The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [117]
‘It’s not a brawl.’
‘It sounds like one to me. Go and change your clothes,’ she ordered, as if Virginia were a child again, ‘and let’s get started. If your husband doesn’t want to come, that’s quite all right. At least, you can’t say I didn’t ask him.’
‘You didn’t,’ Virginia said. ‘I did.’ Joe did not look up from the paper. Virginia shrugged her shoulders and went into the bedroom. She changed her dress hastily, listening for voices from the other room. The only sound was the rustle as Joe turned the pages of the newspaper.
When she came out, Helen was still standing near the door with an aloof face, and Joe was still sitting in the same position, gazing intently at the newspaper which Virginia knew he had already read.
Virginia wore a red silk dress that had once been effective, but was now much too tight for her. She had covered the split at the waist with a broad belt, which emphasized her shape.
Helen looked at her. ‘Aren’t you going to wear a coat?’ she asked.
‘Will I need one? It’s warm.’
‘You will need one.’ Helen shut her mouth tightly and looked away, as if the sight of Virginia in the tight red dress was too much for her.
Virginia put on the shapeless coat which she detested, and went to kiss Joe. He lifted his sulky face to her, but he did not return her kiss. Virginia could not risk asking him to get a taxi, in case he refused.
‘Let’s walk, Helen,’ she said, opening the door of the flat. ‘We can pick up a taxi in Edgware Road. Or we can go by bus, if you like. You’d probably enjoy going on a bus after all this time.’
‘Thank you,’ Helen said, ‘but if I never go on another London bus it will be too soon.’
She did not say good-bye to Joe, and he did not get up. Helen and Virginia went out of the flat. As Virginia was closing the door, she glanced back and saw that Joe was looking after her with a lost unhappiness that she had never seen on his face. Almost she ran back into the flat to say she would not go, but Helen tweaked impatiently at her arm, and she shut the door and followed her mother obediently down the dim passage to the stair-well.
*
Virginia waited until after dinner to say what she had to say to Helen. Spenser’s delight in seeing her, his friendly, easygoing conversation, the pleasure of eating a first-class meal politely served, combined to produce in her an unaccustomed well-being which she did not want to spoil.
After the brandy, which Helen said Virginia should not have, but which Spenser declared was medicinal, Virginia went up to Helen’s suite. She was glad that Spencer stayed downstairs to read the stock-market tape. She would have felt embarrassed and grasping saying what she had to say in front of him. It was embarrassing enough to have to say it to Helen, although the fact that the money was not strictly Helen’s made it somehow easier to ask for it from her than from Spenser.
The sitting-room of the suite, with its thick carpet and handsome furniture, made Virginia feel like a stranger from another world. There were flowers everywhere, flowers which must have cost more than she earned in a week at Etta Lee’s. The bedroom was larger than the whole of Virginia’s flat in Weston House, and the bathroom made her want to tear off her clothes and lie for hours in scented hot water. At the public baths, where she and Joe went twice a week, there was a time-limit, and a limit to the amount of hot water you could use. Putting on your clothes afterwards and going straight out into the street was not the same as wrapping yourself in a bath-robe and falling on to a bed, sodden and dizzy with steam.
While Helen was attending to her face, Virginia sat down on one of the soft beds, and said to the back of her mother’s lacquered head: ‘Helen, I want to ask you something.’
‘Go ahead.’ Helen’s voice came distortedly through a mouth stretched to receive lipstick.
Virginia looked at the floor and said with great difficulty: ‘I need your help. Do you think you could lend me some money?’
Helen kept her waiting while she finished with the lipstick. Virginia sat and stared at her feet, and knew