The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [32]
She handed the sherry, sat down, and waited to be talked to. You did not start a conversation with Mrs Allen. If you tried, she answered shortly and changed the subject. She liked to ask the questions, and you had to answer. In a surprisingly short time, and without asking anything inquisitive, or appearing remotely interested, she had managed to find out quite a lot about Virginia.
While he was talking to his father, Felix kept looking at Virginia, wondering how she was faring. She smiled back at him reassuringly, and tried to look gay. It was bad enough for him to have such an uncomfortable mother, without being made aware of how she affected other people.
Felix did not ask for a drink until his father offered him one. They went to the table. Mr Allen accepted a straight gin, and sipped at it deliberately, without flinching.
‘Is there any vermouth, or anything, Mother?’ Felix asked. ‘I’m afraid I can’t drink like Dad.’
‘I believe there may be some orange juice in the kitchen,’ Mrs Allen said vaguely, as if the kitchen were as unattainable as Mars. ‘No, don’t go for it. It’s bad for Florence. Ring the bell, please.’
Felix rang the bell at the side of the fireplace, which housed a simulated log fire with a flickering electric glow, which gave very little heat and bore no resemblance to flames. After a long time, a maid appeared, an elderly woman as rigid as her mistress, who looked as though she had long ago lost whatever interest in life she might once have had.
There was another long wait while she fetched the bottle of orange squash, carrying the tall bottle in on a small tray, a feat which required some skill and a funereal tread.
Felix drank his gin and orange without pleasure. He looked at the small bottle of gin. Virginia knew that he needed another drink, but he did not take one, although he offered Virginia another sherry.
Virginia looked at Mrs Allen. Her glass was almost untasted. ‘No, thank you,’ she said, despising her cowardice, and wondering how she was going to keep awake.
Felix’s brother and his wife were late. Mrs Allen would not start dinner without them, and the wait was interminable. From time to time, the door opened noiselessly, and Florence looked in with mute inquiry. ‘Keep the roast warm,’ Mrs Allen would say. ‘We will wait.’ She looked as though she could wait indefinitely before she felt anything as stimulating as hunger.
Eventually the brother Edward arrived, puffing apologies for a faulty car, and bringing with him a wife in a blue crêpe dinner dress, who touched cheeks with Mrs Allen as if they had not been in the same family for years. She was a negative, pasty-faced woman, who obviously had dropped no stone into the turgid waters when she married into the Allen family.
Edward was older than Felix, a stout man with bulging eyes and a heavy breath, who would drink nothing and eat scarcely anything, because his life was organized to terror of his heart.
‘Nothing the matter with him, actually,’ Felix whispered to Virginia, while Mr Allen was dissecting the roast beef so slowly that it was cold before Florence handed it to anyone. ‘He’s read too many magazine articles, that’s all.’
‘I’ve never seen you look better, Eddie,’ he told his brother. Edward shook his head unbelievingly, patted his chest, and continued to look askance at the food on the other plates, and at the bottle of Algerian wine, which Florence carried round the table, pouring half a glass to each, well trained in how to make it go round.
After dinner, Mrs Allen took Virginia and Edward’s wife into the bedroom, where the dressing-table was covered with little pin-boxes and photographs in silver frames, and on the double bed were laid out the high-necked nightgown and the striped pyjamas, striking a shockingly intimate note.
It was impossible to think of Felix’s mother and father undressing and lying down in the same bed. Impossible to think that they could ever have conceived Edward and Felix, and that Mrs Allen had given birth to them. She must have closed her eyes and blanked out her mind.