Room Upstairs
MONICA DICKENS
THE ROOM UPSTAIRS
UNABRIDGED
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
One
The road from Boston to Cape Cod is long and straight and ruthless. Two black slashes cutting through the sandy country of pine and scrub oak which never grow to any size before a motorist throws out a cigarette on to the dry grass, and levels everything neatly down again.
In winter, the cars carry Boston businessmen in hats worn straight and true, and women with plastic statues of the Sacred Heart suctioned to the dashboard. In summer, the cars are full of families, and trail boats and little houses behind them.
When the road was made, for the locust families to redouble their assault on Cape Cod, hills were levelled, hollows filled, the landscape brought to order. The bare scrub land is empty since everyone has gone top-heavily to the coast, like passengers crowding to the ship’s rail.
Because there is nothing to see, nobody looks, and there are habitual travellers on this road who have never noticed the yellow wooden house marooned there in the grass below the embankment.
In the lush months, its ancient trees screen it mercifully from the summer cars that go by, zip, zip, zip, fifty a minute. It is only in the autumn, when the traffic thins that the house begins to appear. The oaks reveal one gable. Next week, another. A window heliographing the sun. The sentrybox side porch, as the copper beech begins to lose its claret leaves.
By December, the old house stands nakedly, the broad meadow carpeting the hill behind, furnished with great trees, dark with winter firs. Anachronistic stretch of rolling parkland in a township where people with an acre’s garden call it an estate.
The traveller who sees both the house and the high red barn across the road from it realizes with a stab of pity that they belong together. On the other side of the highway, the same rolling pasture, the soft track with grass between the ruts, the splendid trees.
In the moment before he is under the bridge and gone, he thinks: Bad luck on them, and wisps of phrase like rape of the countryside and the automobile as Moloch go with him up the road, and fall behind.
If he comes back next year and remembers to look again for the yellow house, he will think he was mistaken. What was it he saw? Was it somewhere else? But the red barn is there across the road, and the green slopes of meadow, and the trees.
The house will be gone. Taken away clapboard by clapboard, pane by pane, the banisters done up in bundles, to be set up two hundred miles away, outraged in an alien state.
Why not? None of the family want to live in it any more. Even Laurie. Too much has happened. The headlong cars have the landscape to themselves. The road, in the end, has won.
*
Sybil’s bedroom was at the back of the house. On summer weekends when the processions in her head would not let her sleep, she lay on the high bed with her head tied up in a souvenir dish-towel from London and listened to the cars going through her cow pasture, and wondered if she would ever get used to them, as Theo pretended he did.
Sometimes, when it seemed that all Detroit streamed past beyond the trees, she would swing her feet down on to the rug her mother braided in the bad winter of 1910, and go with her old lady’s heel-toe shuffle, tapping her fingers along the rail of the staircase well - although she could walk anywhere in the house blindfold - in among the sighing shadows of the front room.
Down into the valley of the wide floorboards and up the other side. She knelt to lean on the window-sill and tried to cry, but there are no wet tears at eighty, no beads of sweat.
Only phlegm and urine, both a little out of hand.
Behind her on the bed, flatly quilted with the sunburst patchwork done by Aunt Somebody (the legend was dead at last), Emerson breathed softly and dreamed of his wedding night.
‘It wasn’t my fault.’ Her dialogues with herself, which at seventy were anxieties and grievances, now often took the shape of justification of things of which no one had ever accused her. ‘It wasn’t my fault, Papa.’
Elbows on the wide sill, chin on hands, she stared like a witch at the endless indifferent cars, and swore at them with words nobody knew she knew.
*
On the bridge over the road, Laurie stopped the car and they got out to look over the parapet, the metal hot under her bare arms.
‘There it is.’
‘Is that it?’ Jess leaned on the rail, with the cars bolting along below her like coloured bulbs, and suddenly the whole thing was disaster. Anticlimax. Coming here to marry him. The adventure dwindled and shrank.
‘It’s so near the road.’
‘I told you. They raped us, simply. I told you.’
‘How can you—’
‘We can’t. My grandfather did. He got used to it, after he won his fight over the compensation. She - never. When they were making the road she used to stand and stare at them. When they graded the banks for seeding, she went out at night and trampled all over them. It was silly. They didn’t care. The day they opened this bit of the road for cars, she put on the black she wore at her mother’s funeral, dusty and rumpled. I was a kid then. It was summer, and I was here. She went and stood by the fence down there and stared, and people waved to her.’
‘I wish - I wish we had been married in England.’
Behind her, the saga of Gran and the aunts. Dad and his childhood in Watford. The history of her mother’s veins. Sagas she had been so glad to run from, before they could catch her by the heel and drag her into the same half life of shopping bags and plastic shelf paper.
Ahead of her now, the saga of these others. So different. Too assured. The Mayflower at the back of it all, reverently, as if it were as long ago as the Crusades.
‘Why didn’t she move?’
‘How could she? It’s her home. Mine too, most of my life. Ours maybe, one day.’
He turned her to him. His eyes were a surprising clear blue, Nordic eyes, although his hair was very dark.
I don’t want to. Jess turned her head away and moved her lips on the words without saying them, a compromise between hurting him and cheating with secret thoughts.
The wooden home was beautiful. Pale yellow, with dark shutters, small casements under the steep gables, a huge brick chimney clinging to the angle of one wing.
Settled low into the trees, at its back the quiet painting of meadow and cows, across its face the bright slashing cars, like knives thrown at a circus.
*
All day, people had been arriving. It was like the old days, with children coming back from school and college. Their friends in the summer. Weekends with the children married and bringing their children, and people coming in for Sunday lunch, in the days when the tennis court cage was still up, before Theo’s ramblers dragged it down into the tangled grass.
‘The good old days,’ Sybil said brightly to Anna Romiza, who did not see it that way. Anna, who had spent threequarters of a lifetime in the lesser hotels of Massachusetts, saw people in terms of egg on forks and sheets to whip off no sooner than on, and nasty stains on the carpet She had been shifting the dust around at Camden House since she came to live with her son four years ago, and was more disenchanted than feudal.
Thelma had come from Philadelphia. Without her second husband, since no one liked him. Her mother could not always remember his name. No one knew whether Laurie’s father would be there tomorrow. No one was even sure where he was.
Sybil’s brother Ted had been here for a week, with his linen hat and his lunatic goggling grin, his head wobbling like a spring-necked doll set going by a child’s finger. He was in his old room over the kitchen, among the sewing machines and padded dummies, and every time he tottered down the back stairs, Sybil thought the old fool would fall and break a hip, and she would be stuck with him for months.
Poor Mary would be here tonight. ‘Who will meet the train?’
‘Time that woman learned to drive,’ John said.
‘At forty-six?’ His daughter snorted. ‘I’ll go.’
‘You don’t have a licence.’ ‘Who cares?’
This year, it was her stock answer. Last year, it had been: So sue me.
The house was filling up with family. It seemed odd to Sybil that she wanted them when they were not there, but felt little for them when they came: always more of a nuisance than she remembered, older, plainer, more censorious. Sometimes they talked about her as if she were not there. Sybil did not mind. It gave her the opportunity to hear what they said about her. She’s getting a bit… someone said. Well, let them think so.
Laurie was the one. Laurie was the only one she really wanted.
*
The thought of him being married tomorrow shot through Sybil like hot needles. I hate her. She went to the poxy mirror behind the door of the broom closet to see her pouchy old face drawn down into the saucer of her lower lip. With her gaunt nose and bristly grey and ginger eyebrows, she could look very ugly when she tried. She stuck out her tongue, inspected the bluish knot of vein on one side, put it back, and champed on the resurrected taste of the lobster John and Anthea had brought for lunch.
She did not hear the car. Laurie flung open the back door, calling out: ‘Here she is! Where are you? Here she is!’
I hate her. Sybil nodded at her reflection calmly, her lips composed, and turned with her arms wide in welcome.
Laurie was twenty-six, but looked less in shorts, bare legs and sneakers worn through at the toes, his long London haircut flung about by the drive in the open car. He held by the hand a girl of his own height with square shoulders and straight thin legs, a nervous smile, and eyes under the sandcoloured forelock at once honest and surprised, as if surprised at her own honesty.
Lost. Uncertain. Not at all what I thought.
‘She’s just what I thought she’d be! Welcome to the family, my dear.’
She moved towards them, deliberately tottering a little in a bid for benevolence, abandoning without ever having donned it the role she had planned. She would not be the grandmatriarch, formidable, austere. She would be the frail old lady who could depend on this nice English girl for love and attention, as she depended on Laurie.
*
‘Emerson’s room!’ The grandmother opened the dooron a low, cool room with musty print wallpaper and a few bits of venerable furniture leaning inwards with the tilt of the floor. The bed was a four-poster, with a frame but no canopy, and a beautiful patchwork quilt, sprouting threads.
‘He was my father’s friend, Jess. He stayed here often, you know.’
She crossed the room and stood by the window, shaking her fist at the cars. She made a fist in an odd way, with the thumb straight up and the fingers flat on the palm, shreds of magenta polish on the long spatulate nails.
Then she leaned to look through the low casement; and pressed her face for a full minute against the screen. She turned round, the end of her nose chequered with the pattern of the screen wire, and went on unconcernedly: ‘He slept here the night before his marriage. In this room. So did I. When John was going to be married, I put him. in here. Thelma too. Well, it was her room then anyway. Poor Mary will never marry now. I don’t know whether Emerson was disappointed.’
She said this so chattily that Jess felt foolish, having to ask: ‘The room isn’t - isn’t haunted, or anything?’
‘No, my dear. But it’s his room, after all. I told you that. Naturally you can sometimes hear him breathing.’
*
Of course, they blamed her for all the fuss in the night, when the girl woke screaming, and had to be given a sleeping draught, and looked a wreck on her wedding day.
‘Making up tales like that, Mother,’ Thelma said. ‘You are naughty.’
To be called naughty, like a child. Just because no one had heard the breathing, that didn’t make it any less true. Did Nigeria not exist because none of them had ever seen it? Oh yes, Robert did, that time he brought home a crocodile skin, and Marma had the shoes and purse made.
Two
Two days after Laurie and Jess were married, Sybil fell down the back stairs and broke her thigh.
She fell over a small pile of laundry that she had left on the second step with a warning memo to herself that it might trip Ted.
But Ted was in bed and asleep when it happened. She had just looked in on him, as she always did, to satisfy herself that he was still alive. He looked dead enough, with his jaw dropped and his half-open eyes rolled back into Ms skull, but the blanket was moving up and down, and he was snoring softly.
On the table, a child’s nightlight, made like a little train, shone a blue Christmas bulb through the driver’s cab, so that Ted could find his cookie jar, or his slippers, or his glass of water, or any of the things that punctuated his sleeping and waking through the night.
At the other end of the room, which had become the sewing nook after Ted left home, a pale figure kept guard. He had put his seersucker jacket and linen hat on one of the chesty Edwardian dummies.
‘Good night, dear,’ Sybil said, either to her brother or the dummy, whose shape reminded her of her mother. It had been Marma. It had worn the rose brocade when they were going to the Inaugural Ball, and Miss Hatch was shut in there with it for days with her mouth crimped round the pins.
Sybil shut the door softly, turned to go down and make herself a hot malted, fell over the laundry, and woke hours later with no memory of what had happened.
Why am I lying on the floor? Get up, old woman, and get to bed. The first flexing of her muscles to rise told her to stay where she was. I’ve broken my leg. Well, it has happened at last. As soon as you turn seventy, everyone starts to warn you about ice patches and wet doorsteps and scatter rugs. When you’re eighty, they would put you in a chair, if they could, and wheel you everywhere. Is this the end then? End of freedom and doing what I like? Perhaps I shall she, lying here like a fallen tree; then they’ll be sorry.
But Laurie will weep for me. Not that girl. She thinks I am a witch. She’ll bury me and move into this house, you’ll see, and take down all my pictures.
What room is this? Unfamiliar from this angle. Because she could not raise her head without awakening pain somewhere, she turned it from side to side and saw, in the sallow pause before daybreak, table legs, a thicket of chairs, a button. The rubber spool with a bell in it she had bought for the cats at Christmas. The white underside of a cat bowl, crusted with old fish. A cat itself, crouched with its front paws folded, watching her without emotion.
The kitchen then. Beyond the cat, the dearly beloved claws of the old black iron stove, which wore the bright curlicued label Priscilla welded on to its wide breast, like a horse on a merry-go-round.
Squinting up, she saw, by the luminous clock at the back of the white electric stove that had ousted Priscilla, that it was four o’clock. She must have been out nearly five hours. No wonder her head hurt worse than her leg. Naked under the rucked up nightgown and robe, it lay alongside the other, identical with ridge of bone and flabby calf spread on the floor. But the left foot was turned out like a broken doll.
Her head fell back. ‘Ted!’ she called, as loudly as she could with her throat stretched. ‘Ted!’ But you could fire a gun
in his room and the old pantaloon would never hear. Her eyelids dropped, and she slept again, with a dream of her childhood, and woke still in the dream, walking beside her father through the wet meadow grass, to milk a cow.
Her summer cottons are loose, because she has too much figure for eleven, but the wide apron sash shapes her waist, and feels comfortable and full of purpose. Marma doesn’t like her to milk the cows. She says she would put bloomers on them if she had her way. Jack, or someone like that, said: ‘Why not the bull?’ and she made out she didn’t hear. She won’t look at the bull. She hardly ever comes up to the barn anyway, and it’s months since she went up the hill to the nursery, or even to the pond. She tells Papa he is out of his mind to keep on at the outdoor work when there are men to do it.
By grace divine, O Nature, we are thine. That is one of the things he says.
A step from sun into twilight. The barn is sweet with hay and dung and cow’s breath. Of humblest friends, bright creature, scorn not one.
Flat on her back on the black and white squares of the kitchen floor, Sybil lay quietly, tag lines of Wordsworth reeling idly through her head, and the minor naturist poets with whom her father seasoned her childhood.
Now with violets strewn upon her, Mildred lies in peaceful sleeping. All unbound her something tresses and her throbbing heart at rest. And the something rays of moonlight, through the open casement creeping, show the ring upon her finger, and her hands crossed on her breast.
If it was Monday, Anna would come. Nothing to worry about, except to get the robe pulled down before Anna walked in the back door. She would come through the little hallway where the old hats and coats mouldered, looking cross because it was Monday. Then she would scream, and clap a black hand over her mauve lipstick. Anything out of place made her scream, even a garbage bag rifled by cats, so the sight of Sybil stretched out on the floor should make her really yell. And Ted would wake at last, and feel badly for having slept.
But Anna could not walk in, because the door was bolted. She would think Sybil had gone visiting, and go away.