The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [79]
‘I’m going up to see her,’ she said.
‘Stay away, if you know what’s good for you. She’ll only think you’re spying.’
‘No she won’t. She must feel dreadful, alone up there with that soaked log. I don’t think she has any friends. She’s talked them all away, except that sanctimonious sister of hers, and she wouldn’t want her at a time like this. She’d start quoting the Old Testament. I’m going up.’
She knocked on the door which led to the hall outside the Mortimers’ kitchen. Nobody heard, so she went through into the house. At the sound of her feet on the clotted linoleum of the hall, Mollie came flying down the stairs, her nose bright red, and her creased cotton housecoat buttoned up wrong down the front.
‘How dare you come in here as if you owned the place?’ she called out in her high, grating voice. ‘What do you want? I can’t see anyone now.’
‘I’m sorry, Mollie. I heard that Paul wasn’t well, and I wondered if there was anything I could do to help.’
‘Thank you, Virgie,’ Mollie said more calmly, descending the stairs. ‘Yes, Paul is ill, very ill indeed.’ She glanced upwards. ‘But he’ll pull out of it. He has these spells, you know. He’s never been strong.’ She paused with her hand on the banister post, and looked at Virginia with her unblinking, birdlike eyes, to see if she would accept this.
Virginia could not help admiring her for keeping up the pretence. The whole neighbourhood knew that Paul was an alcoholic, and Mollie must know that Virginia knew. Virginia felt sure that if Joe were in a drunken stupor, and somebody came to try to be nice to her, she would break down and confide all her misery.
Mollie kicked away a cat which came to rub itself against her white drumstick legs. She did not like the cats, which overran the house like cockroaches, and yet she never got rid of any of them.
‘You don’t look very well yourself, Virgie,’ she said, taking the attack. ‘You’re losing weight. You’d better be careful. In my opinion, this craze for slimming is most unbecoming.’
Virginia wished that she had brushed her hair and renewed her lipstick before coming up here. Mollie never lost an opportunity to tell you when you were not looking your best. ‘I’m not slimming,’ she said, and then less curtly: ‘Look, Mollie. Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?’
‘You can’t do anything for Paul, if that’s what you mean. You can’t go upstairs.’ Mollie moved quickly between Virginia and the staircase. ‘He’s much too ill. Nobody but me can nurse him. I’m the only person he will have near him. It’s a fact, Virgie, I don’t know what he would do without me when he has these spells. Why, I can’t even go out of the house in case he calls for me.’
Virginia could understand that she dared not leave the house for fear of what Paul might do. Although Joe had assured her that he was harmless, he had later told her that Paul had once become violent enough to be put into a strait-waistcoat. The doctor had sent a male nurse, but Mollie had been so nasty to the nurse that he had packed up his white coats and his soft shoes and his paper-backed thrillers and walked out of the house, leaving only the strait-waistcoat.
‘If you can’t go out, perhaps I could do your shopping for you,’ Virginia suggested.
‘You can if you like,’ Mollie said, as if she were conferring a favour. ‘I’ll give you a list. There isn’t much I need.’ Kicking aside the cats, she went to the kitchen table, and wrote out a shopping list as long as her arm. She searched in a tooled-leather handbag, and gave Virginia two pound notes. ‘Keep it separate from your own money,’ she said sharply. ‘Then you won’t get muddled with the change.’
Virginia felt sure that she knew exactly the price of everything on the list, and would count the change to the last halfpenny when she returned.
She went out of the front door. It seemed strange to walk down the shallow chequered steps to the street instead of up the steep stone steps from the basement. The whole street looked different from this angle, as it would look if Virginia were a lady with a houseful of rooms of her