The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [95]
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Weston House, which held Joe and Virginia’s flat and thirty others, was a squat fortress of stone slabs rising from the crisscross of narrow streets between Edgware Road and Lisson Grove. It was about fifty years old, and like every other building for acres round, it was indelibly marked by the sooty brand of Paddington and Marylebone stations. The stone slabs might once have been grey, or even white. Now they were pitted and black with a coating of grime that rubbed off on the clothes of scuffling children who knocked against its walls.
Some of the tenants pugnaciously cleaned the inside and the outside of the windows; some, making a pact with the railway, cleaned only the inside; some surrendered completely and cleaned neither side. The windows of the Ropers’ flat on the ground floor had rude words written in the grime outside, which Mrs Roper could read back to front as she sat and rocked the baby, and let the hours slide by with no work done.
Virginia, attacking the squalid legacy of Betty’s sister with energy, cleaned the inside of her windows on the third floor, and made Joe clean the outside. He sat on the sill with the window pushed into his stomach to hold him, and swabbed sketchily at the glass, making faces through it at Virginia, while the woman in the scarlet wrapper watched from her window in the house opposite.
Her name was Mrs Baggott. She was a widow, who lived alone with a parrot. That much was known, although no one could remember Mr Baggott, and no one could remember seeing or hearing the parrot. She spent most of her days and a great part of the night by the window, uncurtained, but closed both in summer and winter. It was said that she knew everything that went on in the street, and once when the American Military Police were looking for a deserter, they went to Mrs Baggott, and either she or the parrot or chance directed them to the room where the coloured soldier was hiding.
It was a Saturday afternoon when the moving-van brought Virginia’s furniture, and not only Mrs Baggott, but most of her neighbours on that side of the street were at their windows or on their steps to see the few pieces of furniture carried out of the van, and up the stone stairs which wound like a dark entrail up the middle of Weston House.
There were faces at the windows of the flats too, some leaning blatantly over the sill, some lurking behind the sooted panes. While the two men were trying to get the bed through the narrow front door of the flat, other front doors opened along the passage. Heads looked out, stared, and were withdrawn as they saw Virginia outside the flat in a pair of slacks pushing and giving advice and hindering, while Joe shouted impractical directions from the other side.
There was a great deal of curiosity about them at first. Virginia did not think that she looked different from the other young women who went in and out of the flats, to and from the shops, or their jobs. She did not think that Joe looked very different from the other men of his age, except that he was better-looking and wore his clothes with a better grace, even when it was only a sweater and an old pair of slacks. Nevertheless, they were newcomers, and therefore queer enough to be stared at.
People stared at Virginia when she met them on the stairs, and if two women were talking in the street when she went by they would stop talking and stare until she had passed. When she and Joe went out together, there always seemed to be someone watching. Defiantly, she would take Joe’s arm and press closer to him, because she had noticed that although the courting pairs walked entwined, the married couples walked a little distance apart, as if they