Room Upstairs (14 page)

When he had to go, Sybil went with him to the kitchen and gave him a spoonful of parsley to chew, so that the woman in labour should not be gassed by his breath. He said goodbye cheerily to Dorothy and told her to try boric acid, and he kissed Sybil, and she stood at the back door to wave him away in his little roaring car.

‘You know what I think about that young man.' Dorothy said, in statement, not question.

‘You mustn't mind about the penicillin, Dot.' Sybil had her pacifying voice on again. ‘Perhaps it's unethical for him to treat birds.'

‘Nix on that,' said Dorothy, harking back to Junior High. ‘I was going to try boric acid anyway, so there, Mr Know-it-all. But that wasn't what I was going to say.'

‘What then?' She forced you to lead her on, even if you would rather let it drop.

‘I think he's after your money.'

Sybil laughed. ‘That's really funny, Dot. That's really a laugh. I haven't got much, anyway.'

‘But would you leave it to him?' Dorothy asked intently. Did she have designs on it herself?

‘It's for Laurie. Everything. Not that there's much of anything. But Montgomery - good heavens, Dot. Fancy you thinking—'

‘You pay a lot of attention to him,' Dorothy said sharply.

‘Of course. I love him.'

‘Mm-hm.' Dorothy nodded, lips closed, racehorse nostrils flaring.

‘What do you mean, mm-hm?' …

‘You love him like you love Laurie, huh?'

‘Is there something wrong in that? I hardly ever see my other grandchildren, and they haven't much time for me when I do. Montgomery is a bit too old, I suppose, but I wish he
was
my grandson.'

‘Doesn't look like it.'

‘Why not? You know how fond I am of him. He doesn't come here as much as he did, because—' she looked at Dorothy.'Because he's so busy.'

‘Maybe that's just as well,' Dorothy said darkly. ‘Maybe that is just as well, because I sure do hate to see old folk making fools of themselves. I sure do hate to see that.'

*

When Laurie came, his grandmother wanted desperately to tell him what Dorothy had said, but she was too ashamed.
Suppose there were some truth in it? A fool of herself. She was austere with Montgomery on Sunday, and would not play checkers with him, as they usually did.

‘Even if I let you win?'

‘I don't care to, thank you.'

It had been so much fun to flirt with Montgomery a little bit, chiding him, letting him tease her, swerving, for his benefit, from imperious dowager to lovable child. All this time, when his casual, humorous young presence had added so much to this old life of hers which he had fought to give her back, had she been merely making a fool of herself?

‘What's poor Mont done?' Jess asked.

‘Nothing, I hope, except tend to his business. Is it a crime suddenly, if I don't want to play checkers?'

She worked on her sewing all afternoon, while they were outside cutting up a fallen tree for her winter firewood. She was mending a sheet, putting in a patch with the small meticulous stitches she could still manage if she pushed her glasses down her nose. Outside the window, she could hear the chock, chock of the axes, and their talk and laughter.

Jess came staggering in with a laundry basket full of chips for the wood-box by the fireplace. She moved with the load pregnantly, stomach out, but Sybil had given up fretting about that. They knew their own business.

Jess put down the basket, and pushed back her forelock with a hand powdered a rich brown from rotting wood. ‘It's lovely out,' she said, and Sybil nodded to the critics who nagged within her: There, you see, I didn't hurt his feelings. I did him a good turn by not keeping him indoors.

When they were gone that night, she and Dorothy saw all their favourite Sunday programmes, and had a nip of bourbon in hot water with sugar, as they sometimes did if they stayed up late and felt cosy.

Dorothy was at her nicest. ‘Happy day?' she asked at bedtime.

‘Very happy. And you?'

‘I'm always happy here with you,' Dorothy said. ‘You know that.'

The bad weather came early that year. It had been possible in some years, Laurie said, to sit outside in the midday sun at Christmas. But already, by November, great lashing storms of wind and rain had driven in from the sea to strip the trees of their last colours, and litter the lawn round the yellow house with broken branches.

By early December, it was already cold, and the sages of Plymouth, which meant anyone who had been there five years and had a gift shop or a bar with driftwood and fishing nets on the ceiling, prophesied a Long Hard One.

The weather was the reason why Laurie and Jess did not come down so often. There was not the same point in escaping from town if you had to stay shut up in the house with Dorothy's catarrh and the bird's imitation sneezes and the old trees groaning like a ship, and scrabbling at the roof.

Once one of the tall sycamores blew down across the drive, way, and they had to leave their car there and go back to Cambridge on she bus.

‘Why do they never blow the other way?' Sybil complained. ‘Why couldn't it have blown down across the road and wrecked a few cars?'

‘Because the wind comes from the sea,' Dorothy explained equably. She could never be persuaded to join in vituperation against the scourge. Brought up in a city, she could not see the tragedy. The cars going by through the night past she front bedroom were company, she said, when she could not sleep. (What about Emerson?) She liked to think of all those lucky people going to quaint Cape Cod. Although she never went across the Canal herself, since to her the Cape spelled her brother-in-law, and that was bad news.

So when Sybil called and asked when they were coming, or when Laurie said to Jess or Jess said to Laurie: ‘We must go to see Gramma,' the weather was a safe excuse for putting it off. Not only an excuse to Sybil, but to each other. There
were certain things, even at this stage of their closeness, that were not spoken, and Jess did not know whether Laurie had faced the curious fact that at Camden House, his real home, it was easier to hurt each other.

When this realization first intruded on Jess, it seemed absurd. But looking back, it became more true the more she thought about it. Did he know? She wanted to ask him, but she could not. Why is it, she wanted to say, that our life together in this cramped, shabby apartment is so perfect, but at Gramma's house, which is old and beautiful and stuffed with years of happiness, we spoil it?

They hardly ever fought at the flat, and if they did, it was half comic, never vicious. But at Camden House, beloved, familiar, Laurie's boyhood skin, they seemed to have at least one small piercing fight every time they were there.

On their last weekend, it had rained all Saturday. Sybil was in bed with a cold, being given tansy tea by Dorothy, and Laurie and Jess had fallen into a stupid argument about the British herb and the American erb. They never argued about pronunciation. It was one of their triumphs over other Anglo-American couples they knew. So why now? Jess put on the mule face which Laurie said reminded him of her father, and later became frigid and averse.

‘You should have married an American girl,' she said, when he complained.

Only Dorothy was happy that weekend, whistling off key all the old Broadway numbers of her youth long gone, and rubbing peanut oil into Roger's growing tail feathers in the most sickening manner.

That Sunday, Jess heard again those curious voices in her head, three of them, and all her own.

She had risen early, leaving Laurie asleep, and was walking round the house drawing back curtains. Dorothy was a great one for secrecy at sundown, and was haunted by the fear that a passing motorist might see her in her slip and come storming in off the highway to rape her.

Window by window, Jess let in a cold grey light that promised snow, and looked without enthusiasm at the day.

When Laurie woke, would he have forgotten yesterday, or
would he remember how stubborn and sulky she had been? If she went upstairs now and knelt by the bed and woke him to say: I'm sorry, would he say that he was sorry too for haranguing her like a prosecuting counsel, enough to make Dorothy carol to Roger: ‘Birds in their little nest agree'? Or would he accept her apology, assuming grandly that it was her fault?

Why should he always be right?

He was cleverer than she was, better educated, better read, he had spent his life among people whose ideas did not all come from tabloid dailies and whose conversation was not limited to food and racing and a piecemeal dissection of the neighbours. He would be a brilliant trial lawyer one day, the Senior Partner had told Jess, and Laurie was not even impressed, because he knew it.

If I'm not good enough for you, she thought sickly, why didn't you find that out in London, since you're so clever?

You're being unfair, he said in her head, or she said it, and it was then that the voices began.

I told her what I thought about it, and she agreed. She always does. She's got no mind of her own. I don't know how she keeps the job. Job. Fob. Lob. She keeps she job. She won't much longer.

Whoever they were discussing, it was not her and Laurie.

All three voices were her own, not the way she sounded when she held the flaps of her ear down to see how she sounded to other people, but the way she sounded to herself when she was speaking. But she was not speaking. She was not even thinking. She was listening quite dispassionately to the three English voices, light, desultory, rather boring.

In the last column you put the figures for the net cost of each item. I put mine in the first column. That's the part in red. He said separate net from gross by one column of figures. That's what I did. You diddle. I did. Take Robin now, he's a good example. I knew his mother. She lived in that house where the bus stops.

Running fast, as if she could outrun the voices, Jess tore through the rooms and up the stairs.

‘I'm sorry - oh darling, I'm sorry!' She flung herself on the bed.

‘You're trembling,' he said, holding her, and she kept her face in the pillow so that he could not see that she was crying.

During the week, Sybil called them. ‘Dorothy wants to know if you're coming on Friday. Her sister might come.'

‘What difference? Has she got a disease?'

‘Ssh.' The grandmother giggled. Dorothy was probably in the same room. ‘It isn't that, but - you know.'

Oh yes, they knew. It was a question of presuming. Dorothy's sister would not presume, etc. So if they said they were going, she would have a grievance and not go near the place for two years, and would eventually come to believe that she had been refused entry, even though she had refused it to herself.

Or would it be Dorothy who took offence, and walked out? Disaster. Her grue was worse than her bite, and Gramma actually seemed to like her, which showed how your faculties could degenerate.

Jess put her hand over the mouthpiece and asked Laurie: ‘You don't want to go?'

He shook his head, so Jess told Sybil that it might snow again, which should satisfy everybody, and probably discourage Dorothy's sister.

‘Ought we to?' Laurie's conscience about his grandmother came in flashes, usually too late.

‘She didn't mind. She'll have Dorothy's sister. Better value in that. And it really might snow.'

‘Yes, it might snow.'

‘But … there's something else, isn't there?'

‘Don't say it,' he said quickly. So he knew.

‘Yes, I must.'

‘Don't. If you don't talk about fighting.' he said childishly, ‘it makes it not matter.'

How could he think that? they were worlds apart still. So she lied perversely: ‘I wasn't going to talk about it. I don't want to.'

‘What is it then?'

‘It's—' She would tell him about the voices. She had
thought she would never tell him, or anyone else. She thought if she never spoke of them they would not come again. Why she looked at him, astonished. That was just his reasoning, about the fighting. We are closer than I thought.

‘Tell me.'

‘I can't. You'll think I'm going mad.'

‘If you are, I may as well know it.'

‘The first time, I thought it was the flu, but then it happened again when I wasn't ill.'

She told him about the three voices which were all her own, and he listened seriously, and chewed on his lips and drew down his dark brows, and said omnisciently, like a psychiatrist: ‘You're tired, that's all it is. I've got to get you out of that office. They're driving you.'

She shook her head. The work in the Admissions office at the college was leisurely and pleasant. But he repeated: ‘It's because you're tired. It doesn't mean a thing, I'm sure. No more than a ringing in your ears. Don't let it scare you.'

‘It doesn't, much. That's what is so odd. I listen to then quite calmly, as if it was an ordinary, rather boring conversation that everyone else could hear. It's only when I realize I'm doing that, I panic, and than they go. Do you think I ought to see - see somebody?'

‘God no.' There must never be anything wrong with her. He could have chills and headaches and sprained fingers. She must be as strong as a horse. The time she had flu, he thought Mont was exaggerating when he told him what her temperature was.

‘I think you're imagining things, my dear,' he said rather patronizingly, so Jess retorted: ‘All right then, listen to this. I wasn't going to tell you, but one night at the house - one night - it was the day we'd been to see Aunt May and you wouldn't believe me about what happened. You were downstairs. I went up to our room, and stayed there looking at myself in the mirror for a long time and wishing I was someone else.'

‘Who?' he asked, with interest.

‘When I went out of the room, I saw - I saw a ghost of myself.'