The L-Shaped Room

by Lynne Reid Banks

  ‘Adopt it?’ I asked, bewildered. ‘But it’ll be mine.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I mean adopt it legally. Then it becomes sort of quasi-legitimate. You give it your name, and it’s all above-board, or something. The law then pretends it’s a waif or stray and that you’re doing it a favour, and all is forgiven. The child becomes officially your adopted child, instead of irregularly your own.’ I opened my mouth to speak, but she silenced me. ‘I know, I know. The law’s an ass. Never mind, what it comes to is that there may well be a sturdy little male to carry the name of Graham proudly into the future. Which there wouldn’t have been, in the normal course of events. But William can’t see that, of course. Oh, dear me, no. So he kicks you out and settles down to a nine-months’ bender. Whack-o.’ My aunt sat down suddenly, looking very tired and rather ill.

  ‘He’s – drinking?’ I said with difficulty.

  ‘Like the proverbial fish.’ She slumped in her chair, her hands limp on her tweed lap, her head lolling as if she were asleep. It was so unlike her to slump that I felt a new alarm.

  ‘Are you all right, darling?’

  She straightened sharply, and grinned at me, but her face was pale and there were shadows I hadn’t noticed a moment before. She had always been, in an aggravated way, very fond of my father, who was her nephew, the son of her twin sister who had died.

  ‘Me!’ she said loudly, ‘I’m all right! Good heavens! Speaking of drink, though, have you any? No, don’t get up.’ I directed her to the Glen Mist. She poured us both a generous tot, and drank hers rather faster than liqueurs are normally drunk, then gasped and blinked as sudden tears started to her eyes. ‘It’s been quite a day,’ she said. ‘Now. Tell me as much as you can tell to a maiden aunt, and let’s see what can be done.’

  I told her a cut-down (but not a Bowdlerized) version of the story, omitting Toby. I wouldn’t have omitted him three hours before, but now it seemed I must face up to the situation as it was without him.

  ‘And you’re sure you haven’t got a hankering for this Terry?’ she asked at the end. ‘Because if it’s just pride, that’s silly. But if you really don’t want him –’

  ‘I don’t, I truly don’t.’

  ‘Pity, since he’s doing so well.’ Addy always had a severely practical streak. ‘Still, we can manage. I’m scarcely rolling in money, but, like the margarine ads say, small amounts can be spread over oodles of bread.’ She sat down on the bed and held my hand; all the flippancy was suddenly gone from her face. ‘Will you come and stay with me for a while?’ she asked gently.

  Addy was one of those rare people who never makes a sacrifice. She didn’t believe in them. The Aunts always used to say she was selfish because of this, but her argument was that as she never wanted anyone to do anything for her unless it gave them pleasure, she never did anything for anyone unless it gave her pleasure. The result was that sometimes members of the family or others who went to her for help came away empty-handed, however great their needs or deserts might be; Addy never used need as a yardstick. But on the other side of the medal were the occasions, such as this one, when she volunteered something you’d never have dreamed of asking for, and you were free to accept it because you knew she’d be disappointed, not relieved, if you refused. I didn’t even have to make the conventional protests. I just squeezed her hand and said, ‘Yes, darling. Thank you.’

  Chapter 17

  LEAVING the L-shaped room was a horrible wrench, because I hasn’t had time to prepare myself for it. Addy saw it and understood, and dealt with it in her own way – by refusing to give me time to wallow.

  ‘I’ll come down to you in a day or two,’ I hedged.

  ‘No,’ she said, with an air of finality. ‘You’ll come now or not at all.’

  She had her car – an ancient Morris known as the Galloping Maggot – parked outside, and before I quite grasped what was happening my clothes had been haphazardly flung into a suitcase, the few of my possessions for which she saw any immediate need piled on to the afghan and gathered up like the bundle of some giant Dick Whittington, and while I dazedly dressed she was lugging these down the stairs and loading them into the boot.

  ‘What about the rest of my things?’ I said when she returned.

  ‘How much do you pay a week for this room?’

  ‘Thirty bob.’

  ‘Would the old harridan take half that as a retainer?’

  ‘I’ll ask her.’

  Addy went down ahead of me. When she’d gone, I looked round. The L-shaped room, partly denuded, already had a pathetic, don’t-leave-me air of desolation. It struck me we could easily have taken everything now. There was no point in ever coming back since I was nothing but a hindrance to Toby.

  But somehow I couldn’t bear to sever connexions altogether. Not so suddenly and finally. Perhaps he would change his mind. Besides, it comforted me in my act of desertion to see some of my things left behind, as one gives one’s glove to a dog when one has to leave it alone, as an earnest of good intention to come back.

  On my way down I stopped outside Toby’s door. It hurt me to think of him, but I couldn’t leave without a word. I knocked. There was no answer. I tried the door; it was open, but the room was empty. I felt a sort of painful relief. I put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and wrote:

  Dearest Toby, my great-aunt has appeared unexpectedly and is carrying me off to her home in Surrey. In view of the way you feel, this seems a good idea; it means you won’t have to worry about me any more, so perhaps the thing you said was gone will come back. I love you and I don’t want to be on your conscience.

  If I’d been honest I would have added, ‘– or to have you on mine’, but that sounded, even to me, as if I didn’t really love him, and I wanted to believe I did and to have him believe it. The trouble was, I couldn’t feel any love for him at the moment, only a pain like a black bruise. I left the letter sticking in the machine and went on downstairs.

  Doris was in such an agreeable mood she’d have said yes to almost anything. She and Charlie were sitting amid the wreckage of Christmas pudding and turkey bones, cracker mottoes and beer bottles; they were somnolent and at peace with the world. Going off to stay with auntie, was I? That’s right, well, have a nice time, dear. Had I enjoyed the party? That’s good. The room? Yes, of course, anything I liked; yes, she’d keep it for me. Thirty shillings for two weeks in advance? Very nice of me, always useful around Christmas, a bit of extra. She didn’t seem to realize it was less than usual, not more. I could almost see her totting up how many bottles of best mild Charlie could get for thirty bob as soon as they opened.

  Then I climbed into the sagging seat beside Addy, and we drove into the country.

  I spent two weeks in her little white cottage before she would even begin to discuss ways-and-means. ‘Rest,’ she said. ‘Eat. Read books.’ I protested for the first few days, but when I tried to talk seriously she simply put her hands over her ears and went about singing in a loud, discordant voice to drown me out. So in the end I put myself in her hands.

  Her beds had deep spring mattresses which supported you as subtly as salt-water, and many pillows, and enormous billowing Continental feather-quilts. After the camp-bed, it was like sleeping in a cloud. Every floor was carpeted wall-to-wall, even the bathroom. Every room had an open fire, cheerily burning. All the walls were white, except where they were lined with books. The cottage itself constituted a small library, and my aunt’s taste in books was catholic – there was something for every mood: thrillers, plays, dozens of biographies, philosophy, and just about every classic Penguins have ever brought out. There was even a pile of well-thumbed American comics, paper-backs full of people called Charlie Brown, Pogo and Li’l Abner. I had never met any of these characters, and sneaked the first booklet into my room as if it had been full of eroticism; but my feeling of guilt was short-lived. Addy discoursed freely on the social significance of Pogo, the psychology behind Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and told me that no less a person than John Steinbeck
had recommended Li’l Abner as one of the great satires of our time.

  After that I went through the pile like a dose of salts. I didn’t find them very significant, but they were extremely entertaining. It was so long since I’d read anything, I found it useful to start in the nursery, so to speak; afterwards I got on to other things and soon found myself reading and reading until my eyes ached and I had to stop. So then I went for walks.

  The countryside round the cottage was winter-stricken. It was too early for even a portent of spring; the trees were stark and without promise; round their roots their last year’s covering lay clogged and rotting. Such birds as there were had a furtive air, as if they had no real business to be alive in those dead surroundings. The water in ponds and ditches lay rank and still, reflecting the lifeless grey of the sky.

  My first walk, by myself, depressed me; like the ponds, I was so empty of colour that I reflected the January drabness of the scenery and had a feeling that this inner deadness was forever, that there would never be another spring. I crouched by the path and with a twig I dug among the cast-off sticky leaves, seeking something, some shoots of green to indicate hope, but there were none. I shivered suddenly, and put my hand inside my coat. I didn’t seem to be getting any bigger. If my baby were to die in there, how would I know? My legs began to ache from crouching, and my coat-hem was getting wet. I stood up, threw the twig away and walked quickly back to the cottage.

  But next time, Addy came with me. She wore rubber boots and a very old tweed coat, but no hat or gloves. Her white hair was as cheerful as snow against the bleak greys and browns of the woods. She didn’t meander idly, as I had; she seemed to be heading somewhere. She strode briskly along, not talking much, humming tonelessly under her breath. In her hand she carried a long whippy willow twig, and as we passed the larger trees she would give them a whack with it; once she said absently as she did so, ‘Wake up, can’t you?’ Periodically she would look round with an impatient air at the dead-seeming wilderness, or glare up at the waterlogged sky. Eventually she spotted a pussy-willow which seemed to be budding; she examined it with an air of slight mollification, like a housewife who inspects her home after the char has gone and eventually finds that at least she’s cleaned the silver … I was so inwardly amused, watching her irritation with winter, so like my my own and yet so different, being positive and active instead of passive and defeatist, that I had no time to wonder if I were unhappy or not.

  I thought about Toby; but now it hurt worse than thinking about Terry, and I tried not to. I thought about Father as well. I kept remembering what Addy had said. Once, I mentioned it to her.

  ‘We can’t just leave him there, drinking away all alone!’

  ‘I’ve let him know you’re down here with me. That should stop him worrying.’

  ‘Do you think it’s worry that’s making him drink?’

  ‘Partly. It’s principally guilt.’

  ‘It won’t stop him feeling guilty – the fact that you’ve taken me over.’

  ‘Well, I can’t help that.’

  ‘But we can’t just –’

  She turned to me and put her hands on her wide hips. ‘So what would you like to do? Go and ring his doorbell and beg him to take you back?’

  ‘No, of course not, but –’

  ‘Suggest something then.’

  I thought, while Addy went on with her cooking. She cooked like an angel. After two weeks I couldn’t tell how much was pregnancy and how much was fat.

  ‘Well?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Couldn’t I – write to him, and tell him I – forgive him?’ I faltered.

  She stared at me.

  ‘Tell him you forgive him?’ she asked incredulously. ‘Are you all there? The first rule about guilt, you poor fathead, is that almost no one has the courage to admit that’s what’s the matter with them. If you should ask him why he’s drinking, he’ll tell you it’s because he’s ashamed of his daughter. Have a little sense.’ She bent and hitched a casserole out of the oven.

  ‘When you say he’s drinking –’ I began cautiously.

  ‘I mean, oddly enough, that he’s drinking. Now let’s drop it. It takes a great deal of drink to do a man of William’s constitution any lasting harm. Let’s get an early night. I want you to help me in the garden tomorrow.’

  But the thin edge of the wedge was in. Next day, clearing the broken brown stalks of old Michaelmas daisies, I ventured to bring up the subject of the future.

  ‘I must try and find a job of some sort soon,’ I said.

  I’d expected her to reiterate her rest-eat-and-read injunction, but instead she stood with one booted foot on her spade and said ‘Yes …’ rather absently, fumbling for a cigarette in the pocket of her gardening apron. The smoke smelt pungent and good in the damp air; she sniffed it appreciatively. ‘Let’s have a bonfire,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘It’s too late, everything’s soaking,’ I objected.

  ‘We’ll cheat,’ she said. ‘Rake it all into a pile over there.’ She went into the cottage and came out again with a can of petrol. We threw the lighted match from a distance and the thing blew up with a satisfying whump. Gradually the blueness died out of the flames and the smoke began to smell as it should. We rushed about like children, finding dead things to feed it with. The smoke was half-steam and the fire hissed spitefully, but it burned, with the surreptitious addition of a bit more spirit. We stood and watched it, savouring the deep primitive pleasure of incendiarism. Addy rested her arm on my shoulder.

  ‘Would you like to work for me?’ she said at last.

  I looked suspicious. ‘No charity.’

  ‘Work, I said. Real work. You can type, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘Did you know I’d written a book?’

  If she’d said she’d built a planetarium, I’d have been less surprised. For all her keenness on reading, she had never struck me as being in the least literary, or in fact creative in any way. She wasn’t even a good letter-writer.

  ‘What sort of a book?’

  ‘Just a book. It takes the form of letters.’

  ‘Letters?’

  ‘Love letters.’

  I was more surprised than ever. I couldn’t think of anything suitable to say to that. Addy was staring at the dwindling bonfire, abstractedly.

  ‘It’s all in rough,’ she said at last. ‘In my terrible illiterate scrawl. I never meant to do anything about it – I mean, in a way, it’s rather private, like a diary.’ My amazement grew. Could these letters represent some non-fictional chapter in Addy’s life? So far as I had ever heard, she had never even nearly married. Now she was middle-aged – no, she wasn’t, she was elderly. I’d never wondered about her age, as she never seemed to change, but now I did some mental arithmetic and it appeared, unbelievably, that she must be nearing seventy. I felt a sudden shiver of disquiet, the way a child feels the first time he realizes that parents are not immortal.

  ‘Anyway, now it seems suddenly like not a bad idea. Of course, in all probability no one will be in the least interested. Still, the manuscript’s sitting there. Who can predict the weird tastes of today? Some publisher might gamble on it …’ She took a last drag and threw her cigarette into the fire. I was somehow reassured by the almost masculine strength of the gesture.

  ‘I haven’t got a typewriter,’ I said.

  ‘I have. It’s older than God, but it works. I bought it in a rummage sale years ago for business letters.’

  We watched the fire. It was dying; the smoke slunk away, keeping close to the ground like a cat that’s stolen something.

  ‘So, your idea is that I should go on living here, with you and on you, and take money from you as well?’

  ‘Well, of course you can do that if you like. Come on in, it’s getting damn’ cold.’

  We went in and made tea and buttered toast and sat in the bright living-room by the fire, listening to the rain which had begun to fall, relishing that peculiar feeling of securi
ty that comes from being warm and under cover during wet weather.

  After two cups each, drunk in silence, Addy got up and fetched the manuscript out of her desk. It was a big, untidy folder, leaking odd bits of paper covered with Addy’s thick, spiky writing. She sat down and began looking through it. Unexpectedly she said:

  ‘How much do you miss that little room of yours?’

  Up to that moment I hadn’t been aware of missing it at all. But when she mentioned it, I felt a pang of remorse because I had been so revelling in the creature comforts of the cottage and making comparisons to the disadvantage of the room in Fulham which had sheltered me through so many trials. I thought of it, empty and cold and getting dusty and airless, and I felt the strongest sort of longing to get back to it.

  ‘I’m missing it now,’ I said.

  ‘Glad you didn’t give it up completely?’

  I looked sharply at her. She grinned complacently.

  ‘Give yourself another couple of weeks here,’ she said, ‘just to get you safely into the fifth month, and then I should go back, if I were you. Take this lot with you, and my antique machine; and get to work. I’ll pay you either by the hour or by the page, whichever you like; and when you’ve finished that, we’ll see.’ She stood up, her hair like a snowy halo in the firelight. She held the folder in front of her with both hands. ‘Perhaps you’d like to make a start while you’re here,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to get through it as quickly as possible.’ She frowned down at the folder, tucking a few of the untidy corners in out of sight; the movements of her hands were oddly tender, but gave an impression of exasperation, like a mother trying hopelessly to make her tomboy daughter look ladylike to meet someone. Then she thrust it towards me. ‘Here, you may as well have a look at it. Just remember, I don’t want your opinion. Unless it’s favourable, of course. Well, I’m going to cook the dinner.’