‘I’ll take him out and hang him in a tree. He can imagine he’s free and wild.’
‘Why don’t you let him go?’ Anna asked.
‘He’d get killed by the other birds.’ Everybody knew that. Anna was a good friend, but she was very silly. You couldn’t have a conversation with her. It passed through Sybil’s mind and out the other side that she might tell Jess that she could manage on her own while she was out being a Pilgrim maid.
As Sybil was going out of the door, lopsided with the birdcage, Anna said: ‘I thought you came in for the spray.’
‘Thank you,’ Sybil concealed surprise with dignity.
While she was directing spray from the can at the beetles, aiming carefully, firing straight into the ruined heart of the rose where the obscene shellbacks clung, Dorothy said calmly: ‘Sybil.’
‘What have I done?’ She wheeled round. Why shouldn’t she use the can? But Dorothy wasn’t there. She was hiding, playing tricks again. In the bushes. Behind a tree. Round the corner of the house. As soon as Sybil’s back was turned, she would spring out and say Groo. Where are you, Dot? I know where you are.
‘Sybil Sybil Sybil.’
Trembling, gasping, her heart knocking a tattoo, Sybil leaned against the tree and shook her fist weakly at the bird, whistling and chattering a whole string of old tag phrases, arching his wing muscles and agitating his plumage so that the cage swung on the low branch.
*
‘He’s talking again.’ When Jess came home, she told her about it at once.
Jess stood under the cage and chirped to the bird and called him pretty names. He listened with his head tilted and his eye unblinking. He would not answer, but as soon as Sybil and Jess and Anna began to talk together, he started off with catch phrases, unreeling the inane old dialogue that he had picked up from Dorothy.
‘I don’t know that I can live with it,’ Laurie said when he heard it. ‘It’s too unnervingly like her.’
‘Perhaps she’s pushed poor Henry out.’ Jess tried to make a scared face, but she giggled. ‘Perhaps her soul has come back into that bird.’
She was going to giggle again, but Sybil said: ‘Yes. Yes, that’s right. It has.’ Why could they not see it? It was all so clear. Clear and simple and, as she saw now, inevitable.
They tried to jolly her out of it. Well, they could think what they liked, but she knew now. It was obvious. This was the way it had to be. In the following days, she became increasingly obsessed with the idea that Dorothy’s spirit was in the bird. It was in her mind all day. She could not talk about it to the others, so she hardly spoke, for there was nothing else that she could talk about.
She grew confused again. Many times, she could not tell who was who. It was like those strange dream-like days with Dorothy on Emerson’s bed, when she was not sure which was Dorothy and which was the bird.
Had that been a dream? No one ever talked about it. Emerson’s door was locked, so she could not go in to see.
‘Why has she locked herself in?’ she asked Jess.
‘Hush, Gramma dear.’ The child patted her, as if she were the grandmother and Sybil the child. ‘We took away the key.’
Were they all in league against her? Was that it? If they knew that Dorothy was in there, were they keeping Sybil out so that they could have her for themselves?
Dot was her friend. ‘The best pal you ever had, Sybil Camden Prince,’ she said, wagging her thick black head until the earrings swung like prayer bells. ‘It was a lucky day for both of us when the road brought me to you.’
Dorothy was her friend, but they kept her locked away. The Dorothy bird was there, and Sybil took to spending most of her time in the kitchen, sitting at the table with her forearms slack and idle and her fingers fiddling with nothing, speaking her thoughts aloud for the bird to hear, and waiting for ah answer.
‘It gives me the creeps,’ she heard Anna say to someone, ‘to see her sit there and converse with herself.’ And Montgomery - that was who she said it to - came over and sat down opposite her at the table and held her hands to keep the fingers still, and made distracting conversation, when all she wanted to do was listen for the bird.
Sometimes it was silent for hours on end. Sometimes it would chatter non-stop. You never knew, so you had to stick around. That was like Dot. Always keep ‘em guessing. Good old Dot. Sybil did not know what she would have done without her in these muddled days. It was absurd of them to pretend not to believe she had come back. They were not as stupid as that. They did not want her to have Dorothy. But Dorothy was all she had, if everyone else was going to call her a liar.
‘Hullo Sybil.’
When the bird said that, she would answer cheerfully: ‘Hullo, Dot.’
Jess would screw up her face and say: ‘Gramma, please? but it was Dorothy’s voice, after all, so why be rude?
If the minister came in here today (but they were keeping him away too), and said: ‘Good morning, Mrs Prince’ in his own voice, what would they say if she answered: ‘Good morning, Maggie Riley’? They’d have her shackled to the walls in no time.
When Sybil talked about the Dorothy bird, Jess looked scared, and Anna cried: ‘Jesus!’ and glued her hand to her mouth. But there was nothing to be scared of. There was no fear any more.
What she could not make anybody understand - and she had not tried for fear of spoiling it - was that Dot had come back to her in peace. As a friend. As a protector. That was why she had come back, for Sybil was weak and helpless and did not know the score.
There was one day when Jess, who was usually so gentle, burst out to her: ‘Don’t keep on with this! You hated her! We shall rot in hell for letting her stay with you.’
‘Get a hold on yourself, child,’ Sybil said, very calmly, leaning on her stick, her foot tapping, mistress of the affair. ‘You’ll make yourself ill.’
She could not understand, the flushed, tousled English girl, carrying her baby so awkwardly, for that art had gone out, along with needlepoint. Could not or would not understand.
Dorothy had come back as a friend. A protector. A lover.
*
If she had not promised Sybil, and herself, that she would stay here at least until her baby was born, Jess might have told Laurie that she could not go on with it.
But she had promised him too, and after their first appalled discussion of Sybil’s hallucination, he had not wanted to talk about it again. It was trivia to him, women’s chat to bore a man as soon as he got home. He shrugged it off, not irritably, but too lightly. The grandmother’s harmless fancy. He humoured her, and said: ‘Oh sure, sure,’ without listening.
If Jess spoke of the bird, he humoured her too, patted her and gave her quick, sexless kisses, and said that everything would be all right when she had the baby to keep her busy.
Sybil was cute enough not to overdo the bird when Laurie was there, but the rest of the time, she was gruesomely obsessed.
As well as finding his voice again, Roger had found his spirit of adventure. He had refused to leave the cage after Jess and Laurie captured him upstairs, but now he came out whenever Sybil opened the door. She would climb on to the chrome and plastic stool, teetering and gasping, and bring him out on her finger.
‘Jess! Jess! Help me down!’
‘You shouldn’t get up there.’ Jess held out her hand and took the old woman’s weight as she half fell, clumsily, off the stool.
‘Don’t be sharp with me.’ Sybil turned up her eyes in a sickening, doggy way.
‘I only said you shouldn’t climb up there,’ Jess repeated in the controlled nursing home shout she despised, but could not avoid sometimes, if she were not to scream.
‘She asked me to,’ Sybil said smugly.
Roger had never stayed with Sybil for long when Dorothy was alive, but now he would perch on her shoulder for hours, nibbling in her hair like a woodpecker and whispering in her ear. Sybil would sit there with a silly, senile smile across her face and her teeth out, for she was forgetting the es
sentials, now that the bird ruled her life.
She even tried to betray the cats, for the black panther with she whiskers like piano wires had never forgotten his taste of Roger’s tail feathers. He sat all day under the cage, slotting his eyes, his muscular tail lashing and curling with a life of its own. When Sybil sat at the table with the bird on her shoulder, the cat would appear in the opposite chair, bolt upright, like a husband waiting for a meal.
‘I’m scared of him,’ Sybil said. ‘Look how he stares.’
‘It’s not you he’s got in mind.’ Jess smiled and caressed the cat, for she often wished that he would spring, and end it.
‘He’ll have to go,’ Sybil said, in an odd flat voice, her eyes not focusing.
‘Over my dead body.’ But the bird was churring and whispering in Sybil’s ear, and she was not listening.
It was very hot. Jess was beginning to have pains in her legs, and she spent more time sitting on a bench at the Plantation, hoping she would not be seen and told to circulate. The crowds and the heat and the baby grew, and she grew more tired, but she could not give it up, for her afternoons away from the house were the only sane part of the day.
She longed to get away, and dreaded coming back. When Anna left, there were at least two hours before Laurie came home. Sometimes she thought about killing the bird. Or taking him in her hand and throwing him out upon the air. What if he would not fly away? What if he came back, pecking at the window screens, tapping round the casement of the door? And she knew that she could not kill him and could not throw him away, because it would mean that she was deranged too, that she believed what Sybil believed.
There were forty-three of them, I counted. The day I was there there was only thirty-nine.
Jess was on the stairs when the voices came to her again. She stopped halfway down, one foot below the other, the weight in front of her balanced on her bent knee, and listened to them.
They were selling them cheap. I hate to hurry you, but we have to leave in five minutes.
There were two of them, but in her own voice, and when one of them said: There’s no excuse, the words seemed to pass in front of her eyes not seen, yet perceived with another sense than hearing, like images on the inside of closed lids, although her eyes were open.
The voices did not come again, but she kept the radio on downstairs, and turned on the transistor in her room, loud enough to keep them away.
Two nights later, she asked Laurie: ‘Do you believe it?’
‘What?’ They were lying on their backs, the moonlight on his face, her body a sheeted mound.
‘What Sybil believes - about the bird.’
‘Don’t start that now. Get your sleep.’
‘You shouldn’t let her go on…’
‘If it gives her pleasure. Why do you get so upset over the poor old lady? It isn’t good for her, or you.’
‘I can’t stand it. I can’t—’ She almost said: I can’t stay here, but caught her breath in a dry sob and said: ‘I can’t stand the bird any longer.’
He had closed his eyes, a marble face under the moon. He did not answer, but she saw his lips tighten.
She raised herself on her elbow. ‘I want to get rid of it,’ she whispered.
He opened his eyes and looked at her for an agonizing moment as if she were nothing, nobody to him, before he smiled, and reached out a hand, and murmured: ‘Come on now. If you’re going to be like this every time you’re pregnant, we’d better not have any more kids.’
*
In the misery that stayed with her all the next day, Jess walked in the garden after dinner, not able to go to bed, not able to sit in the room where Laurie was reading. Through the dusk, a light warm rain fell briefly, not wetting the grass or cooling the air, just passing over the garden like the shadow of a plane.
The crickets and the obsessive summer cars competed for her ears. She went through the gate in the fence, and as she walked up through the dry grass of the meadow, someone walked with her, half a step behind. There was no noise or movement of the grass, but her nerve ends were aware.
She was wearing a light pink dress, and in the corner of her eyes, she saw the pale glimmer in the twilight which was almost gone. She quickened her pace, but you can’t outrun your shadow. At the bank where the meadow rose more steeply to meet the trees, she turned with a sigh and went to meet it. She walked right through its solemn face and insubstantial dress and fell forward into the dry rank grass that the cows had left.
She tried to scream, but it was the paralysed screaming of a dream, jerked out of the sleeper no louder than a moan. She lay there for a long time, with grass in her open mouth like a mad woman. Then she knelt and watched the lights of the house, and at. last she got up and began to go slowly back, keeping one hand in front of her to push away the dark.
She was going to Laurie, but when she reached the house, she went upstairs and got into the bed and fell heavily asleep as if she had been driven to exhaustion, or beaten.
*
Some time later, she tackled Sybil.
‘I have to ask you something, Gramma.’
‘Ask away, my dear.’
‘Come into the other room.’
‘Why?’
She was not going to say: So Roger can’t hear us: She was not going to be caught that way, playing Sybil’s game.
Sybil followed her obeshently, and Jess shut the door and faced her.
‘Tell me something honestly. Do you think this house is haunted?’
‘Well, my dear.’ Sybil began to mumble her bruised lips in and out, tasting the words she might say. ‘All houses are haunted, don’t you know, by the folk who have lived in them.’
‘You told me the first day I ever came here, you told me that there was a ghost of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and that you had heard him breathing. Remember telling me that?’
The old lady nodded, her eyes innocent, rinsed of colour by the years. ‘I could have done that. You slept in Emerson’s room, didn’t you?’ She brightened to a clearer memory. ‘You were going to be married. He slept in there, you know, the night before his wedding to that Plymouth girl.’
‘You told me. And then you told me that sometimes when you were in that room, you could hear him breathing on the bed.’
‘Did I scare you?’
‘Of course. I woke screaming in the night, don’t you remember? And Laurie thought it was because I didn’t want to be married. I tried to forget about it. Now I want to remember. Tell me more about that room. Tell me everything that ever happened. What you saw, what you heard.’
Sybil shook her head. ‘Nothing, really.’
‘But you told me—’
‘Oh my dear,’ Sybil looked down and smoothed her dress over her lap, ‘an old woman’s fancies. My Aunt Lilian Fugler saw a fairy once. I’ll bet you never met anyone under seventy-five who saw a fairy.’
‘You mean you made it up?’
Sybil nodded, still looking down and smoothing the cotton print over her knee, which trembled slightly.
‘Why did you?’
‘Just foolishness, I guess. I can’t remember now. I used to imagine I heard him, to keep me company in there, nights when I watched the cars and couldn’t sleep. It got to seem real.’
‘But it was real! I heard him, Gramma. I swear to you I did. You told me the story and I was afraid. I woke in the middle of the night, and there was someone lying beside me on the bed. I heard the breathing. You must have heard it too.’
Sybil looked confused. ‘I can’t remember.’ Her fingers began to fiddle and pick at her dress, like dying hands plucking the sheets. ‘I can’t remember ever hearing a thing.’
‘But I did.’
Sybil shrugged, collecting herself. ‘That’s your affair,’ she said, and reached for her cane on the back of the chair.
‘Don’t go for a minute.’ Jess took the cane and put it behind her back, standing close to the chair and looking down at Sybil. ‘I want to ask you something else.’
&n
bsp; ‘It’s not my day for being asked questions,’ Sybil grumbled. ‘I can’t remember things today.’
‘Yes you can. You can remember once when I was in your room at bedtime, and I asked you if this house was haunted.’
‘What did I say?’ Sybil asked with interest, waiting for the answer with her mouth open.
‘You didn’t deny it. You were going to tell me something, and then Dorothy came in and interrupted and I thought perhaps you were afraid to say anything in front of her.’
‘Scared of Dot?’ Sybil glanced towards the kitchen and smiled. ‘You’re getting fanciful, Miss Jess. It usually happens in the earlier months.’
‘Think back to being in bed. It was your birthday. I gave you that dressing gown with the rosebuds, the one you spilled grape soda on. Can’t you remember what you were going to say?’
‘About what?’ Sybil was losing course, sidetracked by grape soda.
‘About the house being haunted.’
‘Oh that.’
‘You told me that you had seen a ghost.’
‘Did I?’ Sybil spread her hands and said easily: ‘Don’t take too much notice of that, my dear. Old people see ghosts all the time, you know. Those that have gone are still with us in memory. Though lost to sight, to memory dear thou ever wilt remain. You see, I don’t forget things. My Papa used to read poetry to me by the hour, you know. He had his favourites; well, we all do. I have mine …’ She began to ramble, her eyes in the past, her mouth slack.
‘You said you had seen a ghost,’ Jess repeated, holding herself tense, gripping the handle of the cane in her effort to will the old lady into sense. ‘Think back. Think. Did you - did you even see a ghost of me?’
‘How could I, honey?’ Sybil turned and smiled up at her. ‘You’re not dead.’
‘I mean, before you knew me. Before I ever came here.’
‘Oh sure.’
So it was true. Jess stared at her, but Sybil was still smiling fondly. ‘All grandmas do, I guess. I used to dream of the girl my Laurie would marry. I always hoped it would be someone like you. A nice girl, pretty and kind. You’ve been kind to me, Jess. You’re a good girl.’
Room Upstairs Page 18