Room Upstairs (2 page)

*

Of course, they blamed her for all the fuss in the night, when the girl woke screaming, and had to be given a sleeping draught, and looked a wreck on her wedding day.

‘Making up tales like that, Mother,' Thelma said. ‘You are naughty.'

To be called naughty, like a child. Just because no one had heard the breathing, that didn't make it any less true. Did Nigeria not exist because none of them had ever seen it? Oh yes, Robert did, that time he brought home a crocodile skin, and Marma had the shoes and purse made.

Two days after Laurie and Jess were married, Sybil fell down the back stairs and broke her thigh.

She fell over a small pile of laundry that she had left on the second step with a warning memo to herself that it might trip Ted.

But Ted was in bed and asleep when it happened. She had just looked in on him, as she always did, to satisfy herself that he was still alive. He looked dead enough, with his jaw dropped and his half-open eyes rolled back into Ms skull, but
the blanket was moving up and down, and he was snoring softly.

On the table, a child's nightlight, made like a little train, shone a blue Christmas bulb through the driver's cab, so that Ted could find his cookie jar, or his slippers, or his glass of water, or any of the things that punctuated his sleeping and waking through the night.

At the other end of the room, which had become the sewing nook after Ted left home, a pale figure kept guard. He had put his seersucker jacket and linen hat on one of the chesty Edwardian dummies.

‘Good night, dear,' Sybil said, either to her brother or the dummy, whose shape reminded her of her mother. It had been Marma. It had worn the rose brocade when they were going to the Inaugural Ball, and Miss Hatch was shut in there with it for days with her mouth crimped round the pins.

Sybil shut the door softly, turned to go down and make herself a hot malted, fell over the laundry, and woke hours later with no memory of what had happened.

Why am I lying on the floor? Get up, old woman, and get to bed. The first flexing of her muscles to rise told her to stay where she was. I've broken my leg. Well, it has happened at last. As soon as you turn seventy, everyone starts to warn you about ice patches and wet doorsteps and scatter rugs. When you're eighty, they would put you in a chair, if they could, and wheel you everywhere. Is this the end then? End of freedom and doing what I like? Perhaps I shall she, lying here like a fallen tree; then they'll be sorry.

But Laurie will weep for me. Not that girl. She thinks I am a witch. She'll bury me and move into this house, you'll see, and take down all my pictures.

What room is this? Unfamiliar from this angle. Because she could not raise her head without awakening pain somewhere, she turned it from side to side and saw, in the sallow pause before daybreak, table legs, a thicket of chairs, a button. The rubber spool with a bell in it she had bought for the cats at Christmas. The white underside of a cat bowl, crusted with old fish. A cat itself, crouched with its front paws folded, watching her without emotion.

The kitchen then. Beyond the cat, the dearly beloved claws of the old black iron stove, which wore the bright curlicued label Priscilla welded on to its wide breast, like a horse on a merry-go-round.

Squinting up, she saw, by the luminous clock at the back of the white electric stove that had ousted Priscilla, that it was four o'clock. She must have been out nearly five hours. No wonder her head hurt worse than her leg. Naked under the rucked up nightgown and robe, it lay alongside the other, identical with ridge of bone and flabby calf spread on the floor. But the left foot was turned out like a broken doll.

Her head fell back. ‘Ted!' she called, as loudly as she could with her throat stretched. ‘Ted!' But you could fire a gun in his room and the old pantaloon would never hear. Her eyelids dropped, and she slept again, with a dream of her childhood, and woke still in the dream, walking beside her father through the wet meadow grass, to milk a cow.

Her summer cottons are loose, because she has too much figure for eleven, but the wide apron sash shapes her waist, and feels comfortable and full of purpose. Marma doesn't like her to milk the cows. She says she would put bloomers on them if she had her way. Jack, or someone like that, said: ‘Why not the bull?' and she made out she didn't hear. She won't look at the bull. She hardly ever comes up to the barn anyway, and it's months since she went up the hill to the nursery, or even to the pond. She tells Papa he is out of his mind to keep on at the outdoor work when there are men to do it.

By grace divine, O Nature, we are thine. That is one of the things he says.

A step from sun into twilight. The barn is sweet with hay and dung and cow's breath. Of humblest friends, bright creature, scorn not one.

Flat on her back on the black and white squares of the kitchen floor, Sybil lay quietly, tag lines of Wordsworth reeling idly through her head, and the minor naturist poets with whom her father seasoned her childhood.

Now with violets strewn upon her, Mildred lies in peaceful sleeping. All unbound her something tresses and her throbbing heart at rest. And the something rays of moonlight, through
the open casement creeping, show the ring upon her finger, and her hands crossed on her breast.

If it was Monday, Anna would come. Nothing to worry about, except to get the robe pulled down before Anna walked in the back door. She would come through the little hallway where the old hats and coats mouldered, looking cross because it was Monday. Then she would scream, and clap a black hand over her mauve lipstick. Anything out of place made her scream, even a garbage bag rifled by cats, so the sight of Sybil stretched out on the floor should make her really yell. And Ted would wake at last, and feel badly for having slept.

But Anna could not walk in, because the door was bolted. She would think Sybil had gone visiting, and go away.

‘Ted! Ted - help me!' All my life, I've looked out for him. Lied for him to Marma. Carried notes to that girl down by the fish pier, and now look.

Oh Lord, help me - why do I always call on you last?

The door at the top of the stairs creaked open, and slippers shuffled out.

The turn of the stairway hid her from the upper hall, but she called with all her strength, and beat on the floor with her hands. She raised such a racket that the cat got up and walked away, but Ted went on towards the bathroom and shut the door. When he opened it again, she was shouting and sobbing with distress and exhaustion, but his feet went slop, slop past the head of the stairs, and his bedroom door closed. Sybil had just enough strength to register that he had forgotten to flush the toilet again, before thought was blotted out.

*

When Uncle Ted woke with the taste of soda crackers in his mouth, and found that it was gone nine and Sybil had not come raging in to dash the curtains apart and tell him he was lazy, he felt quite annoyed.

Nine o'clock come and gone, and no juice. She was getting very selfish, that girl. Too much fuss made of her at the wedding, with toasts drunk, and that dam' fool congressman making over her¿

You look like a bride yourself, my dear Mrs Prince. Well
he could tell him how old she was, Ted thought grimly, and went cautiously downstairs to see about getting his orange juice, since nobody cared whether he lived or shed.

She wouldn't let him into the ice box, but - hey there; what's this now?

Turning the corner, Ted almost fell down the last few steps, and knelt over his sister on all fours, calling to her to wake up. What to do, if she was dead? He was afraid of the telephone. It rang, as she opened her eyes. She stared blankly into his face for a few moments, creepily not like Sybil.

The ringing went on, understanding flicked into her eyes, and she said: ‘What's the matter, you deaf or something?'

‘Yes.' She was the old Sybil, not scary.

‘Get the telephone.'

‘You know I—'

‘Ted, for God's sake!' He saw then that she was hurt. Her face was full of pain, her lips stiff and bloodless. After she woke, she had begun to shiver, although the kitchen was flooded with sun.

He put out a hand to pull down her bathrobe, but she clutched at his arm and cried out: ‘Don't touch me!' He pulled himself up by the post at the bottom of the stairs, and went in his pyjamas into the other room where the telephone squatted, daring him. He picked it up carefully and pressed it hard against his good ear, which had been functioning at half speed for years.

‘That was Anna.' He came back into the kitchen quite jauntily, for he had managed a telephone conversation without messing it up. ‘Her grandson has the measles. She isn't coming in today.'

‘Is she going to get help?'

‘Why I - I don't—' Jauntiness dropped away.

‘Didn't you tell her what happened?'

‘I don't know what happened,' he said plaintively. ‘I didn't tell her anything. She hung up.'

‘Ted.' Sybil turned her head sideways to look at him. Her eyes were shrunk to a dark glitter, like washed pebbles. Her voice was weak but familiar, the voice for trying to get something into his head. ‘I've broken my leg. You've got to get help.
Doctor Matson. The police. The fire station. Anyone.'

‘I can't use the dial.' Tears began to squeeze out of his eyes because he was so useless.

‘You can.' Her teeth were in and her pale mouth firm. She stuck out her jaw at him. ‘Dial o. Tell the operator to get a doctor. Anyone.'

Yes. Yes. He could do it. Almost running, with bent knees and toes out, he hurried back across the passage, picked up the earpiece again and put a finger like a trembling wad of putty into the dial. Nothing happened. The shrill hum of no one went on into his good ear.

The telephone was on a low table. He picked it up to peer at the dial. MNO. He tried again. Still no one. Hurry, Ted, hurry. There's only you. His hands were shaking so much now that he could not turn the dial. With a crash, the telephone slipped from him, and bounced off the edge of the table on to the floor.

‘What happened?'

He pulled it up a little way by the cord and looked at it, his lips moving in and out, his ear aflame from the receiver jammed so tight, then he let it fall and dropped the other piece after it. It wasn't humming any more. Ted went back as far as the kitchen door.

‘I dropped it, Syb.'

‘Dear God.' He thought she sobbed. ‘Try again.'

‘I can't. The front seems to be broken off.'

‘Oh God,' she sobbed, and rolled her damp grey head from side to side on the floor. ‘Oh God, help me. Help me, Lord, have mercy.'

She called no more on Ted to help her, but he would. He would and he could. He took coats from the hooks in the back hall, old coats. Theo's Donegal, a raincoat that had been to Europe, and covered her, tucking them under her chattering jaw. Swift as thought, he folded a towel and slipped it under her head.

‘Stay there!' he commanded. ‘Don't move.' Her eyes were closed now, and he did not know if she heard him, but he could hear himself and see himself, the saviour hero, and he felt himself a foot taller, and strong as a young bull.

To the rescue! He threw a gallant salute at the inert bundle on the floor, turned smartly down the passage and through the long front room. The nearest house was far away, but just beyond the wide windows, the cars flashed sunlight back through the trees. Stop!

In the hall, he tore through the coats in the closet, showering wire hangers, and pulled his own haphazard over his pyjamas. A brief struggle with the bolt of the front door, and then he was out and stumbling down the hill, clutching his coat round him, his slippers soaked already, breath rasping.

At the bottom of the meadow, he stood against the fence and waved and shouted at the cars on the embankment. Sometimes the rushing faces looked down at him. One or twice, in a slower car, there were smiles, and someone waved.

‘God damn you!' Clutching the fence with one hand, he shook his fist and raved at them, a mouthing puppet, rag doll in baggy pyjama legs.

There were not many cars going this way. On a Monday, most of the cars were on the other side, headed away from the Cape. God damn! He cursed them too. They could see him there with his wild white hair and his pyjamas. Why in hell didn't they stop?

Take it easy, Ted. The raving old man gave place again to the cool hero. This isn't helping Sybil. With calm pride at his resource, he broke a long branch from a tree and tied to the end of it the enormous white handkerchief which was stuffed half in and half out of his pocket.

‘Stop!' he whispered. He had no voice to shout any more. He waved the flag, holding the stick with both hands, bending his body to it

It was an ancient mariner and he stoppeth one of three. Four, five, six cars went by. Someone pointed, a child waved and laughed out of the back of a station wagon receding. In a small green car, the driver turned his head, passed, slowed, stopped, backed the car up a little, then got out and ran back along the grass verge. He was young, in a plaid jacket, his long morning shadow flung down the slope.

‘What's the matter?'

‘I need help,' Ted called up, trying to keep his cracking
voice heroic. ‘Please help me. Get a doctor.'

‘I am a doctor.' the young man said, as if he were as surprised to hear it as Ted.

Sybil nearly shed.

‘I nearly shed, you know,' she told Montgomery Jones, complacently.

‘I know. I was there, remember?'

She shook her head. She could hardly remember what had put her in the hospital, and nothing of being very ill, except odd scraps of dream, like Laurie's face magnified three times its size, and Mary's whine, somewhere unseen: I have a train to catch.

It was all a tangled tale, punctuated by pain, bells ringing, brief unrelated voices that did not fit. That was why she must be on the lookout for people telling her lies about it. Even this young Doctor Jones, with his crooked nose and his bright humorous eye, who was much more fun than the nurses with their sterile, babyish jokes, even he had his story. Just happened to be driving by. As if anyone could believe that. However, he was perfectly charming, and Dr Matson could come begging for business, as long as Jones stayed in Plymouth. Sybil had half a mind not to pay old Matson's last bill, because he was not there in her extremis, although actually no one had sent for him, since Montgomery was in charge.