The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [46]
The garden looked neglected. The lettuces were going to seed in dry spires. The raspberries were straggling and tangled. When she walked towards the roses, she saw that the big flower-heads were wilting, and dropping pale petals on to the weeds that covered the ground.
Instead of being desolate in its neglect, the small garden held between its walls a hush of content. She knew that she had come here from a long way away, and that in the corner beyond the overblown roses was what she had come to see. The sun struck over the wall at that corner. It shone full in her face, and as its lower edge reached the bricks, and the shadow of the wall crept out over her feet, she was conscious of a deepening joy. Her happiness grew as the sun sank lower. She was drowning in the well of peace within the garden walls.
The sun had almost disappeared, and she knew that when its burning rim slipped below the wall, in the corner where the peach tree spread its arms, she would see what she was looking for.
She could feel it now, could feel its blessed presence, as the branches of the peach tree spread like wings. It was the answer to everything. It was – she reached out with a cry, as someone pulled her roughly back by the shoulder, and Derek was shouting in her ear: ‘Wake up, Jinny! For God’s sake, wake up!’
She leaned against the back of the chair and looked at him.
‘God,’ he said, pushing back his hair, ‘you had me scared. What happened to you?’
‘She was faking,’ Nora said scornfully. ‘What a silly trick to play. You had the boys all excited. Joe thought he’d started something he couldn’t stop.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I knew what I was doing. You really were asleep, weren’t you?’
Virginia wanted to cry. She had been within reach of something lovely, and now it was gone. She could hardly remember where she had been. A garden, was it? It was slipping away from her. What was it she was going to see?
She looked round at their faces: Derek still flustered, and sobered with alarm, Nora laughing at her, the strange man Joe leaning against the mantelpiece with his hands in his pockets and something like triumph on his face.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing happened. I didn’t feel anything. I must have dozed off for a moment. I am rather tired. It’s late, Derek, I think I’d better go home.’
Joe did not say anything. Derek looked a question at Nora.
‘You two go on,’ Nora said quickly, ‘if Jinny wants to. It’s early yet. I’ll stay a little while so as not to break up Joey’s party.’
*
In the days that followed, Virginia could not get the dream out of her mind. Was it a dream? She seemed to have fallen asleep, and yet no dream had ever seemed so real. Real at the time, but faded now beyond recovery. All she could remember was the feeling of reality, and of the deep and drowning peace. Vaguely, there was a garden, rose petals on the ground, the spread branches of a peach tree, and that haunting sense of having been within grasp of something she had travelled all her life to see.
If only she could get back there again! Every night, she tried to recapture the dream, thinking herself back into the garden as she lay in bed; but she could not dream. She could not even fall asleep.
How had it happened? Did that man really have something to do with it – that strange, conceited man with the dark face that kept coming into her mind as she lay awake and struggled to sleep?
She drifted through her work by day, and fretted through the nights, thankful that Helen had gone away, and could not question why Virginia was out of bed making coffee when she should have been asleep.
Joe. Joe Colonna. The last kind of man to be a friend for Derek. The kind of man you met unexpectedly, remembered for a while, but did not meet again. What had he done? What power did he have to open the