The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [100]
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 clatter 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