Room Upstairs (23 page)

The parched earth, cracking like an old woman's skin, relaxed in dark brown fragrance. On the driveway, the birds took baths in puddles instead of the dust. The phlox revived, and Sybil felt so well that in the afternoon, she took Dorothy's secateurs out to trim off the shattered roses.

Japanese beetles, stronger than the wind and rain, were dinging to the dead heads, and eating their way disgustingly into the tight buds that had ridden out the storm. Dorothy used to spray them vindictively, murdering them as they gorged, gritting her teeth as she directed a specially vicious shot at the couples who were getting married on Henry Ford and Mrs Sam McGredy.

Rose spray. Sybil went to the toolshed, but the sprayer was empty. Dorothy used to mix powder in a bucket under the out' side tap.

Sybil could see her clearly, vast from behind like a square triumphal arch, bending in the broad jeans. Where did she

keep the powder. It was hard to remember, when people simply went off and left you trying to find where they put things. There should be a big jar like a gallon jar for Coca-Cola syrup somewhere. It didn't matter. Sybil stood vacant-eyed and slack-mouthed by the rose bed, trailing the empty sprayer.

‘What's the matter?' Anna Romiza called through the open kitchen window.

‘I wanted to spray the beetles.'

‘What with?'

‘Nothing.'

‘You can use the spray can I got for the flies. I'll bring it out. Just wait while I dry my hands.'

‘No dear, I'll come in. You've got your work, I've got mine.'

Always so thoughtful. In the old days, with Nancy and Walter, she would work right along with them, and Nancy said, pretending: ‘I don't know what good we are, she'd never miss us.'

In the spring when it was bedding-out time, she and Nancy worked side by side up on the hill all day, and when Theo came up to see who was going to make dinner, he would say they were better than men. Nancy was like a man. She picked Sybil up once, and Theo said: ‘That's more than I can do.' They laughed then. They were always laughing. Now there wasn't much to laugh at. When the young ones threw away a joke and she asked them to repeat it, they said it wouldn't be funny any more, but then looked at each other and burst out laughing again, which showed it was.

April April laugh thy girlish laughter. ‘What month is this, Anna?' When she went into the kitchen, she had forgotten what she came for. Poor Roger looked very droopy. He couldn't be moulting, if Anna was right about it being July. There was a roast in the oven and the kitchen was too hot.

‘I'll take him out and hang him in a tree. He can imagine he's free and wild.'

‘Why don't you let him go?' Anna asked.

‘He'd get killed by the other birds.' Everybody knew that. Anna was a good friend, but she was very silly. You couldn't have a conversation with her. It passed through Sybil's mind
and out the other side that she might tell Jess that she could manage on her own while she was out being a Pilgrim maid.

As Sybil was going out of the door, lopsided with the birdcage, Anna said: ‘I thought you came in for the spray.'

‘Thank you,' Sybil concealed surprise with dignity.

While she was directing spray from the can at the beetles, aiming carefully, firing straight into the ruined heart of the rose where the obscene shellbacks clung, Dorothy said calmly: ‘Sybil.'

‘What have I done?' She wheeled round. Why shouldn't she use the can? But Dorothy wasn't there. She was hiding, playing tricks again. In the bushes. Behind a tree. Round the corner of the house. As soon as Sybil's back was turned, she would spring out and say Groo. Where are you, Dot? I know where you are.

‘Sybil Sybil Sybil.'

Trembling, gasping, her heart knocking a tattoo, Sybil leaned against the tree and shook her fist weakly at the bird, whistling and chattering a whole string of old tag phrases, arching his wing muscles and agitating his plumage so that the cage swung on the low branch.

*

‘He's talking again.' When Jess came home, she told her about it at once.

Jess stood under the cage and chirped to the bird and called him pretty names. He listened with his head tilted and his eye unblinking. He would not answer, but as soon as Sybil and Jess and Anna began to talk together, he started off with catch phrases, unreeling the inane old dialogue that he had picked up from Dorothy.

‘I don't know that I can live with it,' Laurie said when he heard it. ‘It's too unnervingly like her.'

‘Perhaps she's pushed poor Henry out.' Jess tried to make a scared face, but she giggled. ‘Perhaps her soul has come back into that bird.'

She was going to giggle again, but Sybil said: ‘Yes. Yes, that's right. It has.' Why could they not see it? It was all so clear. Clear and simple and, as she saw now, inevitable.

They tried to jolly her out of it. Well, they could think what they liked, but she knew now. It was obvious. This was the way it had to be. In the following days, she became increasingly obsessed with the idea that Dorothy's spirit was in the bird. It was in her mind all day. She could not talk about it to the others, so she hardly spoke, for there was nothing else that she could talk about.

She grew confused again. Many times, she could not tell who was who. It was like those strange dream-like days with Dorothy on Emerson's bed, when she was not sure which was Dorothy and which was the bird.

Had that been a dream? No one ever talked about it. Emerson's door was locked, so she could not go in to see.

‘Why has she locked herself in?' she asked Jess.

‘Hush, Gramma dear.' The child patted her, as if she were the grandmother and Sybil the child. ‘We took away the key.'

Were they all in league against her? Was that it? If they knew that Dorothy was in there, were they keeping Sybil out so that they could have her for themselves?

Dot was her friend. ‘The best pal you ever had, Sybil Camden Prince,' she said, wagging her thick black head until the earrings swung like prayer bells. ‘It was a lucky day for both of us when the road brought me to you.'

Dorothy was her friend, but they kept her locked away. The Dorothy bird was there, and Sybil took to spending most of her time in the kitchen, sitting at the table with her forearms slack and idle and her fingers fiddling with nothing, speaking her thoughts aloud for the bird to hear, and waiting for ah answer.

‘It gives me the creeps,' she heard Anna say to someone, ‘to see her sit there and converse with herself.' And Montgomery - that was who she said it to - came over and sat down opposite her at the table and held her hands to keep the fingers still, and made distracting conversation, when all she wanted to do was listen for the bird.

Sometimes it was silent for hours on end. Sometimes it would chatter non-stop. You never knew, so you had to stick around. That was like Dot. Always keep ‘em guessing. Good old Dot. Sybil did not know what she would have done without
her in these muddled days. It was absurd of them to pretend not to believe she had come back. They were not as stupid as that. They did not want her to have Dorothy. But Dorothy was all she had, if everyone else was going to call her a liar.

‘Hullo Sybil.'

When the bird said that, she would answer cheerfully: ‘Hullo, Dot.'

Jess would screw up her face and say: ‘Gramma,
please?
but it was Dorothy's voice, after all, so why be rude?

If the minister came in here today (but they were keeping him away too), and said: ‘Good morning, Mrs Prince' in his own voice, what would they say if she answered: ‘Good morning, Maggie Riley'? They'd have her shackled to the walls in no time.

When Sybil talked about the Dorothy bird, Jess looked scared, and Anna cried: ‘Jesus!' and glued her hand to her mouth. But there was nothing to be scared of. There was no fear any more.

What she could not make anybody understand - and she had not tried for fear of spoiling it - was that Dot had come back to her in peace. As a friend. As a protector. That was why she had come back, for Sybil was weak and helpless and did not know the score.

There was one day when Jess, who was usually so gentle, burst out to her: ‘Don't keep on with this! You hated her! We shall rot in hell for letting her stay with you.'

‘Get a hold on yourself, child,' Sybil said, very calmly, leaning on her stick, her foot tapping, mistress of the affair. ‘You'll make yourself ill.'

She could not understand, the flushed, tousled English girl, carrying her baby so awkwardly, for that art had gone out, along with needlepoint. Could not or would not understand.

Dorothy had come back as a friend. A protector. A lover.

*

If she had not promised Sybil, and herself, that she would stay here at least until her baby was born, Jess might have told Laurie that she could not go on with it.

But she had promised him too, and after their first appalled discussion of Sybil's hallucination, he had not wanted to talk about it again. It was trivia to him, women's chat to bore a man as soon as he got home. He shrugged it off, not irritably, but too lightly. The grandmother's harmless fancy. He humoured her, and said: ‘Oh sure, sure,' without listening.

If Jess spoke of the bird, he humoured her too, patted her and gave her quick, sexless kisses, and said that everything would be all right when she had the baby to keep her busy.

Sybil was cute enough not to overdo the bird when Laurie was there, but the rest of the time, she was gruesomely obsessed.

As well as finding his voice again, Roger had found his spirit of adventure. He had refused to leave the cage after Jess and Laurie captured him upstairs, but now he came out whenever Sybil opened the door. She would climb on to the chrome and plastic stool, teetering and gasping, and bring him out on her finger.

‘Jess! Jess! Help me down!'

‘You shouldn't get up there.' Jess held out her hand and took the old woman's weight as she half fell, clumsily, off the stool.

‘Don't be sharp with me.' Sybil turned up her eyes in a sickening, doggy way.

‘I only said you shouldn't climb up there,' Jess repeated in the controlled nursing home shout she despised, but could not avoid sometimes, if she were not to scream.

‘She asked me to,' Sybil said smugly.

Roger had never stayed with Sybil for long when Dorothy was alive, but now he would perch on her shoulder for hours, nibbling in her hair like a woodpecker and whispering in her ear. Sybil would sit there with a silly, senile smile across her face and her teeth out, for she was forgetting the essentials, now that the bird ruled her life.

She even tried to betray the cats, for the black panther with she whiskers like piano wires had never forgotten his taste of Roger's tail feathers. He sat all day under the cage, slotting his eyes, his muscular tail lashing and curling with a life of its own. When Sybil sat at the table with the bird on her shoulder,
the cat would appear in the opposite chair, bolt upright, like a husband waiting for a meal.

‘I'm scared of him,' Sybil said. ‘Look how he stares.'

‘It's not you he's got in mind.' Jess smiled and caressed the cat, for she often wished that he would spring, and end it.

‘He'll have to go,' Sybil said, in an odd flat voice, her eyes not focusing.

‘Over my dead body.' But the bird was churring and whispering in Sybil's ear, and she was not listening.

It was very hot. Jess was beginning to have pains in her legs, and she spent more time sitting on a bench at the Plantation, hoping she would not be seen and told to circulate. The crowds and the heat and the baby grew, and she grew more tired, but she could not give it up, for her afternoons away from the house were the only sane part of the day.

She longed to get away, and dreaded coming back. When Anna left, there were at least two hours before Laurie came home. Sometimes she thought about killing the bird. Or taking him in her hand and throwing him out upon the air. What if he would not fly away? What if he came back, pecking at the window screens, tapping round the casement of the door? And she knew that she could not kill him and could not throw him away, because it would mean that she was deranged too, that she believed what Sybil believed.

There were forty-three of them, I counted. The day I was there there was only thirty-nine.

Jess was on the stairs when the voices came to her again. She stopped halfway down, one foot below the other, the weight in front of her balanced on her bent knee, and listened to them.

They were selling them cheap. I hate to hurry you, but we have to leave in five minutes.

There were two of them, but in her own voice, and when one of them said: There's no excuse, the words seemed to pass in front of her eyes not seen, yet perceived with another sense than hearing, like images on the inside of closed lids, although her eyes were open.

The voices did not come again, but she kept the radio on downstairs, and turned on the transistor in her room, loud enough to keep them away.

Two nights later, she asked Laurie: ‘Do you believe it?'

‘What?' They were lying on their backs, the moonlight on his face, her body a sheeted mound.

‘What Sybil believes - about the bird.'

‘Don't start that now. Get your sleep.'

‘You shouldn't let her go on…'

‘If it gives her pleasure. Why do you get so upset over the poor old lady? It isn't good for her, or you.'

‘I can't stand it. I can't—' She almost said: I can't stay here, but caught her breath in a dry sob and said: ‘I can't stand the bird any longer.'

He had closed his eyes, a marble face under the moon. He did not answer, but she saw his lips tighten.

She raised herself on her elbow. ‘I want to get rid of it,' she whispered.

He opened his eyes and looked at her for an agonizing moment as if she were nothing, nobody to him, before he smiled, and reached out a hand, and murmured: ‘Come on now. If you're going to be like this every time you're pregnant, we'd better not have any more kids.'