The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [82]
Joe, who had never done this work before, was proud of the way he had picked it up. No one could tell him he was slow. He could do anything as fast as anybody. ‘Lay off me, Mr Fuller, for Christ’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘I’m doing my work. I’m not going to get my hands caught in this bloody machine for you or anyone else.’
‘You watch your language,’ Frank said in his creaking, sorrowful voice, ‘or I’ll have you in the office. Don’t think they wouldn’t fire you on my say so. We can get a dozen better than you any day of the week.’
Joe bit his lip and said no more for a while. As much as he disliked the job, he did not want to lose it yet. Virginia was proud of him because of it. When he first came back from the employment office and said that he had found work, and watched her spreading beam of delight, he had been half afraid that he would wipe the wide smile off her face when he told her what the job was. She might not like to be the wife of a factory hand; but to his surprise, she took it in her stride as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to tell her. She accepted it as easily as if she had lived in a mill town all her life, and appeared to take pride and pleasure in washing out his overalls and getting up early to feed him and get him off for the train.
He was earning more than she was too. That was the way it should be, although she still insisted on paying the rent and the housekeeping expenses out of her own salary. She had never asked for his pay packet. He knew that many of the men had to hand theirs over as soon as they came home on Friday, and woe betide them if the seal was not intact. But Virginia was not like that. She did not even ask him how much he was earning.
She came to him sometimes and asked him for money to buy extra food, or stockings for herself, or stuff to put on her face. It was flattering when she did that. Joe enjoyed putting his hand in his pocket and pulling out the wad of notes, and peeling one off. It made him feel like somebody. He had not felt like somebody for a long time, not since the publisher had written so encouragingly about the book, which had somehow come unstuck since then, and had lain untouched in its drawer for weeks.
Perhaps there was something in this idea of being a respectable husband with a steady job. Who would have thought that he would end up like this? Joe marvelled sometimes at the picture of himself as a solid breadwinner, trudging off to the station in the yellow morning light.
What was Virginia trying to do to him? No, be fair to her. It was his doing. He cared enough about her to want to make her happy. This job on the drill was a dead loss, and he was going to black Frank’s eye for him some day, but he would stick to it until he found something better. It was worth it to have Jin so pleased with him, and making so much fuss of him when he came home, treating him like the lord and master he should be if this marriage was going to amount to anything more than a lot of glorious tumbles in bed.
Almost worth it. When Joe had been at the factory for six weeks, Frank told him dolefully that it was time he learned to use a drill properly, and Joe struck him full in his wet moustache and walked out.
How was he going to tell Virginia? She would be disappointed. He would tell her that the factory was laying people off, but she would still be disappointed. Well, let her be. It wasn’t his fault. No man could be expected to take that kind of stuff day after day from an old man who would have been laid off long ago if he had not toadied to the management.
The job was nothing, anyway. Miles below what he could get if he chose. He would never have taken it if Virginia had not pushed him into it after he lost that bet. Joe worked himself round to thinking that it was Virginia’s fault that he had ever gone into a factory. Thus he did not mind so much telling her that he had got himself out of it.
He told her belligerently, prepared to shut her up if she made a fuss about