Room Upstairs (11 page)

She thought about her ‘past', which was short but precious. The few years after school, whose fumbling encounters and tortured disappointments grew more romantic in the memory, more bitter-sweet. If she had not met Laurie, she might have drifted into Steve, who would stay in the Town Clerk's office for years, until he ended up as Town Clerk, and Jess would have had a house like her parents and soon a figure like her mother, and a car full of kids with shiny red cheeks and whining accents they picked up at school, as she had.

Goodbye to all that. She had started life again, burst through the amnion of mediocrity. The British pretended that background didn't matter any more, but it did, oh God, it still did. Here, where no one honestly cared who your parents were, she was accepted for whatever she made of herself, admired for being English.

Your delightful British accent, people said. But she felt herself talking more like Laurie. Thinking more like him. They sometimes started to say the same thing at the same time, and marvelled, for that did not happen to people until they had been married for years.

She thought about Laurie, and seeing him for the first time with that forehead too broad for the rest of his face, and the bright unused blue of his eyes, talking too much and too fast, gesticulating, making a lot of spit, as he still did when he got going, sucking it back on a pause for breath. Luxuriously, she went yet once more through the saga of their London days, unreeling it inch by inch, like a film savoured over and over again. But before she got to the first very interesting scene, Dorothy had finished her newspaper, and that was it for thoughts.

‘Excuse me for being such poor company,' she said, folding the paper into a square and casting it out of the window, for she did not believe in the fifty-dollar fine any more than she believed in the rules of the road. She stubbed out another cigarette into the stinking ashtray, and while Sybil snored gently in the back, regaled Jess with horror stories of the slave labour camp at the department store which she had favoured with her services for so many years. Why had she stayed so long if it really was that bad?

‘No one would ask that who lived through the depression. When you've known what it's like to be out of a job - once is enough, thanks very much.'

They pulled off the highway for lunch, and woke Sybil, mumbling on her teeth, and Dorothy drew out the metal liner of the ashtray, and emptied the heap of cigarette ends outside the door of the car parked next to them.

After lunch, Sybil seemed brighter, though still vague. There were days when she should have been left alone to be an old lady with nothing expected of her, but Dorothy would not allow her to age before her eyes, as Sybil did sometimes, when she wasn't trying.

She gave her a grilling about her stepsister, sharpening up her memory and nudging and jollying her along so successfully that Sybil began to remember things she thought she had forgotten, and even, by the time they left the Turnpike at the town where May was ‘put away', to look forward to the visit with some gusto.

‘May was the pretty one. Always so bright and pretty. And clothes! They were her religion, Marma used to say. I remember a dress she hard. She was going to a picnic, that was it. They were all crazy about bird watching then, and they'd go off on nature walks with this gentleman who could do bird calls. Pink, it was, with a big lace collar like a place mat, and her waist nothing. Her beau was waiting in the hall, looking up the stairs for her, and she ran down, just as light and beautiful, and I saw him kiss her, and then she saw me and said: “What are you gawping at, kid?” but she didn't bawl me out like she usually did.'

‘Why not?' Dorothy prompted, to keep her alert.

‘Because of the boy. She wanted to be cute. She could act anything the wanted to be. Oh, she was a barrel of fun, May was. I could tell you some tales.'

‘Do tell.' Dorothy was caking her nose and cheeks with ivory solid powder, through which the veins would soon show mauve.

‘Oh … I forget She'll tell you. It will be good to see her again.'

At the nursing home, there had been some misunderstanding
about the time. May was being given a bath and would not be ready to receive for half an hour.

Jess went for a walk down the uninteresting road of shabby white clapboard houses with signs which said Optometrist and Podiatrist and Guests. The owner of the nursing home had a fine rose garden and Dorothy went with her to look at the roses, squatting over the labels and repeating the names know-ledgeably, as if she had them all at home.

Sybil went to sleep in the car. When they woke her, she was vague again. ‘Go in where?'

‘To see Aunt May, Gramma.'

‘Oh yes - dear May.'

On the ground floor of the nursing home, rooms opened off a square central hall, where a cocoon of old lady with bandage bows in her hair, and an old man smoking furiously, too close to his moustache, sat before a television screen shot with glaring zigzags.

Dorothy went to adjust the knobs.

‘They don't like you to touch it,' growled the old man, and Dorothy drew back her hand and said: ‘Pardon me.'

As they went across the hall, slowly because of Sybil, figures watched them hopelessly from the open rooms. A tiny old lady like a chimpanzee in a gay girlish wrapper stood just in the doorway as if she had been forbidden to come out, putting a slippered toe tentatively on the No Man's Land of the hall tiles. Sybil smiled at her and nodded, and Dorothy said: ‘And how are
you
today?' like the First Lady at Veteran's Hospital.

Upstairs, in a room which had two beds in it and a smell of faeces, Aunt May lay frail in bed, with rails up, although the outline of her body under the tidy covers looked too insubstantial to move, even as far as the edge.

‘Here's your sister!' said the nurse loudly.

Dorothy pulled Sybil forward, holding her arm, and Jess hung back, smiling awkwardly at the second woman who was sitting beside the other bed, but getting no response, and then trying not to look, as she became aware that she was sitting on a commode.

‘I asked you, Elsie,' the nurse said cheerfully, and drew the
curtain clattering across the rail that divided the room.

Aunt May lay flat as paper, and smiled up at Sybil with her gums, and Sybil leaned on her cane by the bed, breathing heavily, and looked down at her.

‘Well, who's this?' asked the nurse, who was big and kind and slate-coloured. ‘It's your sister, see?'

‘Of course it's my sister,' Aunt May said, with a tiny spark of mettle, like a cigarette lighter in need of a new flint. ‘It's my sister Sybil. You look wonderful, Syb. I'm glad to see you.'

She lifted her skeleton's hand, the sleeve of the nightgown falling away from a wrist you could circle with a finger and thumb, and Sybil put out her hand to take it, the two palms touching like dry leaves.

Still holding her hand, Sybil continued to stand and look down at the woman in the bed without speaking, and May seemed content to lie and look, nodding her head to words that did not need to be said. Even Dorothy was a little non-plussed. Things were not lively enough for her, so she said: ‘Well!' and pulled up a chair and sat Sybil in it, and then introduced herself confidently to Aunt May, as if the name Dorothy Grue were a household word. She pushed Jess to the other side of the bed and shouted. ‘This is the cute little Britisher that's married to Laurie. You remember Loll, of course. Oh, sure you do, that's the girl. Boy, no flies on you, that's for sure!'

She must have been hell as a nurse.

She made some more rallying conversation, and Jess contributed a little. The old lady in the bed, who was not deaf after all, smiled and nodded and said: Yes, yes, and That's nice, and God bless you, and was such easy company that it was a few minutes before they realized that Sybil had not yet said a word.

‘Well, come now!' said Dorothy, still master of ceremonies, especially since the big nurse had gone to the other side of the curtain at a tremulous summons. ‘What do you say to your sister, eh?'

‘My sister?' Sybil looked up at her, her furry eyebrows drawn in with effort. From the other side of the bed, Jess could see her brain trying to work, like arms straining to lift a rock.

‘Hullo, Syb,' May said helpfully, as if she were the visitor and Sybil the patient, and Sybil said, very formal, very polite: ‘It's very nice to meet you.'

‘Gramma - for heaven's sake!' Jess looked blankly across the bed at Dorothy, needing her, ueexpectedly, in this predicament.

‘It's your sister!' Dorothy bent and hissed into Sybil's ear.

But Sybil, still with the puzzled frown, leaned forward, still very courteous, and asked: ‘And where is your home?' the only social conversation she could think of.

‘Why - Springfield.' May was bearing up better than Dorothy and Jess, as if she understood better. ‘But Plymouth originally, you know that.'

‘Oh, that's right. I knew I'd seen you some place before,' Sybil said chattily, and lost interest, looking round the room at the plants, and the family photographs, without recognition, and the towels and plastic bibs hanging behind the door, labelled May and Elsie on adhesive tape. Stricken, clasping her arms as she felt herself beginning to tremble, Jess stared across the bed in horror. Sybil belonged to her life. Her feeling for her was part pity, part protectiveness, part dependence on the stability of her - always there, always welcoming. Now, with the stability disintegrating before her eyes, she realized that part of it was love.

Gramma, come back. I can't bear it if you don't come back.

It was the most terrible experience of my life, Jess heard herself gasping to Laurie. She would hurtle back to Cambridge like a maniac, gallop up the stairs and pound on the door and he would open it at once, because he had been waiting for her, and she would fall into his arms and gasp: ‘It was the most terrible experience of my life!' and he would stroke her hair and be proud of her for going through it for him.

The coloured nurse came round the curtain, her white dress stretched tight across her muscular beam, and said: ‘How's it going, girls? Having fun?'

‘She doesn't know her,' Dorothy mouthed.

‘Well, too bad, too bad. That's the way it goes. Perhaps next time you come. We have our ups and downs, don't we, May?'

‘I mean the
other one.'
Dorothy turned aside and spoke
behind her hand, two nurses together, keeping their sanity by sniggering at the nut cases.

‘I wonder if you ever met my father in Plymouth?' Sybil asked, still making an effort to be social, although she was clearly bored.

‘Gramma - please!' Jess blurted out in anguish, although she knew she should have kept quiet and seen this through maturely. ‘You
must
remember. It's your sister, Gramma dear. Your sister May. You talked about her all the way here. You knew you were coming to see Aunt May. Please, Gramma.'

Please come back. I can't just stand here and watch you go out of your mind.

‘She does know you,' she said to the woman on the bed, who was smiling still, quite calm, her paper hands laid like mouse's paws on the fold of the sheet.

‘I know,' she said, very reasonably. ‘It's all right. I know. Jess. You're Laurie's wife. They've told me about you. I'm very glad you came.'

She held up her hand for Jess to take, and then held up the other for Sybil, as if they were going to swing her up and away off the bed. Sybil got up, and held out her hand without stretching her elbow, and shook her sister's hand with the vague, gracious smile she gave to people in Plymouth she thought she knew, but had no idea who they Were. Then she dropped May's hand and looked round for Dorothy.

‘Want to go already?' Dorothy said. ‘Well, perhaps it's just as well.'

Aunt May squeezed Jess's hand and then let go of it and nodded at her once or twice, her curved eyes hooding over.

‘Goodbye, Mrs - er. It was a great pleasure to meet you.' Dorothy unhooked the cane from the back of the chair, and as she propelled Sybil towards the door, Jess heard her whisper coarsely to the nurse: ‘Looks like you've got the wrong one in here.'

Burning, unable to look at Sybil to see whether she had heard, Jess glanced back at the old woman on the bed and saw that tears were sliding from under her veined lids and over the ridge of her cheekbones.

*

Miraculously, when they got back to Camden House, Laurie was there. He had come down on the bus. Why? He did not say: I couldn't stand the apartment without you. He laughed and said: ‘Aren't you glad to see me?'

He was in the back room, with the sunset blazing behind his head and a card table drawn over his knees, strewn with books and papers.

She saw him at once, through the open doors of the kitchen and the hall and the dining room, and while Sybil and Dorothy were fussing at each other on the way in, Jess ran and flung herself at him: ‘It was the most terrible experience of my life!'

‘Watch out.' He clutched at his papers while she hugged him frantically, until he fended her off and looked at her. ‘What's the matter?' But as she began to tell him, he looked over her shoulder and said: ‘Hello, Gramma. How was the trip?'

‘Wonderful, I'm never: scared with Jess.' Sybil paused in her shuffling trot into the room to see if this had registered with Dorothy, but Dorothy was in the kitchen, turning knobs on the stove in a masterful way.

‘I'd forgotten you were coming, Laurie,' she said happily. ‘Fancy me forgetting that.'

Jess opened her mouth to say: He wasn't, but Laurie grinned and said: ‘You forget all the important things.'

‘Don't I though?' Sybil dropped into a chair and leaned her head back with a gusty sigh. ‘Pour me a glass of sherry, there's a good boy. I'm quite exhausted.'

She
was exhausted! Who had slept for nearly two hours in the car, going and coming, and only woken long enough to go crazy.