Room Upstairs Read online

  ‘Ted! Ted - help me!’ All my life, I’ve looked out for him. Lied for him to Marma. Carried notes to that girl down by the fish pier, and now look.

  Oh Lord, help me - why do I always call on you last?

  The door at the top of the stairs creaked open, and slippers shuffled out.

  The turn of the stairway hid her from the upper hall, but she called with all her strength, and beat on the floor with her hands. She raised such a racket that the cat got up and walked away, but Ted went on towards the bathroom and shut the door. When he opened it again, she was shouting and sobbing with distress and exhaustion, but his feet went slop, slop past the head of the stairs, and his bedroom door closed. Sybil had just enough strength to register that he had forgotten to flush the toilet again, before thought was blotted out.

  *

  When Uncle Ted woke with the taste of soda crackers in his mouth, and found that it was gone nine and Sybil had not come raging in to dash the curtains apart and tell him he was lazy, he felt quite annoyed.

  Nine o’clock come and gone, and no juice. She was getting very selfish, that girl. Too much fuss made of her at the wedding, with toasts drunk, and that dam’ fool congressman making over her¿

  You look like a bride yourself, my dear Mrs Prince. Well he could tell him how old she was, Ted thought grimly, and went cautiously downstairs to see about getting his orange juice, since nobody cared whether he lived or shed.

  She wouldn’t let him into the ice box, but - hey there; what’s this now?

  Turning the corner, Ted almost fell down the last few steps, and knelt over his sister on all fours, calling to her to wake up. What to do, if she was dead? He was afraid of the telephone. It rang, as she opened her eyes. She stared blankly into his face for a few moments, creepily not like Sybil.

  The ringing went on, understanding flicked into her eyes, and she said: ‘What’s the matter, you deaf or something?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was the old Sybil, not scary.

  ‘Get the telephone.’

  ‘You know I—’

  ‘Ted, for God’s sake!’ He saw then that she was hurt. Her face was full of pain, her lips stiff and bloodless. After she woke, she had begun to shiver, although the kitchen was flooded with sun.

  He put out a hand to pull down her bathrobe, but she clutched at his arm and cried out: ‘Don’t touch me!’ He pulled himself up by the post at the bottom of the stairs, and went in his pyjamas into the other room where the telephone squatted, daring him. He picked it up carefully and pressed it hard against his good ear, which had been functioning at half speed for years.

  ‘That was Anna.’ He came back into the kitchen quite jauntily, for he had managed a telephone conversation without messing it up. ‘Her grandson has the measles. She isn’t coming in today.’

  ‘Is she going to get help?’

  ‘Why I - I don’t—’ Jauntiness dropped away.

  ‘Didn’t you tell her what happened?’

  ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said plaintively. ‘I didn’t tell her anything. She hung up.’

  ‘Ted.’ Sybil turned her head sideways to look at him. Her eyes were shrunk to a dark glitter, like washed pebbles. Her voice was weak but familiar, the voice for trying to get something into his head. ‘I’ve broken my leg. You’ve got to get help. Doctor Matson. The police. The fire station. Anyone.’

  ‘I can’t use the dial.’ Tears began to squeeze out of his eyes because he was so useless.

  ‘You can.’ Her teeth were in and her pale mouth firm. She stuck out her jaw at him. ‘Dial o. Tell the operator to get a doctor. Anyone.’

  Yes. Yes. He could do it. Almost running, with bent knees and toes out, he hurried back across the passage, picked up the earpiece again and put a finger like a trembling wad of putty into the dial. Nothing happened. The shrill hum of no one went on into his good ear.

  The telephone was on a low table. He picked it up to peer at the dial. MNO. He tried again. Still no one. Hurry, Ted, hurry. There’s only you. His hands were shaking so much now that he could not turn the dial. With a crash, the telephone slipped from him, and bounced off the edge of the table on to the floor.

  ‘What happened?’

  He pulled it up a little way by the cord and looked at it, his lips moving in and out, his ear aflame from the receiver jammed so tight, then he let it fall and dropped the other piece after it. It wasn’t humming any more. Ted went back as far as the kitchen door.

  ‘I dropped it, Syb.’

  ‘Dear God.’ He thought she sobbed. ‘Try again.’

  ‘I can’t. The front seems to be broken off.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she sobbed, and rolled her damp grey head from side to side on the floor. ‘Oh God, help me. Help me, Lord, have mercy.’

  She called no more on Ted to help her, but he would. He would and he could. He took coats from the hooks in the back hall, old coats. Theo’s Donegal, a raincoat that had been to Europe, and covered her, tucking them under her chattering jaw. Swift as thought, he folded a towel and slipped it under her head.

  ‘Stay there!’ he commanded. ‘Don’t move.’ Her eyes were closed now, and he did not know if she heard him, but he could hear himself and see himself, the saviour hero, and he felt himself a foot taller, and strong as a young bull.

  To the rescue! He threw a gallant salute at the inert bundle on the floor, turned smartly down the passage and through the long front room. The nearest house was far away, but just beyond the wide windows, the cars flashed sunlight back through the trees. Stop!

  In the hall, he tore through the coats in the closet, showering wire hangers, and pulled his own haphazard over his pyjamas. A brief struggle with the bolt of the front door, and then he was out and stumbling down the hill, clutching his coat round him, his slippers soaked already, breath rasping.

  At the bottom of the meadow, he stood against the fence and waved and shouted at the cars on the embankment. Sometimes the rushing faces looked down at him. One or twice, in a slower car, there were smiles, and someone waved.

  ‘God damn you!’ Clutching the fence with one hand, he shook his fist and raved at them, a mouthing puppet, rag doll in baggy pyjama legs.

  There were not many cars going this way. On a Monday, most of the cars were on the other side, headed away from the Cape. God damn! He cursed them too. They could see him there with his wild white hair and his pyjamas. Why in hell didn’t they stop?

  Take it easy, Ted. The raving old man gave place again to the cool hero. This isn’t helping Sybil. With calm pride at his resource, he broke a long branch from a tree and tied to the end of it the enormous white handkerchief which was stuffed half in and half out of his pocket.

  ‘Stop!’ he whispered. He had no voice to shout any more. He waved the flag, holding the stick with both hands, bending his body to it

  It was an ancient mariner and he stoppeth one of three. Four, five, six cars went by. Someone pointed, a child waved and laughed out of the back of a station wagon receding. In a small green car, the driver turned his head, passed, slowed, stopped, backed the car up a little, then got out and ran back along the grass verge. He was young, in a plaid jacket, his long morning shadow flung down the slope.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I need help,’ Ted called up, trying to keep his cracking voice heroic. ‘Please help me. Get a doctor.’

  ‘I am a doctor.’ the young man said, as if he were as surprised to hear it as Ted.

  Three

  Sybil nearly shed.

  ‘I nearly shed, you know,’ she told Montgomery Jones, complacently.

  ‘I know. I was there, remember?’

  She shook her head. She could hardly remember what had put her in the hospital, and nothing of being very ill, except odd scraps of dream, like Laurie’s face magnified three times its size, and Mary’s whine, somewhere unseen: I have a train to catch.

  It was all a tangled tale, punctuated by pain, bells ringing, brief unrelated voices that did not fit. That
was why she must be on the lookout for people telling her lies about it. Even this young Doctor Jones, with his crooked nose and his bright humorous eye, who was much more fun than the nurses with their sterile, babyish jokes, even he had his story. Just happened to be driving by. As if anyone could believe that. However, he was perfectly charming, and Dr Matson could come begging for business, as long as Jones stayed in Plymouth. Sybil had half a mind not to pay old Matson’s last bill, because he was not there in her extremis, although actually no one had sent for him, since Montgomery was in charge.

  Laurie said that her bills had all been paid, but that could not be so. He’d never find them all. Even she could not remember where some of them were.

  Now that she was learning to walk again, pushing the rubber-footed metal frame ahead of her like a criminal in a portable dock, she would wander into the rooms up and down the corridor, and tell the other patients the story of My Accident. The details shifted, but the central theme of heroics held fast.

  There I was, running to get help for my brother, who was ill. He’s eighty-two, you know, poor old soul. …

  ‘I didn’t let you down,’ Ted said, visiting, hat on knee, nervous of the nurses. ‘I did it for you, Syb.’

  ‘Did what?’ With her best New England aspirated W.

  ‘Got the doctor.’

  ‘What doctor?’

  And Thelma, who had brought poor old Ted to see her, because they had all expected her to she, said: ‘That Montgomery Jones, lucky for you. No knowing what Uncle Ted would have done, or you either, if he hadn’t stopped his car.’

  Oh, they were all out to fool her, just because she couldn’t remember anything about that day. Or was it night? There was a vague, disturbing memory of Marma’s dummy, hatted, glimmering in the blue light from the little train.

  ‘But there is nothing wrong with me now,’ she told Montgomery, who was sitting on the bed next to her bad leg and reading her newspaper. ‘And I want to go home. Indeed, I must go home. There a thousand things to do. The cats—’

  ‘The cats are in the barn. Laurie has told you that a hundred times.’

  He was young enough for asperity, not always the careful patience with which the middle-aged insulted age.

  ‘But that house can’t stand empty. It’s not that kind of house, Montgomery. My father built it over a hundred and twenty years ago, for his bride. Once before he shed - not the time he did she, but the time he thought he would - he made me promise it would never be sold. Ted never cared for it that much, and the others - my stepbrothers and sisters - they thought Plymouth was dead.’

  ‘It isn’t now. You can’t drive down the street in summer.’

  ‘Oh, summer people. They don’t count.’

  Cherish my house, Papa had said. She thought of all the empty rooms, holding their breath. The floorboards trying out a creak to see if anyone was there. The waiting furniture, resting a leg on a matchbox or a wad of paper, like stabled horses.

  ‘I must go back.’

  ‘I don’t think you should live alone, Mrs P.’

  ‘Why not? I have for years. Just because I broke a leg doesn’t mean I’m senile, whatever Thelma has been telling you.’

  ‘You could have a nurse for a while. I know a nice woman who—’

  ‘Who wants a job. I don’t need a nice woman. I’m not a baby.’

  ‘I don’t trust that leg yet.’ He laid a clean bony hand on the sheeted hump of it as if he owned it, which he did, just about. Sybil did not count the surgeon. ‘You could spend a few weeks in a nursing home, maybe, till you’re stronger on your feet.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m not ready to go yet. They take over all your savings, and then kill you off quite soon, so they can have the money. Didn’t you know?’ For a doctor, he was terribly naive.

  *

  Later, when Laurie and Jess came from Boston, where they lived in an apartment on the Cambridge side of the river, Montgomery took them to the hospital cafeteria to have a talk among the paper cups and doughnuts.

  ‘She wants to go home,’ he said. ‘And she’s ready to go home. But not alone.’ He was a tall young man, who stooped over tables. He looked up at Laurie from his stoop, stirring his coffee with a wooden tongue depressor.

  In the hospital, she was Mont’s problem. Let loose, her independence destroyed, perhaps forever, by that pile of laundry on the second step, she was the family’s problem. Laurie’s problem, Jess thought. And so mine.

  Thelma was in Philadelphia, sponsoring art shows with her new-married money. John was always All Tied Up in the New York office, or the Bridgeport plant, or the status house at Darien, where Anthea and the girls had learned to live most of life without him. Mary was in New Jersey, teaching kindergarten children not to read, because reading started in the first grade.

  Laurie was with a law firm in Boston, near enough to come often. He cared much more than anyone else, Jess knew. More like a son than a grandson.

  But if I am going to be jealous of an old woman of eighty at this stage of my marriage, I’d better go back to England and cut Gran’s toenails, as a penance. You don’t know what marrying is, Mother said. But I do. It is unbearable heights and unbearable depths and long, long stretches that are either content or boredom, you don’t ask which.

  ‘She rejects the idea of a nurse,’ Mont said, pursing his lips, trying to look like a family doctor.

  ‘Too expensive anyway, on top of what she’s paid here.’

  It was Laurie who took care of Sybil’s money now, and the others gladly left him to it.

  ‘Do what you think best,’ his mother had said. ‘Thank God we have a lawyer in the family at last.’

  They had opened Camden House one weekend when Thelma came up, and the three of them stayed there. Jess had made Laurie lock the door of Emerson’s room. She would not go in that room again. If they ever had to live in this house, she would have the door sealed up and wallpapered over, like that Paris hotel where the woman shed of plague.

  What happened? they had kept asking her. What happened to you? But she did not say, even to Laurie. The grandmother had not asked what happened.

  That weekend, Jess had cooked, and swept up some of the dust that the cleaning woman was supposed to have been taking care of all these weeks. The cows belonging to the farmer who rented the pasture and barn had broken some fences, and Laurie went out in the rain to mend them. When Jess came out to him, they lay under the pattering tent of the huge weeping beech tree, and later carved their intials intertwined on the elephant bark, where his boy’s carving was, and all the family names, the older ones swollen and spread as the tree grew.

  Thelma had spent most of the time complaining about the weather, and throwing the cats out as soon as Jess let them in, and wandering about the house condemning the furniture and pictures and ornaments, although she had grown up with most of them.

  ‘Do whatever you think best,’ she said, when Laurie wanted her to go through Sybil’s desk with him.

  ‘Well, she’s your mother.’ He screwed up his face and ran his hands through his soft black hair.

  ‘Go on and make like a lawyer.’ Thelma said sternly. ‘Power of Attorney. Your father would be proud of you.’

  Laurie’s father was an alcoholic, drowning without trace somewhere in Europe. Laurie never made jokes about him. Thelma did.

  ‘She had a fit when I said nursing home,’ Montgomery told them. ‘And I figure there’s no one in the family she’d live with, even if they would - if they could have her, so—’

  ‘We’d have her with us,’ Jess heard herself saying, ‘if there was room in the flat.’ Would she have said that if there had been?

  ‘Sweet.’ Laurie gave her a smile she did not deserve. ‘But she’d never leave Camden House. She wants to be buried there, On the hill where my great grandfather had his plants. I think there’s a law against it.’

  ‘The coloured woman she talks about. Would she stay with her?’

  ‘Anna Romiza? It’s
all she’ll do to come in and clean.’

  ‘You’ll have to find her a companion, a housekeeper, something like that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Advertise or something. I don’t know.’

  They both looked so defeated, although it wasn’t Mont’s problem, that Jess said quickly: ‘I’ll do it. I’ll find someone.’

  *

  The other girls in the office took a long lunch break to get their hair done. Jess washed her short light hair herself, but she could take longer too, and dash back across the river to the flat to interview people in the lunch hour.

  But there was no one to interview.

  She put advertisements in all the Boston papers, and the Plymouth paper as well, but the only reply was from a desperate woman who asked her to send on the names of anyone she rejected, because she would take just about anybody at this stage, for her stepfather.

  Sybil had eventually agreed to a housekeeper. She would not have taken it from her children, or from Laurie, but Montgomery decreed it, and she took it, as long as it was not called a companion. ‘I am my own companion. I don’t want her around me all the time, making silly conversation.’

  A housekeeper. Now that she had agreed, she could not wait. She telephoned Jess every morning at a quarter to seven, because the nurses woke her at six, to say she could not understand the problem.

  ‘There must be dozens of women looking for a good home. Why, they should almost pay me to take them.’

  ‘The only one I’ve heard from, Gramma, wants a hundred and twenty dollars a week, a separate apartment with television, and free keep for her fifteen-year-old boy, who is retarded.’

  Restlessly, Sybil roamed the hospital corridors, in and out of the rooms of the well and the ill and the boarded up old boshes that were neither well nor ill; sometimes with a stick, sometimes with the metal walker, if she felt regressive. She would not do crosswords, nor read, nor watch television, nór do anything but fuss about getting out. ‘And believe me,’ Mont told Jess, behind Laurie’s back, ‘there is no one in this hospital who won’t raise a cheer when she does.’