Room Upstairs (19 page)

‘What if it did?' Sybil asked, still vague with sleep and shock, scarcely knowing what she said. ‘Would you be glad?'

‘My dear little friend,' Dorothy said, most tenderly. ‘Don't you know that I love you more than any person in the whole world?'

‘You do?' Sybil was sitting on the chair, breathing heavily.

‘Don't you know that by now? Why, I'd offer my life for you, Sybil Camden Prince, if I was ever called upon to make that gift.'

And all next day, she was as sweet and gay as only Dot could be. Cooking up special dishes in such a doting way that Sybil ate them without fear. Getting out the cards and telling Sybil's fortune. ‘Long life and great prosperity. What's this, what's this? Is that a man I see looming on the horizon?'

Cackles of easy-going, familiar laughter, and a coughing fit, and Roger calling for the paper boy, soup and sandwich, naughty Loll, in a frenzy of jealousy.

They went for a drive along the sea. They bought a flowered spring hat for Sybil, which made her look like a carnival horse. In the evening, they watched the late movie, and had hot todshes, and Dorothy cast on a cardigan in marbled wool, which was to be for ‘my secret pal'. She winked, and laid a knitting needle alongside her nose.

Silly old secret pal. Crazy old relic. It had all been in her head. She must never admit how fearful she had been, for they would think her even farther gone than she was.

Dorothy was very charming all next day as well, so that it was a shock great enough to stop the heart when Sybil once more found her mother upstairs, wearing the brown costume,
the feathered hat, the face - the face a twisted horror mask that Laurie had brought last Halloween.

Behind her, Dorothy's rasping chuckle. ‘Ain't she a character?'

‘Why do you do this?' Sybil asked, turning to confront her with burning eyes.

‘When I was a kid, we always played dressing up. I'm a push-over for dressing up, you know.'

‘But why - why—' Sybil pointed at the dummy, mute, paralysed, twisted like a stroke victim in the dim light at the top of the stairs.

‘You don't think I'd presume to put your sacred mother's clothes on me? Whatever they say about me, I know my place.'

Dorothy went into her room and shut the door.

In the night, Sybil could not leave her room, because of the dummy standing guard outside. Guilty, ashamed, feeling one step nearer to that place where the old lashes sat on the commode, she took out the pretty flowered china receptacle that had been part of her bedroom set in the days before Papa had the plumbing put in.

Dorothy would be hopping mad. Well, Sybil would deny her that pleasure. She emptied it out of the window and went back to bed.

She woke again later, and heard soft footsteps in the hall. Lying very still, she could hear someone breathing outside her door.

Dawn was in the room. She watched the handle turn. The door did not open. If she were to get out of bed and put her eye to the empty keyhole, she knew that she would see another eye, gibbous, glistening. Or would it be the hollow eye of the mask, with Bella's dead eye beyond, turned up into the skull?

Sybil lay like stone, as if she were on her own tomb, and listened to her heart. She could see it thudding under the chicken bones and skin that used to be her breast. All at once, she thought of Theo. She prayed to him: Help me, dearest, although it was always she who had helped him.

It seemed an eternity before the handle turned back again, and the shuffling steps went secretly away.

So that was it. At least now I know. The poison didn't work. Now she is going to frighten me to death.

*

Dorothy Grue was sick. She had a sore throat, and although she refused to take her temperature, she was flushed up one minute, the network of her cheeks on fire, and the next, her teeth were chattering like bones, although they really fitted quite well. The heating system was stop and go all day, like the way she drove in traffic, from the amount of times she swivelled the thermostat impatiently back and forth.

‘Why don't you go to bed, Dot dear?' Sybil suggested, after she found her vomiting raucously into the potato peelings in the sink basket.

‘Never sick nor sorry,' Dorothy said without conviction. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. ‘But I do feel a bit low, Syb. Maybe I will lie down for a while, if you're sure you'll be all right.'

‘Me? There's nothing wrong with me.'

‘Why else do you suppose I've fought to stay on my feet all day?' Dorothy asked piteously, thus charging Sybil neatly with whatever consequences might come of her own stubbornness.

She unhooked Roger and took him upstairs. Sybil spent an hour pottering and fiddling and weaving aimlessly back and forth between sink and stove and refrigerator, and achieved a tray of supper for Dorothy of which she was as proud as a banquet.

Chicken soup, little finger sandwiches, ice tinkling in a glass of orange juice. Who can say useless old person now? I shall take care of Dorothy, and she will know how clever and able I am, and how much she needs me. She thinks I need her. Well, now we shall see.

But all we saw was Dorothy putting a tousled black head round the door at Sybil's knock and asking how a person was supposed to eat supper when they were coughing their lungs up like a gas victim of World War One.

She did not ask it angrily. She asked it quite reasonably and patiently. Too patiently. As if the impressive feat of preparing
a tray supper had not altered one jot her opinion of Sybil's senility.

‘Shall I bring you some milk later?' Sybil was still gasping from the climb upstairs with the tray.

‘I may be asleep. If I live so long.'

‘But if you're not?'

‘You can leave it outside the door.'

In all the time that Dorothy had been here, Sybil had never been in her room. No invitation for a tour of the ornaments and family photographs. She had no idea what Dorothy had done with Emerson's room. She could be sleeping on spikes or printing counterfeit dollars for all she knew. When Dorothy was downstairs, the door was locked. Sybil had tried it once or twice.

She took the tray back to the kitchen, and ate the supper herself. The soup was cold, but she could not raise the spirit to put it back on the stove. She was lonely. She wandered, watched the television without registering what was on the screen, looked at pictures of smashed and twisted cars in the newspaper. She had thought it would be nice to be on her own for once, but it was impossible to settle. She wanted to ask Dorothy: Which programme? Which book? Where are my nail scissors, my glasses, my slippers? The things she had lost in these last few months! They walked off on their own, just as if they too had got sick of her, sick of belonging to somebody who forgot where she put them and then did not really care if they were lost.

By the time she was ninety, she would be living in a barren shack, uncluttered, with a spoon tied around her neck and her name on a label.

With no Roger to tell her when it was time for bed, she dozed off in front of the television, and woke hours later when all the programmes were finished and only the President and Old Glory keeping the screen.

Stumbling and mumbling, she warmed up some milk and left it outside the door with skin already forming and said: ‘There you are, Mother,' loud enough for her to hear if she was awake, but not too loud to wake her if she was asleep.

‘Don't make over her, Miss Sybil,' Polly had said in the
kitchen, unkindly. ‘It's you has had the greater loss, pet.'

Bella locked herself in her room after Papa's funeral; and then came downstairs in a blazing temper and criticized everything that had been done. Polly gave notice again - it was her way of getting a few weeks' vacation - and Sybil did the cooking. I cried into the meringue, she remembered, sitting on the edge of her bed next morning open mouthed with her stocking halfway up her good leg, arrested by a vision of the past more clear than she had enjoyed for a long time.

She took such a long time dressing that Dorothy opened her door and yelled healthily: ‘What does a sick person do to get a bite of breakfast around here?'

‘Oh hullo, Dot. Aren't you better then?'

‘If you call having a golf ball on each side of my throat, and an iron band round my head like mesheval torture being better, then yes, I am better. Thank you.'

She was wearing her long stiff dressing gown with the buttons like giant raspberries arching down the front and the hem standing on the floor all round, so that if her feet had dropped off in the night, you would never know it. Sybil had never seen her in pyjamas. She knew that Dorothy wore pyjamas, because she had seen them on the line, square, short-legged, slapping at the wind.

‘I'm so sorry, Dot. Have you tried your pills?'

‘The box is empty. I want you to bring me up some more.' Dorothy had not combed her dry black hair, but she had put on lipstick. She always put on lipstick as soon as she Woke up, or else she went to bed in it. There was a stain of it on her teeth, carnivorous.

‘Of course, dear,' Good, she was needed again. ‘I'll bring them up with your breakfast.'

But when she looked in the cupboard where they kept the herbal remeshes, the jar where Dorothy stored the parsnip and bilberry pills that stood between her and lung cancer was empty.

What to do? Make some more? I could. I'll bet I could. But it would take time. Tell her first? Get breakfast? Start the pills?

In a confusion of indecision, Sybil bumped round the
kitchen, picking things up and putting them aimlessly down, pouring prune juice and spilling it, bending with a groan to get out the old wooden mixing bowl, starting for the stairs and coming back again, for if she reported no pills, Dorothy would be angry. She would set the cords of her neck and pull her lips back, and Sybil would see the lipstick on her teeth.

‘Sybil!'

Well, she was angry now anyway, so there it was. Sybil went to the foot of the stairs and looked up. Dorothy was standing over the stairwell, hands gripping the rail, face scarlet as she leaned forward in a paroxysm of painful coughing.

‘Where are my pills?' she croaked. She leaned over Sybil with her red face and her bulging eyes, and Sybil thought that she would fall on her and smother her with the crimson robe, the wooden raspberry buttons biting into her face.

‘There aren't any.'

‘Dear God alive,' said Dorothy in a towering rage, although it was she who had eaten the pins. ‘So now you expect me to drag myself down there and mix up some more.'

‘I'm sorry, Dot.' Sybil stood at the bottom of the stairs forlornly, with her eyes turned up to the heaving scarlet pouter breast, the staring, pitiless eyes.

‘I'm coming down.' It sounded like a threat.

*

That evening, Dorothy was dead. Sybil knew that she was dead, because although she was lying there on the bed with her eyes open, she did not say a word when Sybil went to the dressing table and picked up a photograph in an ornate gilt frame of a lot of grown-ups and children with faces like pigs standing round a wheelchair where an ancient baby glowered.

She picked it right up and held it near her eyes because she had not been able to find her glasses for days, and examined it closely before deciding that the pig in the billowing shirtwaist was Dorothy, centuries ago. She put it down again, with all those ugly faces to the wall.

‘Hullo Sybil.'

She turned in a flash, the blood running out of her like an
emptied bath so that her feet were lead, rooted, and her head swayed empty and dizzy.

Roger was in his domed cage on a table near the bed, regarding her sideways with his papery seed-shaped eye. Dorothy was still lying there with her eyes rolled back, her jaw dropped, and the top half of her teeth dropped with it across the cavern of her mouth.

Get her teeth in, quick Bridget.

When Sybil was in the hospital, a young nurse had come flying in with her hair all at odds, and cried to the older nurse who was dressing Sybil's leg: ‘Mrs McKenzie's gone!'

‘Get her teeth in, Bridget. If you leave it, you'll never get ‘em in.'

So Sybil went over to the bed where she had so often made Emerson lie and breathe for her, and tried to push Dorothy's top teeth back against her gums. It seemed like a liberty, especially as Dorothy had always preserved the fiction of: Thank goodness I've still got all my teeth, but she was dead now, and dethroned.

Another of the fictions had been: ‘I'm happy to say I haven't a grey hair.' Bending closer now, touching the clammy skin with curious, daring fingertips, trying to turn the head on the stiffening neck, Sybil saw that the roots of the dead black hair were coming in snow white.

‘You should have thought of that before you shed, and given yourself a treatment,' Sybil told her in a schoolmistressy voice.

After a while, if Dorothy went on lying there and could not use the colouring bottle, her hair would all be quite white, and she would look as old as Sybil.

‘You don't look like any young girl now, Dot, I'll tell you that,' Sybil said. Her voice sounded weird in the empty room. Roger was silent, scrabbling under his wing as if he had lice, and then shaking himself up into a ruffled ball and letting the plumage gradually subside into sleekness before he started all over again, scrabbling and ruffling.

It was no wonder that Dorothy was not looking her best, for she had had a rough passage that day. The first time Sybil ventured into the room, emboldened by her cries for help, she
was vomiting all over everything, and doubled up with her hands over her stomach, screaming that somebody was slicing her in two.

‘Oh dear, poor Dot.' Sybil went down to look in the herbal to see what was good for that, but she could not read the small precise writing of her ancestor. She looked in the herb remedy cupboard aimlessly, ran a few plates under the tap, and then sat drumming her fingers at the table, wondering what day of the week it was, and why she was there, and what life was all about in any case.