The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [94]
Virginia understood what Betty meant when she saw the flat. It was two tiny rooms at the corner of a blackened building, with a kitchen even smaller than the one in the Chelsea basement. Betty’s sister had left it in a state of indescribable filth, and Virginia did not attempt to describe it to Joe. She merely took him there, and stood in the doorway between the two rooms, watching him while he looked round, making a face at the smell.
‘We can’t live here, Jin,’ he said. ‘This is awful.’
‘We must, until we can find something better. Mollie will turn us out. It’s no good imagining she won’t, just by not thinking about it. She doesn’t even speak to me any more if I meet her in the street. We’ve got to live somewhere. We’ll be happy here, darling. We’ll be together. That’s all that matters.’ She put her arms round him, and tried to rub the despondency from his mouth with her cheek. ‘I’ll clean it up. I’ll come every evening after work, and wash and scrub. I’ll soon get rid of the smell and all this foulness.’ She kicked at the sea of dirty paper and rags and old tins which surged about their feet. ‘You can do some painting. You told me you’d worked with a painter once. It would be fun working on it together.’
‘The landlord ought to paint it,’ Joe said. ‘Tell him we won’t take it unless he redecorates it.’
‘How can you say that? Anyone would think I was the one who had been poor, not you. You don’t say those things to those kind of people; not about places like this, and at the rent he’s asking. We’re lucky to get it, don’t you see? We can’t make a fuss about it.’
‘I do make a fuss.’ Joe went to the grease-stained alcove which was the kitchen, and lifted up one of the burner rings, which was caked half an inch thick with blackened food. ‘I hate this place.’
‘You won’t,’ Virginia said. ‘I’m going to cable Helen and ask her to cable the warehouse to let me take out some of the furniture. She won’t mind. She’s much mellower now. She’s been put on the New York Social Register. We can have my bed, and as much of my bedroom furniture as will go into that rabbit hutch.’ She looked through the doorway at the bedroom, with its small dirty window and its walls scribbled over by Betty’s sister’s baby. ‘And we’ll take some rugs and the kitchen table and some chairs – oh, it will be fine. It will be our own. We’ll be by ourselves. No Mollie coming down all the time to make trouble, and no Paul getting drunk.’
‘The neighbours will do that,’ Joe said, ‘from what I’ve seen of them.’
‘Let them. We shan’t care. This will be our own place. The basement was always Mollie’s. This will be our first real home. We’ll be happy.’ She found that she was clenching her fists, insisting on their happiness, willing him to believe in it.
Joe looked out of the window at the street full of children, at the house opposite, one of a tenement row, where a woman in a scarlet wrapper sat at an upstairs window, doing nothing, and another woman with her head tied up in a scarf furiously whitened steps, and screamed at one of the children.
‘How can you be happy with me?’ He put his hands in his pockets and sat limply on the cracked and peeling window-sill. ‘I’m a washout. You never should have married me.’
‘Oh, stop it.’ Virginia pulled him to his feet and pulled his hands out of his pockets. She hated to see him slouching and despondent. She liked to see him upright and pleased with himself, which was the way nature meant him to be. ‘I married you because I loved you. Do you hear? I love you.’
‘God help you,’ he said, looking round the filthy room. ‘Look where it’s got you.’
‘I like it,’ she lied. ‘It’s ours. Let’s have a baby, Joe. There would be room. Betty’s sister had one – six, I should think, judging by the mess. We’ll have a baby.’
‘My God,’ he said, ‘what next?’ But he began to grin, tickled by the idea of himself and Virginia and a baby in the tiny flat above the raucous street. He laughed aloud. ‘You’re a wonderful girl, Jin.’ He hugged her with his old exuberance, tightening his grip until he could make her squeal. ‘Don’t leave me.’
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