‘Okay, that’ll do,’ I interrupted hastily. ‘Never mind being sorry, just tell me where you’ve been and what’s been going on around here. And what you meant by coming in here in this state,’ I added severely. I could see he was full of rum to the gills.
He came back to my side, almost fell on to the floor again and put his head down on my knees.
‘You go away,’ he sobbed. ‘You go away Christmas Day, never say good-bye – you just go. Then later, Toby, he go too. Same as you, one time he there, next time he gone. Not say nothing, not say good-bye or comin’ back or nothing. I felt all alone with them two old women. They never like me. That Mavis, she say black men smell. I hear her. She mean me to hear. And Doris, not let me play my guitar for keep myself company. So I go to the club and I get drunk.’
He lifted his head and stared at me angrily.
‘I get so drunk I fall down. I can’t play. They sack me. I been there three years, best guitar they could have, they sack me first time I ever get drunk. I fight with boss. I hit him, then they hit me many, many. They throw me out in the gutter.’ His big hands played with the afghan and he stopped looking at me.
‘So then what?’
‘I come back here. I got nowhere else to go. In my room I get more drunk. I bust your cradle.’
‘My what?’
‘I make you baby-cradle, like I promise. It was for your Christmas present, not quite finished, but then you go away before I can give it to you.’
‘And you – broke it?’
He nodded. ‘Broke it all up. It was a good cradle, best thing I ever make.’ He started to cry again. I began to cry myself. The pain one could inflict, just by forgetting to say good-bye! I could hardly bear to think of him breaking the cradle, his big gentle hands gone savage and destructive on the thing he had made with such care and love. It nearly broke my heart to think of it.
I tried not to cry; I knew it would only make him worse. ‘But how long ago was all this?’ I asked, trying to be practical.
‘Long time, days and days. Then I hate myself and I hate you and Toby and them old women, and I got to get away. I go all sorts of places. I get drunk at night, sleep in park, or where I can. Police catch me, I spend a night in jail – everything. Get in fights. See terrible things, terrible people – bad people. Me bad too. Me rotten bad right through.’ Then he raised his head and said in a slightly less self-abusive voice, ‘Not bad like them others, though. I not go with them bad women like all them others.’
‘That’s good,’ I said. I stroked his head and he rested it on my knees again. He seemed more peaceful now and my own heart had calmed down. ‘And why did you come in here?’
‘I dunno,’ he mumbled tiredly. ‘Just want to be in your little white room. You scare me to hell when you scream. I not think you ever come back.’
We sat quietly for a long time.
‘Come on,’ I said at last, when both my legs were going to sleep. ‘Let’s have some hot coffee and I’ll bathe your eye.’
Chapter 19
I WORKED through the following morning with a light heart. Fear and the anticipation of fear had lifted like a shadow now that John was next door. I could hear him shuffling about, tidying his room, humming to himself. Once in a while we’d shout through the partition to each other. After a while he began to play his guitar. It made a good background.
The letters were falling into sequence. As I typed, I felt the now familiar sense of satisfaction at having a part in something that seemed more and more good to me as I went along. The typewriter and I had called a truce; or perhaps I’d mastered its senile vagaries. Anyway, I no longer had to drive myself to the table in the same way as before. And while I was working I wasn’t thinking with longing about Toby, or with hate about Terry, or with anxiety and guilt about Father. I was thinking solely about the letters, getting completely immersed in them.
At noon, I heard the front door slam, and voices came up from below. I went out on to the landing and leaned over; it was Doris and Mavis, and someone else. I went down and met Mavis toiling up the stairs with a suitcase and the cat in a basket. She looked cheerful and bright.
‘Hullo, dear!’ she said when she saw me. ‘You’re back, are you? That’s nice, we are too! Lovely time we’ve had. Here, could you take kitty for a minute?’ She thrust the jerking, heaving basket into my hands. Low growls of outrage issued from it. ‘Poor kitty-kitty,’ cooed Mavis through the wicker. ‘She doesn’t love her mother, does she then?’
We went into Mavis’s room. ‘How long have you been back?’ she asked, fussing about blowing dust off her trinkets while poor kitty-kitty cursed ominously.
‘A week. Shouldn’t the cat be let out?’
‘Oh yes, will you dear? Now, where was it you went? We visited Doris’s sister in Folkestone. Such a kind soul, but what a lot of little rugs! Charlie came with us. I’m afraid I’m no use as a chaperon … Oh dear, has she scratched you? Naughty girl! She’s apt to do that when she’s first let out. Like a cup of anything?’
‘No thanks,’ I said, sucking my wrist where it had been savaged by vengeful claws.
‘Doris didn’t expect you back … poor ducky, have you been here all alone?’ But she obviously wasn’t interested in my fate. She was bursting with news. ‘I’ll give you three guesses what happened at Folkestone!’
‘I didn’t think anything ever happened at Folkestone.’
‘Oh yes it does! Go on, guess.’
‘I couldn’t begin to. Do tell.’
Mavis looked roguish.
‘If I whisper Doris and Charlie – then couldn’t you guess?’
‘Don’t tell me they eloped!’
She chortled with glee. ‘Gave me the slip! Didn’t tell a soul!’
‘But I can hear Doris downstairs now – they can’t have gone far.’
‘Just to the local registry office, dear, and home in time for tea. Only of course we didn’t have tea. Isn’t it thrilling? Fancy her, at her age! She’s potty for him. Just like two love-birds, weren’t they, mother’s little angel?’ she asked the cat, who gave her a look of contempt and retired under the bed. She went on to me: ‘So we’ll have a man in the house again. I’ve missed one since Toby went.’ Her glance narrowed as she waited for my reaction.
I felt a momentary dislike for her. It was grim to be dependent on someone like her for the news I needed so badly.
‘Go on then, Mavis.’
‘Go on, dear? What about?’
She must have her pound of flesh. ‘I want to hear about Toby.’
She smiled her smug little cat-smile and snuggled her hips into the chair.
‘Well, dear,’ she said, ‘it’s my belief it was all your doing. Terribly lonely and miserable he was, after you’d gone. Didn’t do any typing, never went out, just stayed up there smoking and reading … very unfriendly too, any time I went up to see him. Just wanted to be left alone, he said. I got quite lonely myself; I had to spend my time with Doris, only Charlie came round a lot, and two was company, you could see that a mile off. Well, two days before we was due to go to Folkestone, Toby came to see me. First time since before Christmas. Looked bad, poor boy, quite peaky, worse than for a long time. Said he was thinking of leaving. He only said it casually, I never thought he meant so soon. Where will you be going? I said. Well, he didn’t know, just to somewhere different. Said the place was getting on his nerves. He said had I heard anything from you, and when I had to say no – why ever didn’t you write, Jane? Poor lad, you could see he was pining for you – he said if you ever came back, would I give you this.’
She took an envelope out of a drawer and I turned it over. The back was slightly wrinkled from where she’d steamed it open, but I let that pass. Inside was a short note.
If it’s any satisfaction to you, I can’t write any better when you’re not here than when you are. You’ve become part of this hole of a house – the only good part – and it seems I’ll have to leave the bloody place to get away from you. I wish I h
adn’t said or felt what I did when I last saw you. But the next day my mood had changed, and I wanted you like hell, but it was too late. Serve me right for visiting my personal failure on you, or blaming it on you. I’m sorry.
Toby
P.S. If I thought I could do you any good, I’d stay and wait for you. I feel a bastard for going, but what the hell, you’ll probably never come back anyway, why should you.
P.P.S. By the way, I’m a Jew. So you probably wouldn’t have wanted to marry me anyway.
Everything about this brought him back to me so powerfully it was as if he were in the room. It seemed incredible that I couldn’t immediately start arguing the points in the note, one after the other. How dared he go off and leave a provocative thing like this, so full of what seemed like deliberate misconceptions? I felt a welling fury within me that he was out of reach of my answers, my reasoning, my sudden agonizing longing for him.
It was the final P.S. that was the hardest to bear.
‘What the bloody hell makes him think that!’ I exploded nearly in tears of frustration. ‘I’ve never said a word against the Jews! I like the damn’ Jews, god-damn it! How could he do this?’ I looked up and saw Mavis’s avid, absorbent face upturned to catch my emotion. I stifled my outburst with an effort. ‘Well, so what happened?’
‘Nothing, dear, only next morning he’d gone. Left a note for Doris saying he was sorry he couldn’t pay her, but that he was leaving something to cover it. Doris was ever so put out. I told her she should think herself lucky – worth far more than he owed, I said, but she said she didn’t want the bother of finding someone to buy it –’
‘What? What did he leave?’
‘Didn’t I tell you, dear? His typewriter.’
His typewriter! My heart grew cold.
‘Has she sold it yet?’
‘Not so far as I know, dear. It’s still up in his room.’
I went down and chatted to Doris for a while and then casually offered to buy Toby’s typewriter from her. She tried to drive a hard bargain but I knew she wanted to be rid of it so all the big guns were on my side. I got it for a fiver, and she gave me the key of Toby’s room.
It gave me a strange feeling to go in there and see it like that, with no trace of him left except the typewriter and some cigarette stubs in a saucer. I took the machine upstairs with me; I felt as if it were the one thing saved from a disaster. I thought of using it for Addy’s book, but decided not to. For one thing, the type would be different. For another … well, I happened to be its technical owner at the moment, but it was really Toby’s.
It frightened me to think of Toby, somewhere, working at something that wasn’t writing. I tried not to think of the typewriter left behind, as a symbol of defeat. Whether it was my fault or not hardly mattered. What mattered was he musn’t give up.
I shut my mind and went back to work.
But my mind wouldn’t stay shut. With the letter, a tangible inheritance, lying beside me, my desire for Toby – his companionship, his love and his dear silly face – came back like a boomerang and hit me hard, leaving me breathless and unable to concentrate. I felt astonished that I had endured life without him for so long. It must have been because our last meeting had left such a cold, loveless imprint on my mind that it sealed off everything that had happened before. Now, that ending seemed dim and unreal; all that mattered was the rest. Our long evenings together in this room, with him sitting on the floor talking endlessly about himself and making me laugh; our first incredible night together; our fraught meeting on the landing when I came home from hospital; the next day, strolling through the market with that sense of reckless happiness and completion; the moment when he said, ‘Am I a failure as a writer?’ Was it something I said then that started the chain of estranging incidents? It had all begun, and ended, so quickly. Not surprising, really; it was a law of nature that if a growing thing had no chance to put down roots, to take a grip on life and reality, it couldn’t withstand the first hot sun or downpour of rain. I felt the impact of our failure on each other and sat staring dry-eyed at the letter that proved it so inescapably.
Life without Toby became like life minus an arm. It seemed I couldn’t possibly go through with having the baby without him. No purpose, no prospects seemed really to matter very much when I had no equal and ally to share them with. Loneliness settled on me again like a recurrent disease. Perhaps it would lift for ever when the baby came; but I had an uncomfortable expectation that this would not be so. A baby, more than most things in life, needs to be shared.
I wanted to find him but I didn’t know where to look. It was terrible. Often I raged at him inwardly for inflicting this sense of helplessness on me. Other times I would go out walking the streets in a futile hope of seeing him. Sometimes there would be men who looked like him. The disappointment never stopped hurting.
The weeks passed – the longest of my life. John and Mavis shared them with me. John was out of work for a long time and we shared food as well as time and worries. John’s simplicity about my problems amused and touched me. He would say, ‘Every woman have babies. Not to have babies is sin against the Lord. He help you; He better than a husband.’ I smiled, but it helped somehow. When he was in his own room I heard furtive hammering and sawing – I pretended not to know what he was doing.
Mavis made a very practical contribution. In a way she regarded the baby as her fault, and to make amends she would appear about three times a week with some delicately-made matinée jacket or tiny nightgown, all exquisitely smocked and embroidered. I was embarrassed at first and implored her to stop, or at least to let me pay her, but she became offended at the mere idea and said she enjoyed doing it. In the end I persuaded her to let me buy the materials. Actually I was extremely grateful. My own laboured efforts produced an average output of two pairs of bootees a week.
Addy’s book of letters progressed. I sent off instalments to her each week, and she would promptly send me a postal order for the precise amount due, calculated by the page. It was surprising how much I earned in this way – not great sums of course, but enough to save on, as apart from food for John and myself I was spending almost nothing.
I knew I should be going to classes, doing relaxing exercises, watching my diet, planning for the future. Instead I stayed in the L-shaped room, regarded the descent to the bathroom as sufficient exercise, lived on oranges and eggs and coffee, and dreamed about Toby and the baby – dreams so divorced from reality that they should have made me wince.
Once a week I went out. I shopped, I mailed Addy’s envelope, I went to the doctor’s. Each week I noticed that my coat fitted me a little less comfortably, that Dr Maxwell’s questions about my plans and current activities grew a little more pointed, and that I was a little more tired when I got home. I also noticed Spring was coming. Minute green buds appeared among the soot-blackened old leaves that flanked our front-yard dustbins. On the creeper that spidered its way over the doctor’s house, the buds were pink, like small insolent tongues stuck out at the Winter. Often the air was as bland as warm milk, and aeroplanes rumbling across the blue skies reminded me of the summery sound of bees.
The Spring can be more painful than any other time of the year. Summer is lazy and indifferent; Autumn is demanding and invigorating; Winter is numb and self-contained. But Spring has none of the palliatives. Every emotional nerve is close to the surface; every sound and sight, every touch of the air, is a summons to feel, to open your doors, to let life possess you and do what it likes with you. To refuse to take part in the sharing and feeling and growing that the Spring demands with such gentle imperiousness is punished by a painful awareness that you’re betraying something – the sort of guilt a religious person would experience after committing blasphemy.
And I was refusing. I was escaping again. I had accepted the idea of the baby, but only, it seemed, in terms of fantasy, not reality. Without Toby to hold me down to earth, I might as well have been living in a pink cloud as in a small L-shaped room up f
ive decaying flights of stairs.
The book was nearly finished. I was beginning to wonder what I would do for a living after I had written ‘The End’ and sent off the last sheets to Surrey. Addy had said ‘We’ll see’ – perhaps she knew other authors who wanted scripts typed. I wrote her a letter with the penultimate week’s copy.
Darling Addy,
This is almost the lot. I’m prepared for lots of retyping – I expected some returns from you before now – but those shouldn’t take much longer than a week. I must tell you yet again how tremendously good I think it is.
Have you found an agent or anyone to act for you re: The Book? I believe it’s a necessity. There’s a woman I’ve heard of called Billie Lee; I hear she’s very good and ‘knows everyone’ in the publishing world.
When are you coming to see me? I don’t mean you should get worried and rush up before you feel like it, but it would be good to see you again. The fact is, though I’m perfectly well physically, mentally I feel like a jellyfish. I just seem to drift through the days with no real sense of purpose or definite plans for the future. Nothing seems very real, somehow … I wish it were possible to go and buy oneself a couple of yards of backbone, a pound or two of decisiveness and courage …
Sorry I sound so wet. I’ve no one grown-up to talk to except you. As I say, there’s nothing to worry about. But any pep-talks you can dish up will be well received.
Any news of Father?
Addy was always a bad correspondent. Aside from the weekly postal orders, she had written only one brief note since I came back to London. So I was very surprised to get a long letter back this time by return.
Her writing was a good deal less legible even than usual; the words sprawled haphazardly across the pages, sloping downwards so steeply that a large triangle at the right-hand corner of each page was blank.
Darling, thanks for letter, script, et al, many thanks, sorry haven’t before. Things have been tricky, I note what you say about an agent, how clever darling, I never think of things like that. Can you ring her, sorry to ask but you’d do it so much better and are on spot. Do it quickly and let me know. Don’t plug book too hard, we’re prejudiced, we don’t know if outsiders may hate it. Haven’t done corrections yet, do you think at a push the ms might do as it is? Your editing has improved it so much. About you. Wish I could come, impossible now. I know what’s wrong, you haven’t decided WHAT YOU WANT. (She’d underlined this many times.) Terribly important to draw up a balance-sheet every now and then, debits and credits. Decide what you want, what’s worth fighting for. Don’t drift, ever. Decide – then act. If you fail, well at least you tried. Don’t know what you want so can’t advise you how to get it, but don’t let life push you about. About William. He’s still at it. Again you must decide. Just one question: You say you were unhappy at home. Why didn’t you leave when you could afford to – long before you did? Perhaps you love him more than you think. You’re not a jellyfish darling, you’re like me, you need another person. I invented mine. Those of us who aren’t self-contained need other people as 2-way channels, to feed us with a sense of reality so we can pour ourselves out into life. Through them. My person was in my imagination. That’s the lonely way. I hope yours is more solid, darling. One other thing, don’t listen to people who tell you not to be ashamed. Without shame sometimes, we’d go on making the same mistakes over and over. On the other hand don’t overdo it. It must never touch your basic self-respect, without that you’re done for, and as far as your ‘shame’ is concerned, Claudius was right, ‘Sure it is no sin, or of the deadly seven it is the least.’ It can represent the best or the worst in us; I never found the best in a man and I couldn’t compromise but I’m not saying I haven’t regretted it sometimes. But the best must be worth any discipline, well, I must stop wuffling. Be kind to William and darling, tell the baby when it asks, don’t put it off, don’t put anything off. So glad you like the book, it’s made such a difference, I have real hopes for it now. Don’t worry too much about money. I love you. Addy.
The L-Shaped Room Page 27