The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [143]
Two or three times in the night, she would tiptoe heavily into Virginia’s room to see whether she was asleep. Often Virginia was awake, and Mrs Benberg would shuffle downstairs in her voluminous wrapper and furry slippers to heat some milk, and would sit in the frayed wicker armchair and talk about anything that came into her head until she had talked Virginia into drowsiness.
‘Shall I ever sleep well again, do you think?’ Virginia asked one night. ‘I haven’t slept properly since Jenny died.’
‘Don’t be neurotic,’ Mrs Benberg said. ‘Of course you will. You’ve had the peace knocked out of you for a while, but it will return in due season, like the income-tax demand.’
‘I can’t believe that anything will come back for me the way it was,’ Virginia said. ‘It’s all changed. I always thought I was so lucky. You always said that things would go well for me.’
‘So they have, in a way.’ Mrs Benberg shifted in the chair, which creaked protestingly at every movement of her large body. ‘You’re alive, aren’t you? Isn’t that something? Most people would have been killed, but not you. You’re too tough.’
‘I used to think I was. I’m not so sure now. I’m not sure of anything. You always think you’re immune, and that things like this only happen to other people. Then when they happen to you, it knocks the bottom out of your confidence. Tiny – my old nurse – she used to teach me that there was an angel looking out for me. I used to believe that. I don’t any more.’
‘Oh – angels.’ Mrs Benberg heaved herself out of the creaking chair and stood by the bed, vast as the Statue of Liberty in her long, faded wrapper. ‘Papist stuff. But I’ve an open mind. I’ve nothing against angels, for those who want to put their trust in them. If you believe in them, that makes them believable. If you don’t, not. It’s as simple as that. I can’t imagine that angels are so foolhardy as to waste their time fussing over people who don’t believe in them.’
‘I don’t believe in anything,’ Virginia said. ‘I feel as if there was nothing left to depend on. I don’t know what is going to happen to me.’
‘I do,’ Mrs Benberg said cheerfully. ‘I see it all. But I’m not telling. You’ll find out for yourself in your own good time. At this moment, I see that you’ll go to sleep if I take my loud tongue and my big carcass out of here, and let you get some rest. I put something in your milk. Not poison. Something the doctor gave me.’ She winked at Virginia, then bent to kiss her, her heavy, untidily braided hair swinging over her shoulders like hunks of rope.
She turned off the light, and Virginia lay in the dark and waited for sleep. A street lamp shone into the room through the gap in the curtains which did not meet because Mrs Benberg had shrunk them by too many drastic washings with boiling water and soda. The lamp threw a broken patch of light into the corner of the room, just as the lamp outside the house on the hill had sent its patch of light into the corner of the room where she slept as a child. That was the corner towards which Tiny used to nod before she left the room. ‘You look after my Jinny, now,’ she would adjure the angel, which she had summoned as an antidote to nightmares.
Poor old Tiny. Had she been disappointed not to find her angel waiting for her outside the gate of Heaven when she climbed wearily up there at last? But if Tiny had found Heaven and a gate, and Saint Peter with a big golden key like the ones with which Royalty opened new buildings, and all the other things that Tiny had believed, then there would be an angel too. Everything or nothing, and Mrs Benberg had said that as long as you believed in things, that made them true for you. Was that what she had said? Something like that. …
Virginia felt dreamy and confused. The street lamp had sent her back into the memory of her old bedroom, and she could almost hear Tiny’s hobbling step in the passage outside, coming to listen whether Virginia was asleep. No, that was a firm, heavy step. Mrs Benberg listening at the door to reassure herself once