The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [130]
‘She’s still sleeping,’ Virginia said. ‘I don’t know what I ought to do.’
‘I shouldn’t ask you to go out, should I? Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.’ He took his hand from the rail, and with his back against the wall, dropped one foot disconsolately down to the stair below. ‘Nancy’s here already,’ he said. ‘She didn’t want to be late. But I’ll tell her to go home.’ He dropped down another stair, sliding his shoulders against the wall. His head was forward and his eyes looked at nothing. Virginia was stricken by the thought that she might be ruining his whole life.
‘No – wait,’ she said. ‘I’ll go with Nancy. I promised you, didn’t I? I’m not going back on that.’
Lennie’s head jerked quickly up towards her. ‘But the baby?’
‘She’ll be all right with my husband. She’ll sleep, I think,’ Virginia said, more to convince herself than him.
‘I’ll go and tell Nancy to wait.’ Lennie turned and hobbled swiftly down the stairs, looking up when he reached the bottom to flash up at Virginia a vast, adoring grin.
Virginia went down to tell Joe that she had decided to go out and plead for Lennie. When she had told him about it before, he had not liked it. He would not like it any better now. ‘I thought you were so worried about the baby,’ he would say, and she would never be able to explain to him how much she hated to go, but how clearly she knew that she must go.
Joe was talking to the girl in slacks with the long, straight, blonde hair. Ella, her name was. Her husband was in the other room. Virginia could hear his penetrating, inane laugh. Ella stood by herself at the bar, turning a glass round and round in her predatory hands and talking quietly to Joe.
Virginia went behind the bar. ‘What is it?’ Joe asked impatiently.
Virginia looked at Ella. Ella did not move, so she drew Joe away and talked to him in a low voice. Joe protested, as she knew he would: ‘I thought you were so worried about the baby.’
‘I am, but she seems all right now, and this may be Lennie’s last chance.’
‘Lennie, Lennie,’ he grumbled. ‘I swear you care more about that simpleton than your own child.’
Virginia tried to make him understand, while Ella looked at them out of the corner of her long eyes, with a smile flickering at the corner of her unchaste mouth. Joe was argumentative and a little excited, as if he had been drinking. Ella had probably been buying him drinks. Virginia knew that she did, just as she knew that Ella came to the Olive Branch to see Joe; but there was nothing Virginia could do about it, except hope for the best.
If the best did not happen, she was prepared to fight Ella, just as she had fought Mollie Mortimer, and been thrown out of the Chelsea house for doing it. She would not fight Joe. If he could find it possible to be unfaithful to her, their whole relationship would disintegrate into pieces that could never be put together; but she would fight any woman who tried to make that happen.
*
After Virginia had gone out, hurrying round the corner with the square, florid girl who looked much too robust for Lennie, Joe sat upstairs for a while listening to the baby’s quick, shallow breathing. From time to time he glanced into the crib. Jenny was not so flushed any more. She looked washed out, as if she had been through an exhausting ordeal.
Poor little devil. When she was older, Joe would tell her about this, and how he had watched over her hour after hour. Well – he looked at the clock – actually only half an hour, but it felt like hours. Hours since he had had a drink. No harm in going down to the bar for a little while. He had promised Virginia that he would not leave the room, but Virginia was hysterical about the baby, and much too nervous. He had never known her like this.
After the argument in the bar, Ella had said, smiling to herself: ‘She’s really got you where she wants you, hasn’t she?’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ Joe had said, pressing his hands on the bar with a gesture that showed the strength of his arms. ‘It’s quite the other way about.