The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [102]
It was her birthday. She was twenty-two, and Joe wanted to do something extravagant and wildly luxurious for her. He wanted to buy her jewels, champagne, an exotic dress in which she would not roll up her sleeves and fold her arms. He bought her a gaily-coloured silk scarf. It was all he could afford.
‘It’s real silk,’ he said nervously. ‘The best they had in the shop.’
‘It’s beautiful.’ She stroked the scarf and smiled at him with shining eyes. The present was much more than just a thirty-shilling scarf to her, because she thought he had forgotten her birthday. ‘You shouldn’t have spent so much, darling.’
‘I’ve saved a bit these last few days by not going to the pub,’ he said, trying to sound casual. ‘You know how it is. Now that I’m a father – respectable chap, and all that.’ He laughed self-consciously. He seldom felt embarrassed with her, but her shining pleasure in the birthday present had thrown him out of his stride and made him feel ashamed that it was so little.
‘Oh, Jin!’ He suddenly threw his arms round her and held her fiercely against him. ‘I wish I could have given you something tremendous. I wish I could give you what you want most in the world.’
They were both very much in love that night. It was like the first days of their marriage, when they could not be together in a room without touching each other constantly, and when they went without supper because they began to make love before the supper was cooked, and rose at midnight to eat whatever they could find, sitting close together and talking their thoughts with the complete mental abandonment that is possible after complete physical abandonment.
All next day, Joe could not get Virginia out of his mind. He kept seeing the picture she made in her bright red coat, with her hair blown back by the wind that whipped up the dingy street as he leaned out of the window to watch her go. Before she reached the comer, she had turned to look up at the flats. Why had she done that? On other mornings he was never out of bed to wave to her. Did she guess that he would wave today, or did she look back every morning in case he was at the window?
‘I wish I could give you what you want most in the world,’ he had said last night, and he had meant it. What did she want most in the world? Well, there was one thing he could do for her. Joe dressed quickly, ate all the eggs he could find in the cupboard to give himself strength, ran whistling down the stone stairs, touched his hat impertinently to Mrs Baggott, and found himself a job in a snack bar in the Edgware Road.
*
‘I’ll say this much for your husband,’ Betty said, as she watched Joe deftly slapping a sandwich together. ‘He certainly knows his job.’
‘He’s done this sort of work before,’ Virginia said. ‘He’s rather good at messing about with food.’
‘Mm-hm.’ Betty squinted at Joe’s back through her thick glasses. ‘I should have thought he could have found something a bit better.’
Betty’s fiancé was an undersized but brainy boy who was articled to a solicitor. Her candid comparisons between the law and a snack bar made Virginia wish that she did not have to take Betty to the place where Joe worked. But she liked to go there herself in her lunch hour, and it was impossible to shake Betty out of the tacit assumption that since they went to lunch at the same time, they must eat their lunch together.
‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ Betty sometimes said. ‘I’m tired of everything they serve at the Excelsior.’
‘I’d rather go there,’ Virginia would say. ‘But you needn’t come if you don’t want to.’
‘Oh, I’ll come with you, Ginger, even if it means the Excelsior. But I wonder