The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [68]
‘Don’t worry, Mollie,’ Joe said, trying to laugh off his resentment at the intrusion. ‘She’s already got me where she wants me. Why didn’t you bring Paul? Let ‘em all come. We’re having open house.’
‘She did bring me,’ Paul said from the passage. ‘No room for me in the kitchen. Sorry to intrude on you like this.’
‘Glad to have you.’ Joe took Virginia out to meet their landlord. He was a tall, ungainly man, with a long stiff neck like a giraffe, and some trouble with his feet, which necessitated his wearing carpet slippers all the time he was in the house.
He gave Virginia a cold, shaky hand, and said: ‘Congratulations, my dear. You look as if you were much too good for Joe, but there again, you don’t look as if you would have married him if you thought so. If you see what I mean. I’m a bit fogged today. I hope you’ll be very happy.’ Then he slapped Joe on the shoulder, and said vaguely: ‘Good boy, good boy.’
They all went into the other room. Mollie exclaimed at the way Virginia had already tidied it. ‘It always looked a shambles, in my opinion,’ she said. Her opinion was the mainspring of her life. She gave it at the slightest opportunity, and believed that everything she said must be true, because she had said it.
‘No man has the slightest idea of keeping house,’ she declared, trying a chair with her hand before sitting on it. ‘I always told Joe: You’ve made a pigsty of this place, I always told him. Not,’ she added, catching Joe’s quick glance towards Virginia, ‘that I was ever down here more than a few times, to give messages, or a parcel. I believe in leaving the tenants alone, although the one we had before Joe, this schoolmistress, she used to beg and beg me to come down at night and keep her company. The poor soul was desperate with loneliness.’
‘So desperate that you eventually drove her away to find a place where she could get some peace and quiet,’ Paul said, and his long body shook with silent laughter. He folded himself gratefully into a chair, and rubbed his feet.
‘How can you say that when you know it’s not true? Don’t mind him,’ Mollie told Virginia. ‘He’s a dreadful man. In my opinion, he’s the most dreadful man I ever met.’
Joe could see that Virginia was still a little shaken from the crude interruption of her emotions, but she had recovered enough self-possession to be conscious of her position as hostess. In that easy, well-mannered way, which Joe would never openly admit to admiring, she asked: ‘What can I get you, Mrs Mortimer? Some tea or coffee? You’re our first visitor. You must have something.’
Like all self-centred people, Mollie could hear a question, and then answer it with something else from her own train of thought. ‘I must say,’ she announced, ‘Jo-Jo is the last person I would ever expect to get married. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he told me. I said so to Paul, didn’t I, Paul? Wake up there, old-timer, you can’t go to sleep when you’re paying a visit. The last man on earth, I said. I never was so surprised.’
‘Why is it so strange?’ Virginia asked, narrowing her eyes at Mollie. Joe could imagine these two women getting into a fight some day.
‘Well, my dear,’ Mollie shrugged her shoulders, as if it were obvious, ‘because he’s not the marrying kind, that’s all.’
‘Mollie, you don’t say that kind of thing to a girl who’s just got married,’ Joe said uneasily.
‘Well, I’m sorry. I have to say what I think. You must take me as you find me.’
Virginia certainly knew how to behave herself. Most of the girls Joe had known would have put their claws out and scratched back. He would not have thought any worse of them, but he thought all the more of Virginia for ignoring it, and renewing her offers of hospitality.
‘Which shall it be?’ she asked smilingly. ‘Tea or coffee? It won’t take me a minute to make either.’
‘I don’t care for anything,’ Mollie said. ‘Thank you – what is your name again? I can’t call you Mrs Colonna. Virginia. Good. I shall call you Virgie.’
‘No one ever calls her that,’ Joe said.
‘All the more reason then why I should. Virgie and I are