make love before the supper was cooked, and rose at midnight to eat whatever they could find, sitting close together and talking their thoughts with the complete mental abandonment that is possible after complete physical abandonment.
All next day, Joe could not get Virginia out of his mind. He kept seeing the picture she made in her bright red coat, with her hair blown back by the wind that whipped up the dingy street as he leaned out of the window to watch her go. Before she reached the comer, she had turned to look up at the flats. Why had she done that? On other mornings he was never out of bed to wave to her. Did she guess that he would wave today, or did she look back every morning in case he was at the window?
‘I wish I could give you what you want most in the world,’ he had said last night, and he had meant it. What did she want most in the world? Well, there was one thing he could do for her. Joe dressed quickly, ate all the eggs he could find in the cupboard to give himself strength, ran whistling down the stone stairs, touched his hat impertinently to Mrs Baggott, and found himself a job in a snack bar in the Edgware Road.
*
‘I’ll say this much for your husband,’ Betty said, as she watched Joe deftly slapping a sandwich together. ‘He certainly knows his job.’
‘He’s done this sort of work before,’ Virginia said. ‘He’s rather good at messing about with food.’
‘Mm-hm.’ Betty squinted at Joe’s back through her thick glasses. ‘I should have thought he could have found something a bit better.’
The Angel in the Corner Page 23