The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [98]
Mrs Fagg, who lived on the ground floor of the same house, and was the only woman on the street who whitened her steps every day in rain, sun, or fog, bought Mrs Baggott’s groceries, leaving them outside her door, and picking up the money that Mrs Baggott left there. Jacky, the Ropers’ eldest boy, who had a newspaper round, took up the paper and the milk; but he had never seen Mrs Baggott, except once when he looked through the keyhole and saw her glaucous eye looking into his from the other side.
The speculations about Mrs Baggott were part of the neighbourhood folk-lore. Some said that she had a disfiguring disease, which would terrify anyone who saw her face. Some said that the disease was leprosy, and talked darkly of calling in the authorities. Others said that she had her dead husband still up there, or a hoard of precious jewels, or that she was in communication with the powers of darkness, through the parrot. Children were brought up on fables about Mrs Baggott, and threatened with her when they were naughty.
The American military policeman who had tramped up the stairs in his dazzling white belt and gaiters was the only person who had spoken to Mrs Baggott within memory. When he came down again, the crowd waiting for him outside Mrs Fagg’s house had planned to ask him what the old lady was like; but he looked so unapproachable under his severe white helmet, and his belt and gaiters were so inhumanly white, that they let him drive away in his shining jeep without daring to ask him anything.
These things and many others Virginia came to know as the winter went by and the noisy, dirty neighbourhood became part of her life. She knew about the railway accident that had killed Mrs Fagg’s husband, and word for word what Mrs Fagg had said when she was taken into the waiting-room of the little country station to identify him. She knew that Amy Lewis, who lived next door to Mrs Fagg, was in love with a married man. She had heard Amy’s side of it, a tearful rush of confidences one evening when Joe was out. She had heard, and so had most of the street, Amy’s father’s side of it, when he shouted after his daughter as she went out in her best dress to meet her lover.
Virginia knew that old Mrs Bugle’s children were trying to get her into an institution, that Mrs Pickett had been longer under an anaesthetic than anyone else at St Mary’s hospital, and that Mrs Roper often spent her evenings in the Five Horseshoes, leaving her children alone. The eldest Roper girl would sometimes carry the baby up the stairs, looking for someone who could stop it crying. Virginia had taken it in once or twice, but she could not quiet it or feed it, although it looked half starved, so she had taken it across to Mrs Batey, who could do anything with any baby, except keep it clean. Her own baby had his underwear taken off once a week in winter and then only just long enough to rush on a new set of vests and binders and petticoats, before the air could get at him.
Virginia knew that Ronnie Dale was in trouble over the payments on his flamboyant new motor cycle, and that his wife was eating her heart out for a beaver coat. She had seen the medal that Mr McElligott won in the war for pulling a man two stone heavier than himself from under a toppling wall. She had seen the photographs of Miss Few’s family, stately people, with an impressive house in the background. She had listened to Miss Few’s moist-eyed tales of the days when she had her own lady’s maid; although everyone knew, and had taken care to tell Virginia, that she had been the lady’s maid, and the stately people her employers.
Virginia knew every detail of Mrs Batey’s life history, peppered with confinements, and with the rousing battles which broke out periodically