The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [1]
‘Three,’ Virginia said quickly, but the nurse shook her head, as if she knew what was coming.
‘Tiny will go to her sister,’ Virginia’s mother said. ‘You know she’s been wanting to go for years, haven’t you, Tiny one? You and I, Jinny, will find ourselves a nice little flat, and be happy as two pigeons in a roost – probably happier than we’ve ever been. What do you say – on our own, eh?’ She held out her hand to the child, but Virginia backed away. She held on to the edge of the table, fighting the pricking sobs in her throat. She would not cry until her mother had left the room.
*
After her mother’s heels had gone tapping through the hall to keep a dinner engagement – ‘just as if it was an ordinary night!’ the nurse exclaimed to herself – Virginia wept again in bed. The nurse came up, her humped shadow preceding her up the stairway wall. It was more familiar to Virginia to hear the nurse’s creaking steps than her mother’s swift feet. For as long as she could remember, it had been Tiny coming up at sleep time, Tiny with the stories and kisses, Tiny with the illicit chocolate, Tiny with the hot lemonade for coughs.
Tiny sat on the bed, breathing heavily after the climb, trying to thread a bent pin back into her sparse knot of hair. Her arms were so stiff and fat now, and her chest so sunk into her lap, that it was difficult for her to reach her head.
‘Who will do your hair for you when I’m not there?’ Virginia asked, with a child’s quick recovery from voiceless sobs.
‘Why, my sister, of course. She’s younger than me, you know. She still has all her powers.’
‘Will she let me come and stay with you?’
‘Will Hilda? Of course she will. You’ll have to take the couch, though.’
‘I mean, will Mummy let me?’ Virginia said gloomily. ‘I don’t know what it will be like, living with her. Does she know how to look after children?’
‘If she doesn’t,’ the nurse said sadly, ‘it’s time she found out.’ She put her hands on her knees and got up from the bed. She was not much taller standing up than she was sitting down. ‘You’ll be all right, dearie,’ she said more briskly. ‘You’ll see. Things will turn out.’ Wretched as she was at this sudden ending of an era, ending of her nursery days, ending of the only life she could remember, she was tough enough not to make it worse for the child by mourning with her. ‘And there’s still the angel, don’t forget.’ She nodded towards the corner of the room, where a street lamp threw a barred patch of light.
‘Will he go with me?’
‘I’ve told you often enough. He has to go with you, in every room, to watch out for the corners of life.’
Virginia sighed. ‘I wish I knew what he looked like.’
‘Chances are you never will,’ the nurse said, going to the door, ‘because you believe he’s there. It’s only when you think you’re alone, that he might show up, to prove you wrong. It would depend though. I don’t know. Angels are funny people – if you’ll pardon the liberty.’ She bobbed her head towards the corner of the room, where she had taught Virginia to believe that her angel stood to guard her.
Chapter 2
‘You’re So terribly noisy, Jinny,’ Helen Martin complained. ‘Why are you always so noisy? You don’t get it from me, but your father could shout loud enough in temper, in which, I feel constrained to say, he frequently was.’
‘Stop picking on the poor man.’ Virginia continued to bang the broom against the skirting-board as she swept. ‘It’s done with. Let the past bury its dead, Helen.’ Now that she was grown up, she called her mother that. They treated each other as equals. On Virginia’s side, that meant a certain indiscipline, a thinly-veiled disrespect, but a guarded friendship that had somehow evolved from the difficult years when they struggled