Room Upstairs (16 page)

‘A haunted house, don't be ridiculous,' Dorothy grumbled, shaking out a corset with a rattle and a snap. ‘I've no time for such nonsense myself, and I wish you wouldn't put ideas in
Sybil's head. I've trouble enough with her as it is.'

‘Am I a trouble to you. Dot?'

‘Well, it's not all roses around here sometimes, I'll tell you that,' Dorothy said, in case anyone should think she had it made.

Jess was not going to sleep in her room, not until Laurie was there in the bed with her. She would not see anything if he was there. She did not know how she knew that, but she felt sure of it.

She would rumple the bed and sleep on the sofa downstairs and get up before Dorothy came down. First she was going to write a letter. She was going to write to Mary and ask her for the truth.

Mary used to have nightmares in this house. Mary knew all the old legends. Mary had seen the Charity tree weeping under the new moon.

What else that she had not told?

Dear Aunt Mary,
‘I am terribly troubled and disturbed, and only you can help me.

She wrote a long letter, telling Mary everything. She told her everything that she could not tell to anyone else, for they would think she was losing her mind. Mary would understand. She would not pass it off as imagination, or being tired, or gazing in a mirror. The night before the wedding, when Jess had screamed because there was someone lying beside her on the bed, Mary had been the only one who did not tell her it was a dream. She had stood shyly at the back of the crowding, well-intentioned fuss, wearing a raincoat over her nightdress and looked calmly through her owl spectacles at a scene which was no more than she expected.

The letter was almost finished when Jess heard a car crunch on the gravel at the back of the house. The knocker fell cautiously.

‘Jess - Laurie? Anyone up?'

‘Oh - Mont.' She ran to open the door, which Dorothy had bolted and chained like a fortress for the night. ‘Oh, I am glad you came!'

‘I brought a present for Sybil. I knew it was her birthday, because last year Melia made that marvellous cake, remember? ‘He was holding a box foolishly wrapped with bows and tendrils of ribbon. ‘I'm sorry it's so late. I saw your light from the road as I was going home, and then I saw your car. Where's Laurie?'

‘He couldn't come. He had to go to a dinner with Mr Guthrie, so I came to be at Sybil's party. I wanted you to come, but I couldn't get hold of you.'

‘I was at the hospital all last night and most of this morning, I think. I've lost touch of time.' He passed a hand over his face, and as they went into the lighted sitting room, Jess saw how tired he was. His eyes were shadowed, and his face was grey, and pricked with beard.

‘Sit down.' She pushed him into a chair and picked up the unfinished letter to Mary and crammed it into the pocket of her skirt before she knelt to make up the fire.

‘Babies?'

‘A kid.'

Jess turned her head. His lower lip was pushed out over the top one. His hair, which was never properly cut, stuck up at the back. His eyes were leaden and sad. ‘What happened?'

‘He broke his arm a week ago. Nasty mess it was, but I thought he was doing all right. He came through the operation well, and the fever wasn't unusual. I didn't worry about it too much.'

He leaned forward, dangling his bony hands between his knees and talking into the fire. ‘Last night, I got scared. The antibiotics didn't seem to be touching him. I took him to Children's Hospital in Boston this morning. I've been there all day. They're still not sure what the bug is. It could be a - well, God, Jess, they were talking about gas gangrene.'

Jess sat back on her heels and looked up at him. ‘Whose fault?' In England, if something went wrong, most people accepted it as more or less an act of God. Over here, she had learned, it must always be someone's fault.

‘Not the hospital,' Mont said quickly. ‘Mine. He was playing near a stable. It was a compound fracture - very dirty. I should have spotted it.'

‘But he'll be all right.' She tried not to make it a question.

‘The father came with me to Boston. After the people up there had seen the kid, the father asked one of them whether there was any chance of not being able to save the arm. He said: “Look, Air Dennis, it's no longer a question of saving your boy's arm. It's a question of saving his life.” I wish I hadn't heard that. I knew it was true, but I wish I hadn't heard that.'

‘I'll get you a drink.'

‘Yes, please. Would you make it rather big?'

She poured him enough whisky to knock a horse out, and then sat on the floor again by the fire. He said: ‘This is good,' and sighed, and closed his eyes. After a while he reached out and pulled her shoulder, and she sat leaning against his chair while he stroked her hair, absently, but with pleasure, as if she were a favourite dog.

‘Why aren't you in bed, Jess?'

‘I'm not going to -1 wasn't tired.'

‘What about the Dolly sisters?' he asked. ‘What would they say?'

‘They're fast asleep. And there's nothing to say anything about.'

‘That's the hell of it.'

Jess turned and looked up at him.

‘You know what I feel.' He turned her round again so that she was not looking at him, and kept his hand on her neck. ‘Everyone keeps on at me about Mont's got to have a woman. Montgomery must get married. We must find a good wife to take care of Dr Jones. I used to think so myself. But you spoiled it.'

‘Please don't.'

‘I wish I didn't like that guy you married. It's an immortal situation. What a cliché. The best friend hanging on to the dregs of hope.'

‘We'll never break up, if that's what you mean,' Jess said rather breathlessly.

‘It gets tough though, huh? Marriage, I mean. After the first excitement.'

‘Yes,'she said cautiously.

‘Happy?'

‘Not terribly. Not at the moment.' She blinked. It would be ridiculous to cry, because she was getting a little sympathy. And treacherous, since the sympathy was not impartial. ‘I hated myself tonight.'

‘I hate myself every night,' Mont said lazily, ‘and most of the morning too. What was the matter?'

‘It was Dorothy. She started hinting things about Laurie. At least, I thought she was hinting.'

‘Bitch. She won't speak to me since I refused to give her bird an enema. No loss, but I don't see Sybil enough. Did you push her face in?'

‘I wish I had. But I listened, and I even thought about what she said, and enlarged on it. That was what was so horrible. The thing is - I don't know, is there something about this house? We seem to fight when we're here. Over nothing. Is it the house? Or is it that being with old lashes gets on our nerves? If so, that's hateful. Do you believe there could be something in the atmosphere of a house that affects people?'

‘Not this one. People are happy here. Remember last Christmas, how marvellous it was? I never had a Christmas like that.'

‘Nor me. I used to look forward to the time when this house was ours and we could live here when Sybil—' Her mother's rubric that you brought ill luck to a person by anticipating their death shed hard - ‘eventually. Now, I'm not so sure.'

‘The only comfort I can offer you,' Mont said, ‘is that with me, you'd be worse off. I'll probably never have a decent house, let alone a haunted one.'

Jess got up. ‘Do you think this house is haunted?' she asked, making it casual.

‘By Dorothy Grue.' He said her name like a shudder, and closed his eyes.

‘You ought to be in bed. Poor Mont. It's awful for you about the boy.'

She thought of the child, sweating with fever in the Boston hospital, imagining an arm already putrefied and blackening. And she had dithered introspectively when his anxiety was so much greater.

‘Go on home and get some sleep, if you've got to be in Boston early,' she said, but he was asleep in the chair.

Sybil woke in the small hours of the morning, as she often did, and lay for a while telling herself a few of the old stories.

For some years now, she had been talking to herself out loud. Not because she was a raving lunatic, but because she liked the sound of her own voice.

It was not senility. It had nothing to do with the mumbling old men who shuffled along sidewalks wagging their heads at an invisible audience. If I want to talk to myself, I'll talk to myself, she told her aushence, who were always pulling her up and calling her silly old fool and useless did parson. For reminiscence, it was far more satisfying than mere thinking. Thoughts got confused, but if you put words out on the air, they stayed in place.

The stories she told herself were not the same as the ones she told to Dorothy, which were mostly plain anecdotal recollections, with no moral or motive. To herself, it was a saga of self-justification, an apologia in which Sybil Camden Prince was always right.

It wasn't my fault … I didn't break my leg on purpose, after all. Crippled up … but there was nothing wrong with me until I fell. I always took care of myself. Ask anyone. Sybil can take care of herself, they said; it's a marvel what she gets through. She invented the thirty hour day. Well -1 raised three children and took good care of Theo and nursed him all through the end. No one nursed Theo but me. I could do anything those days. Didn't I milk the cows right through the war after Benny was drafted? Didn't I milk for Papa? He said: She's a better milker than any man on the place, Papa said. I've done anything. All my life I've put my hand to anything, and if it wasn't for this leg … nobody knows what I've been through with it. They don't know, and I'm glad for them.
I wouldn't want my worst enemy to suffer as I've suffered.

She stopped talking and thought for a moment. She had no worst enemy. She had no enemies at all. She didn't have an enemy in the world.

And that's a lot more than you can say for most people, she told the ceiling, for the pillow had slipped down under her neck and her head had fallen back, but she could not be bothered to raise it.

Nights like this when she lay awake, watching the tree outside her window come imperceptibly into detail as the night faded, she always used to go into Emerson's room and put a hex on the cars.

It was a waste for Dorothy to be in there. She did not mind the cars enough to lose any sleep casting spells at them. Well, there was always the bathroom. With groans and gasps and cries of: ‘Oh - oh,' which were purely trimming, for she was not in any pain, Sybil sat up and swung her legs carefully over the side of the bed, rubbing her scarred thigh perfunctorily, like a mechanic wiping a greasy hand on his overalls.

Below her, she heard the back door open. She heard Jess say something, and then to her surprise, she heard Montgomery's voice. Was someone ill! Jess? Dorothy? It was three in the morning by her luminous clock. It couldn't be three in the afternoon, because it was dark outside, she reasoned shrewdly.

‘Be sure and call me tomorrow,' Jess said. Montgomery answered something that Sybil could not hear. The car door slammed, the starter rattled a couple of times, and then he roared the engine, called out again to Jess and drove away.

This interesting interlude made Sybil forget why she was sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs dangling over her slippers like a fireman ready to jump into his boots. Montgomery was gone, so there was no need for her to go downstairs, if it was her he had come to see. She swung her legs back again, pulled up the covers and curled up to sleep in the evocation of that far ago womb.

*

‘Well! What shall we two girls do today?'

Sybil was tired, with a vague recollection of having been awake for rather a long time in the night. But Dorothy was full of pep and energy, and the old house shrank from her assault with mop and duster, like a fragile patient at the approach of the Pride of the Nursing School.

Anna Romiza still came on Tuesdays and Fridays to clean, but this did not quell Dorothy. On Mondays and Thursdays she had to racket round so that Anna should not label her a messy housekeeper, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays she had to racket around doing all the things that Anna had neglected. On Tuesdays and Fridays when Anna was there, Dorothy was pretentiously integrated, which was trying for Sybil, who had never thought about Anna as coloured before Dorothy drove it home.

‘I hadn't thought about doing anything yet,' answered Sybil, who was still thinking about whether her breakfast was going to digest, or stay for ever in her stomach like pebbles in a bag.

She stared, put a hand to her mouth and belched discreetly, saying: ‘Pardon me,' as Dorothy had taught her, although she had believed all her life that it was not wrong unless you called attention to it.

‘Those old gas pains again?' asked Dorothy delightedly. ‘You know what we've got for
that'

She had the leaves of the willow tree that hung into the pond, bruised with pepper and steeped in wine. She had the decoction all ready prepared in a Coca-Cola bottle labelled Sybil: Gas.

‘I don't want it.' Sybil made a face. ‘It tastes bad.'

‘Natch. No medicine that was tasty ever did anyone any good.' Dorothy put the glass of tainted wine in front of Sybil. ‘Drink it, dear.'

‘I don't want to.' Swimming out of memory, came a picture

of herself sulking over milk, her mother standing over her in

a fyry.

‘Come on, drink up!' Dorothy said brightly, and Roger swung on a blind cord and chattered: ‘Drink up, Roger kiss Mother, Sybil Sybil Sybil.' He liked the sibilance of her name. It mixed in well with the chirps and twitters that
peppered his talk when he was in two minds whether he was a bird or a person.

‘It will make me feel worse.'

‘Drink it, I said.' When Dorothy spoke like that, her eyes bulged as if they would pop right out of her head on to the floor. Her mouth was a scarlet bar.