Room Upstairs (8 page)

It had been an up and down weekend, all the same, and on Sunday evening Sybil dozed in her chair. Dorothy's light tap
on the shoulder was a guillotine blow which woke her with a start.

‘Time for bed,' Dorothy said in Roger's voice. ‘I'll bring up your hot drink.'

She went into the kitchen, and at the clink of china, the bird said: ‘Bedtime, Sybil,' with the mindless response of a ventriloquist's dummy.

Sybil climbed slowly and creakily with her head down, as if the stairs were a mountain. When she reached the top and looked up, there was her mother.

She was standing in the hall, half turned away, with her arms folded into a muff in front of her. She was wearing her long brown travelling suit with the braided jacket, and the big green cavalier hat with the veil. Her face was hidden by the veil, and for the fraction of a second while her heart stopped, Sybil was overwhelmed with loss. Then her heart began to' thump and bang so that she could hardly breathe, and she clung to the banister post while Dorothy came up behind her, laughing and coughing, and ripped off the veil, and the wadded newspaper fell from the wooden neck of Bella Camden's dummy.

‘How do you like my joke?'

‘Ha, ha,' Sybil croaked, through her hammering heart, ¿he would be all right if she could just get to her room and lie down.

‘Just my little joke. I'm a push-over for jokes, you know.'

‘That first winter in the harbour,' Sybil told Dorothy, who knew shockingly little about Pilgrim history, although she claimed to be a push-over for the past, ‘was nearly the last. Half of them shed from some dreadful disease, poor souls. They started burying them up on the hill, but when more people kept dying, they flattened out the mounds and sowed a crop over, to fool the Indians.'

Dorothy raised her eyebrows, which were inked in to match her hair.

‘They didn't know much about medicine, beyond things like stewing bugs in wine, so after a bit the old Indian women began to teach them their herbal remeshes.'

‘No Wonder Drugs in those days.' put in Dorothy, who could not listen for long without comment, even when she had nothing intelligent to say.

‘That's right, Dot.' Call me Dot, she had said, and Sybil was trying, but it made her feel like the bird. Dot loves Roger. Hullo Dot, scratch a bird. ‘And one of the colonists made some notes for a herbal, and that was my ancestor Will Camden. Great, great—'

‘You told me.'

‘And it was his grandson,' she could see him now, labouring with his own brown hands, sweating in a jerkin and breeches, ‘built one of the first big houses in the town. There's a gift shop there now. They pulled it down for termites. But it was older than the Owens house, that Maud is so proud of, and better built as I remember. Mustn't it have been pretty, without all the stores and gas stations and sea-food restaurants, just those graceful white houses running down the hill to the harbour. Do you think we have been born in the wrong century?'

‘No doubt of it,' Dorothy said. ‘I've always seen myself as Nell Gwynne. But listen here. If we don't think our modern buildings are pretty, why should they have thought theirs were in the days when they were modern? Got you there.'

‘I wasn't trying to score a point.' Dorothy often tried to turn a harmless conversation into a contest. ‘I was trying to tell you about this house, since you asked.'

‘Pardon me for living.' Dorothy inflated her red-hot nostrils.

‘When my father married his first wife, Charity, Charity - I even forget her family name, can you beat that? I always knew everything Papa told me about our family. He built this house for her. It was yellow then and ever since. Colonial yellow. It was the dead of the country in those days. New England was sprouting factories and mills, so there was this
movement to get back closer to Nature. They were all in it, people like my father and Emerson and Hawthorne and Alcott. Louisa May held me on her knee once, when I was a baby. When Papa's father wanted him to go into business, he said: I aim to raise flowers, not dollars. That's what he used to tell me. Flowers not dollars, Sybbie, there's your soul's profit. Although as it turned out, he did very well with the nursery gardens. Trees and plants from all over. Anything would grow for him. I've seen him talk to a plant as he set it in, asking it if it would be all right. That must seem silly to you.'

Dorothy shrugged. ‘You're the one who said it.' She was knitting, with great needles like rolling pins and thick wool, to make a sailing sweater for Laurie. It was only when she was doing something like counting stitches or following a dressmaking pattern or a recipe, that Sybil got the chance to ramble on. It was not always that she could remember much to ramble on about. It came in fits and starts, like doors opening on a gust of wind. If it came when Dorothy was not a captive aushence, Sybil would tell some of it to the bird, which was better than muttering it to herself like a crazy old woman. For it had to be given shape between the lips, like the breviary prayers of a priest.

‘It was so quiet out here. He used to make me stand still and listen. You can hear things growing, he'd say. Imagine that now.'

The cars were always there at the back of everything: talk, music, the clatter of pans, everything but the television sing-along shows, which Dorothy turned up full blast and sang-along to.

‘Here at the quiet limit of the world. … He built this house with love. And Charity loved it. Much more than my mother, his second wife, ever did. She shed at the new moon, did Charity, and they say her tree would weep at nights, when the moon was new.'

‘What tree?' Dorothy looked up, repousse eyeballs glistening.

‘It's gone now. They cut it down for—' Sybil stuck out her tongue towards the road. ‘He planted two trees, John and Charity, on either side of the driveway that used to run
through the pasture from the town road. There was a board at the gate. Camden House Nurseries. The finest herb garden in New England, and he knew all the old Indian remeshes, passed down from Will Camden. When he shed, Ted was married and gone, and I was barely sixteen, and my mother didn't care, so it was all let go, till my husband and I moved back after the war. The first war, of course. You wouldn't remember that.' Though she would, all right, and could have been a nurse then. Sybil had to pretend she did not know how old Dorothy was, but she had sneaked a look at her driver's licence.

‘When Papa shed, my mother took to her room. She'd heard about Hawthorne's motto: shutting herself up for forty years in the house at Salem, and vowed she'd do the same. But with her it only lasted forty hours of trays outside the door. She came down in a rage, and she and I lived here together.'

Nowhere to escape. When she was a child, running to her father - Wait for me, Papa! Her stepbrothers used to mimic her - Wait for me, Papa!

Then he shed, as he had to, for he was sixty when she was born, and left her with Marma. Kisses and tantrums, and waiting on her and hiding the little grey kitten behind boxes in the cellar, sick with anxiety that she might find it. Wait for me, Papa - but he had gone, and left her a prisoner.

A sleeping Princess, Theo called her. Marma took to her room again.

‘Poor Marma,' she said, with a sudden memory of the old forced loyalty. ‘She wore black to my wedding.'

‘My sister and I were going to start an antique shop once,' Dorothy said, not so inconsequentially, for Sybil's wedding was ancient history. ‘We were offered this old barn at Middle-borough, only she got married.'

‘The summer people will buy anything.'

‘I didn't mean that.' Dorothy gathered up her ball of wool and stabbed the giant needles through it criss cross, like a regimental badge. ‘I meant genuine antiques.'

Melia Mulligan had recoiled from Priscilla aghast, but one of the things Sybil liked about Dorothy was that she appreciated the fine old stove, and asked Anna to blacklead it every
week. That was one of the reasons why Anna did not like Dorothy, but there were others.

The stove had been converted to burn oil some time ago, although it had not been used for years. Dorothy got in a jar of kerosene, and when the electric stove boiled the milk over or turned out a lopsided cake like a tam-o-shanter, she often threatened it that she would be glad to cook on Priscilla when the summer hurricanes knocked out the power lines.

Her passion for antiquity extended also to Emerson. ‘A part of our (she pronounced it ower) literary heritage.' although it was doubtful whether she had read a line. After a while, she asked if she could move her things and sleep in the front room.

Sybil wanted to say No. Where would she go at night when she could not sleep and wanted to cast witch's spells on the cars? But by now, when Dorothy asked if she could do something, it was the same as saying she was going to do it.

But she was so kind. So dependable. Sybil closed her mind to criticism, for Dorothy was making herself indispensable. Already, in a few months, it was hard to imagine how she had managed this house without her, or even her own daily life, which Dorothy now had in such a reassuring grasp.

Sybil had not said anything about the breathing, since it did not seem Dorothy's kind of story. But she said: ‘Emerson went out of his mind, you know. He told Papa that his essay on Shakespeare was written by the Holy Ghost.'

‘Perhaps it was.' said Dorothy, who had nothing against the Catholic Church.

‘He thought he was risen from the dead.' Sybil went on hopefully. ‘He shed before I was born, but at the end, they said, he looked as if he had come from the tombs, just a web of skin over a skull.'

‘Your grandmother-in-law is trying to scare me.' Dorothy told Jess. ‘She's wasting her time. In hospital, I was the only one who wasn't silly about the cadavers.'

‘Is that your room now?'

‘Why not? Best bed in the house. What's the matter, child?' Jess's pale eyebrows were half circles when she was surprised, her brown eyes wide. ‘Is there something funny about that room?'

‘No.' Jess let down her eyebrows. ‘Oh no, of course not.' She looked at Sybil, but the old woman turned away, fiddling arthritically with the tangled spools in her sewing basket.

Dorothy had been several times to stare down at Plymouth Rock under its stone canopy. If Sybil were sitting in the car, for she would no more cross the road to look at the landing stone of her ancestors than a Londoner would look up at Big Ben to see the time, Dorothy would heckle her: ‘How do they
know
it's the one?' They need not try any tricks with her. She was not your gullible tourist.

How did they know? Sybil had never thought to ask. ‘How do they know what Priscilla Mullins said to John Alden?'

‘They don't.' Dorothy started the engine and made a terrible noise with the gears. You could never best her in argument, but Sybil liked to try, for fear her wits would slip away from her completely.

When the Mayflower II came out of winter hibernation, Dorothy went down and inspected that, above and below decks, and drove in her humpbacked car, which had no shine left on the two-tone green paint, out to the replica of the- first Pilgrim village.

‘You come too, Sybilla.' That was her sweetness name. ‘Ill bet you've never been. I knew a woman lived in Buffalo all her life and never saw the Falls.' Although she did not seem to have many friends or relations Dorothy knew ‘a woman' to fit almost every situation.

‘It's the walking,' Sybil said. But really it was the driving. She could just endure the trip into town with Dorothy, because it was better than not going at all, but farther than that took years off her life, which she could not spare.

Laurie had sold Sybil's car for her, before Dorothy could get the idea of driving it, but she was quite content with Two-tone, which she handled as if it were the last car left on the road. She drove quite slowly, ‘no risks for me', with, a line of frenzied drivers behind her taking frightful risks to get past. She stalled her engine on railroad crossings and going the wrong way up busy one-way streets, and would not use the direction lights for fear of wasting the battery.

When her sister came from Provincetown, she took her to
the Pilgrim settlement, and brought her back to the house afterwards. The sister, with a name like Mrs Outboard -Sybil never did get it - was younger and thinner than Dorothy, with protruding teeth and the darting eye of a Welfare agent sent out to investigate an Assistance claim.

Sybil had the percolator going when they returned, and the coffee cups set out, with the cream and sugar. If Dorothy had said they wanted tea, or taken over the hospitality, it would have hurt. But why should it hurt that she thanked Sybil extravagantly and praised her, and called Mrs Outboard's attention to the pretty traycloth she had chosen?

‘That lacquer tray's a nice piece,' the sister said, writhing her lips in her life's perpetual struggle to get them over her teeth. ‘You've got a lot of fine old things here, Mrs Prince.'

‘Why, thank you.' Sybil was pleased with her. She took her all over the house, showing her its small rarities and treasures; but after supper, when she suggested staying overnight, as it was getting late, the sister looked alarmed, and left hastily for Cape Cod.

‘Did I say something wrong, Dot?'

Dorothy laughed, riding the bird on her stubby finger, wiggling the nail for him to nibble. ‘She doesn't like old houses.'

‘But she was so interested in seeing everything!'

‘You made it rather difficult for her not to be.'

The bird began a long insane monologue about paper boy and where's the money and come on Sybil, and Dorothy began to chatter back at him. To keep herself from apologizing in her own home - for something she had npt done! -Sybil went away to telephone Laurie and Jess. They were out. After a while, she still knew that she felt badly, but she could not remember why.