The Crimson Rooms (5 page)

Everything was much as ever; Prudence was seated at the writing desk with her back to the room in a posture of frigid restraint, and Grandmother perched at the very far end of the sofa, holding her crochet to the dim light that filtered through thick lace curtains. There was no sign of our visitors.

“She’s still here,” whispered Mother, hands on hips.

“Of course. She would be.”

“For heaven’s sake, Evelyn, what have you done to your face?”

“It’s nothing.”

Mother looked baffled but continued: “Well, anyway, she’s unpacked.”

“She must wear clean clothes, I suppose.”

“She left the boy with us for hours while she went out. She said we needed to be better acquainted with him though I can hardly bear to look at him. He’s so like . . .” She dabbed her eyes and added: “We couldn’t think what to give him for lunch. Prudence said the girls couldn’t be expected to provide different meals for a child. If we had a house full of servants like before the war, but we’re so overstretched . . .”

“Didn’t you ask Edmund what he’d like?” I asked, eager to prevent a well-rehearsed complaint about the servants.

“He was very vague, just said, ‘No tomatoes,’ and you know it’s mean of me but I thought,
she’s
told him to say that because James—oh my darling boy—never liked tomatoes and she wants us to believe in him. In the end Rose boiled an egg. I couldn’t go to bridge and leave him with Mother and Prudence, it wouldn’t have been fair.”

“Well, I should think not.”

Prudence suddenly turned around, pen suspended midair. She had a habit of staring very hard when she spoke, and her light gray eyes were full of disapproval beneath drooping lids so that she resembled, at times, a basset hound. Her voice was too loud for the dimensions of the room. “I said he ought to eat tomatoes. Boys should eat plenty of fruit and vegetables.”

“It was the way his mother just left him without even saying where she was going or asking if we minded. I can’t
stand
her,” said Mother. “And as for the letter she’s supposed to have sent telling us she was coming, I’ve seen no sign of that.”

“Where is Meredith now?”

“Upstairs somewhere with the boy.”

“I’ll go to her.”

“Be very careful what you say. She makes no bones about it, she’s short of money. She wants the boy to have an education and she wants to live here, in this house, presumably rent-free. Oh, good God, I wish your father were alive.”

But it was Father who landed us in this situation, I thought. Mother’s habit of idolizing the dead (as she had the living) was infuriating, especially as the full extent of Father’s failure to insure his family against unpleasant shocks had come to light. “Since there is no question that Edmund is James’s son,” I said, “we must take some responsibility for him, as I’m sure Father would have wished.”

Mother would not meet my eye. “She might want a lot of money—which we don’t have. It’s one thing to believe we’re related to the boy, but can we be sure she’s really the mother?”

“You’ve presumably had plenty of opportunity to question her.”

“She tells me that she was a nurse in the hospital to which he was sent when he was wounded but what does that prove? He can’t have been there long. A couple of weeks later he was . . .”

“What else did she say about James?”

Mother flinched. Over the years, his name, like
Jesus
, had become a word almost too sacred to form. A shiver trembled across the muffled surfaces of the drawing room, the layers of wool and lace and linen among which we women moved with slippered feet, the arrangements of dead birds and foliage under glass domes, the china figures, the photograph frames; James in his rugby shirt, James as a fat baby in a perambulator.

“Some questions one cannot simply ask,” said Prudence.

“Did Father never speak about it to either of you? He obviously knew of Edmund’s existence.”

Silence. I had placed Prudence in a dilemma that she managed by pressing her shapely lips together and folding her hands. If she admitted Father had confided in her, she would be guilty of having withheld vital information from me. If she hadn’t known about Edmund, her position as Father’s chief adviser, adopted since her arrival in the house in 1919, would be diminished. She therefore wished me to believe that of course Father had confided in her but had bound her to secrecy. In fact, I suspected she hadn’t been told.

Mother put her hand to her forehead in a gesture that in prewar days she’d used to great effect in Christmas charades but was now usually a precursor to tears. “He might have mentioned something. It was all too terrible, so soon after James was killed. You can’t expect me to remember . . .”

“You must remember, Mother. If Father made her promises, we should honor them.”

“Oh, he would never have done that. He was much too careful.”

Grandmother now made one of her unexpectedly apposite interventions into the conversation. “He’s a nice little boy. I like him.”

“Mrs. Melville was very patient with him, weren’t you, dear,” enunciated Prudence, “showed him all your cards and buttons.”

I hovered for a moment longer by the window, clutching my elbows, head down, then, braced to meet Meredith and the boy again, took the stairs two at a time. But when I reached the second floor, I was shocked to see that the door to James’s room was flung wide open so that light from its unshuttered window poured onto the landing, a light made mellow as it soaked color from the deep red curtains, the crimson and green and blue in his rug, the faded red of his bedspread. I hesitated for a moment, then took another step. Usually this room was visited only by Mother, who made a daily pilgrimage. Until today, James, had he miraculously returned, would have found nothing changed: his books in order, his shirts and socks folded neatly in the drawers, the seam of wallpaper near his pillow peeled where he had picked at it during a bout of measles, his plaid slippers still thrust under the bed.

This sudden violation of hallowed territory took my breath away: the sash was thrown up so that noises from the street burst in, the quilt was rumpled, and James’s childhood books tossed about on the carpet. Mother and son sat on the bed, passing my brother’s kaleidoscope between them, as if unsure what it was. Edmund’s legs were swinging and Meredith was wearing a light green frock that left her round arms and slender ankles visible. It seemed to me that James’s room had been reconstituted, its dull, breathless parts raked over to reveal their shiny sides, like glowing coals.

Meredith’s eyes, when she glanced up and saw me, were abnormally large in her kittenish face and bright with relief. I could not help recognizing the dreary day she must have spent in our house among hostile women, and I softened a little, despite this desecration.

“Well, hello there, Evelyn,” she exclaimed and, leaping off the bed, seized my wrists, raised herself on tiptoe, and kissed my cheek. “You look very hot. And oh my Lord, what happened to your face?”

“Nothing, it’s nothing.”

“It looks to me like a very nasty scratch.” Her cool fingertips touched the wound inflicted by Leah and I smelled the floral perfume she must have dabbed on her wrist. “I have some lotion in my room. Let me fetch it.”

“Please. Leave it. Oh, be careful with that, James was very fond of it.” The boy was shaking the kaleidoscope and holding it to his ear. “Bring it to the window and you’ll see better how it works.”

I took it from him, put it to my eye, and glimpsed the chips of colored glass re-forming into patterns I could no longer bear to see. When Edmund stood shyly beside me, I covered his left eye with my palm and told him to look into the tube. “I see colors,” he cried. “I see them change. Mommy, won’t you take a look at this?”

His tousled head was waist-high to me and he had a distinctive fragrance like fresh greens. He was all green, in fact, just as James had been. His eyelashes fluttered against my hand and I noted, as he twisted the kaleidoscope, that his fingernails were grubby and needed cutting. Until he was eleven, I had been James’s nail-cutter, after that fingers and toes were his own responsibility and I was wordlessly excluded from yet another intimate ritual. The back of Edmund’s head from crown to nape was so endearingly steep-angled that I had to resist the urge to cup it in my hand.

Meredith gripped her son’s shoulder and dropped a kiss on his hair. Then, her hip leaning into him, she took the kaleidoscope and peered through it. My heart gave a lurch of recognition because there, prominently displayed on her middle finger, was a silver signet ring engraved with James’s initials, JHG, bought by me for his eighteenth birthday on the day before he went away. The trip to the shop was still vivid in my mind, the glass cases of engagement rings winking their hard eyes, James turning his smooth, slim hand back and forth to admire the new ring. “Are you sure it’s not too girlish?”

“You must have something to remind you of me. I’ll drop straight out of your head otherwise.”

“Absolutely, you’re right. I’d never think of you again.”

I couldn’t help myself; I reached out and touched the ring on Meredith’s finger. “I always assumed it must have been buried with him.”

She pulled it off and dropped it into my palm with such alacrity that I realized the exposure of the ring had been quite deliberate. It had been fitted with a clip because it was too big for her. I wanted to close my fist around it and hold it to my breast, this fragment of my brother, but she slipped it back on her finger. “Actually I wear it for Edmund’s sake, as a reminder of his father.” Then she added briskly: “I am so grateful for your kindness last night, by the way. I admire the way you took it all in your stride.”

“Hardly. As you probably realize, it’s just so extraordinary for us to meet you both.”

I told them supper would be served in five minutes, then left them in possession of my brother’s bedroom because I couldn’t bear to linger another moment. In my own room, I locked the door. My face, pale except for an inch-long gash on the cheek, stared back from the dressing-table mirror. “Where
did
you get that chin?” Mother used to ask. Her own was soft, with a shallow dimple, a
lady’s
chin. Mine, she said, was a feature of my intractability, like my mass of untamable hair. “James has all the looks,” Mother would add, “the best of both families; your father’s intellectual brow and good nose, my mouth and cheekbones. One day he will break hearts.”

There were snippets of James in my room too, the hopelessly inappropriate gifts he’d bought me with his pocket money: a powder puff, a small china doll, a notebook too small to write in. And a tin box of letters kept in my bottom drawer alongside winter cardigans: letters from boarding school, from the seaside when he visited a friend, from France.

Snatching the pins from my hair, I dragged at the tangles with my fingers. Meredith’s hair was cut so short that the pink tips of her ears and twisty little earrings were exposed. With savage sweeps of the brush, I set to work, coiling and jabbing until my hair was neat and prim as a Victorian governess’s. I had longed and longed for James to come back but not like this, under the wing of a spiky little Canadian with guileless eyes and flawless teeth. What had she taken away from me, in exchange for the gift of her son?

Monday dinner was cold roast
made over as a pie or fricassee. We stood behind our chairs, Mother at the head of the table, Grandmother at the foot, Prudence on one side, I the other, awaiting our visitors. The electric light did nothing to soften that somber room with its maroon flocked paper and Gothic furniture, including a sideboard hefty as a church coffer. Despite the plainness of the food, the table was laid with exquisite care; white damask cloth, second-best oak mats, napkins in polished silver rings, bone-handled cutlery, including cheese knives though there was never a cheese course. The girls loved any job that harked back to our family’s glory days.

At last we heard light footfall on the stairs and mother and child appeared, very spruce with combed hair, Meredith wearing a glittering jet necklace. She had changed into a crushed-velvet evening dress with a draped neckline and wrap-over skirt, and looked dainty as a fashion plate. The rest of us wore evening blouses tucked into our serviceable skirts.

“Oh, good Lord, I hope we haven’t kept you waiting,” she cried.

Edmund took one look at the empty places beside or opposite Prudence, seized his mother’s hand, and wailed: “I want to sit next to Mommy.”

We weren’t used to howling children and Prudence glowered at him.

“He’s not normally shy,” said Meredith. “I expect he’s still tired from the journey.”

“Of course, I’ll sit next to Prudence,” I said, moving around the table. We then all watched as our visitors sat down without saying grace and unfolded their napkins. Behind Grandmother’s head, in full view of Meredith, was the large, framed photograph of James in army uniform with just a hint in his frank eyes that he couldn’t entirely take all this seriously: the uniform, the war, his rank as officer. Perhaps only I noticed the shake of Meredith’s head when she glimpsed him. After that, she seized her spoon and worked her way ravenously through a bowl of tepid mushroom soup. Meanwhile I was conscious of a tussle within Prudence between piety and good manners. The latter won, though after she was seated she folded her hands in her lap and mouthed a quick prayer.