The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [122]
Joe was a little sickened by the way the boy tagged after Virginia, with those innocent eyes following her every move. When she went shopping, he limped after her to carry home the groceries. If she picked up anything, he took it from her. If she rested in the daytime, Lennie went dot and carry up the stairs with cups of tea and vivid sugar cakes from the bakery on the corner. He called Joe Mr Colonna, but he called Virginia, more familiarly, Mrs C., and referred to the coming baby as Our Baby.
If Joe found Lennie upstairs, bringing sustenance on a bar-room tray, or asking Virginia if he could run any errands for her, he shooed him down to his own part of the house. He did not consider Lennie a man, but he did not want even the runty, hobbling boy hanging round his wife, and he kept a sharp eye on the men in the bar if they joked too familiarly with Virginia.
He had never known that it was possible to feel so possessive about a woman. With other girls, he had not cared too much whether they cheated him or not. With most of them, it was a relief when another man took them off his hands. It was more fun to look for a new one than to tag along with the same girl after the first excitement had degenerated into habit.
With Virginia, however, it was different. The excitement had never worn off. Even now that she was swollen and clumsy, she still had the power to move him uncontrollably. He would never let her go. No one else must have any part of her, and he was thankful that her mother and stepfather had gone away again and removed the danger of even the slight influence they might have with her. She belonged to him, to Joe Colonna, who had never before owned anything worth having. His desire to possess her utterly made him love her and hurt her at the same time. She was passionate, obedient, faithful, and yet he knew that there was something at the heart of her which he would never possess and master, and it was that tormenting knowledge which compelled him at times to abuse her.
Now that they were at the Olive Branch, they hardly ever fought. Life had suddenly become so good that there was nothing to fight about, except when Joe thought that she was pampering Lennie, or being too familiar with him. Virginia was happy. Joe knew that. Her kitchen and her three sunny rooms upstairs were a palace to her after the dingy little flat. She was preparing for the baby as if it were the only one that had ever been born. As if it were Jesus Christ himself, Joe sometimes told her, but she did not like him to say that.
That was one of the things he could not understand about her. She did not go to church, and she told him that she had never been taught any religion, and yet she believed in things like the Bible, and all the useless fairy-tales about Christmas and Easter, and once he had caught her by the bed saying her prayers. She had scrambled quickly to her feet, bulky in the thin nightdress. When he had asked her what she was praying for, since she now had everything that any girl could want, she had said that she was repeating something her nurse had taught her. Angel of God, my Guardian dear, it went. That angel again. Well, it had brought them together in the first place. He must admit that, although it irritated him that it was still roaming about in the corners of her mind. With bloody great wings, no doubt, and a plate on the back of its head, like the ones on the statues in the big Catholic church round the corner, where Joe had wandered in once at the tail-end of a crowd to see somebody getting married.
At first, Virginia helped Joe and Lennie to serve in the bar. She enjoyed that, and Joe was proud of the way she looked and the way she knew how to talk to the classiest customers on their own level. Nevertheless he watched her. Let her never forget which side of the bar she was on. She