The Angel in the Corner (20 page)

‘Oh, yes, darling.’ She came into his arms eagerly. She was splendid to kiss, so warm and full of life, and he still got that dangerous, exhilarated feeling of wanting to grab her too fiercely and hurt her.

He raised his head. ‘The old hypnotism still work?’

‘Do you think it was only that?’ She always looked worried when she spoke of that peculiar evening, as if she were trying to puzzle something out. ‘I did feel that night that you had some power over me. Was it only – this kind of power?’

‘I don’t know. I told you, I had no idea what I was doing. I only knew I wanted you terribly.’

‘Why did you let Nora stay on after I’d gone?’

‘Why look a gift horse in the mouth? The poor girl didn’t have much fun though. My heart wasn’t in it.’

‘She looked very smug next day.’

‘That was for your benefit. You’re not sore about that after all this time, are you?’

‘Perhaps I should be, but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything you’ve done, as long as it’s all in the past.’

‘It is, my love, it is.’ He hugged her, swaying from side to side. ‘I’ll never look at another woman. Do you believe that?’ He believed it himself. He could not remember ever being so happy, and he knew that she was perfectly happy too as long as he held her, and shut out the conflictions of her old life beyond the barrier of his arms.

‘What have you got in the gunnysack?’ he asked. ‘I’ll open all the tins and cook you something you never had before. Did you bring that white dress – the one with all the vital parts
missing? Wear it. Wear it for me, will you? Let’s make a big night of it.’

‘Joe.’ She held back a little from him, and he saw that clear candid look in her eyes, that searching for truth that made him look away when he could not tell it to her. ‘Aren’t you going to the club tonight? Can’t you still have your job there?’

Here it came. Sooner than he had planned, and just when things were going so well. She was not so different from other women after all, with her uncanny ability to ask the awkward question at the wrong moment.

He walked away from her. ‘I’m not going back there,’ he said. ‘I chucked up that miserable job for good before we went to Glasgow.’

‘They’d take you back, though. William’s kind. He likes you too.’

‘He can find another mug to be kind to. Get this into your head. I’m not going back there. I can’t think how I stuck it so long.’

‘What will you do, then? Have you thought of something else? I hate to be sordid, but we must have some money coming in from somewhere. How are we going to live?’

‘You’ve got a job, haven’t you, on that fancy magazine? We can get by on that for a start.’ He looked at her to see how she was taking it. She was pale, but she was taking it all right. You could say that for Jin; she would never let you knock her cold.

She said quite calmly, measuring her gaze to his: ‘I haven’t got the job any more. I told them I wasn’t coming back.’

‘Go back and tell them you’ve changed your mind.’

‘I can’t. They probably wouldn’t even take me after I walked out on them like that. You don’t call up an editor one day and say: “I’m not coming in any more. I’m going to be married,” and then waltz in a few days later, and say: “Turn that woman out of my chair. My husband says I’m to go on working here.” What a funny man you are, Joe. You see things all upside down sometimes.’

‘Only by your standard.’ He resented her tone of light rebuke. ‘Why shouldn’t the editor take you on again, if you were getting on as well as you said you were? Listen, you don’t
mind
do you?’ He wanted to make it impossible for her to mind. ‘You
always said you loved working there. If I stopped you doing it, you’d say I was ruining your career. What’s wrong in giving you the chance to go ahead with it?’

‘You don’t see, do you?’ Virginia picked up the suitcase that held the tinned food and the whisky and went into the kitchen. Joe followed her. They were close together in the tiny kitchen, which was scarcely more than a large cupboard.

‘Why are you being so difficult about this?’ he asked. ‘I thought you would jump at the chance.’

‘I’m not being difficult.’ She shook back her hair, and tried to smile. ‘I’d be glad to go back to the magazine. I hated leaving, but I thought I had to, if we were going to Glasgow. It’s just that – don’t you see, Joe? I would have liked to be the one to suggest it.’

She bent down to open the case. He took her arm and pulled her up again. ‘Well, you weren’t,’ he said roughly. ‘And if you’re trying to take me over, you can stop it right away. You’ll do what I tell you. We’re married now, don’t forget that.’ He felt her arm quivering under his grasp. Was it excitement or fear? Did she like this kind of treatment, or did she hate him for it? He had been too rough, but she had it coming to her. If she was going to start taking offence at everything he said, she had got to be straightened out right away.

‘Let go of me,’ she said quietly, and he loosened his grasp.

‘I didn’t mean to be like that. I’m sorry, Jin,’ he said with difficulty. He hated apologies. He had never cared what people thought of him, but he cared what Virginia thought. It was a new sensation; painful, and a little humiliating.

‘I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean anything.’ She knelt down and began to take tins out of the suitcase and stack them on the floor. ‘Of course I’ll be glad to go back to the magazine. It will give me something to do, while you –’ She sat back on her heels, and asked without looking at him: ‘Are you going to get a job too?’

‘I may. I’ll have to look around. I thought I might start on that book I’ve been wanting to write.’ He had not thought of that for some time. Now it seemed like a fine idea. He felt sure that he could bring it off.

‘There’s money in it, Jin, I’m certain of that. I’ve got some
first-class dope. Never been written before, as far as I know. I’ll be famous. I’ll make you rich. Listen to me! Listen –’ He knelt on the floor beside her, scattering the tins. ‘Don’t turn away like that. What’s the matter with you? You think I’m too dumb to write a book, is that it?’ This time she gasped as he took her arm, and he knew that he had hurt her.

He pulled her against him, and forced her head back. Her mouth was closed and rigid. He forced it open, and felt her shudder as she relaxed against him.

‘Yoo-hoo! Anybody home?’ There was a clatter of heels on the stairway from the house above, and Mrs Mortimer appeared in the doorway before they had time to get to their feet. ‘Excuse
me,’
she said. ‘Do I intrude? Don’t mind me, Jo-Jo. I know what young love is. I just came down to pay my respects to the bride.’

She was a shrill, sparse woman like a quail plucked for the oven, with the fixed eye of a bore, and a thin red nose that had rejected the pale powder which clung patchily to the rest of her face. As Virginia and Joe scrambled to their feet among the rolling tins of soup, she came into the kitchen, holding out two hands, ugly with bitten hang nails.

She embraced Virginia. ‘Welcome to the ancestral home. I hope you’ll like it here. Jo-Jo always grumbled about it, but in my opinion, he’s lucky to get a place as nice as this. He’s not the best of tenants, but I dare say you’ll straighten him out.’

‘Don’t worry, Mollie,’ Joe said, trying to laugh off his resentment at the intrusion. ‘She’s already got me where she wants me. Why didn’t you bring Paul? Let ‘em all come. We’re having open house.’

‘She did bring me,’ Paul said from the passage. ‘No room for me in the kitchen. Sorry to intrude on you like this.’

‘Glad to have you.’ Joe took Virginia out to meet their landlord. He was a tall, ungainly man, with a long stiff neck like a giraffe, and some trouble with his feet, which necessitated his wearing carpet slippers all the time he was in the house.

He gave Virginia a cold, shaky hand, and said: ‘Congratulations, my dear. You look as if you were much too good for Joe, but there again, you don’t look as if you would have married him if you thought so. If you see what I mean. I’m a bit fogged
today. I hope you’ll be very happy.’ Then he slapped Joe on the shoulder, and said vaguely: ‘Good boy, good boy.’

They all went into the other room. Mollie exclaimed at the way Virginia had already tidied it. ‘It always looked a shambles, in my opinion,’ she said. Her opinion was the mainspring of her life. She gave it at the slightest opportunity, and believed that everything she said must be true, because she had said it.

‘No man has the slightest idea of keeping house,’ she declared, trying a chair with her hand before sitting on it. ‘I always told Joe: You’ve made a pigsty of this place, I always told him. Not,’ she added, catching Joe’s quick glance towards Virginia, ‘that I was ever down here more than a few times, to give messages, or a parcel. I believe in leaving the tenants alone, although the one we had before Joe, this schoolmistress, she used to beg and beg me to come down at night and keep her company. The poor soul was desperate with loneliness.’

‘So desperate that you eventually drove her away to find a place where she could get some peace and quiet,’ Paul said, and his long body shook with silent laughter. He folded himself gratefully into a chair, and rubbed his feet.

‘How can you say that when you know it’s not true? Don’t mind him,’ Mollie told Virginia. ‘He’s a dreadful man. In my opinion, he’s the most dreadful man I ever met.’

Joe could see that Virginia was still a little shaken from the crude interruption of her emotions, but she had recovered enough self-possession to be conscious of her position as hostess. In that easy, well-mannered way, which Joe would never openly admit to admiring, she asked: ‘What can I get you, Mrs Mortimer? Some tea or coffee? You’re our first visitor. You must have something.’

Like all self-centred people, Mollie could hear a question, and then answer it with something else from her own train of thought. ‘I must say,’ she announced, ‘Jo-Jo is the last person I would ever expect to get married. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he told me. I said so to Paul, didn’t I, Paul? Wake up there, old-timer, you can’t go to sleep when you’re paying a visit. The last man on earth, I said. I never was so surprised.’

‘Why is it so strange?’ Virginia asked, narrowing her eyes at
Mollie. Joe could imagine these two women getting into a fight some day.

‘Well, my dear,’ Mollie shrugged her shoulders, as if it were obvious, ‘because he’s not the marrying kind, that’s all.’

‘Mollie, you don’t say that kind of thing to a girl who’s just got married,’ Joe said uneasily.

‘Well, I’m sorry. I have to say what I think. You must take me as you find me.’

Virginia certainly knew how to behave herself. Most of the girls Joe had known would have put their claws out and scratched back. He would not have thought any worse of them, but he thought all the more of Virginia for ignoring it, and renewing her offers of hospitality.

‘Which shall it be?’ she asked smilingly. ‘Tea or coffee? It won’t take me a minute to make either.’

‘I don’t care for anything,’ Mollie said. ‘Thank you – what is your name again? I can’t call you Mrs Colonna. Virginia. Good. I shall call you Virgie.’

‘No one ever calls her that,’ Joe said.

‘All the more reason then why I should. Virgie and I are going to be very
special
friends, I know. It will be nice for me to have another woman in the house again. Paul is the quiet type. He doesn’t always feel like talking.’

‘Don’t forget what happened with the schoolmistress, Mollie,’ Paul said, blinking and stretching his eyes to keep himself awake.

‘There you go again, being perfectly dreadful. Of course I wouldn’t dream of gate-crashing the love nest. I know when people want to be alone.’ She made the harmless remark sound offensively lewd. ‘I just want Virgie to feel free to come up and chat with me whenever she likes. No man is ever such a good confidante as another woman, in my opinion.’

‘Don’t expect Virginia to run up and cry on your shoulder every time we have a row,’ Joe said. ‘She’s not that kind.’

‘And we don’t have rows,’ Virginia added. ‘Joe, why don’t you get Mr and Mrs Mortimer a drink? They must have something, now that they’re here. We’ve only got whisky, I’m afraid, but nobody has drunk our health yet. You can be the first.’

She sounded wistful, and Joe had a sudden vivid picture of
what her wedding would have been like if she had married the kind of man her mother expected. White lace, and yards of that flimsy stuff they hung over the heads of brides to make them look like virgins, and champagne, and people making speeches, and Virginia radiant as a queen. She had looked radiant enough in her plain blue dress in the registry office, but not like a queen, more like an excited child.

He put his arm round her. ‘You shouldn’t have said that,’ he whispered.

At the word whisky, Paul’s eyelids had flown up like shutters, and he had leaned forward in his chair. Mollie had stood up and gone to him, holding out her hand to help him to his feet.

‘We’ll have to be running along,’ she said. ‘It was so nice meeting you, Virgie. I hope we’ll see a lot more of you.’

‘I hope so too. I’m sorry you won’t stay to drink our health, Mrs Mortimer.’

‘Mollie to you, I insist. We don’t drink dear. Thank you all the same.’ She departed quickly, hustling Paul’s stumbling feet up the stairs, and leaving the smell of stale lavender water in the air behind her.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ Virginia asked. ‘I tried to be as nice as I could, though I don’t think she likes me. Did I say something wrong?’

‘You did, but it wasn’t your fault. It was the whisky that sent her scuttling off like a scared rabbit. Paul’s an alcoholic.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘No harm in him. He manages to get the stuff, when he can get away from her, but he’s perfectly respectable about it. You just won’t see him around for two or three days sometimes, but he’ll come out of it looking as innocent as a baby. It all goes to his feet. I can’t think how he does it. The only time I was ever on a real bender, I ended up in hospital. Scared the pants off me. Don’t look so alarmed. I won’t do it again.’

‘I hope not. It must be dreadful for Mollie, but I dare say she drives him to it.’