The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [42]
People were going in and out of Saint Paul’s. Virginia climbed the steps, and went in to that unbroken bubble of peace within the restless city. The organist was practising chords. The cathedral was full of sound and of people walking about, and yet it seemed deserted. Virginia stood isolated at the end of the nave. The quiet groups of sightseers in the side aisles seemed miles away from her. The organist was in another world. She stood emptily in the tall solitude of space under the vaulting roof, and waited for her angel. Where was he now? Was it not true, after all, that you were never alone?
Chapter 7
Joe Colonna went into the tiny, cluttered kitchen and stirred the spaghetti sauce. It smelled good. He tasted it. It was good, better than the one his father used to make. He crossed the passage into the one room which was his home in the Chelsea basement, and threw some more wood on the fire.
He was proud of that fireplace. All the other bed-sitting-rooms in which he had lived had electric fires, or gas stoves which popped and roared and dropped pieces of asbestos into the grate. The combination of a wood fire and an address in Chelsea were of proven value. The street was too far down the King’s Road, but it was still in Chelsea, and to be able to say: ‘I have a place in Chelsea’ was very different from saying: ‘I have a place in Fulham.’ The wood fire made something romantic out of the shabby basement room, with its covered bed that still looked more like a bed than a divan, and its window half below the pavement, where the feet passing beyond the area railings were on a level with your head.
Joe switched off the ceiling light and lit the lamp on the table by the window, which was laid for four. The leaping firelight made the other end of the room inviting. Derek’s girls would like this. Other girls had liked it. ‘Oh, a wood fire – how lovely!’ they cried, and in no time at all they were sitting on the floor with their shoes off, curled up and purring, thinking that they looked as attractive as the girls in films who were made love to in log cabins, with the camera trickily placed behind the flames.
Joe shook up the pillows on the divan, took a last look round the room, then put on his coat and went up the steep area steps to the street. He went into a wine shop in the King’s Road, and bought two bottles of cheap red wine and a bottle of whisky. After he had paid for them, he looked again into his wallet. There were no more pound notes in there, and this was only Wednesday. The girls would have to be satisfied with the red wine. He must make the whisky last.
Back in his room, he set the wine in front of the fire, and put the whisky in the cupboard under the kitchen sink. When he stood up, he looked at himself in the shaving-mirror. Smooth, the new haircut. Thank God his hair lay back naturally, without his having to flatten the wave out of it with grease. Black hair, like his father, and he had given Joe his dark Italian eyes and high ridge of cheek-bone. Of his mother’s docile, pallid features there was no trace.
Joe was better-looking now at thirty than he was as a young man. He had been too slight then, too narrow in the face, and the army uniform had at first looked too clumsy for him. But the war, and the first disciplined life he had known had filled him out and toughened him. It had taken the softness from his mouth and the smoothness from his skin. It had weighted his immature shoulders with a man’s muscles, and his inexperienced mind with the conviction that for a man who had nothing behind him, there was always a war on, even when the world was at peace.
While he was studying himself in the small circle of mirror, he heard a car door slam in the street above, and then voices on the pavement. Girls’ voices. One was giggling. Joe stood at the back of the other room, so that he could not be seen, and watched them coming down the stone steps. Which one belonged to Derek? One of the