The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [97]
‘Nosey old bitch,’ Joe said, when she had gone away with his socks to darn. ‘Why can’t you keep her out of here? She only comes in out of curiosity, to see what we’re up to. Why are you so nice to her, Jin? You weren’t half as nice to Mollie, and she wasn’t half as much nuisance.’
‘She wasn’t half as nice. Mrs Batey is friendly. I like her. She’s the only one who has tried to be friendly. The other people all look so suspicious. They look at me as if I didn’t belong here.’
‘You don’t,’ Joe said. ‘Not yet. I’ve lived in this sort of place before. When you first come, you’re a stranger for weeks, sometimes for ever, if they don’t like you. You can’t expect to jump right in and make friends with everyone right away. They don’t trust you. Why should they?’
‘Wouldn’t you, if you lived here, and I moved in as a new tenant?’
‘I’d be hammering on your door with my tongue hanging out,’ he said, ‘but that’s different. Making a woman doesn’t take as long as making friends, not in a place like this. Or anywhere, for that matter. But in this place, it takes longer to make friends. Why worry about it? We’ll be out of here long before these people give themselves a chance to find out what they’re missing.’
He was wrong. The weeks went by into winter, and it was very cold in the flat, with only a small gas fire in the sitting-room and no heating in the bedroom, but Virginia and Joe stayed on.
What else could they do? The rent was low, but it was all they could afford. Joe had been in and out of two or three temporary jobs, but he was no nearer to being the success Virginia had promised herself he should be. He had sold the typewriter to pay a debt, and as far as she knew, he had destroyed what he had written of the book. When she asked him about it, he said: ‘If it was published, everyone would know I’d been in prison, and how would you like that?’
‘You could use another name.’
‘Don’t be silly. Why should I sweat my guts out to write a book if nobody’s going to know I wrote it?’
Virginia accepted this, just as she accepted the realization that Etta Lee’s and the flat at Weston House were no longer a stop-gap until something better came along, but a regular pattern of life. A different pattern to any she had known, but one to which her rugged youth enabled her to adapt herself without discouragement. Weston House was dirty and tawdry and lacking in all the refinements and many of the essentials of comfort. The street was alive with poverty – but it was alive. Shame and tragedy and failure were here, but so was courage; and the easy, unsubtle humour that relished the sound of a laugh; and the insidious, gossiping fellowship of women caught in the same boat, with small hope of leaving it for something better. Virginia was in the same boat, and the women began to accept her. The women’s tongues ruled the neighbourhood. They could make or break a character. The men merely lived there, and took little part in the dramas and intrigues and confidences with which the women painted some colour into life.
Gradually, Virginia began to know her neighbours. She was no longer a stranger. Other new tenants came and were stared at, and Virginia, from her vantage point of resident, found that she was just as curious about them as people had been about her. Imperceptibly she became part of the life of the flats, belonging to it just as surely as the Bateys and old Mr McElligott and the Ropers and the flashy Dales and poor Miss Few, and all the other couples and families and widows and spinsters and lonely old men who made up the population of Weston House.
She began to know some of the people who lived across the street, although in winter there was not the same pavement and doorstep camaraderie that the summer brought forth. She never got to know Mrs Baggott. Nobody did, because Mrs Baggott never came down from her eyrie to speak to anyone. She had not been seen