Room Upstairs (15 page)

Laurie laughed, and she laughed too, in relief. She had
meant him to be impressed, but now it was more reassuring that he was not.

‘Only Sybil sees ghosts.'

‘I did.'

‘Emerson?'

‘I told you. Myself.'

‘Maybe it was my great grandmother. She deserved to be a displaced soul. You can't see a ghost of yourself, darling.'

‘I saw it.' She described the momentary vision. How it had looked like her, and moved, and seemed in some way to be under her control. ‘Like a reflection, only there isn't a mirror there.'

‘That's it. You said you'd been looking in a mirror. You looked for so long that the image was printed on your eye. Yes, that's it.' He began to talk fast, gesticulating. ‘Listen, here's how it is. If you look at a light bulb, you can still see it when you look away. Dark, like a negative, but you see it. Try it. You can do it with anything, if you stare hard enough. I'm looking at that doorknob.' He fixed a ferocious blue stare on the brass doorknob, counted twenty, and then switched his head quickly round. ‘There - there it is. Over on the wall. It's white. See it?'

‘Of course not.'

‘Nor could anyone have seen your ghost, unless they'd been staring at you too. Dorothy.' He giggled. ‘Suppose you looked like Dorothy and came face to face with yourself. That would really rock you.'

His explanation was so logical and satisfying that Jess was not afraid any more. She had not been afraid at the time, strangely, any more than she had been afraid of the voices. It was only afterwards that her skin began to creep.

Thanks to Laurie, she thought no more about the apparition. Until about ten days later, when for no reason it came into her head in a shop, and she stopped dead in the crowded ground floor aisle and stared at a display of hectically coloured bags that no one in their senses would carry.

The light bulb was reproduced black. The darker doorknob came out white.

The head and neck of herself which had hung before her
over the stairs had been colourless, like a dream, but the hair was light, the eyes and mouth dark. It was not a negative.

‘Can I help you?'

‘How much are the bags?' she asked, and moved on without hearing the answer.

*

‘But you've never missed my birthday!'

‘Gramma, I've told you. If it were any evening but the twelfth. If I don't go to this dinner, 111 get shot. I don't want to - a bunch of politicians sounding off at each other in Neopolitan dialect. But Guthrie said, “You'll go with us,” and he means it.'

‘You'll be glad to know,' Sybil said unfairly, ‘that I'm bitterly disappointed. It may be my last birthday.'

‘She'll probably live at least ten more years,' Laurie told Jess, ‘but she makes me feel like hell. What shall I do?'

‘I'll go,' Jess said, although she did not want to. ‘It won't matter if I'm not at the dinner, but you must be.'

‘Birthday dinner with Sybil and Dorothy. You might roast Roger.' He groaned. ‘I can't let you always do my jobs for me.'

‘It's all right. Don't worry, darling. I like to do things for you. I would kill myself for you, if it would help.'

He looked at her quickly, and saw it might be true. ‘I never had a wife like you,' he said. ‘Ill skip the dinner.'

‘No, you must go. I'll be all right. I'll come right back after they go to bed.'

‘I don't like you driving so late.'

‘I'm not helpless.' But sometimes he liked to pretend that she was. So she agreed to slay the night and drive back early in the morning.

‘Ask Mont,' Laurie had said. ‘Be more fun for you.' But Mont was at the hospital, and could not come to the telephone.

Jess arrived with a car full of presents. She had something for Dorothy, and a new toy for Roger's cage, which was almost as important as remembering the nylons and earrings for Dorothy.

‘Where are all the cats?' she realized that six o'clock had come and gone, without the familiar sight of Sybil pottering
back and forth between the can opener on the wall and the dishes on the counter, ankle deep in mewling, undulating boshes.

Sybil looked at Dorothy. ‘They live in the barn now.' Dorothy said. ‘They were too much trouble for Sybil to take care of. And always under her feet. We were afraid she'd trip over them and break her other leg. I knew a woman who fell over: a stray cat on the steps of the public library, and split her skull from neck to crown.'

‘It wasn't because of Roger's tail?' Jess asked Sybil, not Dorothy, but Sybil's face was blank, and Dorothy answered: ‘Don't be so petty, dear.'

‘How do you keep them out?' Sybil's cats were as much a part of the house as the pictures on the walls or the smell of old woodwork.

‘Just don't let ‘em in.'

Dorothy was pouring drinks, and they were toasting Sybil, but Jess could not blot out the vision of anguished whiskered faces outside the windows, daws scrabbling at the glass, and Dorothy pulling the cúrtame across on the outer darkness where there should be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Maud Owens came to dinner, and an elderly couple whom Sybil had known all her life. Dorothy had roasted a turkey and made a cake like a temple, and Sybil had been with her to the liquor store and chosen the champagne herself, since Dorothy's taste in alcohol ran to communion-type wine and California port.

Maud was amusing and the elderly couple were charming, and it was much gayer than Jess had expected. After Maud had driven the others recklessly off up the driveway in a blast of blue smoke, she said: ‘It was a lovely party.'

‘Except for one thing.' Dorothy's mouth closed as if she had drawn a string round it.

‘What?'

Dorothy shook her head without unfastening her mouth. ‘Bedtime Sybil,' Roger whispered raucously, as she took the china mug from the dresser, rattling it purposely, and Sybil said: ‘One of these days I'll go to bed when I please and not when that bird says so.'

Dorothy went up with her, and when she came down, Jess asked her: ‘What do you mean - except for one thing?'

Dorothy sank the wattles of her chin into her watermelon bosom which had encroached so far on her waist that it was arbitrary where she put a belt, and raised her eyes to fix them on Jess.

‘You should know, dear.'

‘You mean because Laurie couldn't come?'

‘The first time he's ever missed,' she said.

‘It isn't. Two years ago, he was in England.'

‘The poor old lady.' You could not argue with Dorothy, because she merely bulldozed on, as if you had not spoken. ‘She took it very hard.'

‘She took it very well. She had a wonderful time tonight. I haven't seen her so bright and gay for weeks.'

‘Ah - tonight,' Dorothy said. ‘The juice of the grape hath miraculous powers, hath it not? I wish my herbals would work as quickly.'

‘But he couldn't come. She understands that. I knew she was disappointed at first, but she'd never try to get in the way of his career. After all, she paid most of his way through Harvard.'

‘Did she indeed?' said Dorothy. ‘That's very interesting. I wonder why she never told me.'

Jess did not say: Because it's none of your business, or: It might give you ideas about her money, although both thoughts occurred to her. She said: ‘But that's not why he's good to her,' which was a thought that might have occurred to Dorothy. ‘He loves her, you know that. I love her too. That's why I came, and I think it almost made up to her for Laurie.'

Showing some bice green slip and a lot of fat veined leg, Dorothy climbed up on the stool and opened Roger's cage. He flew on to her shoulder, balancing with a lift of his wing as she climbed awkwardly down, and muttering into her nest of black hair, which she wore pulled up all round into a puffy roll.

‘Listen - why should you worry about it, Jess?' she said. ‘No man is worth making yourself miserable over. I learned that years ago when I lost mine.'

‘I'm not miserable.' Sometimes Dorothy made far less sense than Sybil.

‘I wouldn't blame you if you were. Eighteen months married, and your mother three thousand miles away. Jess will go down to Grandma like a good little girl. Very convenient.'

‘If you mean—' Jess's body filled with heat. She could feel it burning up into her face.

‘I don't mean anything.' Dorothy mumbled her lips in and out, and the bird pecked bluntly at them, a parody of kissing.

‘What are trying to put into my mouth, you naughty girl? Is that all the thanks poor Loll gets for being so thoughtful and insisting you stay overnight?'

Jess went out. She ran upstairs and into her room, and sat down on the bed, breathing hard. She was very angry. But when she started to think about it, Dorothy had not really said anything. It was she - she herself who had interpreted the silly little digs into full scale scandal.

But it was true he had jumped at her offer to come. And he had insisted on her staying the night. They had not been apart for a night since their marriage. Why now? Her mind churned like dirty wash-water. She hated herself. But the germ of the idea was there. She had let it in. She fought, but it was disgusting that she should even have to fight. If he ever knew, he would kill her.

Or I would kill myself. She got up wearily from the bed and turned to pull down the cover. She felt very tired, drained of strength, the movements of her muscles unreal and meaningless. Before her, on the other side of the bed, she saw the head and shoulders of Jess, her face screwed up and pale with misery, her eyes staring at nothing.

Poor girl. The image made an attempt to smile, as she made her mouth move towards a smile. She was wearing the white blouse, fading out towards the waist. Jess thought of it as She, a separate thing, and yet there was again a sense of possession, almost of power.

She stared at her. The other She stared back. They could stand there staring until the end of the world, eyes trapped in eyes, but with no thought behind them, for thoughts took up
moments of time and this was suspended in a timeless space with no relation to past or future.

Touch me. Jess lifted her right hand and reached out. Across the bed, the image reached its left hand forward. Her hand became cold, numb, as if all the life had run from it. The hands met, but there was no feeling. Jess closed her eyes to stop the image staring, and when she opened them, there was nothing there.

It was not until Jess realized that she was standing in a familiar lighted room, staring blankly across the bed at nothing, that the terror invaded her like an icy hand, her own chill hand, feeling its way through all the courses of her nerves into the last secret chambers of her brain.

She heard Sybil's stick, and through the doorway she saw the old lady, in the quilted rosebud dressing gown that had been one of her birthday presents, navigating slowly back from the bathroom to her room.

‘Gramma!' Jess went to her.

‘What's the matter, child? You're panting.'

‘Am I?' She stopped, for the panting was not involuntary. ‘I ran up the stairs.'

‘When do the young stop running and start walking? How do you like me in my grand new robe?' She struck a little attitude of vanity, making the face with which she tried on things before the mirror, and it was all so familiar and safe and dear that Jess kissed her, and hugged her hard, because the chill and the terror had vanished, as if nothing had happened.

But it had happened. And this time she had not been looking in a mirror. She had seen it, and she had not been afraid of it. Not at the time. That was why the fear came afterwards - because she should have been afraid.

‘Do you believe in ghosts?' she asked, when she was tucking Sybil into bed.

‘I'd better.'

‘You told me you'd heard Emerson breathing in there.' She jerked her head towards the room that was now Dorothy's.

‘Hush,' Sybil said. ‘They told me not to talk about that. I can't remember why, but I remember they told me.'

‘Because they thought you frightened me.'

‘Was that it? Oh well.' Sybil had got her teeth out. She looked smaller in bed, as old people do, as if the mattress sapped her. Her jaws caved in and the sockets of her faded eyes were red with fatigue. Over her brindle hair she wore the familiar turban made of a linen dish-towel depicting the Trooping of the Colour that Jess had sent her from London before they ever met. What can one send Americans that they haven't already got? And then she had seen the dish-cloth, in dozens of designs, in Boston department stores.

‘They thought I imagined the breathing, you see.'

‘Oh well.' Sybil's attention wavered. She reached for the jar of dubious smelling ointment which Dorothy had prepared for the skin on her hands.

Jess asked quickly, to get her back: ‘Have you ever seen a ghost - here, in this house?'

Sybil nodded. She was rubbing the cream in circles, nodding every time the fingers came round.

‘The house is haunted then?'

‘Now then, now then, what's going on here?' Dorothy charged in, just like Miss Driscoll charging into Five B although she used to know what was going on because of the spyhole in the door.

‘Is the house haunted?' Jess repeated, for she had to know.

What did Sybil see? What if it - oh God, what if it was a spectre of me, appearing for years, perhaps even before I was born?

Sybil would have cried out at the first meeting: ‘But I know you!'

Jess thought back, and saw Sybil that first day, coming towards her with a smile of welcome. Or of recognition. ‘She's just what I thought she'd be.' That's what Sybil had said, as if she had seen her before. ‘She's just what I thought she'd be.'

The old lady did not answer. She lay on her back gumming the insides of her jaws and watching Dorothy, who was folding clothes which Sybil had already folded.