The L-Shaped Room

by Lynne Reid Banks

  I opened the folder with a feeling of apprehension. I wanted so much to be able to say something nice about its contents, which evidently meant more to Addy than I would ever have dreamed possible. But love letters! There was something – incongruous about the idea. Addy, who knew all about one sort of love, had always seemed to me completely immune to the other.

  I selected a letter at random from among the assorted pages jammed inside the cover. It began without salutation, and consisted of a light-hearted account of a day’s doings. It might have been a page from a diary, so uninhibited, vital and intimate was it; but there was an undercurrent – not very strong in the first sheet I read – of a second-person factor; on closer examination I noticed that the small inevitable disappointments and set-backs of the day were glossed over humorously, as if to spare the reader worry; the highlights were brought out the way an actor ‘points’ certain lines to get a laugh from his audience.

  I picked out another sheet. This was longer; its tone was immediately more serious. A totally different phase in the life of the writer was being described. There was no attempt here to disguise the pain behind the words, caused by some unspecified sorrow. Here the feeling I got was of a willing opening-up of the heart, an essential sharing of sorrow in the sure knowledge of understanding and comfort. The words ‘I know you will understand how I feel because you always do,’ did not appear; that was simply the assumption behind the letter; it needed no stating. In fact, it soon proved to be behind every one, the gay, the serious, the tender – the perfect security of perfect sympathy.

  I thought this would make for dullness after a while – was there to be no conflict between the two lovers, the voluble sender and the silent, reflected receiver? But soon I discovered that the conflicts came in the writer’s life, and, later, that the conflicts were, in some odd way, resolved in the letters. Most of the writer’s troubles were self-made, as in real life; they were the self-created hells that a sensitive, emotional woman will always encounter in her everyday dealings with herself and with other people; it was impossible not to believe in them as I read. And I marvelled at the way that explaining them to the recipient of the letters, getting outside them sufficiently to avoid alarming him, yet safe in the knowledge that this was a token act of kindness because he would know quite well how desperately important they seemed to the writer – these factors, together with the vital underlying one that basically nothing mattered too terribly except the fear of losing the one who was loved, made for a sense of balance and light-hearted courage in the face of life which I found so moving and exciting that I kept reading, one letter after another, avid to see how this magic formula would affect the wide range of life-like situations the writer found herself involved in.

  I soon stopped associating the writer with Addy. This was evidently a woman in her early thirties, living a life full of mental and physical activity in the heart of some big city. The reason for her separation from her lover was never made clear – there were glancing references to it as something inevitable which would end one day – in some of the happier letters it seemed that they were about to meet; only in her rare moments of despair did she allow herself to hint that they might never be together again. But generally one got the impression that the relationship could scarcely be improved. That was what was so clever about the letters. They created two people, two rare people complete in each other – no, more than that. The writer was complete in herself. I recognized this with a shock when I realized that there was never even a reference to letters received.

  I was still reading haphazardly and greedily when Addy came back into the room. It must have been two hours later. The fire had sunk to embers and I was a long way away; it was an effort to come back and reconcile the young woman writer with the old woman aunt. I blinked up at her as she moved about laying the table with brisk, graceless efficiency. I looked at the shiny, lined face, the cropped white hair, the lumpy figure and stumpy ankles and bony, direct hands. Was the warm, temperamental, essentially feminine young woman, whose words I’d been reading, still shut up inside that other body, like the thin man in the fat man, and were these jumbled pages on my knee her way of getting out?

  At last Addy, the solid, seeable Addy, stopped busying herself with the table and looked at me. It was a look I’d never seen on her face before – a vulnerable, eager, apprehensive look. I realized in that moment that she had never shown this work to anyone before and that she cared, very much, what I thought of it. But I couldn’t find the words to tell her. So I just nodded.

  ‘You like it,’ she said. What happened to her face then was wonderful. I got up and kissed her.

  ‘Of course they’re not in order,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t let you read them all jumbled up like that.’ She took the folder from me and began looking through it again, eagerly, as if finding someone else who liked it had made it more exciting to her.

  ‘But I want to ask you something,’ I said. ‘Why does he never write to her?’

  She looked up at me, a look I could hardly interpret. It was partly a sort of kindly impatience with me for not having understood, and partly rue. ‘Because he doesn’t exist,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Men like that never do. They always have to be invented.’

  Chapter 18

  IT took me all of two more weeks to get the hang of the typewriter, a foot-high erection of jangling steel with a temperament behind every lever, and to sort the letters which made up the book into some sort of order. Addy herself grew infuriated, saying she’d had no idea they were in such a muddle, she’d just written them at odd times and stuffed them into the folder, never seriously intending to ‘do’ anything with them. ‘If ever a work of art was untainted by considerations of commerce, it’s this one,’ she said grimly, as we knelt on the floor together with the innumerable sheets of paper spread out round us like the sea round a pair of islands. The pages ranged from foolscap sheets to perforated scraps torn off a small shopping-pad; most of the writing had been done with a blunt pencil. It was fatal to let Addy start re-reading any of it, because she immediately started making extensive corrections. ‘That was all right as long as it was just for me, but if other people are going to see it …’ I teased her and said real artists were only concerned with the impossible task of satisfying themselves. ‘What bosh,’ said Addy contemptuously. ‘I’m easy to please. I think every word I write is inspired. But I don’t expect others to regard it with my biased eye.’

  At last I was ready to start the fair copy, and Addy went off in the car and returned with reams of quarto and boxes of carbon, rubbers, rubber thimbles, and a box containing a fascinating lump of something like plasticine for cleaning the typewriter keys. (It wasn’t much good for cleaning anything when we got finished playing with it.) Then she established me at a large table with everything neatly arranged within reach, and left me to it.

  But not for long. She couldn’t keep away. She kept making excuses to come into the room and would edge her way over to me and stand, breathing heavily, mesmerized by the sight of her hectic scribble being translated into beautiful clean print on the uniform white sheets. As soon as one was free of the machine, she would pounce on it and set about ravishing its virgin perfection – slashing great lines through it, writing inserts in the margin and indicating their intended positions with balloons and arrows and crosses. As I retyped it, she would suddenly twitch and gag behind me as she saw something else that needed changing.

  After a week of this I had typed a total of fifty-two pages. Forty-one of them were waiting to be retyped, twelve for the second time, eighteen for the third.

  ‘Darling,’ I said at last, ‘whether you’re paying me by the hour or by the page, you’ll be broke very soon if I don’t take the whole issue out from under your thieving hands. Let me go home and do you a fair copy and send it to you, and then you can make ALL your alterations at once.’

  With the greatest reluctance, she agreed. ‘It’s like sending your only child away to boarding-school,�
� she said fretfully as she drove me to London. I smiled secretly. I knew she didn’t mean me. I think she had almost completely forgotten, during the past three weeks, that there was a bona fide child involved in any of this.

  But I hadn’t.

  Prior to Addy’s remark about the likelihood of its being a boy, I hadn’t cared, one way or the other; now I wanted a son. This was irrational, since obviously I was more nearly capable of rearing a girl by myself than a boy – I knew almost nothing about little boys except that their need of a father was imperative if they were not to grow into Oedipus-riddled weaklings or even outright homosexuals. I had also heard that if you allowed yourself to think of your unborn child as positively one sex, and then it turned out to be the other, the pre-natal influence of your wrong conviction had a most undesirable effect – you found yourself landed with an effeminate boy or a brawny hairy girl, thoroughly unbalanced and with every right to blame you.

  In any case, I was rapidly reaching the stage when I suspected that every passing thought about the baby could have a positive and permanent effect on it for good or ill – as if it had been made of very soft clay and each thought was a fingerprint. I endeavoured to think only beautiful but strictly neuter thoughts, but this was difficult, since I was considering it more and more as a potential human being, and almost all humans are so unmistakably one sex or the other. It was relatively easy to think about a neuter baby, but almost impossible to envisage a neuter child or a neuter adolescent. So eventually I evolved a system where, to be fair, I followed each boy-fantasy scrupulously with a girl-fantasy. Only as the boy-fantasies invariably came first, the girl-fantasies were always faint and unconvincing repetitions, to be raced through like homework in order to return to the ever-strengthening image of a boy.

  The house looked, and smelt, just as usual. Addy sniffed ostentatiously as I let us in. ‘I smell bugs,’ she said.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘though I’m surprised you know what bugs smell like.’

  ‘I was a nurse in the fourteen-eighteen war,’ she said succinctly.

  The house was very quiet. It was the middle of a week-day – but even allowing for that, it was very quiet. We toiled up with my things from the car. The L-shaped room had an air of damp neglect, and (as it were) hardly looked up when I came in.

  ‘There’s a funny smell in here, too,’ said Addy.

  I sniffed. It was a faint staleness; vaguely familiar; I couldn’t identify it. ‘Just being empty,’ I suggested, hurrying to light the gas and open the window.

  ‘That’s unlucky,’ said Addy, pointing to the Christmas tree, a pathetic little object bedecked like a corpse at a mortician’s. Underneath it on the table was Toby’s present, the paper and carbons. They were almost buried under a layer of pine-needles. The sight sent a cold pang through me. I’d been, for five weeks, an escaper to another world; now, faced with the tree he’d helped me to buy, the memory of the Christmas that had gone so bleakly wrong came back as clearly as one remembers last night’s painful experience on waking from a deep, exhausted sleep.

  Addy was watching me closely. ‘Perhaps I was wrong to bring you back here,’ she said. ‘You look funny. Are you going to be all right?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something to do now.’ I spread an old newspaper on the floor and lifted the dead tree, with all its trimmings, on to it.

  ‘Oh, save the decorations for next year!’ Addy said.

  I shook my head. Separating the tree from Fred’s pot, I carried the sad remains down and out to the dustbin in the front. Addy came with me, and handed me the manuscript through the window of the Galloping Maggot.

  ‘Take care of your little self,’ she said, fixing her young blue eyes on me. The ‘little’ touched me; sentiment was unusual from her. I blinked and nodded. Our eyes stayed locked for a long moment, hers stern and tender at the same time. Then she let in the clutch and the car bounded forward.

  ‘Thank you for everything!’ I suddenly remembered to shout after her. Her hand appeared through the window and made a rude gesture to my thanks. The car turned a corner and I had a quick glimpse of her stern profile, her gay white hair blowing. Then she was gone.

  Now it was she who seemed unreal, she and the cottage and the last five weeks. But the manuscript was left; it gave me an incredulous feeling, like a solid trophy brought back from a dream.

  I went slowly upstairs again. This time I let myself stop outside Toby’s door. I stood on the landing, thinking how we had met there when I came out of hospital. My heart was beating painfully. He will always be important to me, I thought with sudden doomed certainty.

  I knocked. There was no answer; I hadn’t expected one. It was too quiet. I tried the door – it was locked. That gave me an uneasy jolt. Toby never locked his door. He always said there was nothing to steal except Minnie, his old typewriter, and he added that if anyone stole her he would personally murder the thief.

  I went up the last flight to my own floor. The silence began to seem slightly uncanny. I tried John’s door; he was nearly always in at this time of day, but he wasn’t in now. As I opened the door, a stench came out and hit me in the face. It was the mother and father of the faint smell in my room, and was compounded of stale air, unwashed linen, John’s own personal smell – and, to my surprise, rum.

  Uneasily I closed the door and went into my own room. It had perked up slightly already. I set myself to work, washing curtains, dusting and cleaning. It was much later that I made a tour of the house and found that, though it was now after eight o’clock at night, it was still quite empty.

  And it stayed empty.

  Actually I expect Jane and Sonia were in the basement, but somehow this didn’t count. The house was hollow and silent beneath me. I’d never been the nervy type who minds the dark or being alone in an empty house. Perhaps because I’d never been alone in an empty house for any length of time.

  During the days it was all right. I worked on Addy’s book, and went to the doctor’s, or shopping. I ate out sometimes. Often I went to Frank’s for coffee and toast. Every time I’d been out I hurried back hoping to find lights on and the house full of the small comfortable sounds of inhabitance. I wouldn’t let myself admit, at first, how much I dreaded the dark crouching quiet of the night.

  It seemed to get worse, not better, as the days passed. I felt a sense of unreality, as if I had been left alone in a condemned house. Where were Mavis and Doris? Where on earth was John? – and Toby? Were they all dead? Had the house been sold? Ludicrous things comforted or upset me. It was a disproportionate relief to find the pilot light in the bathroom Ascot still burning. It gave me a feeling of shivery disquiet to see the piles of ‘3d. Off – Buy Now’ throw-aways mounting on the door-mat. Doris had always pounced on these, and never let them filter through to anyone else.

  At night I lay in bed and found it increasingly hard to sleep. The weather was freezing, and the cold seemed to permeate the corpse-like house. It was only by burning my gas-fire nearly all the time that I maintained my little beach-head of living warmth against the encroaching rigor mortis that I imagined was gripping the house.

  My imagination was working overtime. All the womanish terrors which I had always felt myself to be above, came creeping over me as I lay alone. I thought of everything – prowlers, burglars, murderers, maniacs – even ghosts. I was disgusted with myself, but I couldn’t help it. I got so that I even imagined small sounds, and frightened myself half senseless by my interpretations of them.

  One night about a week after my return, I imagined I heard a door close, far below. It was nearly midnight. I had been lying there since ten o’clock, fighting the urge to switch the light on. I lay absolutely still, listening. Had it been the door? I now thought I could hear more faint sounds. They seemed to get louder and nearer. Footsteps coming up the stairs … I began to sweat. I tried to get hold of myself. In the morning it would seem senseless and babyish. But now I was sure I could hear something. Traffic outside and
the roaring of fear in my ears prevented my being sure until the footsteps were on the last flight.

  Now it was unmistakable. It was a slow, irregular sound – a few steps up, then a pause, then a few more steps. My body was rigid in every muscle. I hadn’t bolted the door. I had no weapon. I was alone in the dark and in this neighbourhood could probably scream myself hoarse and no one would come. I don’t think I’ve ever known such physical fear. It was at its peak long before I heard the footsteps stop outside my door and someone fumbling at the handle.

  I didn’t even hear my own scream as the intruder came into the room. I knew I had screamed only when a hand clutched at my mouth and a voice said urgently, ‘Don’t – don’t!’

  It was the familiar smell that reached my frozen senses first, and then the softness of the hand, and then the voice. Slowly I relaxed as my fear receded, leaving me as limp as a sheet thrown over the pile-driver of my heart, nearly bursting through my ribs.

  John was slumped on the floor by the bed, his hand still holding my mouth, but loosely, as if he, too, had suddenly lost all his strength. I moved it and said in a shaking voice, ‘You stupid bloody great idiot, you nearly made me die of fright!’

  He grunted and shook his head.

  ‘Get up and turn the light on, for God’s sake.’

  He obeyed, finding the light after a few moments’ blundering about. Reality and sense and comfort returned in a split Second. ‘Tomorrow,’ I said grimly, ‘I shall go out and buy some night-lights. Now will you kindly tell me what the hell’s the idea?’

  He really looked worse than I felt. He was unshaven, his frizzy beard stuck to his chin like black crêpe-hair. His clothes were filthy and torn and he had what on anyone white would have been a black eye. He was shivering like a wet dog and tears were running down his cheeks.

  ‘I sorry,’ he began. ‘I sorry, I sorry –’