The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [99]
‘Just like Edgar,’ Mrs Batey said cheerfully, ‘to do it when a copper was looking. That one never had any sense. I don’t know where he’d be without me to look after him. The magistrate said as much. “Mrs Batey,” he said, “if you hadn’t come to court and spoken for him, I’d have given him ten days.” “Big help that would be to me, your honour,” I said, “with four kids to feed.”’
All these things Virginia learned as the winter went by, and the end of the old year was swallowed up by the boisterous festivities of Christmas and of a very different New Year’s Eve from the one which had found her in Felix’s prosperous car, listening to the midnight stroke of Big Ben. The neighbourhood became her part of London. The people at Weston House became her friends, and even the dark, uncomfortable little flat on the third floor, where she fought to keep happiness as well as passion in her marriage to Joe, became dear to her, because it was home.
Joe never accepted Weston House as philosophically as Virginia did. He still grumbled and talked about getting away from it, although he would not do anything to make that possible. He found some objection to all the jobs Virginia suggested he might try, and such jobs as he did have from time to time barely kept him in drink and cigarettes.
He was not particularly affable to the neighbours, although they were the kind of people among whom he was brought up. But he had grown away from them, and he did not want to go back to their narrow, needy world. He had made friends with some of the men. Not the Mr Bateys and the Mr McElligotts and the colourless, compliant men who made up the majority, but the rebellious few, the vagabonds, who were either not tied down by a wife and family, like the smooth-tongued Jack Corelli, who would get on a box at Speakers’ Corner for anyone who paid him, or who were tied so loosely that they never felt the pull, like the roving Will Roper, who worked with a circus, and came home unexpectedly about four times a year, usually in the middle of the night.
Joe and Jack Corelli had brave schemes for making big money quickly. They never came to anything. They were doomed from the start by lack of funds or enterprise, but they kept Joe’s enthusiasm alive, and so Virginia did not discourage them. She neither liked nor trusted Jack Corelli, but she bore with him when he came to the flat with his violent shirts and his bombastic talk, just as Joe had to bear with Mrs Batey and the screaming Roper baby and Miss Few’s endless tales of dead grandeur. His method of bearing with them was usually to remove himself to the Five Horseshoes.
The Five Horseshoes, two corners down from Weston House, was a very respectable public house, with a décor of grained mustard paint and old port wine advertisements as depressing as any of its kind in London. Virginia did not object to it as a haunt of vice, but she soon became tired of going there herself, and she wished that Joe would get tired of it too.
The Five Horseshoes yielded him a little business for Ed Morris, and he was down there nearly every night, and part of the day too as far as Virginia knew. She walked to the shop in the morning to save the bus fare, and walked wearily back at night, and often, as in the days when she had worked at Lady Beautiful, she had no idea where Joe had been while she was away. But in those days he was not drinking so much. When he came home, he was usually sober, and avid to see her. Now he was not always sober. Although there were many times when his desire for her was as fierce as ever, and as powerful as ever to awaken her answering desire, there were times too when he came home only to pick a quarrel with her, as if he resented the fact that she was always there, waiting for him.
Yet, if she had not been there, he would have gone to look for her. Once when she had stayed late at the shop to help with