The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [129]
‘I don’t know, Lennie.’ Virginia struggled with herself. Of course, Jenny would be all right with Joe, but suppose … suppose … a dozen suppositions raced through her mind as she stood looking at Lennie in his yellowed white shirt with the long apron tied twice about his meagre waist. She had never left the baby with Joe for longer than it took her to hurry to the shops. Perhaps that was her mistake. Perhaps now, when Jenny needed care, was the time to start letting him be a father.
If it were any time but now! But Lennie had said it was now or never, and his eyes were on her, ready to light up in hope, or turn away in defeat.
‘All right,’ she said, and saw his eyes light up. ‘I’ll try for you.
How will I find the place?’
‘It isn’t far. Just up Euston way. Nancy can come round here and fetch you,’ Lennie said, talking more confidently. ‘And she’ll see you home. We’ve got it all worked out. We’ve talked it over and over. Nancy said you’d never do it. “You don’t know Mrs C.,” I said. “She’ll do it.” And’ – his eyes were big with the wonderment of being proved right – ‘you’ve gone and said you would.’
Virginia went back upstairs to wait for the doctor. When he came, he said that Jenny had pneumonia, and after he had said it and left, as if his words had dealt her a blow, Jenny began to get worse. By the following day she was very pale, and her lips were dusky. Her breathing was quick and distressed, with a queer guttural sound at the end of each expiration.
‘Respiratory grunt. That’s perfectly normal,’ the cheerful young doctor said, too cheerful, too impersonal to calm Virginia’s fears. ‘She’ll do for now. We’ll see how she goes. Don’t worry.’
Don’t worry! Virginia stood at the top of the stairs and watched him run briskly down, clap on his hat, a smaller, more becoming version of Felix’s black homburg, and swing out through the front door. How could he tell her not to worry? Didn’t he know it was her baby?
She went back to look at Jenny. Even in the few moments when Virginia had been saying good-bye to the doctor, the baby’s breathing seemed to have become more laboured. As well as the little grunting expiration, there was now an occasional gasp as she drew in her shallow breaths, as if the effort to get enough air were becoming more painful.
All day Virginia watched her baby fighting its lonely, preoccupied battle for oxygen. Jenny’s lips were blue, and her skin like wax. Her tiny face was pinched and sucked in at the cheeks, and from time to time she wrung Virginia’s heart with a gasping, struggling cry, as if she were pleading for help in her pitiful fight for air.
Joe called the doctor three times, and when he came at last, the baby had grown suddenly better. She was sleeping. Her breathing was easier, and her face was growing flushed under the damp black hair, matted closely to her perspiring head.
‘Don’t worry,’ the doctor said again, and Virginia felt that he did not believe her description of how bad the day had been. Once more she watched him skipping down the stairs, always in a hurry to get on to the next patient. Once more she turned back into the room where Jenny lay, and went straight to the crib to reassure herself that the baby was still asleep, because she knew now how quickly the changes could come.
Joe was standing on the other side of the crib, his hands in his pockets, his face gentle with a tenderness she had never seen there before for Jenny. ‘Poor little devil,’ he said. ‘You don’t realize how you feel about them until they’re sick.’
Virginia had heard people say that about dogs. It was not much for a father to say, but coming from Joe, it was enough for her.
When evening came, she had to decide what she was going to do about Lennie. She heard his footstep on the stair, so different from Joe’s springy tread, and she went out on to the little landing to stop him coming up. Jennie was still asleep. She did not want Joe shouting up the stairs after Lennie tonight.
Lennie stood below her, leaning forward with one hand on the stair-rail and the other on the wall, looking