The L-Shaped Room

by Lynne Reid Banks

  Well, Mavis’s little weakness was perfume, and in that house I could well understand it. Despite her age and circumstances she was a very robust and cheerful woman. Her small room (one of the ones without running water) was pin-neat, which was a marvel considering how many knick-knacks she’d managed to cram into it. Every available surface was jagged with them, tiny coloured boxes, statuettes, minute vases that wouldn’t hold a daisy, balding velvet pin-cushions, countless little dishes and ashtrays with place-names on them (she seemed to have souvenirs from almost every seaside town in England) and a great many photographs of all sizes. The walls, too, were smothered in pictures, embroideries, beaded purses, plaques and tiles in a variety of colours and to suit a variety of tastes. Evidently all was fish that fell into her collector’s net. The bedcover was patchwork, done in tiny hexagons about the size of sovereigns; her cushion-covers were thickly embroidered. There was a bookshelf, garnished with a bobbled fringe, on which stood a row of second-hand paperbacks, mainly detective and love stories.

  She had obviously lived in the room for years, and had everything organized. There was a large bucket under the basin in which she kept her current water supply. Her cooking facilities were limited to a single gas-ring, but she had a trivet in front of the fire (on which the coffee-pot now rested) with the help of which she was able, as I later discovered, to prepare quite complicated meals and serve everything hot. She had no bedside light, only the central one, but I noticed a cord had been run from this to enable her to control it without getting out of her bed, under which, as another example of her trouble-saving devices, reposed a large and gaily-flowered pot.

  After Toby had introduced us, I was urged to sit down and make myself at home. I found a small, precise-looking cat in possession of the arm-chair, so I sat on the floor near the fire, a deference which Mavis evidently regarded as quite proper. She poured the coffee, which was so strong it practically snarled as it came out of the pot, and then sat down herself, taking the small cat on to her knee.

  ‘Well duckie,’ she said brightly, ‘and what do you do with yourself?’ Her Cockney accent, although not of the strongest, jarred somehow in the same way as the lipstick and the perfume – it seemed unrelated to the rest of her. So did the coffee, if it came to that. Looking at the room, I’d have expected that nothing but tea, rather weak tea, would be drunk here.

  ‘I work in town,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, in town, do you?’ she repeated, as if this were the most fascinating information. ‘What sort of work?’

  ‘In an office.’

  ‘Really? In an office? Well! Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes, very much.’

  ‘Whereabouts is your office, then?’

  ‘In the West End.’

  ‘Really?’ she said again. She seemed very surprised. ‘I thought they always paid very well in these West End offices?’

  I saw that she was leading me on to dangerous ground. Toby’s ears were so pricked they almost met on top. ‘Not always,’ I qualified.

  ‘In my day, if a girl worked in a West End office, she could afford to live rather well – only of course they all lived at home then, until they got married.’ She gave me a sharp little look. ‘Mind you, I approve of this getting out on your own. It’s the only way to learn, really, isn’t it? Someone like me, now, I lived with my mother till she died, and by that time I was thirty, and aside from running a house and sewing, there wasn’t one blooming thing I could do. Nasty business, starting to try and earn your living at thirty, especially in those days. There was only a few alternatives, of which the theatre was the least respectable but one; but I had a go at it because it was a touring opera company and I wanted to travel.’

  ‘Were you an actress?’

  ‘Gawd help us, me? Never. I was wardrobe mistress. Went all over England, I did – loved it. Stayed with the same company for twenty-five years, saving the war, and I’d be with it still if it hadn’t broken up. Didn’t have the heart to start again with a new lot after that; and anyhow, my eyesight’s not what it was, so I thought I’d just settle down somewhere and have a bit of a rest.’ She sipped her coffee and glanced round the room, letting her gaze rest affectionately on this and that. ‘Do you like the way I’ve done the room?’ she asked contentedly. ‘Nice, isn’t it? Every trinket tells a story. Got enough to start a junk-shop but I love them all, they all mean something special to me. See this?’ She picked up a round thing made of china, prettily painted, with holes in the top like a salt-cellar. ‘Know what it is? It’s a pomander. Smell.’ She held it out and I breathed in the musty, spicy smell of old herbs. ‘Manager of the company give me that for my fortieth birthday. He guessed me thirty-one. That was a lie, of course, but if I do say it I didn’t look more than thirty-five. I always had the feelin’ if he hadn’t been such a snob he’d have asked me to marry him.’

  ‘And would you have done?’ I couldn’t help asking.

  ‘What, marry him? Not likely!’ She laughed. ‘Oh, he was all right, but not for life. That’s always the trouble with picking a husband. However much you like a man, it’s never enough to last for life.’

  ‘But have you never been in love, Mavis?’ asked Toby seriously.

  ‘In love! Get away with you!’ she retorted as if the notion were preposterous. But the topic was obviously not displeasing to her. She ruminated.

  ‘Well, of course I’ve been in love,’ she said. ‘I suppose. I mean, I must’ve been, mustn’t I? Everybody is, sometime or other. If I wasn’t in love that time in Eastbourne, I’m sure I don’t know what I thought I was up to …’ She hummed reminiscently to herself, and her hands, with their long seamstress’s fingers, strayed about among the oddments nearest to her and rested on a little ivory box. ‘Brought that back from India, he did,’ she mentioned vaguely. ‘Well, now, I don’t know what we’re talking about me for, I’m sure. How are you getting on, Toby? Let’s have some more coffee.’

  Toby did the honours. This was obviously established routine between them. A dish of coffee and milk was respectfully submitted to the cat, who drank it contemptuously and then retired to her box of shavings with an air of having sustained an insult. Meanwhile Toby, who needed little encouragement to talk about himself, was in full spate.

  ‘I’ve mentally committed myself to two thousand words a day,’ he explained. ‘I know it’s not much, but all the writers’ biogs I’ve been reading lately say it’s absolutely essential to set a schedule for yourself and stick to it. Even if it’s not a very demanding schedule. Well, of course, they didn’t say that – I say that. Because I always find, with good resolutions of any kind, if you ask too much of yourself you might just as well give up in advance; your subconscious sort of boggles right from the start.’

  ‘What are you writing two thousand words a day of, dear?’

  ‘Oh, the same old book.’

  ‘Let me see – is that the one about the French Revolution?’

  ‘Mavis, no! That was years ago. Anyway, it was a short story, and I gave it up after ten pages. What do I know about the French Revolution? Only what I’ve found out from other writers.’ He brooded with his chin in his hand, a lock of black hair falling in his eye. He looked like a Jewish leprechaun.

  ‘Well, what’s this one about, then?’

  ‘It’s a bit difficult to explain in a few words. There’s this man you see. He’s a cameraman for a newsreel company, and it’s a good job financially, but he’s not satisfied with it; he wants to be a film producer, a great one. And his wife –’

  ‘She doesn’t understand him?’ suggested Mavis.

  ‘But she does, you see, that’s the whole point!’ Toby got to his knees, his beaky blackbird’s face lighting with excitement. ‘She does understand, she’d be glad for him to chuck in the good job and have a go at the thing he wants to do, but the thing is, he never puts it to her, because he thinks it wouldn’t be fair to her to ask her to decide. They’ve got two kids, you see. He thinks he hasn’t the right to risk the kids�
� future. But what he’s really afraid of, though he won’t admit it to himself, is that if he ever did try, he’d fail; so he goes on not trying and kidding himself he’s sacrificing his dream for his family’s security.’ He paused and looked from one to the other of us. ‘That’s as far as I’ve got so far,’ he said, adding, with concealed anxiety, ‘What do you you think of the idea?’

  I thought it was a very good idea indeed, but before I could say so Mavis remarked, ‘Well, I don’t know, dear, I like a bit more of a story, myself. Why couldn’t you have the wife not understand him, and drive him into the arms of another girl – a film star, say? I like it being to do with the films,’ she added encouragingly.

  Toby looked at her uncomprehendingly, as if she’d suddenly started speaking in a foreign language. There was a pause, and then, presumably because he liked her and wanted her to understand, he tried again. ‘But Mavis, it’s nothing really to do with films, as such. I mean, he could just as well have been a –’

  He stopped in the middle of his sentence, chilled by her look of simple disappointment. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, giving it up. He swallowed the last of his coffee quickly. ‘I’m off,’ he said. He stood up and gave Mavis a quick kiss. ‘Coming, Jane?’

  I thanked Mavis for the coffee and followed Toby up to his room. I’d never been into it before, as Toby, after his first invitation, had seemed to lose his nerve about my reaction to it and had said several times that he must ‘tidy it up’ before I saw it. Now, however, he made no protest. He went directly to his table by the window and, tearing the latest sheet out of his small, battered typewriter, began to read it frowningly, as if it had in some way betrayed him.

  I stood in the doorway, ankle-deep in crumpled-up pieces of quarto which littered the room. The bed was unmade, obviously chronically, and everything was thick with dust; but the room had an air of male austerity which surprised me. I had thought it would be full of symbolic distractions like pictures, magazines, trimmings of various sorts to match the frivolous side of Toby’s personality. There were none. The walls were bare; the surfaces of furniture had the basic minimum of functional objects on them. There were a few books, mostly the sort you can pick up at bookstalls for a bob or two, plus Penguin classics. For the first time I began to realize Toby’s writing might really be a force to be reckoned with.

  ‘Here, why not sit down somewhere?’ He shifted a pile of papers off a chair. He was still re-reading his recent output, obviously with new eyes. Eventually he put the pages down with a deep sigh. ‘What do you think of Mavis?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I thought she was a nice enough old thing. But I could have hit her for being so crass about your book.’

  His whole face changed, as if someone had switched on a light behind it. ‘Do you really think that – that she was crass? I thought I was going nuts – what she said had absolutely no relevance to the idea of the book at all. But then I wondered if perhaps that meant that there wasn’t any real idea. I mean, as all she could see in it was the film angle. I couldn’t wait to get back here and look at it again, to make sure there was some point to it.’

  ‘Haven’t you any confidence in yourself at all?’

  He drew back, as if I’d attacked him physically. ‘Of course I have! What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I mean, how can it matter a damn to you what Mavis says? Why do you even bother to tell her about it? One minute with her should tell you she’d never understand. Did you look at the books she reads herself? Mysteries and romances. You might just as well describe your plot to a shop-girl in Woolworth’s and hope she’d see its possibilities.’

  He stared at me, looking from one of my eyes to the other, his mouth slightly open. At last he began stammeringly, ‘Well, I – I – I mean, she’s part of the public, isn’t she?’

  ‘Not part of your public,’ I said firmly.

  He sat down and stared blankly at the pages in his hand. ‘Why did you say haven’t I any self-confidence?’

  ‘Having to rely on somebody like Mavis to keep your morale up – your belief in your work –’

  ‘But no, you’re wrong!’ He jumped up and began to pace about excitedly. ‘It’s just the opposite! When I get an idea, I’m so certain it’s good that I believe everyone – everyone, even people like Mavis – will see it the way I do. I’ve got too much self-confidence, if anything, not too little!’

  I said, ‘I don’t believe there’s ever been an idea that everyone thought was good.’

  He stopped. ‘What are you saying, then?’

  ‘It’s none of my business –’ I remembered belatedly.

  ‘No, go on, go on!’

  ‘Just that you shouldn’t need to submit your ideas to anyone for approval. If you do, you’ll get as many reactions as there are people. In the end, if you’re stupid enough to try and please all of them, you’ll tinker and adapt and mess about until there’s nothing of your original idea left – it’ll be just a disgusting hotch-potch product of a lot of people’s brains where it should be the pure product of one. Whether the finished result is good, bad or in-different, the very least it should be is yours.’

  He opened his mouth to speak, and then shut it again. ‘Damn it,’ he said. ‘Now I can’t ask you what you think about my plot.’

  I was so dying to tell him that I said jokingly, ‘If you must ask somebody, at least choose a person whose judgement you respect.’ But I got what was coming to me because he said thoughtfully, ‘Yes, you’re right’ – and proceeded not to ask my opinion.

  Interludes like this became, as the days passed, more and more like short patches of calm water on a storm-and-fear-ridden ocean voyage. I, who had wanted, or thought I wanted, above all to be alone, soon grew afraid to be left alone for five minutes. Because as soon as I was, with nothing to keep my mind busy, the bogies came – as surely as they must come to a criminal with a guilty conscience, or an alcoholic fighting temptation. My bogies were chiefly questions. How am I going to keep it? Should I keep it at all – wouldn’t it be better to have it adopted? What will it think of me when it’s old enough to realize it hasn’t a father? Or more immediate ones like: How am I going to tell people? What will James say? What shall I do, when I have to leave the hotel? Shall I wear a ring and pretend to be a widow? Have I the courage not to tell any lies? How will it feel to be the only woman in the maternity ward whose husband never comes to see her? And over and over again: why did this have to happen?

  One bogey was not a question, but a statement, always for some reason in the third person: You’ll never be free again.

  I never thought about the baby as a person in its own right, or wondered what it would look like, or speculated about its sex, or thought of names for it. I tried to turn my thoughts that way sometimes, but the only face that came into my mind was a face blackened by my own dark rebellious anger against it, and the only name spread a cold, slow poison through me. So my thoughts were always heavy with bitterness, and a responsibility I didn’t want and wasn’t ready for.

  Sometimes I longed to have someone to talk to. I thought if I could talk about it to some other woman, the back-breaking seriousness of it might lift a little and reveal some exciting or entertaining aspects of the situation squashed underneath. Dottie was the obvious choice, but when I imagined her probable reaction it didn’t entice me. It wasn’t that I was afraid she’d be shocked or censorious, but that I felt she would regard the whole thing in the light of her own situation. She was twenty-eight and getting a bit worried for fear she’d never find anyone to marry. I imagined her attitude to my predicament would be along the lines of: How marvellous to have a baby, at least you’ll have that, and: Of course nobody frowns on illegitimacy these days; what fun, I do think you’re wonderful, can I be godmother? In a way this sort of light-hearted approach was just what I wanted; in another way it was utterly out of keeping with my own feeling of the terrible importance of the thing. Somehow I felt that what I really needed was an older woman, someone who understood
all the implications, who could see the thing in the perspective of wisdom and experience. It took me some months to realize that these dim yearnings of mine must be for my mother.

  I often thought of Father. The raw edge of my dislike for him was already blunted by separation. I remembered many cheering, comfortable and endearing qualities in him. Very often, sitting in the office with those two telephones so temptingly close, I nearly phoned him; but in the end I always decided against it.

  I’d made up my mind that if the sickness didn’t stop by the end of the next week, I’d have to leave work. I couldn’t keep it up. Although I fed myself religiously with all the right, digestible, nourishing foods I could think of whenever I felt they’d stay where I put them, the constant repetition of throwing up every morning, followed by the titanic effort involved in getting myself to work afterwards, was telling on me. I felt perpetually feeble and weepy.

  I went back to Dr Maxwell, the GP Graham had sent me to, and he told me I should try and rest as much as possible. I explained the situation to him and he said well, he couldn’t help that, morning sickness was morning sickness; if you had it you’d had it, ha-ha, and why didn’t I take a holiday? I told him I’d already had my holiday for the year, and I couldn’t get another one without saying why. ‘Why can’t you just be ill?’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a certificate. You’ll get fagged out if you go on like this.’ I said I’d think it over and let him know, and he gave me various things to take including some pills which he said might do some good.

  They didn’t seem to. After two days of dosing myself with the stupid things I looked so terrible that even James, who’d been studiously closing his eyes to my increasingly haggard mien in order to give me a chance to ignore it myself, couldn’t avoid noticing it. He kept giving me fractious sideways glances, and popping into my office at odd times for no special reason; the impression he gave was that he was watching out to see I didn’t pull a fast one on him and he found several opportunities to slip a homily on mind-over-matter into our conversations.