The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [142]
‘Don’t tell my mother. Please don’t let anyone tell my mother what’s happened,’ Virginia had begged. ‘I don’t want to see her … and listen to her. Not yet.’ That was the only thing she had asked. For the rest, she had submitted without protest to everything that was arranged for her, and she now lay listlessly on the narrow, humpy bed, among the boyish relics of Jim’s schooldays in the small front bedroom of Mrs Benberg’s house.
Life had stopped. Whatever future there might be was indiscernible, hidden round a corner which she had not the energy to negotiate. She might as well be here as anywhere else. The meaningless days and nights ran into each other, and although the doctor said that she could get up, it did not seem to matter whether she got out of bed again or not.
Jim was home on leave, relegated to the downstairs settee and perfectly happy about it. Like his mother and father, he could not do enough for Virginia. He was in and out of her room all day with a joke, or a present, or flowers, or an armful of magazines. ‘Something to cheer you up,’ he would say, darting his chubby, beaming face round the door, with his curly hair on end and his cheeks on fire from the wind in the street.
He could not cheer her up, but at least he could give her his bedroom. He was proud of that. ‘Think nothing of it,’ he said, when Virginia apologized for keeping him out of his bed. ‘Of course you’re not spoiling my leave. As a matter of fact, it’s simply made this leave for me, having you here. I’m falling in love with you,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I never met a girl like you, and I don’t suppose I ever shall again, so I might as well make the most of having you here.’
Like his parents, he was devotedly eager to help Virginia, and took as much pleasure as they did in doing it. Disaster brought out all that was best in the Benbergs. They rallied unswervingly to the challenge as if it were a crusade, and subordinated all their other interests to Virginia, around whose bed the life of the flimsy little house now revolved. For Jim, she was a sensational figure, unattainable, but an object of dazzled worship because she had taken part in the kind of drama for which his own cheery life would never be the stage.
When she heard Jim’s breezy tattoo on the door, Virginia always turned her face aside, and kept the right side against the pillow while she talked to him. She was ashamed of the hideous raw scar which ran from her temple almost to the angle of her jaw. She had looked at herself once in a mirror, and then she had asked Mrs Benberg to take the mirror away, so that she could not see the appalling stigma which she bore in memory of Joe.
She had wept when she looked in the mirror, but not only for her ruined face, and because the doctor would not predict how well the wound would heal. When she wept, weakly, hopelessly among the china animals and the schoolboy books and photographs in Jim’s room, her tears were for Joe, and for the terrible way his life had ended.
She knew that her mother would say that she was well out of it, because of what he had done to her. That was why she could not bear to see Helen. Even Spenser might say that. It was what everyone would say. Only Mrs Benberg understood that her marriage to Joe had held the enchantment of a dream as well as the horror of a nightmare, and that the awakening was not merciful, but bitterly sad.
Mrs Benberg was a tireless and enthusiastic nurse. She scoured the neighbouring shops for delicacies. Her spirited step on the stairs rattled the little house countless times a day as she ran up to see what she could do to make Virginia comfortable. Unlike Jim, who was always trying to tease a laugh out of Virginia, Mrs Benberg did not try to cheer her up. ‘What’s the percentage?’ she said. ‘You’re wretched now. You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t, so it’s no use my trying to bully you into being happy. That will come later, and no doubt