The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [123]
After a while, when the time for the baby drew near, Virginia did not want to show herself any more. ‘You’re too big to get behind the bar, anyway. You’re as big as a house,’ Joe said. He said it front of Lennie, who cast down his eyes and hurried out of the room. Lennie did not like to hear that kind of talk.
Virginia stayed upstairs and sewed and waited, and packed and unpacked and packed again her bag for the hospital. Joe kept Lennie in the public bar, and ran the saloon bar himself. Not that it made much difference, since the customers wandered from one to the other, but Joe felt that it was only right that the landlord should be in the saloon. Besides, there was that woman, the wife of the man with the hawthorn-hedge moustache, who drove racing cars. She always came into the saloon bar. Ella, her name was. She usually wore pants, and Joe was prepared to stake his life that they were hot ones. Joe looked at her. She looked at him. She did not talk much, but in the old days, he would have taken her up on that look.
Meanwhile, he joked with her husband, and got on the right side of him … just in case. No harm to Virginia; but Joe had been faithful to her ever since they were married. If he did not break out some time or other, he would begin to think he was getting queer.
Ella’s husband was jovial and friendly. All the people who came into the Olive Branch, unlike the morose beer-suckers in some public-houses, were friendly, accustomed to being on good terms with whoever was behind the bar, ready to buy you a drink if you kept them amused. And you could buy yourself a drink any time of the day, whenever you felt like it, and even fiddle one now and then off the record, if you were careful. It was a good life. It was the first time that Joe had been his own master, or been paid for doing work that he enjoyed. He was happy, confident, and once more full of the old bravado that had been knocked out of him by the squalid, penny-pinching months at Weston House.
When the baby was born, Joe stood drinks on the house for everyone in the bar. The people in the public bar came across the passage to see what the noise was about, and they got free drinks too. Joe was in his element, the centre of attraction, congratulations, and crude masculine jokes. He had not meant the baby to be a girl, but there it was. He decided then and there in the bar to call her Jenny, his mother’s name, and he became very sentimental thinking about it. This was a great night for sentiment. People began to buy him drinks, and he leaned his elbow on the bar and thought tenderly of Virginia with her big, exhausted eyes, and her dark hair on her shoulders, clutching the dark, shrivelled baby to her, and begging the nurse not to take it away.
Ella was in the bar without her husband. She seemed amused by the occasion. At closing-time she was still there, looking at Joe, and he knew that it would have been easy to take her upstairs after Lennie had gone. But tonight he was sentimental. Tonight he was the husband and father to end all husbands and fathers, and Ella shrugged her bony shoulders and went out with the rest of the people into the little street that was so quiet until the Olive Branch let out its customers into the warm night.
*
For a while after Virginia came home, Joe was tender and considerate, delighted with Virginia, and proud of the tiny living thing he had created. Presently his delight in Virginia’s achievement was tempered by his realization of the baby’s-demands on her. His pride in his daughter was less intense when he discovered what it was like to have a new-born baby in the house.
From the start, Jenny was a nervous, difficult baby. She cried a lot, and did not want her feeds, and was always awake when she should have been asleep. Virginia worried about her all the time, and expected Joe to do the same, but after a while he did not want to listen to her worries any more.
‘It’s bad enough,’ he said, ‘to have the kid crying half the night, and you jumping in and out of bed,