The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [47]
It was childishness. It was imagination. It was the wine and the whisky and the wood-smoke in that stuffy basement room. She held out, telling herself these things, for three days. Then she did what she had known all the time that she would do.
*
Joe had decided that he would wait for a week, and then telephone Virginia. He would telephone her at the office, where she could not talk freely or for long. She would have to make up Ler mind quickly, with less time to think of an excuse.
He did not have to wait for a week. A few days after the supper party, a letter came. The handwriting was large and semi-legible. The notepaper was thick and good.
‘Please telephone me as soon as possible,’ she had written. ‘I want you to do something for me.’
Joe allowed her to wait a day, then he rang the number of the magazine.
‘Editorial.’ Her voice sounded business-like. When she knew who it was, she said: ‘Oh.’ He heard her take a breath. ‘I can’t talk now,’ she said quickly. ‘I wish you had called me at the flat. I’ll have to explain when I see you. Can I see you?’
‘Why not?’ He saw himself grinning in the mirror that was set into the telephone box above the slots for money. ‘When?’
‘Tonight if you can. It’s important. There’s something I – oh, look, I’ll have to ring off.’
‘I’ll be waiting,’ he said, as he heard her put down the receiver with an agitated clatter.
*
Joe had lighted the fire again. He had made the room look as it had looked the other night, with the pink lamp on the table, and the other end of the room lit only by the shifting flames.
When Virginia came in, she went straight to the fire, looked into it for a moment, then turned and said with the defiance of nervousness: ‘I want you to hypnotize me again.’
Joe laughed, and came over to her slowly. ‘That’s a good one,’ he said. ‘What do you think I am – Svengali?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you are. You’ll think I’m idiotic, but something happened the other night, and it wasn’t finished. I want to finish it.’
‘You’re right, it wasn’t finished,’ he said, staring at her coolly. ‘It only just began.’
‘How do you know?’ She frowned. ‘I don’t think you know quite what you did, but somehow it worked, and I want you to do it again.’ She sat down facing the fire with her head up, gripping the arms of the chair, as if she were going to be electrocuted. ‘Do it quickly, and let’s get it over.’
‘Get it over? What’s the hurry? Let’s have a drink and talk. Then if you still want to play games – we’ll see.’
‘I don’t want a drink. I had too much the other night. That may have been the trouble. Please do it again. Come over here, in front of the fire. Do what you did before, and see if you can put me to sleep.’
‘Why do you want me to hypnotize you?’ Joe stood in front of her, standing easily, with his hands in his pockets and his well-shaped head on one side. ‘I didn’t think you liked it very much the other night. You looked like death.’
‘I had a dream. I can’t forget it. You see, I was – oh, I can’t tell you. It sounds absurd. But I have to get back into the dream again. Haven’t you ever come out of a marvellous dream, and fought against waking up, trying to fall back in again? I’ve tried to get back every night, but nothing happened. I thought perhaps you could do it for me.’
Joe shrugged his shoulders. ‘Funny way to pass an evening, but if you insist, I’ll try. I’ll need a key though. Mine isn’t a Yale.’
‘Give me my bag.’ Virginia did not want to move now that she was in the chair. There were two keys to the flat in her purse. She gave one to Joe and settled back in the chair, closing one eye and staring fixedly with the other.
Joe started the same rigmarole which he had acted before. Virginia stared at his eye through the hole in the key, trying to recapture that swooning sense of drifting right away from the room. When it happened before, it had not been a gradual loss of consciousness, like going naturally to sleep. It