Room Upstairs (18 page)

‘All right then,' he said. ‘It was Dorothy.'

Jess sat down. ‘Tell me. Tell me what she said. Don't shout at me. I have to know exactly what she said.'

She put her hand on the sofa beside her, but he sat down on the other side of the room and put his head in his hands. When he started to talk, low and flat, like a child repeating a lesson, he did not look at her.

*

He had been alone in one of the rooms after supper, trying to finish the Sunday paper before it was time to leave.

Dorothy came in and started to talk, which was a compulsion with her when she saw anyone reading. She croaked on rather disconnectedly about nothing much, and he thought she might be a little tight. She sat with her legs apart and her skirt drawn back over her fat doughy knees, and there was a sort of glitter to her eyes, as if he had discovered how to manufacture pep pills out of her herbs and simples.

‘Jess looks well, doesn't she, Loll?' She lit a cigarette and coughed as if her lungs were coming up - ‘I don't know when I've seen her look so well.'

‘Nor I.' He lowered the paper and smiled at her, because she was saying: ‘What a lovely girl she is. I'm sure she's going to have the loveliest baby that anyone ever saw.'

She wasn't a bad old sack really. He went back to the editorial, and it was while his face was behind the newspaper that Dorothy said: ‘Better be sure it's your baby.'

‘What the hell are you talking about?' He threw the paper down, and she was smiling, the tip of her pale tongue just showing between her teeth, her head on one side, like a bird.

‘It's not my business. I wouldn't want to interfere in what Isn't my business. It just seems funny to me, that's all.'

‘What seems funny to you?'

‘All this time married - why wasn't she pregnant before?'

Laurie got up in a cold fury and went out of the room and banged the door on her. The woman was drunk, or mad, and he should not even have listened that far. He went to the doorway of the dining room, and stared through at the back views of Jess and Montgomery doing dishes together at the sink. Then he went back into the front room, where Dorothy was sitting just as he had left her, knees apart, head on one side, smiling, as if she had known he would come back.

Sick, distraught, hating himself even more than he hated Dorothy, he said: ‘Go ahead then. Tell me.'

*

‘If you can believe that,' Jess said heavily, ‘You can believe anything.' She felt as if she were made of lead, hardly able to speak for the weight that was on her.

‘You don't deny that he was there?'

‘Of course I don't deny that he was there. I told you about the boy with the broken arm. You were here when Mont called the next day. You even talked to him about it.'

‘You didn't tell me he was there all night. Why?

‘He wasn't.' She did not know why herself, except that she had wanted to guard the sad little disclosure of Mont's heart. ‘How did Dorothy know anyway?'

‘Sybil told her. She woke and heard you saying goodbye to him. So you see, you can't blame Dorothy entirely. Sybil was out to make trouble too.'

Jess got up and went quickly across the rug, which tangled the feet like poodle fur, and knelt down in front of Laurie with her arms on his knees.

‘What's happened to you? How can you believe these things of people you love?' She raised her head and looked at him. His spare young face was set and hard in a way she never saw it. His mouth looked as if it would never smile again.

‘It all adds up, you see,' he said drearily. ‘I wanted to be there for Sybil's birthday, but you persuaded me to stay home. You worked quite hard at it, insisting that I go to the bloody dinner.'

‘You had to go. You didn't want to go to Sybil's. I was trying to be nice to you.'

‘Yeah.' He thought for a moment and then said: ‘Dorothy said you called Mont as soon as you arrived, to ask him to come over.'

‘You told me to! I didn't get him anyway, but it was your idea. Call Mont, you said. You told me to!'

But he would neither remember nor listen to her. The poison had gone into him and he was feeding on it, as it fed on him and made him a stranger.

The only time he was himself for a moment on that terrible evening was when Jess asked him, when they were in bed, cold and miserable and not touching: ‘Why did you pretend at first that it was Sybil who told you all those lies?'

He did not answer for a long time. Then he gasped as if it was hard to get his breath, and said: ‘I was ashamed of listening to Dorothy.' He turned away from her, and she thought that he was crying.

Jess had gone to England to visit her family.

‘Less than a year married, and runs home to mother so soon?' Dorothy asked, with a gruesome twinkle.

‘She hasn't run home.' Laurie tried to stay polite. ‘She wants to see them, and this is the cheap fare season, and later she'll be too far on with the baby.'

‘In my day,' Dorothy said, ‘wives stayed close to their husbands when they were carrying.'

‘In your day,' Laurie said rudely, ‘women wouldn't let their husbands sleep with them when they were pregnant, so they had to stick around to see no one else moved in.'

Dorothy bridled, but Sybil let out a guffaw. It was the sort of remark she could still enjoy, but with which people seldom favoured her, as if her memory had gone about that too.

While Jess was away, Laurie only came once or twice to see his grandmother. He did not stay long, and seemed nervous and irritable. They were working him too hard, driving him like a nervous horse. Sybil had seen him like this before when he was at college, plunging exhausted into combat with his final exams.

At Easter, when she thought he would come, and bring her an egg with a trinket inside, he went south to stay with his mother. Sybil felt abandoned. Maud Owens was in Europe. Even the milkman had gone to Florida, and committed his deliveries to a pitted high-school boy who forgot the yoghurt.

Sybil was deserted. She did not know when Laurie would be home. Jess did not say when she was coming back. Since the day when Dorothy had forced Sybil to tell her something she did not want to tell - Sybil could not now remember what it was - she had been growing increasingly tyrannical. She was happy, singing penseroso songs like
Pale Hands I Love,
with only a sketchy idea of the words, but it was the happiness of triumph. Sometimes Sybil thought she might be drunk, even at ten o'clock in the morning. She made lines on the bottles, so that she could check, but Dorothy was not on liquor. She was intoxicated with power. She had Sybil just where she wanted her, and there was nothing that Sybil could do, for her only hope was to keep her in a good mood.

She felt that Dorothy was watching her. That was why she was not drinking: to keep a clear head. Watching and waiting. For what? For Sybil to she? One morning, her tea tasted funny. So that was it. Dorothy was slowly poisoning her. The next day, Sybil set her alarm and got up early and made the tea herself. It still tasted funny, but Dorothy drank it without comment.

Not the tea then. Something else. Sybil began to leave untouched any food that Dorothy did not eat too. But she began to feel so ill and weak that she asked Montgomery to come in and overhaul her.

‘Fit as a fiddle,' he pronounced, too blithely. ‘You're a remarkable woman for your age, my dear.'

‘She's trying to poison me,' Sybil croaked, watching the door.

‘Rats.' said Montgomery. ‘I'm forced to say she's taking very fine care of you. You're in good shape.'

‘Why do I feel so rotten all the time?'

‘I do too.' (Nothing so maddening as a doctor who dismissed your ills by claiming them for himself.) ‘It's the spring. I'll have a tonic made up for you.'

But Dorothy poured the medicine away down the sink, and gave Sybil a brew of crushed alfalfa.

Mercifully, the telephone rang. Quick as a flash when she was out of the room, Sybil poured the green mess into the calceolaria, rampaging fleshily, like all Dorothy's house plants.

Sybil wrote to Jess:
Please come back soon. I am afraid
…

A week later, she found the letter in the car when she opened the glove compartment to look for a peppermint.

‘Why didn't you mail this?'

‘Mercy, I forgot it. Give it me. I'll swing by the post office and mail it now.'

As she handed over the blue airmail letter, Sybil saw that it had been opened.

‘You never stick your letters down properly.' Dorothy put out her mauve tongue and licked the flap.

By the time they reached the post office, Sybil had shifted forward in her seat and had her hand on the door handle. ‘I'll get out, Dot.'

‘Aren't you cute? But what would people think, letting you run errands for me. No, lady, you sit right there and rest that poor crippled leg while Dotty does the jumping around.'

‘It isn't crippled,' Sybil said, but Dorothy was already out, and banging the car door with a noise like the last barrier of sound, so Sybil continued to herself: ‘All the doctors said there's nothing wrong with it.'

Dorothy came out smiling, with a handful of seed catalogues and heart-broken appeals from priests in youth camps.

If I had enough nerve, Sybil thought, I'd get right out and go in there and look in the waste basket. ‘Did you mail it?'

‘That's what I went in for, wasn't it?'

She did not have enough nerve.

Once, when Dorothy was making beds upstairs, Sybil went to the telephone in the kitchen and dialled Thelma's number
in Philadelphia. She would disguise her voice, so as not to waste time talking to her daughter, and when Laurie came to the phone, she would say quickly:
Come home. Oh, please come home.
There would not be time for more before Dorothy came back.

With her eye on the door into the hall, she listened to the ringing. It stopped, and someone said. ‘Miz Dutton's residence.'

‘May I—'

Roger gave a piercing squawk, like a parrot having its throat torn out, and Sybil hung the telephone back on the wall and moved away quickly as Dorothy's feet pounded on the shallow old stairs.

In a few minutes, the telephone rang. Relief poured through Sybil like a shot of good bourbon. The maid had guessed, had recognized her voice. Had she been there last time Sybil visited?

‘I'll get it.' Dorothy left Roger, now preening and chuckling, lifted the telephone and said: ‘Prince Home', as if it were a funeral parlour.

‘It's for you.'

Sybil took the telephone with a wild heart, gabbling a prayer to whatever God had not totally deserted her to tell her what to say. When are you coming home? At least she could say that.

It was Montgomery.

‘What did
he
want?' Dorothy asked, preparing to go back upstairs now that the conversation was over.

‘He wanted Laurie's address. He's going on vacation, and he wants to send him a postal card from the Virgin Isles.'

‘No comment.' Dorothy smiled and went back to making up Sybil's bed like a hospital, taut as fetters across her toes.

*

Sybil was afraid for her life. She was absolutely convinced now that Dorothy was out to kill her.

It was just a question of time. And Dorothy would take her time, playing with Sybil as a cat would play with a mouse still alive in a trap.

Trapped within the walls of her own house. If she wandered outside, Dorothy would hasten after her, taking her arm uncomfortably, putting a hand under her elbow at the rough spots, as if Sybil did not know every stick and stone and tuffet of this land better than Dorothy knew the runnels and open pores of her own face.

She had got to be very careful. When Dorothy suggested walking to the pond, she said it was too far. That was true. Sybil could not walk very far these days, and she had not been up the hill to the nursery and she herb garden for months.

‘Take you in the wheelbarrow,' jested Dorothy, determined as she was to get Sybil to the brink and push her in.

At night, the old lady lay awake long hours, telling the Nordic sagas.

I've never done anything to her. I gave her a home. I took her in and gave her a home when she hadn't a friend in the world to turn to. They've all gone away. When you're old and ugly and you can't remember what day it is, everyone goes away.

‘What does it feel like to be so old?' That girl of John's, ridiculous name, why should I remember it? I told her. I said, it feels like when you see your hostess wondering why you don't go home, so she can do the dishes. She laughed. I could always make people laugh. Syb's my clown, Papa said. When you're old and silly, they look as surprised if you cut a good joke as if the corpse sat up and spat in their eye.

Monotonously, defensively, she put the words out on to the darkness, watching the door. She would have locked the door, but Dorothy had taken away the key. Or had the key gone years before? So many people had messed around in this house that was only Sybil's, it was too much bother to remember.

When in spite of herself, she grew drowsy, she knew then for certain that Dorothy had drugged her bedtime milk.

‘I don't want milk tonight,' the said, the evening after she found that out.

‘Oh come, Sybilla. I just got through fixing it.' Dorothy sat her down at the table and urged the china mug on her, and Roger said: ‘Drink up Sybil drink up. Sybil Sybil Sybil.'

That night, she climbed out of bed after Dorothy had gone to her room, and wedged a chair under the door handle, as they did in thrillers.

She fell asleep, and when she woke for one of the bathroom trips that were as mindless as sleepwalking, she had forgotten about the chair. She fell over it and made such a racket that Dorothy popped out of Emerson's room in a long stiff Mrs Noah dressing gown and cried: ‘Dear heaven, I thought the other leg had gone at last!'