Room Upstairs (6 page)

And then the reckoning. She had flown, but from one trap into another. She had committed herself to a stranger, and there was no way out. She had somehow slept at last, and when she woke in a panic of fear, she had thought for an instant it was the same panic of her thoughts, before she realized that there was someone sharing the dark with her. There was someone beside her in the bed.

That was when she had screamed, and they came in and turned on the light and there was no one there. Nothing but her own sobbing breath, shuddering in her throat.

In England, Jess had never thought about ghosts. Well, there had never been any. In the kind of houses and flats her family and friends lived in, the only spectre was the landlord or the man collecting payments on the washing machine. In the stately homes she had visited with Rodge, before Laurie upset all her ideas about men: ‘This is where the ghost walks.' the guide would say, but no one believed it. Most of them weren't listening. They were speculating how much things were worth, and whether the guide was a poor relation of the Duke.

You're daft, her mother would say if she could see her lying on one side of the bed, with her hands by her sides and her red toes turned up like a tomb. What in the world are you lying there for in the dark with all your clothes on?

To prove something to myself.

Prove yourself to others first. What will people say?

Jess laughed, because it was funny when it was three thousand miles away, and even rather dear. From the end of the narrow passage which ran behind her head, as if in answer, came a disjointed cackle, and a small hollow sound like a ping-pong ball.

Melia's door was bolted on the inside. She would not open it, or even answer, so Laurie slid a thin file past the edge of the door, which did not fit any better than the others in the house, and edged the bolt back.

The bed was neatly made, the ornaments stood pat, the
braided rugs were geometrically in place. Melia sat upright on a straight chair in the middle of the floor and recognized nobody. At her feet, the bottles of California red were ranged like candlepins. The only thing out of order was a pink plastic toothmug which had fallen upside down on the floor, seeping a small stain.

‘A wino.' Mont helped Laurie to heave her on to the bed and cover her.

‘Darling Melia,' Laurie said. ‘She was so perfect. Damn her.'

Woken by the noise, Sybil stood silently in the doorway with her teeth out and a stringy shawl clutched round her like a derelict.

‘Don't cry, Gramma,' Jess said, as she took her arm to turn her away, and saw that her eyes were dim with tears.

‘It was the toothmug. A plastic toothmug. She could have taken any of my good glasses. She knew that.'

In bed, she turned up the yellowish whites of her eyes at Jess. ‘Please don't make her go.' But she was too weak next morning to lie, and when they made her tell them that Melia had done this before, it was pack and out, with the teddy coat and the furry mittens like paws, which Sybil had given her.

Too big a risk, they said, and Sybil should have been pleased that they cared so much, but she was not. She wasn't afraid of Melia. Laurie was. He was afraid to be alone in a car with her. She might talk, or she might not, but he would not know what to say either way. Montgomery took her to a brother they discovered in Brockton, who received her without surprise, although Melia had never even mentioned him.

She took the hooded basket, and the puppy Tiger Two, ‘as a memento of the happiest days of my life', she said, and totally unmanned Montgomery in Brockton by pressing her pink velvet lips to his cheek.

*

Jess sent off her advertisement again to all the papers, in case of a flock of kindly, widows going bust over Christmas, but without much hope. Laurie wrote to his mother and his Uncle John, but with even less hope. To both of them, since Sybil was not destitute, there was no problem.

What were they going to do? They talked it back and forth for hours, as they would later discuss their children. In bed. While they were dressing. In the kitchen while Jess was cooking and Laurie pacing the pocked black and white linoleum. Out in the snow, dragging his old sled up the hill before they came shrieking down into the big drift by the fence.

Laurie's vacation had already started, so they stayed, ‘to give the old lady a good Christmas at least. They looked on it as her last, since it seemed that she would have to leave Camden House, and nothing then would be the same again.

Sybil pottered, laying the table backwards and filling pepper mills with salt. She seemed to think that Melia was coming back. When she's better, she told visitors, even Montgomery, as if the myth of illness had never been exploded.

In the attic, Laurie found strings of coloured lights, unused since his grandfather could no longer climb ladders to decorate the house. He strung them round the gutters and gables, and decked the Norway spruce like a giant Christmas tree, staining the snow below it with light.

‘Give em a treat on their way to the Cape. Next year,' Laurie said, forgetting, or pretending, ‘let's floodlight the house.'

‘If she can't live here, will they make her sell this place?' Jess asked.

‘Would you mind?' ‘I know how much you would.'

‘But
you
.'

‘I wouldn't have, at first. I didn't like it. I don't like you having more than me.' Jess risked honesty, because she knew he could stand her faults, and because she was going to add: ‘But you know how it's grown on me. I thought it would keep us apart, this place, and your grandmother. But they've drawn us closer, haven't they?'

‘Merry Christmas,' Laurie said.

‘About time. I used to dread it at home. My brothers, they've married awful women. They'd stuff, and then get into a fight, and the kids were sick into paper hats.'

*

Laurie had plenty of friends around Plymouth, and over the Christmas days they had parties and people in for drinks and meals, and boys came whom Sybil had not seen for years, and girls who had been children only a minute ago it seemed, now with young husbands who were clumsily charming to her.

She forgot to be tired, and her leg hardly bothered her in the excitement of having the place full of young people again, with all the fires blazing and the ice-box filled, and Jess and the other girls giggling in the kitchen, handmaids to a perpetual feast.

It would seem very quiet when it was just her and Melia again, with the cut up fryers and the knitting and the regular television programmes which accented their day. But of course, Melia was not coming back. They thought she had forgotten that, but most of the time she had not. She did not want to talk about it, or think any more about things like senior citizen housing. So she pretended that Melia would be coming back after Christmas.

On Christmas evening, when Laurie and Jess had gone to see friends, Sybil was messing about with the dishes in the sink, so that Jess would be pleased when she came home from the cocktail party.

The lights of their car came round the bend of the driveway and across the back window sooner than she expected, and she broke a cup, agitated, wanting to be done before they came in.

When the knocker of the back door thumped, she stood frozen, with her mouth open, the handle of the cup still on her finger.

Keep quiet and they will go away. Old lashes did not answer the door these days, unless they wanted to get their brains bashed in.

The knocker fell again. Montgomery always whistled, and the young people usually shoved right in, clamouring like seagulls.

‘Who is it?' she called uncertainly, wishing the bolt was across, but the voice which answered was so cheery that Sybil went to the door, still holding the cup handle.

Outside on the stone mill wheel doorstep stood a shortish, stoutish lady in high red shiny boots and a topheavy hat of some harsh grey fur like kangaroo hide. Beneath it was a fair amount of dead black hair which would fool nobody, for she was sixty-five if a day, and a brightly lipsticked smile pushing up cheeks that were coloured high with broken veins.

All this Sybil saw with great clarity, which was unusual, for since My Accident, she was usually a little flustered meeting new people, and did not register them in detail until later.

‘You'll think I have the devil's own cheek,' said the lady, putting a boot confidently on the doorstep, ‘but the truth of it is this. I was driving by on the other side of the road and saw your house with all the pretty lights. The first sign of cheer since I left the Canal. Such a picture in the snow, it looked, I just had to turn off and find my way across the road to tell you.'

‘Why, how nice. Do come in.' Sybil stepped aside and the visitor came in, scented rather strongly, but not unpleasantly.

‘Aren't I absurd?' she said. ‘I've never simply obeyed an impulse like that. I don't know why I did.'

‘I'm glad you did,' Sybil said, and meant it. Although Laurie and Jess were only just down the road, she had been getting a little jumpy at the sink, undecided whether it was worse to draw the curtains and not know what was outside, or to risk the pale turnip face of a Peeping Tom pressed suddenly against the black glass. ‘My grandson will be back any minute, and you must stay and tell him, because he was the one who put up the lights. Although it was my husband, of course, who bought them, several years ago before he shed.'

‘I'll introduce myself. I'm Dorothy Grue. I've been spending Christmas with my sister in Provincetown, but it's a small house, and her husband - well, one doesn't want to outstay one's welcome.' If Sybil could tell life histories before they were even into the kitchen, so could she.

‘I am Sybil Prince.' She put out her hand, saw the cup handle, and they both laughed.

‘I'm very glad to know you.' Miss - Mrs? (no ring) Grue put her feet apart and bent from her broad hips, knees out and forward, to pick up the broken china. Yes, she was no
chicken. Only her hairdresser knew for sure. But Sybil knew. That colour at that age.

She had for some years been surprised to find how spiteful one became as one grew older. In her prime, tinted hair would have been a matter of interest, perhaps admiration, if it suited the face below. But not a thing to crow over, and project a vision of herself asking Jess: Did you note the hair?

This was the first time since her illness that she had had a visitor without Melia or the children there to officiate, so she extended herself in hospitality. She hung Miss/Mrs Grue's coat up herself on a broad wooden hanger, not a mere wire one from the cleaners, and took her into the long living room at the front of the house, not the cosier room at the back hall from the kitchen, where most of the living of the house was done.

She brought the sherry and cigarettes, and some crackers, making so many small journeys back and forth that her visitor said, ‘You shouldn't put yourself out for me.'

‘I'm glad to do it. I'm not allowed to do much.' She laughed. ‘They think I'm helpless, since my accident.'

‘Oh yes?'

When she took off her coat, it had been revealed that Dorothy Grue had an enormous shelf of pouter pigeon chest. Cardigan buttons ran down the front of it in a grand curve, over which she nodded and smiled most genially, shaking her Christmas bell earrings as she invited: ‘Do tell me about it.'

*

It was all settled. By the time Laurie and Jess came back, a little silly from the party, it was all settled.

Warmed by the sympathetic interest of the kindly stranger who sipped her sherry with her elbow held far out to reach past the bosom, and chain smoked with genteel compulsion, Sybil told about Melia. Not all of it. One had one's loyalties. Melia had been an angel and she would have her back tomorrow, wino or no wino, if they would let her. But enough to set the scene.

Lulled by sympathetic wags of the marsupial hat, Sybil confessed that she could no longer manage on her own, and that her future was in jeopardy.

‘No housekeepers? It sounds like a very fine offer. One I would jump at, at any rate, and not shed a tear for the retail trade. When you've worked all your life to keep yourself, as I have' (Miss Grue then; bad luck not to get a husband to change your name, if nothing else), ‘you begin to wonder what it's all about.'

Hold your horses, Theo used to say, to her crazy, unpractical notions, like taking all the children to Canada for the weekend. When Sybil was a child, her father called her Musket Camden, because she was always shooting off. Musket shot off now with all the old rashness. Had not Miss Grue proved herself a fellow Musket by suddenly swinging her car off the highway to go calling on a stranger?

‘Come and live here.'

‘Oh, come now, I—'

‘They're going to make me leave the house, I know they are.' Sybil leaned forward, knowing she was gabbling too much (it was the sherry), hearing in her voice the gossipy hiss she hated, but was too old to control, like the mean triumph over Dorothy's hair. Dorothy? Hold your horses, Syb.

‘I'm not saying I wouldn't be tempted. I'm not saying that at all. I wonder. …' She chuckled and slapped her thick thigh. ‘It would make my sister sit up though. Our place on the Cape, they call it. A few boards knocked together by a carpenter's apprentice. You push a thumb tack in to hang a calendar, and the house practically falls down. But this house.' She nodded round the long room, pursing her lips at the dark family portraits, the deep faded sofa, the carved panelling in the alcove where John Camden's cumbersome desk still stood, because no one had ever been able to move it. ‘If I lived in this house, know what I'd do?'

‘What would you do?' They had turned in their chairs to sit facing each other, bony knees almost touching cushiony ones, Sybil's skirt drawn too far back in her eagerness, her eyes fixed on Miss Grue's eyes, which were prominent, with shiny whites like hard-boiled eggs.

‘Make new curtains for that big window, for one thing. Velvet Something rich. Wax up these old floors.'