The L-Shaped Room

by Lynne Reid Banks

  It was like a nightmare in which one gets lost in a zoo. I wanted to get out again, but that would have called forth more inane jeers. I put my head down and walked to the far corner of the café, where there was an empty table. I sat down and stared at its coffee-smudged red top. I wished I smoked, it would have given me something to do with my hands. I felt spotlit; there was a sort of horror about the faces I had seen as I came in – thin, meaningless, unreachably stupid. I felt the baby kick protestingly against the sudden tension within me, and it hurt for the first time.

  Someone came to stand by my table. I said, ‘Coffee please,’ without looking up, but the figure didn’t move. I felt an unthinking panic, as if those simian creatures were closing round me; it rose to my throat and I thought wildly, ‘It’s bad for the baby for me to feel so afraid,’ I stood up sharply, meaning to push through at any cost and get out. Face to face with me was Terry.

  He took off the pulled-down hat and his fair hair dropped on to his forehead, giving his sharply-angled face a look of ineffectual youngness. His eyes wavered, met mine, as if accidentally, and then swivelled off again. He looked like a child who expects a beating.

  I stared at him with unbelief. I had hardly thought of him for months. At one time I used to feed myself perpetually with fantasies of this meeting. Lately, I had always imagined meeting Toby. By now I was thinking, even in dreams, of Toby as the father of the baby. The truth of the matter swept in on me shatteringly now. This thin, intelligent face – that rather small mouth, those blue eyes, that nicely cleft chin and narrow, angular jaw – all these my baby might have. It was incredible. I couldn’t relate the seed of that body to the body within me, any more easily than with any other man I knew, or didn’t know. I felt no pull, no pang of affinity. I scarcely felt recognition. Only a remote mental astonishment.

  ‘Hallo, Terry,’ I said. The astonishment echoed in my voice.

  ‘Hallo,’ he muttered.

  I became aware that the Teddies were murmuring and guffawing.

  ‘What a place to meet!’ I said. ‘I ducked in here because I thought there was a stranger following me.’ It shocked me anew to realize how right, in one sense, I’d been.

  ‘I saw you asleep in that garden,’ he said. ‘I’ve been sitting there for an hour, looking at you.’

  Our eyes met. ‘Just please don’t ask if it’s yours,’ I said.

  His fair skin flushed darkly. ‘I wasn’t going to,’ he muttered.

  He reached out hesitantly and took my arm. ‘Let’s go somewhere civilized where we can talk,’ he said indistinctly. Stares and whispers followed us as we went out. I wondered if something intuitive deep in those untouched shaggy brains told them, as intelligent observation could not have done, that we were not an ordinary married couple.

  Out in the lamp-lit street we walked along aimlessly. Terry had dropped my arm uncertainly as soon as we were outside. I was aware as I hadn’t been before of the weight of the child, and my own waddling, head-back gait. I tried to think of something to say, but the situation was so unexpected I couldn’t.

  ‘Let’s get a taxi,’ said Terry.

  ‘That’d be lovely,’ I said politely.

  In the taxi I made myself relax. My legs and back ached painfully. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the padded movement and the pattern of passing lights on my eyelids.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I reluctantly forced my mind to function. ‘Yes, just tired.’

  He was sitting in the far corner of the taxi, looking at me with the same helpless, expectant expression.

  ‘Where are you living?’ he asked.

  ‘In a room in Fulham.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Quite all right.’

  ‘What’s the address?’

  I told him. I felt as if I were floating on a tide of events it was pointless for me even to try to control or fight. My back was still aching; I shifted about trying to ease it.

  Nothing more was said till we reached the house. Terry paid the taxi while I stood on the pavement. Then he turned, almost apprehensively, and looked up at the house.

  ‘It looks pretty shabby,’ he said.

  I laughed. ‘You should see it by daylight,’ I said.

  He hung back. ‘Couldn’t we go somewhere else?’

  I understood his guilty reluctance to see the details of the situation he had placed me in. ‘It’s not all that bad,’ I said, thinking with unexpected hardness, Let him see it. Why should I let him off? ‘Come on.’

  He followed me silently up the long flights of stairs. ‘Isn’t it very bad for you to climb all these stairs?’ he asked. He seemed unable to help rubbing his own nose in it. My hardness disappeared. I felt sorry for him. After all, what a shock it must have been for him to see me sitting in that depressing, grimy little garden, my hair lank with heat, my smock unmistakably bulging, probably asleep with my mouth open … He must have recognized me, started towards me perhaps, and suddenly – seen; stopped short; calculated with numb horror – and then, how much easier to run like hell than to stay! I stopped at the top of the fourth flight and tried to get my breath without panting.

  ‘It’s good exercise if you go slowly,’ I said casually.

  ‘God, not more!’ he exclaimed anxiously as we started to climb again.

  ‘Only one flight.’

  The L-shaped room welcomed me as usual, its flashing whiteness leaping outwards from the lamp as I switched it on, its patches of bright colour pleasing my eyes. James’s flowers were still not finished; they fanned gaily from one of the bakelite mugs, flinging exotic shadows. I moved a plastic bath-bowl filled with a jumble of baby-clothes and talc so that Terry could sit in the arm-chair.

  He sat, as if dazed, but jumped up again guiltily as I began to light the fire. ‘Here, I’ll do that –’ I handed the matches to him silently, watching his hands tremble over the business of striking them. He took longer over it than necessary, putting off the inevitable moment when we would have to talk. I felt sorrier and sorrier for him. I wished now I could have spared him. After all, what possible good would it do?

  ‘Would you like anything – coffee?’

  ‘No, heavens, no, please!’

  I sat on the bed resting my back. He sat again in the arm-chair. After a while he met my eyes.

  I found it easy to smile at him. ‘Don’t look so anguished, darling – it’s serious, but it’s not a Greek tragedy.’

  It seemed natural to call him darling. It was more a theatrical than an emotional term of endearment. But it seemed to stick a further barbed dart of guilt into him. His hang-dog expression was almost comic on his long, thin face. I hadn’t realized how well it lent itself to lugubriousness.

  ‘I can’t seem to get it into my head,’ he mumbled. ‘I sat there in that garden, trying to get it into my head,’ He licked his lips. ‘Why didn’t you get in touch with me?’

  I forbore to mention that he hadn’t left me his address. ‘Because it seemed such a cheek – presenting you with a bill like that for something you hadn’t even enjoyed.’

  There was a silence and then he said with an effort, ‘You didn’t enjoy it either, so why should you pay the bill all by yourself?’

  ‘There was no alternative for me.’

  ‘Wasn’t there?’

  ‘No, there wasn’t.’ I winced from my own dishonesty, remembering the night I had panicked and made that unkept appointment with Dr Graham. But there was no need to mention that now, I felt.

  ‘Did you never even think of telling me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You could have found me if you’d wanted to.’

  So he remembered about the address. ‘Yes, but I didn’t want to, Terry.’

  He stared at his knees. ‘Was I so – did I behave so badly?’

  ‘I understood how you felt.’

  ‘It was just that it was all so –’

  ‘I said I understood. I felt the same way.’

  ‘Everything was spoil
ed. It was so much my fault that I couldn’t face you, remembering how I’d felt before, and how I felt afterwards –’

  ‘Terry, do shut up about it,’ I said quite gently.

  We sat silently. At last he roused himself.

  ‘Jane, I can’t tell you what I felt when I saw you asleep there, and realized … You looked so tired and alone. What you must have been through all these months – I don’t want you to tell me about it, although I know I deserve to have to hear it all – I just can’t bear to think of it.’ I said nothing, and he said with difficulty, ‘Did your father –’

  ‘Terry, don’t do this to yourself. What on earth good will it do? It hasn’t been so bad. I haven’t been alone all the time. I met a boy – in this house – in fact, I made quite a lot of new friends. It’s been interesting and good for me in lots of ways.’

  He was staring at me. ‘God, how you’ve changed!’

  ‘How?’ I asked, interested.

  ‘Don’t you want to – to hurt me in some way – punish me for all you’ve gone through?’

  ‘No. Well, only a little. If you’d come back a few months ago – but I feel different now. More peaceful about it.’

  ‘Jane –’ he leaned forward. ‘Tell me how you feel now. Bitter? As if you were caught in a trap?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not a bit like that any more.’

  ‘How, then?’

  ‘I’m quite excited about it. I can’t wait to see what he’ll be like.’

  A look of gratitude and relief flattened out his face for a moment. His mouth relaxed open and he stared into my eyes.

  ‘You mean it,’ he said at last. ‘Thank God, you really mean it.’

  ‘Of course I mean it,’ I said lightly.

  Chapter 21

  AFTER he’d gone, I sat quietly on the bed. I could hear John’s record-player through the wall; he had on his favourite, the cracked old 78 version of St Louis Woman. I closed my eyes and let its harsh melancholy notes spin over me. After a while, I opened them again. The late evening light was gentle with the shabbiness of the room, giving it a look, almost of elegance – if you didn’t look at the stove, whose bared tap-teeth snarled unconcealably. I looked round with pride and affection. The pain in my back had gone; the relief was wonderful.

  The baby stirred. I had often thought I could detect his mood from the way he moved; now he seemed to me petulant, reproachful. I put my hand down and felt the blurred outline of his head.

  ‘What’s your trouble, my lad?’ I asked aloud. ‘Should I have taken the money he wanted to give us? Why not, you ask. A good question.’

  Well, why not? He hadn’t offered it out of a sense of duty. Or had he? I didn’t much care. What mattered was that I hadn’t wanted it, from him any more than from James. ‘It would have given him some claim on you,’ I said to the bump under my hand, ‘and such claims can’t be bought with money.’ But I knew that wasn’t the only reason. I looked at the stove, snarling like the part of me that had wanted Terry to see all this – the five long flights, the darkness, the smells, the landing taps; I had wanted to punish him. But that feeling had gone – so quickly. I drew back my lips and snapped my teeth happily at the stove. I felt pleased with myself. It would have been so easy to hate Terry, to take advantage of his vulnerable position; it would have been so easy to take the money, and to justify taking it. I wasn’t pleased because I’d resisted the temptation to take it. I was pleased because I hadn’t wanted it.

  Now, if it had been Toby …

  The happy feeling went. The light was fading and the Satchmo trumpet-notes seemed to stain the air like streams of ink. Desolation laid its hand on me. I wanted him with a pain like cold steel.

  Terry’s words came back. ‘If there’s anything I can do …’ It had been a plea. He needed to help, somehow. When you break something irreplaceable in someone else’s house you want to pay something. The hostess is cruel if she doesn’t let you. Well, paying was out of the question. But perhaps –

  I rested for half an hour, stifling a growing feeling of impatience. It was good relaxing practice. Then I got up and went down to the phone.

  He answered at once. His voice still sounded strained.

  ‘Terry, it’s Jane.’

  ‘Jane!’ His voice went light and high. He sounded very glad, not discomforted. ‘You rang! I’m so pleased – did you change your mind about –’

  ‘No, darling. But I thought of something you could do for me.’

  ‘Of course! Oh, bless you for thinking of something – I’ll do anything –’

  ‘It won’t be easy – you may not be able to do it at all.’

  ‘I want to try,’ he said eagerly.

  I couldn’t help being warmed. He had a kind of fundamental sweetness. I began to remember what I had loved about him.

  ‘You remember I mentioned a man I’d met who lived in the house here?’

  ‘No – I mean, you probably did, but –’

  ‘Well, his name’s Toby Coleman. Actually I think it may be Cohen.’

  ‘Jewish?’ Terry’s tone chilled perceptibly. I’d forgotten this about him.

  ‘Yes. He’s left here and I’ve no idea where to start looking for him, but I want to find him. He’s a writer. By this time he may well be trying to interest publishers in his first novel. Do you think you could ask round for me?’

  There was a silence. I thought he might say, ‘Hell, I’m not a detective,’ or ‘There must be about a hundred thousand writers trying to flog first books,’ or even ‘What do you want with some little Kyke?’ I could sense all those thoughts going through his mind while the silence dragged on.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll do my best. Just a tick while I write the name down.’

  A letter came from Billie Lee. ‘… Not at all what 1’d expected, and not the sort of thing one can be certain of selling. But personally I like it so much that I am prepared to push it. It’s written as if the author had never read a book in her life, but in some mysterious way it’s none the worse for that … I’ll let you know as soon as there’s any news, but it may be months, so be patient. I believe it will be a winner.’

  This seemed enough to start getting excited about and I rushed to phone Addy. I was childishly disappointed when I couldn’t get a reply. I felt almost irritated with her for not being there to be told. I tried several more times that day to phone her, but she was never in. Eventually, feeling rather cheated, I wrote to her, enclosing Miss Lee’s letter. She was a terrible correspondent and I hadn’t heard a word since our last phone call, but I was sure this would get a rise out of her. But days passed, and not even one of her scrawled postcards came.

  A week went by, and another. I knitted. I walked, I typed terrible plays for television. I had a little money, my body was healthy and responsive, my baby seemed to think he was in a gymnasium. I stayed fairly quiet; my mind was alert, but peaceful. I knew only now how the bitterness against Terry had been undermining me. It must have been mainly subconscious, but it was as if an abscess had been lanced; the poison had drained out, the strange internal pressure relieved.

  There were suddenly only seven weeks left, and I woke up to the fact that I had nowhere for the baby to live. It was Doris who brought it home to me. She came shuffling up one evening, breathing hard and crossly with a noise like snoring.

  ‘Are you there, dear?’

  I asked her in and offered her tea. She didn’t answer. She was staring round the room, her mouth ajar.

  ‘Gawd save us,’ she breathed at last.

  ‘I’d forgotten you hadn’t seen it,’ I said, waiting for an explosion of wrath.

  She groped for a chair and sat down heavily, her eyes never ceasing to dart hither and yon, sharp with disbelief.

  ‘Well!’ she got out. ‘Well, I never. I wouldn’t have known it!’

  I decided to brazen it out, though I didn’t really hope this would prevent a frightful row. I was only thankful that my-sister-made-that-rug was still in the p
lace of honour before the fire.

  ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’

  I expected an outburst of protest as soon as Doris had mustered sufficient words of withering scorn. To my utter amazement a slow smile spread over her large (and, since her marriage to Charlie, placid) features. ‘Takes a bit of gettin’ used to – all that white – fair dazzled me eyes at first. But – well, I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

  I hastily made the tea before this mood wore off.

  Doris looked round again, and now her eyes narrowed. One could almost see the £ signs ring up in them like a cash-register.

  ‘Nice-looking room, this,’ she said speculatively. ‘Best in the house, in some ways. Away from the traffic noises, nice and bright – tasteful. That’s what Mrs Williams always said. A nice, tasteful little room.’ I could see that she was already getting used to the transformation. Quite soon, as far as she was concerned, the room would always have looked like this. ‘You have to own it’s good value for thirty bob,’ she said, looking me straight in the eye.

  I tried not to laugh. ‘Oh, certainly,’ I agreed solemnly, not seeing the trap I was heading for.

  ‘Of course, I let Mrs W. have it for that; but then, she was living on her widow’s pension.’

  ‘I thought she had it for nothing.’

  ‘At first, that was,’ Doris said quickly. ‘In the end, she insisted. Such a lovely, bright room, she said to me. I must pay something. So I let her have it for thirty bob. Just, like, a token rent.’ I saw the trap yawning, and tried to dodge, but it was too late.

  ‘I haven’t even got a widow’s pension,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Ah, but you’re young, dear, now aren’t you?’ She smiled blandly. ‘You can work. You do, of course, I’ve heard you typing away up here, ever so industrious. She’s a worker, whatever else she’s not, I’ve said to Charlie. Besides …’ And now she allowed her eyes to drop. ‘Quite soon there’ll be two of you – won’t there?’ She smiled archly to show that her mind was broad. ‘Make no mistake, dear, I’m not saying anything. You’re welcome to stay, but really what I come up here to say was, well it doesn’t make it easier to find tenants, having a baby in the house, crying and that. So, I was wondering …’ She stopped to think. It was obvious the look of the room had made some quick reassessments necessary. ‘I was wondering if you’d like the bigger room downstairs, the empty one on the first floor. Fewer stairs for you to climb,’ she coaxed, ‘it’s only three-ten a week.’