The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [96]
After a while, Virginia began to say ‘Hullo’ to anyone who stared. She wanted to get to know them. It felt wrong to be living among them, and to see them every day and know their clothes and their habits, and to hear through the thin walls of the flats all the noises they made, without knowing who they were.
Some of the people did not answer. Their stare changed from curiosity to surprise, as if a word was the last thing they expected to hear coming from Virginia’s mouth. Some of them answered grudgingly, and hurried away, unwilling to commit themselves too far with this stranger. Only Mrs Batey was friendly right from the start. She lived on the same floor as Virginia, in one of the larger flats at the end of the passage. Although she had five children to keep her busy, she usually managed to be looking out of her door when Virginia left for work in the morning, or returned in the evening.
She was a flushed, sloppy woman, with turned-over feet and a figure which Miss Sunderland would have given her eyes to corset. She had a large, loose smile, with many teeth missing, and a cheerful voice which was never much less than a shout. In the evening, she would yell a greeting down the echoing stone passage, and if Virginia went closer to stop her yelling, she would often find herself scooped into the Bateys’ dishevelled flat and set down at the kitchen table with tea and buns before she could find a way out.
The Batey children were all table high and grinning, except the baby, who was permanently in an uncushioned perambulator in the middle of the kitchen floor, tied in by a chewed dog leash. When Virginia could not eat the buns, she fed them to the children, who begged round her like shameless little dogs. When the baby screamed and strained at the leash to make the pram rock, one of the children would pick a piece of bun off the floor and cram it into his mouth like a comforter.
The children were all fat and filthy and surprisingly healthy. Virginia was clean and thin, and therefore, by Mrs Batey’s standards, unhealthy. She treated her like an extra child, and tried to fill her out on starches. Scarcely an evening went by without Mrs Batey’s thunderous knock on Virginia’s door, and Mrs Batey’s exuberant entrance, sure of her welcome, with a plate of cakes or biscuits, or a paper full of home-made toffee.
If a curtain wanted altering, Mrs Batey would tear it off its hooks and take it away to her own flat to shorten it with a crooked hem, which Virginia would have to unpick late at night when there was no fear of Mrs Batey coming in and catching her. If she saw a pile of clothes waiting to be ironed, Mrs Batey would scoop them up too, and bear them off to the devastation of her flat-irons, sprinkling them so enthusiastically that they often returned damper than when they left home.
If she did not like the look or sound of the old gas stove, Mrs Batey would bring in her husband, who was a gas-fitter, driving him before her like a hostage, and standing over him while he took the stove to pieces before Virginia had a chance to cook supper, and left it dismantled overnight until he could bring a spare part.
Since Mrs Batey was the only friend she had in the flats, Virginia put up no defence against her ministrations, but Joe began to mutter under his breath as soon as her shining red face appeared round the door. Mrs Batey took no notice. She was used to men, and had long ago discounted them, except as the begetters of children. Women were what mattered. Women were the ones who made the wheels go round. If she had her way, there would be only women in the government. ‘Then you’d see the price of bacon come down!’
Unlike most mothers, she favoured her daughters over her sons, and when she was in Virginia’s flat, she gave her conversation and the warmth of her heart only to Virginia, and ignored Joe, except to push him aside if he was in her way when she was heading for something that needed tackling.
She was a great one for tackling. She would tackle anything.
‘I’ll tackle