The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [51]
Mary provided the club’s local colour. William, with gleaming spectacles and a round head of neatly-brushed hair, was a more stable figure in the background. He dressed soberly and kept the accounts straight, and the cook reasonably hygienic, and the barman moderately sober.
Joe had come into the club one night with a friend called Jackson, who was wanted by the police. It was in the days of the roulette wheel. Jackson had disappeared early, after a warning telephone call from one of his scouts, but Joe had stayed on and lost all the money he had with him, and his watch and cuff-links as well.
As he was out of a job at the time, William, who was the kindest of men, put him temporarily on the pay-roll, tolerating Joe’s irregular attendance as long as he would do any job that was necessary while he was on the premises.
Sometimes Joe helped the cook. Sometimes he worked behind the scenes of the theatre, or had a walking-on part, or took the money at the door, or was sent out to do the marketing. He was the barman at the moment, since William had failed to prevent the last bartender from pouring part of every cocktail he made into a jug and drinking the mixture in the men’s room.
Virginia found Joe behind the bar, reading the evening paper with his feet up on a crate of ginger ale. It was early yet, and there were only a few people in the restaurant, the solitary desperadoes who turned in for a drink on their way home from work. Mary was sitting at a corner table writing letters with a quill pen. He looked up as Virginia came in, and gave her the smile which could not help being a leer, even when it was only meant to be friendly.
‘Joe,’ he called across the room, in his cracked lisp, ‘the missus is here.’
As Virginia was the first girl who had been seen in Joe’s company for so long at a time, it was the club joke that he was as fettered as if he were married.
Joe lowered the paper, but did not put down his feet. ‘Hullo, Jin,’ he said, without surprise. She came to the club on most nights when he was working there. It did not matter. She could not be coy and elusive with Joe. That would have bored him. Sometimes she made herself stay away, to prove that she did not need him, but she always came back quite soon. He was pleased to see her, but he would not say that he had missed her.
Sometimes when she came, he would be in the back room, where women were not encouraged to go. Mary would tell her: ‘Go home. You’re wasting your time,’ but the good-hearted William would interrupt the poker game to tell Joe that Virginia was waiting for him.
Occasionally, when he was winning, Joe came out almost at once. More often Virginia waited in vain, helping William and the half-caste girl Betty to serve the food, so that she would not appear too obviously abandoned, until it grew late, and she had to go away without seeing Joe.
Virginia went behind the bar and began to polish glasses for Joe, who hated to do that. He sat with one arm on the bar and watched her. He was wearing a white shirt without a tie. In the open neck of the shirt, the trunk of his throat was dark and strong.
‘Joe,’ she said, still busy with the cloth, ‘the missus is going to give you your freedom.’ She tried to make it sound like a joke, because she did not like saying it.
‘Tired of me?’ he asked casually, knowing that she was not.
‘Helen says we’re sailing on the eleventh of May. I shan’t be seeing you much longer.’
‘Just as well for you,’ he said, getting up to make a drink for a man who had signalled from one of the tables. ‘Ending this is probably the most sensible thing you’ve done. You never should have started it.’
‘I started it?’ She followed him to the other end of the bar, where he was bending to get ice. ‘How can you lie like that?’
‘Did I ask you to come back to my room?’ He grinned at her over the cocktail shaker. ‘It was you who came, with your cooked-up tale of wanting to be