Room Upstairs

by Monica Dickens

  She stopped talking and thought for a moment. She had no worst enemy. She had no enemies at all. She didn’t have an enemy in the world.

  And that’s a lot more than you can say for most people, she told the ceiling, for the pillow had slipped down under her neck and her head had fallen back, but she could not be bothered to raise it.

  Nights like this when she lay awake, watching the tree outside her window come imperceptibly into detail as the night faded, she always used to go into Emerson’s room and put a hex on the cars.

  It was a waste for Dorothy to be in there. She did not mind the cars enough to lose any sleep casting spells at them. Well, there was always the bathroom. With groans and gasps and cries of: ‘Oh - oh,’ which were purely trimming, for she was not in any pain, Sybil sat up and swung her legs carefully over the side of the bed, rubbing her scarred thigh perfunctorily, like a mechanic wiping a greasy hand on his overalls.

  Below her, she heard the back door open. She heard Jess say something, and then to her surprise, she heard Montgomery’s voice. Was someone ill! Jess? Dorothy? It was three in the morning by her luminous clock. It couldn’t be three in the afternoon, because it was dark outside, she reasoned shrewdly.

  ‘Be sure and call me tomorrow,’ Jess said. Montgomery answered something that Sybil could not hear. The car door slammed, the starter rattled a couple of times, and then he roared the engine, called out again to Jess and drove away.

  This interesting interlude made Sybil forget why she was sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs dangling over her slippers like a fireman ready to jump into his boots. Montgomery was gone, so there was no need for her to go downstairs, if it was her he had come to see. She swung her legs back again, pulled up the covers and curled up to sleep in the evocation of that far ago womb.

  *

  ‘Well! What shall we two girls do today?’

  Sybil was tired, with a vague recollection of having been awake for rather a long time in the night. But Dorothy was full of pep and energy, and the old house shrank from her assault with mop and duster, like a fragile patient at the approach of the Pride of the Nursing School.

  Anna Romiza still came on Tuesdays and Fridays to clean, but this did not quell Dorothy. On Mondays and Thursdays she had to racket round so that Anna should not label her a messy housekeeper, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays she had to racket around doing all the things that Anna had neglected. On Tuesdays and Fridays when Anna was there, Dorothy was pretentiously integrated, which was trying for Sybil, who had never thought about Anna as coloured before Dorothy drove it home.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about doing anything yet,’ answered Sybil, who was still thinking about whether her breakfast was going to digest, or stay for ever in her stomach like pebbles in a bag.

  She stared, put a hand to her mouth and belched discreetly, saying: ‘Pardon me,’ as Dorothy had taught her, although she had believed all her life that it was not wrong unless you called attention to it.

  ‘Those old gas pains again?’ asked Dorothy delightedly. ‘You know what we’ve got for that’

  She had the leaves of the willow tree that hung into the pond, bruised with pepper and steeped in wine. She had the decoction all ready prepared in a Coca-Cola bottle labelled Sybil: Gas.

  ‘I don’t want it.’ Sybil made a face. ‘It tastes bad.’

  ‘Natch. No medicine that was tasty ever did anyone any good.’ Dorothy put the glass of tainted wine in front of Sybil. ‘Drink it, dear.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’ Swimming out of memory, came a picture

  of herself sulking over milk, her mother standing over her in

  a fyry.

  ‘Come on, drink up!’ Dorothy said brightly, and Roger swung on a blind cord and chattered: ‘Drink up, Roger kiss Mother, Sybil Sybil Sybil.’ He liked the sibilance of her name. It mixed in well with the chirps and twitters that peppered his talk when he was in two minds whether he was a bird or a person.

  ‘It will make me feel worse.’

  ‘Drink it, I said.’ When Dorothy spoke like that, her eyes bulged as if they would pop right out of her head on to the floor. Her mouth was a scarlet bar.

  Sybil drank, belched again, and clapped her hand across her face, as the wine came back sour and nauseating into her mouth.

  ‘You bring that up, I’ll give you some more,’ said Dorothy lightly. ‘I’m going away off up the hill now to get some parsnip root so we can make up some more of my cough pills.’

  If she gave up cigarettes, she would not have the cough, but Dorothy Grue would smoke in her coffin, she threatened, and now that she had discovered the herbal joys, she cherished the cough as an excuse for pill-rolling.

  ‘Watch those beets while I’m gone. It’s your saucepan you know, if you let them burn the bottom out.’

  Sybil did not know whether to be glad or sorry that the willow and wine mixture had worked. It would have been nice to be able to tell Dorothy on her return from the seedhouse: I told you it wouldn’t do me any good; but on the whole it was nicer to be rid of the indigestion.

  Dorothy did not return anyway, not for quite a long time, and Sybil began to feel panic. Had she walked out? There were times, she admitted to herself, oh yes, there were times when she would not have been sorry to see her vanish into thin air, go up in a puff of her own tobacco smoke. No other way for her to go without someone’s feelings getting hurt.

  But only to think of her not being there brought a frightening emptiness. What would happen to my life? I cannot do without her, Sybil thought, trapped and sick with anxiety, like a woman with a brutal lover.

  If she had walked out … she often threatened it. ‘One of these days, I’m going to walk right out of this house and see how you get along without me.’ Sybil always laughed, but with the uneasy feeling that it was not really a joke.

  She had been angry about the medicine. She had walked out. What shall I do, left here all on my own with no one to know or care? I can telephone for help. But then if she comes back and it turns out she’s only been for a walk, what kind of a fool shall I look?

  Just in time, she remembered the beets, and trotted, limping with the effort-of haste, into the kitchen to snatch off the pan with a wildly beating heart. Saved by the bell! But Dorothy was right. It was her pan. If she wanted to burn it, she’d burn it. Burn the bottom out of every dam pan in the place and she couldn’t say boo.

  It was easy to be bold about Dorothy when she was not there. When she was, it was easier to stay in her good favour. Pleased that there was something she could do to help, Sybil drained off what little water was left in the beets, and squeezed them in the old wooden press that she had found in the cellar, getting a considerable amount of beetroot juice on her clothes as she worked.

  One of the things Dorothy had gleaned from the notebooks of Sybil’s father was that if you sniffed beetroot juice up your nose, it would restore a lost sense of smell and also cure bad breath, if you had it.

  Dorothy would not agree that she ever had bad breath, but she had lost much of her smelling power from years of chain smoking. So every now and again, she would soak wads of cotton in beet juice and stuff it up her flaring nostrils which were red to start with, but now like a vision of hell.

  The Congregational minister had come visiting once when Dorothy was giving herself the smell treatment. She had gone to the door like that, and when he saw her with two magenta pools in the middle of her face he cried out: ‘Has there been an accident?’ and clutched his heart, for he was almost as old as Sybil, and not as strong.

  When the juice was made, there was nothing for Sybil to do but worry, and when Dorothy eventually came back, with a small jar full of whitish powder, she said: ‘Wherever have you been? I’ve been quite worried.’

  ‘Thought I’d poisoned myself at last? No such luck, Sybilla.’ Dorothy was in a much better mood after her trip up the hill. ‘The storage jar up there was almost empty. It was warm as a greenhouse with the sun pouring in, so I stayed to pound u
p a whole lot more of the parsnip root. If we’re in for a rough winter, I’m going to need it.’ The fiction that her cough was bronchitis was always preserved.

  The pills were made by mixing the powdered root with the pulp of boiled bilberries which had been mashed and stored in a jar when the berries were ripe. Dorothy then added a large amount of honey, and enough commeal to bind the whole mess together in the scarred old wooden bowl which was part of the cult, like Priscilla.

  ‘Can I roll the pills?’ This was a great treat, allowed only to good girls. But Sybil was a good girl now, because she had drunk the sickening wine and it had cured the indigestion.

  She sat very happily at the table, rolling the paste into strips along the corrugations in the pill board, and breaking off neat little lumps which she revolved between finger and thumb until it was ‘a perfect pillule!’ Dorothy popped one into her mouth and rolled it round with bulging eyes of pleasure, as if it was a candy ball. Sybil knew they did not taste very good, because she was fed one every time she cleared her throat, but Dorothy pretended they were delicious, so that Sybil had no excuse for making a face.

  Roger coughed. Was it possible that he was clever enough to connect the cough with the pill? Dorothy believed he was.

  ‘Of course you shall, my pet.’ She wedged one of Sybil’s pills between the bars of his cage, and he took an indiscreet peck at it, and then fell to cleaning his beak frantically on the perch, as if he were sharpening a carving knife.

  ‘Roger all better!’ Dorothy told him. ‘We dont need that stupid old Doctor Jones, do we?’

  Doctor Jones. Montgomery. Sybil paused with a pill half rolled, still bullet shaped between thumb and finger. What did that remind her of?

  ‘Funny thing, Dot,’ she said. ‘I just remembered. You weren’t sick in the night, were you?’

  ‘Never sick nor sorry, that’s Dorothy Grue.’

  ‘How about Jess?’

  ‘She was all right when she went off this morning. What are you getting at? Did you hear something in the night?’

  ‘Montgomery—’ Dorothy turned quickly to look at her. Oh, nothing.’ She moved her fingers again to roll the pill.

  ‘Montgomery what?’ But Sybil was not going to say any more. Silly old Gramma she might be, but instinct was instinct and she still had it with the best, and her instinct told her now to keep her mouth shut.

  ‘He sent you a present, remember? Cheap looking thing, I thought, but some might like it.’

  ‘Yes, it was lovely. I’ve forgotten what it was. What was it?’ Dorothy had lost interest and turned away, but Sybil was still flustered.

  ‘A china cat. Fancy forgetting what Doctor Jones gave you, of all people! Though he might have had the courtesy to come in and say Happy Birthday dear Sybil. Leaving it on the doorstep, like a baby. I wonder when he came by.’

  ‘Oh, I know.’ It was not often that she knew something that Dorothy did not.

  Dorothy turned round again and was staring at her intently, her red mouth slightly open, her convex eyeballs glittering. ‘What do you mean? You’re hiding something. What are you getting at, lady?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’ Not when you look at me like that. I can’t tell you.

  ‘Tell me.’ Dorothy moved towards her and Sybil clutched the edge of the table, because she was afraid.

  She shook her head. ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ she said weakly.

  ‘Tell me, I said.’ Sybil could see herself in Dorothy’s eyes, two tiny old lashes in pink sweaters transfixed in the shining iris. ‘He was here last night,’ she said. ‘That’s all. I heard him talking to Jess.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘I don’t know. I heard Jess say: “Be sure and call me tomorrow”.’ ‘What time was this?’ ‘About three.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ - ‘

  ‘Oh—’ Sybil shrugged her shoulders, and then dumped thorn forward. She was suddenly very tired. ‘I forgot, I guess. It’s not our business anyway.’

  ‘No.’ Dorothy began to move away, still keeping her eyes on Sybil, though the eyes were not looking at her now, but backwards into her own head as she stepped backwards. ‘It’s like you say - none of our business.’

  Twelve

  When Jess found out at the end of February that she was pregnant, she was so happy that it seemed that all happiness in her life before had been a mere frivolity.

  She felt that all of a sudden she mattered. The world could not do without her. Laurie could not do without her. She had never mattered before. Driving on the Express-way which hurtled cars in and out of Boston three abreast like a chariot race, death if you hit, she had thought sometimes that she could be gone without trace. She would leave no mark at all. Her parents would grieve conventionally and go to church two or three times, but it would not affect the pattern of their existence. The wound in Laurie’s life would close over after a while. He would still become a brilliant lawyer. He would marry a second girl and not insult her with memories of the first. It would be as though Jess had never been.

  But now - now she was important. She was going to do something - was doing it already with every pulse beat she shared with the foetus - that would make her remembered for ever. As someone’s mother and grandmother and great grandmother, she was a vital link in the saga that ran back through and beyond the Mayflower. Posterity could not do without her. Laurie could not do without her.

  He was overjoyed. ‘You’d think no man had ever been a Daddy before,’ Dorothy said, but she said it benignly. Everyone was all of a sudden more benign, more affectionate. Sybil rallied out of the vague, uncertain lassitude that had been creeping over her, and became more sensible and alert, as if she had quickened with the quickening of the baby.

  Dorothy, who had beca growing more bossy as Sybil grew more senile, stopped bullying her, except in a joking, comradely way, which Sybil quite enjoyed. She liked the attention of Dorothy bustling her about, and checking up on her at all hours of the day. What’s she doing now? Lay off that salt shaker - with a heart your age! You wear that undershirt one more day, it will walk right out the door. She liked the freedom from all decision and responsibility which Dorothy’s dictatorship ensured.

  For a while, Laurie and Jess had been afraid that Dorothy was after Sybil’s money, but a few staged conversations to let her know shere was not much had made no difference. In their absorbed excitement over the baby, however, they forgot the slight nagging worry that Dorothy was getting power drunk.

  And Jess began to forget fear. The voices and the visions did not return. She could remember that she had been afraid, but she had forgotten what the fear felt like, and she was not afraid of its return. Her ghost had been laid. The last time she had experienced the horror of seeing herself was the night before she conceived her child. It had come to life when she and Laurie had come together again at the apartment, rushing hysterically home from work as if they had been parted for a year.

  The child had exorcized the ghost. Jess talked no more about the house being haunted, and she thought of it no more. There was nothing to remind her. The atmosphere had changed to greet the splendid changes within her.

  Montgomery was just as delighted as everybody else. Jess had always said that she would she rather than be his patient, and he said that was a good thing, since he already had twice as many maternity cases as he could handle.

  Then suddenly, it was all gone, the vessel shattered and the happiness run out and seeped away.

  It was at the end of a Sunday in March. A soft blue day that was a rehearsal for spring. Laurie and Mont played golf, and Jess walked round with them, picking out the clubs she thought they ought to use, and enjoying the exercise as dutifully as walking the baby after it was born.

  Sitting on the bench at a tee, waiting for Mont to find a wildly driven ball, Laurie said: ‘I never thought of you as beautiful before.’

  ‘I’not.’

  ‘You are now. Is it because we are so happy?’

  She n
odded, holding his hand down with hers on the bench. ‘You see me differently.’

  ‘I see you very clear,’ he said. ‘Oh God, we’re lucky.’

  When it was time for them to leave the yellow house, she could not find him. She thought he was outside with the car, so she put on her coat and said goodbye to Sybil and Dorothy, who was on whisky tonight, for some reason, and very cock-a-hoop.

  She kissed Mont in the kitchen and turned, laughing at something he said, and saw Laurie in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, hunched and glowering.

  ‘Where were you?’ she asked, going to him. He put out a hand and pulled her outside, pushed her roughly into the car and drove off without saying a word, his profile hard and almost unrecognizable.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ He did not answer. She had seen him angry before, but never like this.

  ‘Where wore you?’ the asked again. Something had happened. He had met somebody. What had happened to him?

  On the hill.’

  ‘Why?’ She put a hand on his arm.

  He shook it off. ‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk at home.’

  In spite of her dismay, Jess went to sleep. Caught in the predicament of his rage, she still could fall asleep, although it would be better to be killed awake, and he was driving like an idiot.

  Safely in Cambridge, by some miracle, they went up the stairs of the old brown brick building in silence. Laurie shut the front door behind him and pushed her into the room, where she stood clasping her hands in the middle of their beautiful shaggy orange rug.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘How about it?’

  She waited, and let him talk. After a minute, she asked: ‘Who told you this?’ quietly, because he had been shouting, and it had sapped all other sound.