The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [116]
‘We haven’t got a telephone,’ Virginia said.
‘I’ll get a taxi for you. Who wants a taxi? Anyone want to leave?’ Joe came into the flat. He had apparently been listening outside the door. He came forward a little unsteadily, with a wide grin on his face, held out his hand to Helen, then changed his mind and bent to kiss her.
Helen moved a step away. ‘You’ve been drinking,’ she said.
‘Sure. Know any law against it?’
Virginia’s heart sank. So he was going to be difficult. He was going to be defiant, trying to show that he was as good as anybody, and succeeding only in being insolent. Now it would all start again – the antagonism and the disparagement and the unpleasantness, just when Virginia had hoped that she could reconcile her mother to her husband.
‘It’s damned hot in here.’ Joe took off his jacket. He was wearing a faded blue shirt without a tie. He threw the jacket at a chair. It missed the chair and slid on to the floor.
Virginia picked it up. Because Helen was watching her, she spent a little time hanging the coat over the back of a straight chair, smoothing it out, tweaking up the shoulders. It was an old tweed jacket, rubbed at the edges and with a button missing.
Virginia had been meaning to replace the button for weeks, but she decided to do it now.
Helen watched in silence while Virginia took out her sewing basket, sat down with it and began to look for a suitable button; then she burst out impatiently: ‘For heaven’s sake, Jinny! Do you have to start being domestic now? Spenser is waiting for us.’
‘First things first,’ Joe said. ‘She has to sew on my button first. You didn’t know what a good little wife your daughter was, did you, Helen?’
He managed to make the name sound fairly natural, but Virginia knew his voice well enough to guess that he was forcing it out because he had made up his mind to be casual with Helen. If he had been sober, it would have sounded only casual. As it was, it sounded somehow mocking and insolent, especially as he was standing with his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels and looking Helen up and down as if he were undressing her.
‘Of course I knew,’ Helen said coldly. ‘I didn’t expect her to be anything else.’
‘But you didn’t expect her to waste it on a bum, eh?’ Joe continued to stare at her with a twisted grin.
‘Joe, please,’ Virginia said uneasily, bending her head over her sewing.
‘Joe, please what? What have I done now?’ He went over to Virginia.
She broke off the thread and looked up at him, holding the jacket in her lap. ‘Don’t be like this, darling,’ she murmured. ‘You’re making everything worse.’
‘Don’t be like what?’ he echoed loudly. ‘Here, I’ll take that.’ He snatched the jacket roughly away from Virginia. ‘I’m going out again, since I seem to be making a mess of myself here.’
‘Don’t go,’ Virginia said. ‘Helen has asked us to go and have dinner at the Savoy.’
She looked challengingly at her mother. Helen could only say: ‘Yes, of course, the invitation includes your husband if he would care to come.’ She said it stiffly. The way in which she said ‘your husband’ made it impossible to imagine her ever addressing him as Joe.
‘No, thanks,’ Joe said. ‘Not tonight. Some other time.’
‘Please come, Joe,’ Virginia said, ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Well, go ahead,’ Joe said airily. ‘You go ahead. Don’t worry about me. I’ll find a piece of bread and cheese or something.’ He made it sound as if Virginia were deserting him.
‘I’d much rather you came.’ Virginia felt that if he did not come now, and meet Spenser, and have dinner as one of the family, the ice might never be broken. Joe would never abandon his childish defiance. Helen would take it as an accepted thing that she saw Virginia without him. ‘Please come,’ she said again.
‘I told you, no. I told you to go ahead.’ Joe sat down in the chair by the window, stuck out his legs, and took up a newspaper.
‘If you two are going to spend all evening fighting about it,’ Helen said, ‘nobody will get any dinner. I must say, Jinny, I didn’t expect to be mixed up in a brawl as soon as I saw you.