The Angel in the Corner

by Monica Dickens

  ‘We’re all right.’ The bravery of the words was hollow. Saying them made Virginia realize how far from the truth they were. But she would never tell Spenser that she had asked her mother for help and had been refused.

  She pressed the call-button for the lift. ‘I’ll have to hurry,’ Spenser said. ‘I don’t want to say this in front of the elevator boy, and I didn’t dare say it in front of my wife, because I haven’t told her yet, and she likes to be the first to know things. I’m going to help you, Jinny.’

  ‘No, thank you. We don’t need any help.’

  ‘That’s my girl. I knew you’d say that,’ Spenser said with satisfaction. ‘You’re just as stubborn as your mother. That’s why I’m not going to talk to you. I’m going to talk to Joe. Send him round here tomorrow. Noon will do. We’ll have lunch,’ he said, in the tone of a man accustomed to having his summonses obeyed. ‘I know he’s not working, so he can’t make that an excuse.’

  The doors slid back and Virginia stepped into the lift. She could not promise to send Joe to see Spenser. She did not know whether he would go. But even with this doubt, her mind was looking anxiously over his meagre wardrobe, deciding what he could wear to make the best impression.

  Chapter 13

  The Olive Branch was one of the most attractive public-houses in that part of London which lies between Portman Square and Cavendish Square. Pleasantly situated in a quiet cul-de-sac of neat, inexpensive houses, it was convenient both for the commercial folk of Marylebone High Street, and for the professional medical men who flew their small brass flags of success in the neighbouring streets and squares.

  The clientele had once been heterogeneous, but since the war the unassuming little tavern had become increasingly fashionable among the kind of people who liked to refer in a sporty way to Going Round to the Local, and who treated the Olive Branch as a kind of club, so that a labourer who turned in casually for a half pint of bitter might turn quickly out again to seek the more democratic air of the Swan in the High Street.

  The Olive Branch was not old, but it was constructed in a cottagey style with cream-washed walls and a tiled roof, that gave it the air of a village inn in the heart of London. A firm of brewers had built it before the war as a public-house, but it somehow managed to give the informal impression of an ordinary house turned into a pub, like one of those country cottages which have a window pushed out at one side of the porch to turn the parlour into a sweet-shop.

  The public and saloon bars were on opposite sides of the flagged entrance passage, and both of them looked like parlours turned into bar-rooms. The windows were small, with small panes and wide sills where tankards could be set down among the geraniums. The walls were panelled half-way up and whitewashed above. Oak beams ran across the low ceilings, and the bars themselves were made of darkened oak, with surfaces deliberately full of splits and knot-holes to give the impression of years of use.

  Behind the two front-rooms were a kitchen and a store-room, and upstairs were three small but charming rooms for the landlord. Behind the house was a tiny walled courtyard, with seats made out of beer casks for customers who wished to drink outside in the summer, and an ivy-covered woodshed to supply the mellowed brick fireplaces which added to the cosiness of the two bar-rooms.

  It was a snug little berth all right, and Joe congratulated himself that it was his. Well – his and Virginia’s, of course. It was her stepfather who had got them the job of managing it for the brewery, but if Joe had not put on such a good show for the old man, he might not have pulled it off.

  ‘Very man to man, I was,’ he told Virginia. ‘ “You must realize, my boy,” the old duck kept saying, “that you are a family man now, with all the responsibility that entails.”

  ‘ “Of course, sir,” I said. I kept calling him sir. He liked that. “All I want to do is to make a good home for my wife and baby.” I cleared my throat. A little emotional, I was, when I talked about the baby. He seemed to like that too. Then I looked him in the eye, and put on my sincere face.’

  ‘What is your sincere face?’ Virginia asked.

  ‘Like this.’ He opened his dark eyes very wide and set his mouth in a straight line. Virginia laughed, and they laughed together, and he hugged and kissed her in the saloon bar, paying no attention to Lennie, who was rubbing up the fireplace with red brick polish.

  Lennie was their assistant, a thin, red-haired boy with a face like a freckled wedge, small wondering eyes, and a shortened leg from the infantile paralysis which had condemned him to spend most of his childhood in irons. Barman, pot-boy, maid of all work, he had worked in the Olive Branch since he left school. It meant more to him than his own home, and he knew its working inside out, and knew the names and affairs of all the regular customers, and could advise Joe on who should be tactfully denied credit. Everyone knew him, and knew his name, and gave him presents at Christmas, and tried to buy him drinks, although he was a teetotaller; a broadminded one, however, with an expert’s aesthetic appreciation of bottles and shining glasses, which allowed him to be tolerant of those who drank from them.

  The last landlord, a genial clown, who was largely responsible for developing the popularity of the Olive Branch, had taught Lennie everything he knew, except how to drink a quart of beer in one swallow, before he died of a heart attack half-way between the woodshed and the public bar, carrying a load of wood on Lennie’s day off.

  Lennie had loved him. He mourned him deeply, never ceasing to blame himself for having taken the day off, or for not having filled the wood-baskets before he took his day off. Since he had to love the person for whom he worked, he attached his affection to Virginia. He would do anything for her, and although he was resentful of Joe, because he could not forget the jolly, fat man who had died, he tolerated him because he was Virginia’s husband, and helped him in every way with the running of the public-house.

  Joe was a little sickened by the way the boy tagged after Virginia, with those innocent eyes following her every move. When she went shopping, he limped after her to carry home the groceries. If she picked up anything, he took it from her. If she rested in the daytime, Lennie went dot and carry up the stairs with cups of tea and vivid sugar cakes from the bakery on the corner. He called Joe Mr Colonna, but he called Virginia, more familiarly, Mrs C., and referred to the coming baby as Our Baby.

  If Joe found Lennie upstairs, bringing sustenance on a bar-room tray, or asking Virginia if he could run any errands for her, he shooed him down to his own part of the house. He did not consider Lennie a man, but he did not want even the runty, hobbling boy hanging round his wife, and he kept a sharp eye on the men in the bar if they joked too familiarly with Virginia.

  He had never known that it was possible to feel so possessive about a woman. With other girls, he had not cared too much whether they cheated him or not. With most of them, it was a relief when another man took them off his hands. It was more fun to look for a new one than to tag along with the same girl after the first excitement had degenerated into habit.

  With Virginia, however, it was different. The excitement had never worn off. Even now that she was swollen and clumsy, she still had the power to move him uncontrollably. He would never let her go. No one else must have any part of her, and he was thankful that her mother and stepfather had gone away again and removed the danger of even the slight influence they might have with her. She belonged to him, to Joe Colonna, who had never before owned anything worth having. His desire to possess her utterly made him love her and hurt her at the same time. She was passionate, obedient, faithful, and yet he knew that there was something at the heart of her which he would never possess and master, and it was that tormenting knowledge which compelled him at times to abuse her.

  Now that they were at the Olive Branch, they hardly ever fought. Life had suddenly become so good that there was nothing to fight about, except when Joe thought that she was pampering Lennie, or being too familiar with him. Virginia was happy. Joe knew that. Her kitchen and her three sunny
rooms upstairs were a palace to her after the dingy little flat. She was preparing for the baby as if it were the only one that had ever been born. As if it were Jesus Christ himself, Joe sometimes told her, but she did not like him to say that.

  That was one of the things he could not understand about her. She did not go to church, and she told him that she had never been taught any religion, and yet she believed in things like the Bible, and all the useless fairy-tales about Christmas and Easter, and once he had caught her by the bed saying her prayers. She had scrambled quickly to her feet, bulky in the thin nightdress. When he had asked her what she was praying for, since she now had everything that any girl could want, she had said that she was repeating something her nurse had taught her. Angel of God, my Guardian dear, it went. That angel again. Well, it had brought them together in the first place. He must admit that, although it irritated him that it was still roaming about in the corners of her mind. With bloody great wings, no doubt, and a plate on the back of its head, like the ones on the statues in the big Catholic church round the corner, where Joe had wandered in once at the tail-end of a crowd to see somebody getting married.

  At first, Virginia helped Joe and Lennie to serve in the bar. She enjoyed that, and Joe was proud of the way she looked and the way she knew how to talk to the classiest customers on their own level. Nevertheless he watched her. Let her never forget which side of the bar she was on. She was on Joe’s side. She was in Joe’s world, not theirs.

  After a while, when the time for the baby drew near, Virginia did not want to show herself any more. ‘You’re too big to get behind the bar, anyway. You’re as big as a house,’ Joe said. He said it front of Lennie, who cast down his eyes and hurried out of the room. Lennie did not like to hear that kind of talk.

  Virginia stayed upstairs and sewed and waited, and packed and unpacked and packed again her bag for the hospital. Joe kept Lennie in the public bar, and ran the saloon bar himself. Not that it made much difference, since the customers wandered from one to the other, but Joe felt that it was only right that the landlord should be in the saloon. Besides, there was that woman, the wife of the man with the hawthorn-hedge moustache, who drove racing cars. She always came into the saloon bar. Ella, her name was. She usually wore pants, and Joe was prepared to stake his life that they were hot ones. Joe looked at her. She looked at him. She did not talk much, but in the old days, he would have taken her up on that look.

  Meanwhile, he joked with her husband, and got on the right side of him … just in case. No harm to Virginia; but Joe had been faithful to her ever since they were married. If he did not break out some time or other, he would begin to think he was getting queer.

  Ella’s husband was jovial and friendly. All the people who came into the Olive Branch, unlike the morose beer-suckers in some public-houses, were friendly, accustomed to being on good terms with whoever was behind the bar, ready to buy you a drink if you kept them amused. And you could buy yourself a drink any time of the day, whenever you felt like it, and even fiddle one now and then off the record, if you were careful. It was a good life. It was the first time that Joe had been his own master, or been paid for doing work that he enjoyed. He was happy, confident, and once more full of the old bravado that had been knocked out of him by the squalid, penny-pinching months at Weston House.

  When the baby was born, Joe stood drinks on the house for everyone in the bar. The people in the public bar came across the passage to see what the noise was about, and they got free drinks too. Joe was in his element, the centre of attraction, congratulations, and crude masculine jokes. He had not meant the baby to be a girl, but there it was. He decided then and there in the bar to call her Jenny, his mother’s name, and he became very sentimental thinking about it. This was a great night for sentiment. People began to buy him drinks, and he leaned his elbow on the bar and thought tenderly of Virginia with her big, exhausted eyes, and her dark hair on her shoulders, clutching the dark, shrivelled baby to her, and begging the nurse not to take it away.

  Ella was in the bar without her husband. She seemed amused by the occasion. At closing-time she was still there, looking at Joe, and he knew that it would have been easy to take her upstairs after Lennie had gone. But tonight he was sentimental. Tonight he was the husband and father to end all husbands and fathers, and Ella shrugged her bony shoulders and went out with the rest of the people into the little street that was so quiet until the Olive Branch let out its customers into the warm night.

  *

  For a while after Virginia came home, Joe was tender and considerate, delighted with Virginia, and proud of the tiny living thing he had created. Presently his delight in Virginia’s achievement was tempered by his realization of the baby’s-demands on her. His pride in his daughter was less intense when he discovered what it was like to have a new-born baby in the house.

  From the start, Jenny was a nervous, difficult baby. She cried a lot, and did not want her feeds, and was always awake when she should have been asleep. Virginia worried about her all the time, and expected Joe to do the same, but after a while he did not want to listen to her worries any more.

  ‘It’s bad enough,’ he said, ‘to have the kid crying half the night, and you jumping in and out of bed, without having to talk about it all the time. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with her. Why don’t you believe that, and stop fussing?

  You used to be such good fun, Jin. Now you’re degenerating into just a mother, like all the rest.’

  ‘I am a mother,’ Virginia said, and it still sounded odd to say it. ‘How can I help worrying? If she just wouldn’t cry so much, it wouldn’t be so bad.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ Joe said bitterly. The baby’s crying was increasingly on his nerves. Sometimes when he was in the bar, he would listen to the piteous, penetrating sound from above for as long as he could stand, and then he would run up the stairs and shout angrily at Virginia: ‘For God’s sake, can’t you keep that child quiet? You’ll drive everybody out of here before you’re done with it!’

  People in the bar would make jokes about the child’s crying, which could plainly be heard when there was not a noisy crowd. ‘Safety-pin trouble?’ they would ask, raising their eyes to the ceiling, or: ‘Why don’t you go up and slap the poor little brute on the back?’ – manufacturing a belch.

  ‘The kid’s all right,’ Joe would say curtly. Although these were the same people to whom he had boasted when Jenny was born, he now resented their domestic allusions, which seemed to minimize him into the figure of a henpecked father, pacing the floor in the small hours with a yelling baby.

  Before the baby was born, Virginia was always waiting quietly for him to come upstairs after the bar closed. Now she nearly always seemed to be busy with the baby. Sometimes when he was upstairs after closing-time, he would grow so irritated by the sight of Virginia anxiously trying to make the baby feed at her breast, that he would fling off downstairs and go out to a club, or spend the rest of the evening drinking by himself in the bar.

  Weighing the baby to see how much she had taken, mixing the bottle to supplement the unsuccessful breast-feeding, Virginia would try to puzzle out why Joe felt like that. She had always understood that a man liked to see his wife feeding his baby. Joe hated to see it. He thought that Virginia would spoil her figure. He wanted her body to be all for him, not shared even with their baby. Although the conception of Jenny had satisfied his creative pride, he had never really wanted her. Virginia knew that. Now that Jenny was here, he was jealous of her because she had turned Virginia into part wife, part mother, instead of all wife and lover.

  Understanding this, Virginia tried to be extra loving to Joe, so that he should not feel left out of this mysterious, unimagined intimacy between herself and Jenny. She had never known anything like the tenderness she felt towards the restless, difficult child, with the fuzz of black hair and the speck of nose and the mouth that folded so sweetly in slumber, and protested so violently much of the time she was awake. When Virgi
nia held her in her arms, and the tiny, groping hands clutched at her, it seemed almost as though, by the very fact of her beloved existence, the baby were protecting her, instead of she protecting the baby.

  Since she could not discuss the baby’s ups and downs with Joe, Virginia discussed them with Lennie, who was always ready to listen. If Joe went out during the day, Lennie would often stump up the stairs to hang over the crib and gaze with wonder at the tiny child. He bought impossible presents for her, and would nearly break his heart trying to make the feeble hand grasp a tin trumpet or a golliwog. When Virginia let him pick Jenny up, he would sit motionless on the low chair, his feet carefully planted, his short leg trembling a little, his pointed, freckled face absorbed, holding his breath in tenderness and wonder at the feeling it gave him to have the baby in his arms.

  Joe came home one afternoon and found him holding the baby like this while Virginia was downstairs in the kitchen. Jenny had been quiet, staring at Lennie with calmly unfocused eyes. When Virginia heard her cry, she ran upstairs to find that Joe had snatched her away, and was holding her awkwardly, while he snapped at Lennie to get downstairs where he belonged.

  Virginia took the baby from him. ‘Just when we had got her quiet,’ she said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t be so rough with her.’

  ‘If I can’t even hold my own kid,’ Joe said, ‘I’d better go downstairs and let this pet nursemaid of yours move in up here.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that.’ Virginia frowned at him. Lennie was looking from one to the other, fidgeting and embarrassed.

  ‘You’d better go down,’ Virginia told him. ‘Thanks for helping me.’

  Lennie looked at the sobbing baby, and made a little hopeless gesture towards her, as if his hands longed to hold her again. She would often stop crying for him when she would not stop for Virginia.

  ‘Do what you’re told,’ Joe said curtly. ‘Get downstairs and stay there. I don’t want you up here again.’