Room Upstairs (7 page)

Anna would be furious.

‘Recover the chairs, if you like. I'm good at that kind of thing. I like to keep busy.'

‘Oh, so do I.' Sybil was fortyish, bustling, domestic. ‘We could work together. Every hour that fleets so slowly has its task to do or bear. Luminous is the crown, and holy, when each gem is set with care. Adelaide A. Proctor. I'd forgotten I remembered that. Funny how the real poetry goes, and the ©Id trash stays with you.'

‘I'm a push-over for verse too,' Miss Grue said, and sighted her eye at the sherry decanter, so that their pact might be sealed in wine.

And so when Laurie and Jess came back home, with another equally silly couple, who stopped off in the kitchen to see what they could find to cook, the
fait accompli
of Dorothy was presented.

All the things that Sybil had feared they would say, they did not, but Dorothy answered some of them anyway. She spoke of references. Of past jobs and family connexions. Of her nephew who was Chief of Police in some town in Rhode Island.

They liked her. Sybil could see that they did, although they were not saying much that was sensible. She liked them too. She laughed good naturedly when Laurie tripped over the corner of a rug. And when Jess said: ‘You shouldn't have had that last martini, darling,' and Laurie suddenly blazed: ‘Cut it out - what's the matter with you?' she laughed again. But it occurred to Sybil that she had never heard him speak like that to Jess. Or to anyone.

‘Is that really her name?' Montgomery whispered.

Dorothy heard. Would she hold it against him? But she said brightly: ‘Grue by name and grue by nature,' which did not mean a thing, although she said it as if it did.

She had quite a gift for making meaningless remarks sound
significant. Even the little common exhortations, like Here we are and There you go, with which she boosted Sybil through the ploys of the day, acquired new depth. When, being one of those people who talk only medicine to doctors, she told Montgomery that she was never sick nor sorry, her heavy voice, harsh with cigarettes, made it almost a warning, or a threat. No more big meat and gravy meals? Poor Montgomery had better start looking for a wife again.

‘I'll stop by in a couple of days to check that lung.' He put his long, strong hand on Sybil's shoulder, and she reached up and patted it. She was very fond of him, and believed that he had saved her life, although at the time, if she remembered right, it had seemed easier to she.

‘No need to worry about
her?
Dorothy said cheerfully. ‘She's in good hands now, you know.'

‘Mrs Mulligan was nice enough,' Montgomery said mildly, but Dorothy capped him.

‘An alcoholic.' She had been a practical nurse in the days before they were called that, and had as little use for doctors as a Christian Scientist.

‘I'll stop by in a day or so,' Montgomery repeated, for it would take more than a nurse to put him off. He was the only doctor at the hospital who had no dread of the charge nurse in Obstetrics. ‘But thanks for taking such good care of her.'

Bless you, Sybil thought, for being nice to her. Dorothy was her discovery, and she wanted everyone to like her and be pleased that she was there in the side room over the porch, with yet another new spread, because Melia's had to be burned. The poor woman had led quite a sad kind of life, what with one thing and another, and her fiance being killed, and there being nothing to sit on behind the ground floor counters at Merricks, to whom she had given her best years and her arches, industrious fool that she was.

On his first visit after Dorothy moved in, with enough baggage for a siege, Laurie had said: ‘Don't let her treat you like a child,' because Dorothy had been a little assertive about vegetables. But she would grow on him, just as she was growing on Sybil, with her energy and her loves and hates
nothing in between for anybody - and her decisions made like a knife, swift and clean so that Sybil had no worries.

Melia Mulligan had been a lovely woman, but she had always been consciously a servant, expecting orders, paid to keep her lady comfortable and content. Dorothy Grue was a friend. Someone who shared the house and just happened to do most of the work because she was the strongest. She took no orders. If you wanted something done, you had to say: ‘We'll have to think about cleaning out the spice rack,' or: ‘I think I'll change my sheets today,' and Dorothy would chip in at once: ‘Thinking never got anything done. It's on my list for this morning.'

At the beginning of the month, although the cheque-book would be lying handily on Sybil's desk among the welter of clippings, old letters and indecipherable memos to herself, there was no direct transaction. Sybil had to leave the cheque in a stamped envelope on the table in the hall, and on her next trip to the post office, Dorothy would mail it to herself, and collect it the following day from their box. Heaven knew what Frances and Bea thought, for they had been at the post office for years and knew Sybil's writing, but there it was. There were these niceties about Dorothy, and they would never chew drumsticks together within range of the garbage can; but Sybil could accept prim dining room meals with the applique cloth which cost seventy five cents to launder, and the pretence that Dorothy drank prune juice because she liked the taste.

It was worth it.

Melia had been a delightful accessory, but Dorothy was a whole outfit. She brought to the house a feeling of life and activity which Sybil, waning, craved. The young people brought a sense of beginnings. Dorothy brought a sense of something accomplished. In the evening, as they sat with their ritual sherry, she would swat her rubbery thigh and say: ‘Well, we've had quite a day of it!' And even though Sybil had done almost nothing, she would feel she had been busy all day.

To understand Dorothy, as Sybil pointed out to Laurie and Jess, you had to understand about Roger. He was the most
important thing in her life, her lover and her child, and if anything should happen to him, it would be worse than Melia with Tiger.

Roger Grue was a budgerigar, a male of brilliant oily green and yellow plumage. He lived in a vast domed cage like the concourse of Pennsylvania Station, hanging high in the kitchen above the cats, who sat in a Druids' ring below, convinced that they could hypnotize him.

One of Dorothy's first acts of self assertion, after she had finished praising everything in sight, including the Priscilla stove on which she threatened to cook, had been a sweeping: ‘The cats will have to go.'

Sybil refused. Whose house is it? her mind prompted her, as if there were some danger of forgetting. She had always had cats, even when her mother was alive, and allergic - only it was called nerves in those days. Even when she and Theo were in that dreadful plum-coloured house at Amherst, where John and Thelma had scarlet fever, before the war.

When Sybil announced, with all the old vehemence she was afraid she had lost: ‘The cats are staying,' she thought for a moment that Dorothy would pack. Her impressive chest went even further up and out as she drew in breath through nostrils that were cut back and blood-shot, like a racehorse.

They measured eyes, and then she let out the breath on a laugh, and the cough which always followed it. ‘Anything you say. It's your house, after all.'

There you see, said Sybil to the unseen aushence of critics. Nothing to worry about.

So the farmer's son Bobby, who did odd jobs for Sybil after school, fixed a hook in the ceiling near the sunniest window, too high for the cats, or for the head of anyone except Montgomery, who would not bump it twice. To reach the cage, Dorothy bought a chrome and plastic stool with a shiny red seat, which converted to a little pair of steps. It was hideous in the kitchen, where everything was old wood and wallpaper, but there it was.

When the cage door was open, the bird perched on the outside of the bars, rattling them with his beak like a boy with a stick and railings, or made clattering tours high up the wall,
alighting on Dorothy's shoulders, where he could mumble her face with his Armenian beak and deride the cats with his flat unfocused eye.

Dorothy talked to him incessantly, and when he was not in a muttering narcissistic trance before the mirror in his cage, he talked back. He had dozens of phrases which he used haphazardly, reeling off twenty or so at a time, like a tape recorder. Hullo Dot. Soup and sandwich. Pardon me for living. Roger loves Mother. He had given Sybil several shocks, and would give her many more, for although one of the cats could chirrup like a bird when it was stalking, she had never had a talking bird, and it would take some getting used to.

From his gilded pleasure dome under the kitchen ceiling at Camden House, he quickly picked up several new items. Hullo Sybil. What's for lunch? Oh those cars. Bedtime, Sybil - when Dorothy took down the cocoa mug which Laurie had once painted shakily: ‘Grandma.'

Dorothy thought he was a genius, although most of what he said was unrelated nonsense.

‘He knows everything I say,' she claimed. ‘He knows what he's talking about better than some folk I could mention.'

Nonsense, Sybil wanted to say, but there was a chance that Dorothy meant her, so she let it pass.

Dorothy declared: ‘That bird is all but human,' and there were times when you could almost believe it. For the uncanny thing about Roger, the unnerving thing that caught you off guard if you had forgotten him, was that he spoke in Dorothy's voice.

Everything he said was in her tone, muted a little and husky, but the huskiness was hers, the pitch and vowel sounds identical. He could even imitate her cough, and the tch-oh, with which she greeted an empty matchbox or verdigris on the pickle relish.

When he called out: ‘Come on Sybil!' she often answered: ‘Where to?' before she realized Dorothy was not in the room. Once, coming down the back stairs, she heard him say: ‘Have a hot biscuit,' and put on a courteous smile for Dorothy's visitor. But there was no one there except two cats on duty,
and the bird, and the radio playing softly to keep him company.

‘You make a fool of me'. Sybil shook her stick at him, and he gave a hacking cough and told her; ‘Dot loves Roger.'

He was Dorothy's familiar, her alter ego. Her doppelganger, Laurie said, but that was too sinister for the relationship that existed so cosily between the budgerigar and Dorothy Grue.

‘Perhaps it's your fiance,' Jess said, one Saturday at the end of March, when they were snowed in again by the late blizzard which always belied the radio voices babbling, by the calendar, of Spring. ‘Perhaps Roger is a reincarnation of Henry. Most people, if they were given the chance, would come back as an animal or a bird, I should think, not as a person.'

They knew all about Henry by now. Dorothy had quite taken the young couple to her pouter pigeon bosom, and relaxed with them at weekends, as if they were part of the family. No. Sybil shook her brain as she often had to, like a watch, to make it tick properly. As if
she
were part of the family.

They knew about Henry and the car accident, and where Dorothy was when she heard the news, and how it was up to her to tell his mother. ‘They called me first.' That was the crowning triumph over a woman she never had the chance to triumph over as a mother-in-law.

‘Perhaps you're right dear,' Dorothy said. The bird sat on the end of her pen, as he often did when she wrote letters, making kissing noises and riding back and forth across the page. ‘Henry used to write to the papers a lot. He was a mine of ideas. Perhaps Roger does guide my pen then. My friends all tell me I write a very interesting letter.'

What do you write about? Sybil sometimes wondered. What do you write them about me?

‘It's probably a woman anyway,' Laurie said a little sulkily. He was moody this weekend, as Sybil had not seen him since he was in the limbo between school and college, bored with everything except this house and her. ‘One day it will lay an egg.'

‘If he does, it will be a biological miracle,' Dorothy said brightly. She rode over moods by ignoring them. ‘You can tell he's a male by the blue round his nostril, see?'

‘Poor soul, that's why he's so opinionated,' Jess said. ‘Why don't you get him a mate?'

‘He wouldn't talk. He'd chat to her instead of me.'

‘How cruel.' Jess glanced at Laurie, sprawled yawning in the splayed armchair. ‘He's probably a mass of frustrations.'

Dorothy's colour had risen a little. The bird flew from the pen on to her head where it nested, beady eyed, in the hair which was locked in the bathroom for a long session every three weeks. Sybil had found the bottle when she was poking in the trash can to see what it was the bird had broken, flying into the dresser; but she would never tell. Dorothy had never told the children, or Montgomery, or Thelma when she came last week, that Sybil had mistaken Alice Manning whom she knew quite well, for Nancy Parkes whom she knew equally well, and sent a detailed message to Alice's mother, who had been dead for twenty years. Not gossiping about Dorothy's hair was a small price to pay for saving her own face.

‘Women always assume that men are frustrated without a mate. If that thing is Henry,' Laurie said, ‘he's got it made. All food and no work and he does all the talking.'

Dorothy laughed, but Jess frowned and said: ‘That's silly. Like a rotten magazine cartoon, as if all married men were trapped.'

Once, Sybil would have been shamefully pleased to see them almost quarrel. Not quarrel, but look at each other with cold knowledge.

Now, because she accepted Laurie as Laurie and Jess, and they were her candidates for the future, it was distressing. Perhaps the girl was pregnant. But surely they would tell her?

Next day, the sun glittered on the new snow, and they played outside all morning, and when they came in starving for roast chicken, they were tangibly, almost embarrassingly, in love.