The Angel in the Corner

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Yes, Mr Colonna.’ Lennie did not look at him. ‘How about the milk then, Mrs C.?’ he asked. ‘You didn’t bring it up. Shall I –’

  ‘Get out, I told you!’ Joe looked as though he would hit him. ‘You’re working for me, not my wife. Now get downstairs and do your work, before you find yourself out of a job.’

  Lennie took one last anxious look at Virginia and the baby, and scuttled out of the room.

  ‘You shouldn’t be so rough with him,’ Virginia said, as they heard the irregular thump of Lennie’s feet hurrying down the steep stairs. ‘You scare him when you’re like that.’

  ‘I’ll do more than scare him before I’m through,’ Joe said. ‘He drives me crazy always toadying round you. I won’t have him coming up here any more – understand?’

  ‘You’ve said that before,’ Virginia said, rocking the baby and looking at Joe calmly over the top of the soft, wispy hair, ‘but I can’t stop him coming up here. He’s been so good to me, and he does love Jenny.’

  ‘Let him have a baby of his own and love that, and leave mine alone,’ Joe said.

  ‘Oh, he will. He’s engaged to a girl called Nancy, didn’t you know that? They’re going to be married as soon as Nancy can pluck up the courage to tell her parents. Apparently they don’t like poor Lennie.’

  ‘Well, neither do I. I don’t trust that little weasel. He’s the only fly in the ointment around here, as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘You would never have learned to run this place without him,’ Virginia said.

  ‘Who says I wouldn’t? Nothing to it. I can run this pub with one hand tied behind my back. I don’t need that snivelling cripple to tell me my business. It was different for the chap before. He wasn’t married, but you and I could do this place on our own. You could do the cleaning and the glasses, and you could manage the Public all right.’

  ‘But I couldn’t leave Jenny for so long.’ It was the first thing that Virginia thought of, but she knew, even as she said it, that it would annoy him.

  ‘Always the damn baby! Who are you married to – the baby or me? Listen, if I want you downstairs, you’ll come downstairs, and if I want to get rid of young Lennie, I’ll get rid of him. I’m going to speak to the chap from the brewery next time he comes.’

  ‘Joe – you couldn’t do that! Why, Lennie would die if he couldn’t work here. The Olive Branch is his life.’

  ‘Well, keep him downstairs then, or I swear I’ll get him fired.’

  ‘You couldn’t be so mean.’

  ‘I could. You’ve no idea how mean I could be to anyone who starts messing about with my wife.’

  ‘Messing about – how ridiculous. As if poor Lennie would ever think of anything like that.’

  ‘That’s what they all say. He’s just a poor, simple boy. He wouldn’t think of anything like that. And then one day you come home, and the poor simple boy’s pants are on the floor, and the poor simple boy is in bed with –’

  ‘Oh, stop it,’ Virginia said wearily. The baby was quiet now, and she went to the crib and laid her down. Instantly, Jenny began to cry again. ‘Why do you have to be like this?’ she asked, with her back to him, leaning over the crib. ‘We’re so happy here, and everything has turned out so well. We’ve got our chance at last. Why do you have to spoil it by picking quarrels about nothing?’

  ‘God knows.’ Virginia turned, and saw that his face was not angry any more, but a little sad. ‘It’s just that I see red when I think anyone is trying to muscle in on my property.’

  ‘Lennie isn’t trying to muscle in. He’s fond of me, I know, but only as if I was his mother. His mother isn’t very nice to him.’

  ‘I’ve heard that one before, too,’ Joe said, with a grin. ‘ “He loves me like a son,” and the first thing you know, there’s incest brewing. Keep him downstairs, Jin,’ he said more seriously. ‘He can stay, if that keeps you happy; but he must stay downstairs.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you want. I want to keep you happy too, you see. I hate it when you’re so belligerent.’

  ‘You don’t hate it. You hate me. Isn’t that more like it?’

  ‘No, darling.’ Virginia went to him, and stood close to him.

  ‘I love you. You know that.’

  ‘Yes.’ He let out his breath on a long sigh. ‘If I thought you didn’t, I’d kill you.’ He kissed her fiercely, while the baby whimpered and fretted in the crib behind them.

  *

  ‘That child will never stand the winter,’ Mrs Batey said, crossing her arms in front of her, lifting up her bosom and letting it drop again. She had come to visit Virginia, bringing with her a huge, cracked leather shopping bag in case she saw any bargains in Marylebone High Street. Mrs Batey never went on an expedition without taking the bag for possible booty. Even the short trip from Weston House to the Olive Branch was an expedition, and might yield a cut-price cauliflower or a set of pig’s feet.

  In the bag was a dented sponge-cake with the jam oozing out, which she had made for Virginia. ‘Not that you need it as much as you used, love,’ she said, looking round the little upstairs room with its bright curtains and pink walls and gay nursery rugs on the floor. ‘My stars, you have fallen on your feet, and no mistake. A bit different to dear old Weston House. Not that I grudge it to you, love. You deserve it, every bit of it, and perhaps that husband of yours deserves his luck too, if any man ever deserves anything. Running a pub! Edgar will eat his heart out with envy when I tell him about it. “Wouldn’t do for you,” I’ll tell him. “You’d drink up all the profits before a week was out.”’

  Jenny had been sleeping when Mrs Batey came, but the raucous laugh induced by the thought of Edgar running a public-house woke her up, and as so often, she announced her awakening by a fretful cry.

  Mrs Batey tiptoed weightily to the crib, and leaned over it for a long time making chirping and sucking sounds, before she straightened herself up and announced in the voice of an expert: ‘That child will never stand the winter.’

  She did not mean it unkindly. She did not mean to frighten Virginia. It was just a piece of news that was worth giving out because it was sensational.

  ‘What nonsense,’ Virginia said, trying not to mind. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her. She has a cold now, that’s why she looks so pale.’

  ‘Well, you watch her, that’s all,’ Mrs Batey said. ‘I’ve seen them come, and I’ve seen them go, and they sometimes go quicker than they come, that’s where it is. I lost my first, you know, at four months. That’s a bad time for the little ones, with winter coming on.’

  ‘Jenny isn’t much more than four months old,’ Virginia said. ‘Please don’t talk like that, Mrs Batey. I don’t like it.’

  ‘Have I upset you?’ Mrs Batey was amazed. ‘I wouldn’t do that for the world. Don’t take it to heart so, love,’ she said, as Virginia picked up the baby and cuddled her, caressing the back of her neck. ‘I just said what came into my head, and there I go again, putting my foot in it as usual. Edgar says I’ll rise up out of my box at the funeral and speak out of turn to the preacher.’ Her laugh made Jenny jump and quiver a little in Virginia’s arms.

  ‘Let me hold her,’ Mrs Batey said. She took Jenny and sat down with her, making a wide lap, and settling the baby into the crook of her arm as naturally as a violinist tucks his fiddle under his chin. She ducked her head and clucked her tongue and made hideous grimaces, which Jenny accepted passively.

  ‘You see, she’s all right,’ Virginia said nervously. ‘She’s not crying now. I’m sure she’s all right.’

  Mrs Batey pursed her lips and shook her head. ‘Not strong,’ she whispered out of the side of her mouth, as if Jenny could understand.

  ‘The doctor said I would have to be careful of her this winter, keeping her warm, and out of draughts, and that sort of thing, but he would have told me if there was anything wrong with her.’

  ‘Doctors tell what suits them,’ Mrs Batey said with a sniff. ‘Don’t they, little love?�
�� she inquired of Jenny. ‘She’s a little love, that’s what she is.’ She began to cluck and grimace again. ‘Looks just like my poor little Maurice though. He fell away to nothing at the end.’

  Virginia changed the subject, asking Mrs Batey about the people at Weston House. She was worried enough already about Jenny, without having her anxiety fed by Mrs Batey’s tales of horror. Mrs Batey gossiped happily and slanderously on for an hour, until Joe came up from the storeroom, where he had been stocktaking with Lennie. He greeted Mrs Batey civilly enough, and asked her what she thought of Jenny.

  ‘She’s a little beauty,’ Mrs Batey said, ‘just like her mother. Frail though. My stars, she’s frail. I’ve been telling Virginia, she’s got to watch her now that the raw weather is settling in.’

  ‘Don’t go filling her up with that stuff,’ Joe said impatiently. ‘She fusses enough as it is. There’s nothing wrong with the baby. She’s as strong as a horse. Got my constitution.’ He never would admit that Jenny was in anything but the rudest of health.

  As if to contradict him, Jenny coughed, a dry, painful cough that pushed her body forward in Mrs Batey’s arms.

  ‘That doesn’t sound too good,’ Mrs Batey said sharply.

  ‘That’s nothing,’ Joe said. ‘She’s got a cold. Everyone coughs when they have a cold.’

  Virginia said nothing. Jenny had been coughing like that for two days. Each time the tiny chest jerked, she felt a constriction in her own chest, and sometimes she even found herself clearing her throat, as if she could relieve the child herself. She fetched the bottle from the pan of hot water and taking the baby from Mrs Batey, sat down and tried to make Jenny take her milk. At the first suck, Jenny began to cough again. Virginia sat her up until the spasm ceased, but when she laid her back and put the bottle to her mouth, the choking cough started again.

  ‘Sounds croupy,’ Mrs Batey said. ‘I don’t like it. You’d ought to get the doctor to her.’

  ‘I thought about it,’ Virginia looked at Joe, remembering the morning’s argument, ‘but I don’t like to bother him for nothing.’

  ‘That’s his funeral,’ Mrs Batey said. ‘What’s a doctor for? Not to sit all day filling out forms for the National Health.’

  ‘And not to be pestered by hysterical women,’ Joe said. ‘Jenny’s greedy, that’s all. You women love to make a fuss about nothing. If I went for my beer like a baby goes for its bottle, I’d choke too, only no one would fuss about me. Look here, Mrs Batey, I wish you’d stop trying to put the wind up Virginia.’

  Mrs Batey tucked some descending hair back under her hat, buttoned up her coat, which gaped in the middle where there was no button, picked up the shopping-bag and said: ‘That child is ill, young man, and if you can’t see it, you’re blinder than I thought you were.’

  She snapped her mouth shut at him, rattling her false teeth. She had never liked Joe. In the days when she had darned his socks and ironed his shirts, she had only done it for Virginia, and Virginia had often imagined how much pleasure it must have given her to rip her murderous flat-iron through one of his shirt buttons and split it in two.

  ‘Must you go? Too bad you can’t stay and see the child die in convulsions,’ Joe said sarcastically.

  Mrs Batey ignored him and went to clap Virginia on the shoulder with her work-grained hand. ‘I must be running along,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some shopping to do. I promised the kids I’d try and pick up a rabbit. Bye-bye for now, love. Come back and see us soon. We often talk about you at the flats.’

  ‘You’ll have plenty to tell them now, won’t you?’ Joe said, opening the door to hasten her out.

  Mrs Batey walked to the door, stopped in front of him in her shapeless hat and her worn, gaping coat, and looked at him as disdainfully as if she were a queen. ‘I’ll tell them that your wife is worried sick, and that you haven’t the sense or the decency to help her, if you like,’ she said, and swept out, trailing the shopping-bag thump, thump after her down the stairs.

  The next day, Jenny’s cough was worse. ‘I’m going to call the doctor,’ Virginia said, starting downstairs for the bar.

  Joe followed her. ‘You’ve let that old trout scare you,’ he said. ‘Sickness and death are her favourite subjects. Why do you listen to her?’

  ‘She ought to know about babies. She’s had five – six with the one that died. But it isn’t only Mrs Batey. I can see that Jenny isn’t well, even though I haven’t had six babies. You only need one to be a mother. Please go back and stay with her Joe, while I telephone. She’s breathing so badly, I don’t think she ought to be left.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’ He leaned against the doorway of the saloon bar, while Virginia went behind the bar to the telephone. ‘Nothing is going to happen in five minutes.’

  ‘I keep remembering what Mrs Batey said. They sometimes go quicker than they come. I can’t get it out of my mind. Please, Joe – think I’m silly if you like – but please go up to her.’

  ‘I’ll go if you like.’ Lennie came into the passage from the other bar with a broom in his hand. ‘Nothing wrong with our baby, is there?’

  His anxious face looked past Joe through the doorway, but Joe pushed him back and said: ‘Nothing’s wrong. You keep out of this.’

  ‘Can I just run upstairs and see her?’ Lennie asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I can hear her coughing. That little cough does something to me, Mr Colonna –’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ To silence him, Joe went upstairs, shutting the door of the room with such a loud bang that Virginia had to ask the doctor to repeat what he was saying.

  When she finished telephoning, Lennie had crept up to the other side of the bar. He leaned his arms on it, stringy and thin with the sleeves rolled up. He twisted his fingers. ‘Mrs C. –’ he began, not looking at her.

  ‘What is it, Lennie? Don’t worry about Jenny. She’ll be all right.’

  ‘Oh, I hope so. I pray for her every night,’ he said. ‘Honest.

  I pray for you, too, Mrs C.’ He raised his eyes.

  ‘Well – that’s nice,’ Virginia said uncomfortably, ‘but I don’t really need praying for.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you do,’ Lennie said earnestly. ‘But that’s not what I wanted to say. I wanted to ask you’ – he dropped his eyes again – ‘Nancy’s people are coming to town tomorrow night. She lives with her aunt, you know. They’re coming to see her, just for the one night. After that, they’ll be off back to Chelmsford, because they can’t leave the shop.’

  He paused. Virginia could hear Joe walking about upstairs.

  What was he doing? Was something wrong? She could not wait to get back to Jenny.

  ‘It’s like this.’ Lennie took a deep breath. ‘They’re not in favour of me and Nancy going together, as I told you. We want to get engaged. Not secret, like we are now, but right out in front of everyone, so Nancy can wear the ring and that. She wears it round her neck now.’ He paused again, thinking tenderly of Nancy’s neck. ‘They don’t really know me, you see. They’ve got no call to object, but it’s just that they don’t know anything about me. I wondered, could you – could you – oh, no.’ He took his arms off the bar and turned away dispiritedly. ‘Of course you couldn’t.’

  ‘Couldn’t what?’ Virginia came round the end of the bar and took his arm. ‘What do you want me to do, Lennie? You want me to go and speak to Nancy’s parents – is that it?’

  ‘Oh, Mrs C., you are clever.’ Lennie’s eyes combed her with admiration. ‘How did you guess it? That’s exactly it. What do you think of it, eh?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’ Virginia hesitated. ‘I don’t see how I could leave Jenny.’

  ‘We thought of that, Nancy and I. I mean, even when we didn’t know she was poorly, but knowing how much you thought of her and that. You could go after closing-time, we thought, when Mr Colonna was free to be with the baby. Best to go after supper, anyway. People are always more reasonable then.’

  ‘I don’t know, Lennie.’ Virginia struggled with he
rself. Of course, Jenny would be all right with Joe, but suppose … suppose … a dozen suppositions raced through her mind as she stood looking at Lennie in his yellowed white shirt with the long apron tied twice about his meagre waist. She had never left the baby with Joe for longer than it took her to hurry to the shops. Perhaps that was her mistake. Perhaps now, when Jenny needed care, was the time to start letting him be a father.

  If it were any time but now! But Lennie had said it was now or never, and his eyes were on her, ready to light up in hope, or turn away in defeat.

  ‘All right,’ she said, and saw his eyes light up. ‘I’ll try for you.

  How will I find the place?’

  ‘It isn’t far. Just up Euston way. Nancy can come round here and fetch you,’ Lennie said, talking more confidently. ‘And she’ll see you home. We’ve got it all worked out. We’ve talked it over and over. Nancy said you’d never do it. “You don’t know Mrs C.,” I said. “She’ll do it.” And’ – his eyes were big with the wonderment of being proved right – ‘you’ve gone and said you would.’

  Virginia went back upstairs to wait for the doctor. When he came, he said that Jenny had pneumonia, and after he had said it and left, as if his words had dealt her a blow, Jenny began to get worse. By the following day she was very pale, and her lips were dusky. Her breathing was quick and distressed, with a queer guttural sound at the end of each expiration.

  ‘Respiratory grunt. That’s perfectly normal,’ the cheerful young doctor said, too cheerful, too impersonal to calm Virginia’s fears. ‘She’ll do for now. We’ll see how she goes. Don’t worry.’

  Don’t worry! Virginia stood at the top of the stairs and watched him run briskly down, clap on his hat, a smaller, more becoming version of Felix’s black homburg, and swing out through the front door. How could he tell her not to worry? Didn’t he know it was her baby?

  She went back to look at Jenny. Even in the few moments when Virginia had been saying good-bye to the doctor, the baby’s breathing seemed to have become more laboured. As well as the little grunting expiration, there was now an occasional gasp as she drew in her shallow breaths, as if the effort to get enough air were becoming more painful.