The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [101]
‘Not with Edgar, if that’s what you mean.’ Mrs Batey pursed her chapped lips to sip the hot tea. ‘Good thing I wasn’t, or I’d have shot myself from disappointment long ago. I’ve had my moments, though. Don’t think I haven’t. Don’t try to tell me I don’t know what love is.’
Virginia tried to look beyond the coarse, shining features and the spread flesh to see Mrs Batey as a girl, fresh and ardent and appealing.
‘It was in Wales,’ Mrs Batey said, her eyes softening. ‘I shall always think kindly of Wales. That’s why I voted Labour last time – though Edgar dared me to – because of Mr Bevan.’
When she had finished her tea and cursorily inspected the pattern of the leaves, she set down the cup and said: ‘I’d better clear out before your man comes back. Are you sure you’ll be all right now? You want to take it easy, mind, in your condition.’
‘I never told you about that,’ Virginia said quickly. ‘I haven’t told anyone yet.’
‘You don’t need to, darling. You can’t be that way as often as I’ve been without you can spot it right off in another woman.
Good luck to you, sweetheart, but you tell that villain who fathered it to keep his hands off you for a while. There’s things can go wrong. I know. And how would he like to be responsible for that!’ Mrs Batey gathered the green coat about her and went out, rejoicing in the triumph of maternity over the brute male.
*
When Virginia told Joe about the baby, he scarcely knew what to think. Although she swore that she felt well, he was overcome by a great wave of anxious tenderness, and wanted to do something for her, to show her how he felt. Then almost immediately he began to wonder how it would all end. It was dramatic and touching with the baby inside Virginia, but what about after it was born? What would life be like then?
A baby! Well he had done it this time all right. His baby. A son. Another Joe Colonna, dark-haired, with big brown eyes. But how would they keep it, when they could barely keep themselves? Virginia was so confident, so sure that everything would go well, but, my God, when people started having babies, it was the beginning of the downhill drag to slumminess. Look at the Bateys. Look at the Ropers. And some of the families in that rabbit-warren across the street. Kids everywhere. Noise and mess and no place for a man about the house. No wonder Will Roper cleared out as often as he could, and only came home for long enough to knock another one out.
Then Joe’s misgivings were replaced by tenderness again, and a wondering pride in the thing that had happened to Virginia. He did not go out for several evenings after she had told him. He stayed at home and cooked the supper, and waited on her, using the deft mannerisms with which he remembered his father had sometimes delighted his mother, putting a napkin over his arm at home, and behaving as if he were still at the restaurant. He tried to do her ironing, struggling with shirts and blouses and refusing to take advice from Virginia. She would have been happy to let him go on with it, but Mrs Batey marched in and swept the mangled clothes away from him with cries of horror.
Joe found himself watching Virginia more closely in the days after she told him about the baby. Lately, he had not taken much notice of her, and all the time this thing had happened to her and he had not known it. Why had she waited for two months to tell him? Was she afraid of him? She did not behave as if she was. He had been brutal to her, but she did not flinch from him. When he was rough with her, she would often fight him back, if she could get her hands free.
Joe watched her and wondered about her, and saw for the first time how thin her face had become, how large her eyes and brilliant her mouth against the fine white skin. Her arms and legs were thinner too, and there were shadows under her collar-bones that had not been there when her shoulders bloomed so smoothly out of the exciting white dress. She looked somehow whittled down, stripped for action