Room Upstairs (12 page)

‘Don't forget to offer one to Dorothy,' Sybil said, as she always did, for although Dorothy and the sherry bottle were old friends, she pointedly waited for an introduction when anyone else was there.

‘What happened?' Laurie asked Jess, at the cupboard in the corner. ‘What's the matter with you?'

‘Come outside. Please come outside. I've got to tell you.'

‘The car?'

She laughed, right in his face as he turned with the bottle. Neither of them cared a straw about the car, except as a boring necessity. When she tore the chrome strip off one side, she forgot to tell him for weeks, and when he found it, curling in the trunk, he threw it away.

‘Come outside.'

He looked at her through the heavy-rimmed glasses he wore when he was being a lawyer, which Mont swore had plain glass lenses. ‘I'm working.'

‘You were.' She pulled him through the room and out of the side door. Outside, she leaned against the cypress tree at the corner of the house, breathing with her mouth open, staring at him.

‘She didn't know her. That's what happened. She talked about her all the way in the car, and then when we got there, she didn't know her.'

‘What did you expect? The poor old bat must be over ninety.'

‘Not May. She knew. But your grandmother. She didn't know her own sister. I'm glad to meet you, she said, and she asked her if she'd ever met her own father.'

Flat. The nightmare that had boiled in her all the way home, waiting to spill over in release, fell flat. He shrugged and said: ‘So what? She never should have gone all that way.'

‘You asked me to take her!'

Who was going crazy? All the way home, she had fermented, saving the story for him as they saved all the incidents of their day to spill out, interrupting, gabbling, in the excitement of coming home to each other at night.

‘I thought you'd want to hear.'

‘I do.' He put his hands in the pockets of his cotton trousers, although she was aching for him to put them round her, on her. ‘I do, honey,' he said, with a patience that was worse than anger, since he never called her honey except when he was imitating the kind of married couple they did not want to be. ‘But not if you're going to make fun of her.'

‘I'm not making fun of her. It was Dorothy who—'

‘Dorothy what?'

The worst thing she had been fermenting for him all the
way along the endless, soul-destroying Turnpike was what Dorothy had said to the nurse.

You've got the wrong one in here.

And in the car…

‘In the car,' she began, and pushed herself away from the tree to stand against him.

Sybil had kept silent for a long time, while Dorothy chatted inconsequentially, and rushed the radio full volume from station to station, too fast to get anything but howls and bellowed syllables and claps of song. At last, she leaned forward and asked Jess: ‘Who was that poor woman who claimed she was my sister?'

‘She
was.
She was your sister May.'

‘Don't play games with me. I know my own sister, I should hope. I'll show you a picture of May when we get home, then you'll know.'

It would be the picture on the stairs, May laughing and shaped like a figure eight, in her wedding dress with a train lice a carpet and her hair cushioned out.

‘Yes, Gramma.'

Dorothy said nothing, but made catarrhal noises in her nose and clicked her teeth a little. They fitted better than Sybil's, but when they both clicked them at meals, it was like dining in the boneyard.

Whea Jess heard Sybil snore, she glanced over her shoulder to make sure she was asleep, and said to Dorothy: ‘I'm very worried.'

She sounded middleaged to herself, saying that, fusspot. She had a vision of her mother, pressing a hot water bottle at the sink to make the air spit out. ‘I'm very wearied about your father,' if he sneezed twice.

‘I think she thought to see Montgomery, don't you? She's sever been like this.'

‘She doesn't need Doctor Jones.' Dorothy never called him anything but Doctor, even on Sundays. ‘She has me to take care of her.'

‘Yes, but—' Jess stopped being middleaged and fussy. She was young and inadequate and…

And frightened, she wanted to tell Laurie. I thought she
was
glad.
She was glad about what happened to Gramma.

That was the most terrible part of the whole terrible day. But now, suddenly, she could not tell him. It would be petty, mischief making, hysteria. He would think she was trying to make trouble, common, suspicious, like her mother and her friend down the street when they talked with hisses and side glances.

‘In the car what?' He put his arms round her.

Dorothy opened the kitchen window and went: ‘Yoo-hool'

He swore. He could not stand her, but passively. She was here. She was necessary, He could put up with her. He would never understand the flame of hatred that had leaped in Jess as they were going out of the room in the nursing home, with May weeping silently and the big nurse snickering. And had leaped again in the car when Dorothy said: ‘She has me,' and smiled.

She could not tell him. He kissed her, but she was chill and passive with disappointment.

‘Well, OK.' He dropped his arms. ‘Let's go back in.'

‘How was Aunt May?' he asked Sybil casually.

‘I don't know.'

‘Why? Did she she before you got there?'

‘Don't say things like that. May's not dead. She's as fit as I am.'

He made a face at Jess that said: You see, and went back to his card table,

‘Did you see her today?' Jess asked Sybil, loudly, to make him listen.

‘See who?'

‘Aunt May.'

‘What about her?'

Jess took a deep breath. ‘You saw her today.'

‘Well, you say so.' That was Sybil's way of agreeing and disagreeing at the same time. ‘I slept so much in the car, I daresay I forgot.'

‘But, Gramma.' Jess knelt before her and took her dry hands. ‘You remember when we were in that room at the nursing home. And in the bed there was a woman who—'

‘Leave her alone, Jess,' Laurie said. ‘Don't bully her.' He ran a hand through his black hair, rested his head on the hand with the fingers spread, and started to read again, remote, unconcerned.

‘All right.'

Jess went upstairs to their bedroom. Were they staying the night, or what? He had not brought a bag. But they kept a few things here, an old razor, toothbrushes, sweaters, since they came so often. Jess felt heavy and defeated. It was too great an effort to go downstairs and ask him: Do you want to stay the night?

If he was reading, he would not look up. Or perhaps he would look up and through her. She could not reach him. She could not communicate. What had happened? She stood in front of the high bureau that served as a dressing table, and stared and stared at her face in the oval mirror in the dark wood frame on the wall.

Why should he love her? She examined every inch of her face, analysing the structure of the eye, the nose, the way the pale mouth moved when it opened, smiled, dosed over the teeth. She stroked her cheeks, pulled back the corners of her eyes, pushed her light hair back from her rounded, childish forehead, then hit it back down again, pulling it into points impatiently between thumb and finger.

How do I look to him? She tried to see herself from outside, and thought she looked like just another girl, immature, uninteresting. Why should he love you? she asked the unexciting, unexotic face, I wouldn't, if I was a man. She stared woodenly for a few moments longer, and then, in a kind of flat despair, turned away and went out of the room into the hall over the stair-well.

I never noticed there was a mirror there.

She saw herself, head and neck, a few yards in front of her, very clearly, the round brown eyes surprised, the mouth unsure. The fair hair was untidy, pulled raggedly down in points. Not bad though, not bad at all. Not pretty, an interesting face, exciting, sexual. If I was a man…

She opened her mouth. The mouth of the image opened. She turned her head and saw the other head begin to turn, but
when she looked back, it was gone. There was no mirror on the wall.

I saw myself.

In September, the great trees round the house seemed to deepen, heavy and rich with green, in the pause before they kindled, and the fire crept imperceptibly through them until they ringed the house with a blaze of colour that made motorists exclaim: Why go to Vermont? whether they meant to go or not.

Day by day, the yellow house looked paler among the fantastic scarlet and orange and gold. It was the season when Papa said: ‘We must have the house painted this year.' But when the leaves faded to ochre and fell, and the house stood revealed on the dying grass for the first time since the start of summer, the yellow paint looked brighter, and brighter still when the snow came, and so he would let it go. ‘Till next year.' he would tell Marma, ‘when there are not so many expenses outside.' But she would rather see money spent on the house than on the grounds and nurseries, and there were always expenses outside.

One year, he dammed the stream which ran from a spring under the hill through the corner of the pasture to the pond, and made an ornamental pool, with seats and spouting frogs and water lilies. Sybil worked with him when Ted was away at school. She took a pair of Ted's corduroys and put them on behind a bush out of sight of the house, and took them off before she went in, and Marma would say: ‘You ean't have worked very hard, you didn't get your skirts muddy,' although she would have been angry if she had.

‘In looking on the happy autumn fields,' Sybil remarked to Dorothy, panting a little as they went through the gate and up the slope, ‘and thinking of the days that are no more.'

‘You can say that again.' Dorothy trudged beside her in a pair of stiff blue jeans she had taken to wearing in the garden,
rolled several times at the bottom, for anything that would accommodate what she called her waist was much too long in the leg. ‘Though I wouldn't have my time again, if it was handed me. It was different for you, of course.'

Sybil agreed, although she privately thought that she had worked far harder than Dorothy in bringing up three difficult children and a grandson, and helping Theo with the land all those years.

She was taking Dorothy to see the place where the ornamental pool had been. The stream had long since broken the dam, and destroyed all the stonework over the years, carrying most of it away down the slope to be buried in undergrowth. Now there were only a few lumps of broken masonry, and part of one of the stone frogs, embedded in the tufty grass.

Dorothy was not very interested in the few Roman remains. She was afraid Sybil would start to reminisce about her father, which always aggravated her, so she pottered on farther upstream, and Sybil sat down heavily on a stone and waited for her, trying to look at her beloved house without looking at the cars flashing behind at forty-three to the dozen, as if the idiots did not know that Labour Day was long come and gone.

‘Eureka!' Dorothy came sturdily back down the hill, the same shape as the frog in those pants, holding in one fist a plant with a thick hairy stem and big dark lily leaves. ‘Hellebore. Why didn't you tell me it grew here?'

‘I didn't know you wanted it.'

‘You did so. What do you think I've been dusting the roses with all summer? You won't catch Dorothy Grue buying those expensive chemicals when Nature has given all her resources into her hand.' (She got that bit out of Will Camden's herbal notes.) ‘Itchweed, they call it. Here I've been making do with those few roots I found by the old rain tank, and had to go so easy with it the Japanese beetles sat up and laughed at me. Listen here - with this little lot by the stream, time I get them dried out, well have enough rose dust to last us for life. Your life anyway.' Dorothy planned to live a whole span after Sybil. In this house? Sybil sometimes wondered.

But she was a worker, you must give her that. This summer and fall, she had spent so much time outdoors that
Sybil had often been lonely, sitting idle under the trees in the long chair, or alone in the house with Roger and the watching cats, who were not nearly such relaxed pets since they had the bird on their minds.

Some companion, Sybil would think to herself, some housekeeper, as she poked about the kitchen, looking into the icebox and the oven to try to guess what Dorothy was planning for lunch. Some companion. And yet when the weather was bad and Dorothy was in the house all day, talking, knitting, bossing, putting dustcloths into Sybil's hand, or settling her on the ugly plastic stool with ironing board at sitting height, ‘to keep you from getting rusty', Sybil would wish she could get her out of the house.

There you were. There was no pleasing some people, she thought, meaning herself. ‘That's what happens to you when you get old,' she told the bird, slyly rattling the bars of its cage with a spoon, which Dorothy forback her to do on account of Roger's nerves, ‘You don't know what you want.'

Like a baby. But if you had to become a baby, why couldn't life be arranged the other way around? If you started as an old woman, people would put up with you as a novelty, knowing you would improve. Then you could end up as a fragrant baby, and everyone would dote on you and never think you were a nuisance, however much attention you demanded.

Sometimes when she was too much alone, she would think about telling Laurie or Jess that Dorothy neglected her. But when she saw them, she forgot. Or if she remembered, it did not seem to matter anyway, once there were people around. It only mattered when she was alone for so many hours that her thoughts curdled; but then there was no one to tell.

Just as well. Since they had taken her to that sad place where the old man did not dare touch the television and the little monkey lady did not dare step out of her room, Sybil had got to be extra careful.