Room Upstairs (25 page)

She headed back to the grass, chopping angrily with her cane at thistles, which did not flinch. I was running up that hill long before you were born, she told whoever it was who was telling her it was too far. I'll get up, she panted aloud, stumbling and lurching through the lumps and tufts the winter had heaved, if I have to do it on my hands and knees. And later, after a blank interval when there was no mind to think or speak with, only the body toiling perpetually upward, she came to herself in sunlight and saw that she was indeed climbing the last slope on hands and knees.

Her cane was gone, somewhere far below. Who cares. I lose one a week. Stones were under her hands, dry cow dung, thistles. She raised her head like a tortoise and saw the top of the seedhouse, leaning against the sky, its old blue paint faded and flaked like a dinghy left too long in the water.

Excelsior. In New Hampshire, Papa took her up a mountain, and they said Excelsior to each other when they reached-the top. But there was another top farther on, and so they said it again there.

Rasping breaths knifed her throat. She paused, leaning against the slope, and decided not to go any farther. It had been a good climb. Below her, the house sat quietly among
the bare trees, waiting for the leaves to clothe it. It was very peaceful resting here on the bosom of her own hill, with a small breeze softening her face that had been climbing with clenched jaw. Perhaps she should stay here. Here at the quiet limit of the world, Papa said, under the sky, with the dark miles of pines between him and the sea. Here at the quiet limit of the world, a white haired shadow roaming like a dream the ever silent spaces of the East.

But he never did roam here. He went away and left her with Marma. Wait for me, Papa! With a grunt, she pushed herself upright and moved one foot above the other, to find him at the top of the hill.

The door of the seedhouse was shut, but not locked. She pushed in and sat down on the broken chair, getting her breath back in the familiar dusty savour of dried earth and flowerpots and crumbled herbs.

I did it. I did it, Dot. You will be proud of me.

After a while, she was able to get up and poke about on the shelves, looking for what she had come for. But she knew what I she had come for, that was the thing. They thought she was done for, obsolete, a useless crone sopping her crusts in sweet tea.

There were roots spread on the drying racks. Some of them had been there too long and were mildewing, some were crumbled and hollow. No telling what they were, but they were no use anyway. On a shelf at the back of the shed, near the thick board and the scarred rolling pin that Dorothy used to crush roots and dried stalks were the big jars that Ethel Wills gave her. Sybil took the one that contained the most powder, since Dorothy would need a good supply of pills to tide her through convalescence, and clutching it to her, shut the door of the shed and went home the longer way down the road and down the driveway, using a bamboo plant stake for a cane.

As she mixed up the powder and the fruit pulp and the cornmeal in the old wooden bowl, she wished that Dorothy could see her, so efficient. But if Dorothy were there, she would be doing the mixing. Sybil was only allowed to roll the pills.

She tipped in an amber waterfall of honey. She added a
little more, for Dorothy's sweet tooth, and hooked in a finger nail, to taste before she rolled. Disgusting. Did the pills always taste that bad? If so, Dorothy had been putting a good face on them to shame Sybil for grimacing over the willowleaf wine.

But poor old Dot was sick now, and must be pampered. When Mary was a child, you couldn't get a pill down her, hysterical as she was. Polly used to hide her tablets in a big spoonful of strawberry preserve. They still had some of Melia's chunky marmalade, for when oranges were cheap, she had made enough for a year's siege. When she had rolled the pills, Sybil took them upstairs with the marmalade and a spoon and a glass of water on a tray. She had to lay the marmalade jar on its side, and the water was all over the tray by the time she reached the top, but she filled up the glass in the bathroom and knocked on Emerson's door.

‘Where have you been?' Dorothy jerked open the door as if she had been waiting behind it. ‘I thought you'd shed.'

‘I might have,' Sybil said proudly, ‘with my heart. Going all—'

But Dorothy would not hear the epic tale. She grabbed a pill, chased it down with water and began to cough again, holding the sides of her great chest as if the bows of her ribs might fly apart.

Sybil put the tray on a chair and put two pills into a big spoonful of marmalade, and when Dorothy opened her mouth to gasp, Sybil popped in the spoon, opening her own mouth like a mother feeding a baby.

Dorothy leaned against the doorpost and glowered wanly. ‘That marmalade tastes funny.'

‘Best in the house!' She did not remind her who made it, for Dorothy could never hear any good of Melia Mulligan, only bad. ‘Take a couple more, for luck. That's a good girl. Come on now, to please Sybil.' Cooing and coaxing, for there was no more ire in Dorothy, only a sickly weakness, she gave her two more marmaladed pills, and was emboldened to suggest: ‘Let me help you back into bed.'

The slam of the door wiped the smile from her face like the back of a hand.

*

‘Why didn't you tell us this before?'

‘I never thought about it. All the fuss and excitement and the fool questions, it went clean out of my head. Can you imagine me making it to the seedhouse and down? I couldn't do it now to save my life. But to save Dot's, I could.'

She was losing logic again, quite serenely, but Jess was beginning to tremble. She felt sick and cold, and her hands were shaking, so she twisted them together. They were sweating, but her mouth was thick and dry and it was hard to speak.

‘It must have been the shock of—the shock of—' She could not speak to Sybil about Dorothy's death.

She did it. She killed her.

She put her hands to her mouth and rushed out of the room. She ran outside, though the sink was nearer, and vomited up her soul into the long feathery grass beside the wire of the tennis court. There was nothing left inside her, and the baby plunged fretfully, as if he too would be vomited up and leave her.

She lay there for a long time. When she got up at last and carried the baby indoors on legs that had no power, Sybil seemed to have forgotten everything again. She had poured herself another drink, and was in the kitchen chopping cabbage with the glass at her elbow, like any suburban housewife cooking dinner by the light of a martini.

‘What's the matter, child?' She turned as Jess came in. ‘You look terrible.'

‘How do you expect me to look?' Jess swallowed, to see if she might be sick again.

‘It's hard, I know. It's hard for women. Dot says if men had to have the babies, it would solve the population problem.' She laughed. ‘Shall I put dill into the slaw, or does it get in your teeth the way it does mine?'

She had forgotten already. Whatever door had kept the truth concealed had clanged again. Jess was the only one who knew.

Let me forget too, she prayed before she went to sleep. Let me forget. But in the leaden awakening of the morning, what might have been a dream was true.

She could hardly look at Sybil. When she took in the break
fast tray, and the old lady reached out scarecrow arms to embrace her, Jess stepped back quickly to the window, pretending to look out. She killed her. She stared down into the garden in a panic. She let her she an agonizing death. She's a murderess. She's mad.

All day the thoughts twisted in her mind like maggots. She spent most of the morning in bed. Then she telephoned Anna and asked her to come early. She drove to where a finger of rocks lay out into the sea, and sat hunched up in her Pilgrim dress, staring at the green shifting water, not caring that the people who were fishing on the rocks farther out stared at her white Dutch cap and her big white collar fluttering.

She craved the crowded obliteration of the Plantation, but when it was time to go there, she could not show them her face. She went back up the beach, carrying her shoes, and got into the car and drove barefoot towards Boston. When she was in the street where Laurie's office was, She could not get out of the car because she was wearing her Pilgrim dress, so she drove back to Camden House and asked Anna if she would stay on for a while.

She changed her clothes and sat outside behind a tree, and when she heard Laurie's car at the top of the steep driveway, she rushed round the house to cry to him: She killed her! But when he stopped the car with a bounce and jumped out and ran to her, she could not tell him.

She had asked Anna to stay later, because she had the idea that when she told Laurie, he would take her away from there. Away from Sybil and the bird and the yellow house and the stench of death that swept down the stairs like poison gas.

He put his arm around her and they went into the house together, and nothing was changed. She could not change it. If she told Laurie - but torturing everyone would not make her own torture less. Suppose he felt a perverted legal compulsion to reveal the truth, even about his own grandmother? Montgomery? His doctor's code could also righteously destroy. Nothing to gain by haggling over Dorothy's disintegrating corpse. Everything to lose.

Sybil had forgotten already. The guilt had been passed to
Jess. And to her child. She would tell him in the end, because she would tell him everything she knew. Laurie would bring him up in warm pride of his family. Then Jess would shiver it with her cold secret.

Somehow she got through another day. She went to the Plantation in the long woollen dress, which was strained now as tightly as Dorothy's cardigans. New images of Dorothy crowded her mind to replace the old false images of Dorothy as fool and fated bungler, hatching her own death. Dorothy was victim now, the bludgeoned corpse in Epping Forest, the mutilated woman in the river.

A victim who would never be avenged, because of Jess. She sat on a three-legged stool inside the Myles Standish House and held on to her baby and thought: I am not fit to have a child.

Myles Standish, with fiery ginger hair like scrubbing bristles glued too tightly to his head for wanton visitors to pluck, was doing business with one Hobomock in a Masonic apron, who brought beaver skins shaped like tennis rackets.

In the background, Rose Standish, a thin, work-weary woman with a furious wax baby, offered the Indian a plate of what looked like dog food, although you could tell by her harrowed face that it was her own dinner.

Visitors came in and out from the dusty sunlight, and asked questions and made the same joke about Mrs Standish and the dog's dinner, and Jess answered them automatically and laughed her polite Pilgrim laugh. A middle aged woman in patchwork Bermuda shorts stood tiptoe girlishly to whisper something to her husband.

He looked at Jess. ‘Quite right,' he said, as they went out. ‘They had to populate America, after all.'

As she drove home, dark thunder clouds were massing over the bay, and by the time she reached the house, the light had gone out of the sky, and the air was holding its breath for rain. Anna ran to her car, for she hated to be in this house in a storm, waiting for a tree to crash through the roof.

The thunder stayed far off, rolling over the sea, but the rain began to fall, straight and heavy, thudding on the shingles.
Upstairs, the bedroom was in twilight. It was hard to breathe. Rain was sluicing in from a broken gutter. Jess shut the window and turned to see herself in the long mirror behind the door.

She stood with her hot hands hanging awkwardly, a vast unwieldy bundle in the drab dress, an old face peering under the silly bonnet, a clumsy ugly person who would never be a girl again.

She turned on the light. As she moved about the room, her bulky reflection was everywhere, on the door, in the dressing table mirror, on the window pane against the streaming dusk.

‘Jess! Where are you?'

‘In here.' Let her hear or not hear. I can't be in a room with her alone. A door shut, and Sybil's feet scraped unevenly across the hall and began to creak on the stairs.

Jess stood still. The sound of the closing door, the direction of the shuffle - it sounded just as if Sybil had come from Emerson's room. It had been locked since the men broke up the bed, threw it out of the window and burned it. Had she found the key? Was she compelled to haunt that dreadful room, without remembering why?

Jess waited until the stair treads were silent. Downstairs, Sybil sang out to the bird in a hymnal tremolo. I have got to know that she can't go in there. I can't go out of this room and past that door and turn towards the stairs, without knowing that it is locked.

Still in the Pilgrim dress, she went down the passage and across the corner of the hall. The closed door tilted slightly away from the hinge. She stood before it and looked at it for some time, vacantly, without expression. Then she put out her hand and turned the dull brass knob.

The door was not locked. She pushed very gently, and it opened, a little wider, wide enough to show her the fingers outstretched to meet hers on the cold door handle, the person in the humble white cap and stuffy dress, slim, neat at the waist.

With a cry she snatched away her hand and the door swung wide and would have banged against the bed, but there was nothing there.

My baby?

She flung out her hands. The image held out empty hands before an empty body. My baby!

She was stabbed through with a terrible sensation of loss, as if her child was being torn from her, not skilfully, surgically, but roughly, brutally, in unbearable pain.

As she sank to her knees in the doorway, she saw the image sink with her, less clear now, greyly transparent, and they toppled forward together in a despairing embrace, and became one in pain.

When she opened her eyes, the image was gone. Between suffocating waves of pain, somehow she crawled to the railing above the stairs.