Room Upstairs (24 page)

*

In the misery that stayed with her all the next day, Jess walked in the garden after dinner, not able to go to bed, not able to sit in the room where Laurie was reading. Through the dusk, a light warm rain fell briefly, not wetting the grass or cooling the air, just passing over the garden like the shadow of a plane.

The crickets and the obsessive summer cars competed for her ears. She went through the gate in the fence, and as she walked up through the dry grass of the meadow, someone walked with her, half a step behind. There was no noise or movement of the grass, but her nerve ends were aware.

She was wearing a light pink dress, and in the corner of her eyes, she saw the pale glimmer in the twilight which was almost gone. She quickened her pace, but you can't outrun your shadow. At the bank where the meadow rose more steeply to meet the trees, she turned with a sigh and went to meet it. She walked right through its solemn face and insubstantial dress and fell forward into the dry rank grass that the cows had left.

She tried to scream, but it was the paralysed screaming of a dream, jerked out of the sleeper no louder than a moan. She lay there for a long time, with grass in her open mouth like a mad woman. Then she knelt and watched the lights of the house, and at. last she got up and began to go slowly back, keeping one hand in front of her to push away the dark.

She was going to Laurie, but when she reached the house, she went upstairs and got into the bed and fell heavily asleep as if she had been driven to exhaustion, or beaten.

*

Some time later, she tackled Sybil.

‘I have to ask you something, Gramma.'

‘Ask away, my dear.'

‘Come into the other room.'

‘Why?'

She was not going to say: So Roger can't hear us: She was not going to be caught that way, playing Sybil's game.

Sybil followed her obeshently, and Jess shut the door and faced her.

‘Tell me something honestly. Do you think this house is haunted?'

‘Well, my dear.' Sybil began to mumble her bruised lips in and out, tasting the words she might say. ‘All houses are haunted, don't you know, by the folk who have lived in them.'

‘You told me the first day I ever came here, you told me that there was a ghost of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and that you had heard him breathing. Remember telling me that?'

The old lady nodded, her eyes innocent, rinsed of colour by the years. ‘I could have done that. You slept in Emerson's room, didn't you?' She brightened to a clearer memory. ‘You were going to be married. He slept in there, you know, the night before his wedding to that Plymouth girl.'

‘You told me. And then you told me that sometimes when you were in that room, you could hear him breathing on the bed.'

‘Did I scare you?'

‘Of course. I woke screaming in the night, don't you remember? And Laurie thought it was because I didn't want
to be married. I tried to forget about it. Now I want to remember. Tell me more about that room. Tell me everything that ever happened. What you saw, what you heard.'

Sybil shook her head. ‘Nothing, really.'

‘But you told me—'

‘Oh my dear,' Sybil looked down and smoothed her dress over her lap, ‘an old woman's fancies. My Aunt Lilian Fugler saw a fairy once. I'll bet you never met anyone under seventy-five who saw a fairy.'

‘You mean you made it up?'

Sybil nodded, still looking down and smoothing the cotton print over her knee, which trembled slightly.

‘Why did you?'

‘Just foolishness, I guess. I can't remember now. I used to imagine I heard him, to keep me company in there, nights when I watched the cars and couldn't sleep. It got to seem real.'

‘But it was real! I heard him, Gramma. I swear to you I did. You told me the story and I was afraid. I woke in the middle of the night, and there was someone lying beside me on the bed. I heard the breathing. You must have heard it too.'

Sybil looked confused. ‘I can't remember.' Her fingers began to fiddle and pick at her dress, like dying hands plucking the sheets. ‘I can't remember ever hearing a thing.'

‘But I did.'

Sybil shrugged, collecting herself. ‘That's your affair,' she said, and reached for her cane on the back of the chair.

‘Don't go for a minute.' Jess took the cane and put it behind her back, standing close to the chair and looking down at Sybil. ‘I want to ask you something else.'

‘It's not my day for being asked questions,' Sybil grumbled. ‘I can't remember things today.'

‘Yes you can. You can remember once when I was in your room at bedtime, and I asked you if this house was haunted.'

‘What did I say?' Sybil asked with interest, waiting for the answer with her mouth open.

‘You didn't deny it. You were going to tell me something, and then Dorothy came in and interrupted and I thought perhaps you were afraid to say anything in front of her.'

‘Scared of Dot?' Sybil glanced towards the kitchen and
smiled. ‘You're getting fanciful, Miss Jess. It usually happens in the earlier months.'

‘Think back to being in bed. It was your birthday. I gave you that dressing gown with the rosebuds, the one you spilled grape soda on. Can't you remember what you were going to say?'

‘About what?' Sybil was losing course, sidetracked by grape soda.

‘About the house being haunted.'

‘Oh that.'

‘You told me that you had seen a ghost.'

‘Did I?' Sybil spread her hands and said easily: ‘Don't take too much notice of that, my dear. Old people see ghosts all the time, you know. Those that have gone are still with us in memory. Though lost to sight, to memory dear thou ever wilt remain. You see, I don't forget things. My Papa used to read poetry to me by the hour, you know. He had his favourites; well, we all do. I have mine …' She began to ramble, her eyes in the past, her mouth slack.

‘You said you had seen a ghost,' Jess repeated, holding herself tense, gripping the handle of the cane in her effort to will the old lady into sense. ‘Think back. Think. Did you - did you even see a ghost of me?'

‘How could I, honey?' Sybil turned and smiled up at her. ‘You're not dead.'

‘I mean, before you knew me. Before I ever came here.'

‘Oh sure.'

So it was true. Jess stared at her, but Sybil was still smiling fondly. ‘All grandmas do, I guess. I used to dream of the girl my Laurie would marry. I always hoped it would be someone like you. A nice girl, pretty and kind. You've been kind to me, Jess. You're a good girl.'

Jess gave her back her stick, but Sybil did not get up. ‘What did you want to ask me?' she asked intelligently. ‘You wanted to ask me something.'

‘I have. I wish I hadn't,' Jess added softly, as she moved away.

Out of the tangle of illogic and wool-gathering, one truth remained. No one but Jess had ever seen a ghost in this house.

Even poor Mary, with all her myths and legends, and the Charity tree weeping under the new moon. Shall I write to her again and ask her if that too was a lie? And she will answer Yes, and say it was only hysteria, from the servant's mumbo jumbo. And I shall know for certain then. This house is haunted only for me.

*

‘Would you like a drink, Gramma?'

‘Shan't we wait for Laurie?'

‘He's not coming tonight. Remember, I told you.' (They always said that, but it wasn't necessarily true.) ‘He's going to hear the Vice-President speak and go on to the reception, and he'll stay the night in town.'

‘Not taking his wife to the party?'

‘Look at her.' Jess stuck her stomach out even farther and made a face like a pig. They both laughed.

Jess made mint juleps, and Sybil said: ‘In my day, no mother would dream of taking liquor for the whole nine months.'

‘In my day, no mother would last the nine months without it.'

They laughed again. The girl was friendly and more cheerful. She seemed to have got over her odd fit earlier in the day when she kept asking Sybil something and Sybil could not seem to give her the right answer, which was not surprising, since she was never quite clear what the question was.

The day was waning in unremitting heat. It was cooler in the house, so they sat in the shaded back room, and Sybil brought the Dorothy bird to share the pleasant hour with her, and perch on the edge of the wooden bowl, drilling holes in the potato chips. It would not surprise Sybil to see it take a peck into her julep. Dorothy had liked her shot.

‘You make a very fair-julep, child. Just like we always had them.' The medicinal bittersweetness, half taste, half fragrance, was like a sob for so many other summers. Juleps with Theo while the tired figures on the hillside moved slowly, raking the last of the hay before dark. Parties for John - or was it Laurie?

‘Uncle Ted taught me.'

Parties for Ted. He had betrayed that girl with the funny nose like a faucet. ‘Everyone knew about it. There was quite a scandal. I expect she's dead now.' She chuckled. It was comic to think of everyone else falling apart but Sybil.

She raised her glass, and the bird said without looking at her: ‘Drink up Sybil, drink up. Sybil Sybil Sybil.'

Jess made a face at the bird, and Sybil said: ‘He always said that when Dot gave me medicine. Stuff she'd made herself.'

‘I always wondered why you drank it.'

‘I had to.' Sybil glanced at the bird, but he was investigating under his wing. ‘There was no gainsaying her. You knew that. Drink up, she'd say, and I did.' She put up a hand between her mouth and the bird and whispered to Jess behind it: ‘Though I'll admit to you now that there was a time when I was afraid she was trying to poison me.'

Weird - that came back all of a sudden. She had forgotten about that time of terror, since Dorothy came back to the world so benign. ‘I thought she drugged my hot milk.' She could see herself now, sitting at the table, crying because she dared not drink and dared not refuse. It was all coming back. Must be the mint.

‘Poor Gramma,' Jess said, not really believing. ‘But then in the end, she poisoned herself. You don't suppose she meant that batch of pills for you?'

‘Oh no,' Sybil said quickly. ‘Oh no, because she didn't make those pills. She was much too sick.'

‘I'm coming down.' She looked up in fear, and Dorothy loomed against the banister rail, wild-haired, lipstick on her teeth, her face as red as her awesome robe, the wide arc of raspberry buttons done up all wrong. The rack of coughing seized her and she gripped the rail until it shook, and the thin wooden posts trembled.

Sybil thought she would choke to death. When Dorothy raised her head, her eyes were streaming, and saliva ran from her scarlet mouth on to the scarlet robe.

‘God damn it,' she said - Dorothy never swore - ‘I'll never make it.'

‘I'll do it, Dot.' Sybil heard herself gabbling and falling
over her words, so eager to help. ‘I'll make the pills. I know how. I've helped you dozens of times.'

‘Tell me how,' Dorothy croaked, suspicious in extremis.

‘You take the powder, the parsnip root, and mix it with the bilberry pulp, and then you pound in cornmeal and put in a mess of honey till it tastes good, and then you roll the pills.'

Clever Sybilla, Dorothy could have said, but she only grunted: ‘OKI guess you can do it. It's the only thing will do me any good.'

The jelly jars in which Dorothy kept the powders and liquids she used were on the top shelf of the cupboard, neatly labelled, for Dorothy was as precise in her herbalism as John Camden had ever been.

Sybil could not find her reading glasses, had not been able to find them for days, but she knew which was the jar for the dried parsnip root. A place for everything and everything in its place was one of Dorothy's sayings, informatively, as if no one else had ever said it.

There it was, next to the horseradish. It was tall and narrow and had once held dill pickle chips. Sybil stood on a chair, panting and clutching at the cupboard shelves. The jar was empty.

What now? She sat down on the chair holding the empty pickle jar, facing the counter under the cupboard as if she were going to play the organ. The eye of the mind saw a tiny figure of herself, like things seen far away in fever, limping up the stairs, knocking on Dorothy's door and saying: ‘I'm sorry, Dot. I couldn't do it.'

Impossible. She had to do it. She had promised. And Dorothy would be pleased with her. She would say: I owe you my life, Sybil Camden Prince, because Sybil had not failed her in her time of greatest need. Sybil had made pills.

But the wild parsnip. She had not been up to the old seed-house on the nursery hill for at least a year, but she knew that was where Dorothy dried the various roots on the sunny shelves, and beat them into powder and stored them in big jars she got from the lady at the soda fountain. This lady's name was Ethel Wills, and she ate only Nature's foods like dandelion salads and carrot tops, which made it hard for her
to have to work among the synthetic juices and plastic hot dogs, but easy for her to understand about the herbal remeshes, and so she saved the big syrup jars for Dorothy.

Thinking of Ethel Wills, and the hot fudge sundaes they had enjoyed from her, and would enjoy again when Dorothy was well, Sybil changed her shoes without realizing just what she was about, and found herself out on the wet spring lawn, headed for the gate of the fence.

There had been a path once, a dirt track for the brown horse that hauled the cart, and later Theo's tractor, and the Jeep. Trees and bushes were gradually obliterating it, seeded firs growing up between the ruts. Dorothy would not use the path, because the branches caught at her hair. Was it a wig? The thought arrested Sybil as she wandered in she trees on the other side of the fence, looking for the path. Or did Dorothy prefer to climb up through the meadow, because it was too steep for Sybil to follow?