Room Upstairs Read online

  *

  Jess sent off her advertisement again to all the papers, in case of a flock of kindly, widows going bust over Christmas, but without much hope. Laurie wrote to his mother and his Uncle John, but with even less hope. To both of them, since Sybil was not destitute, there was no problem.

  What were they going to do? They talked it back and forth for hours, as they would later discuss their children. In bed. While they were dressing. In the kitchen while Jess was cooking and Laurie pacing the pocked black and white linoleum. Out in the snow, dragging his old sled up the hill before they came shrieking down into the big drift by the fence.

  Laurie’s vacation had already started, so they stayed, ‘to give the old lady a good Christmas at least. They looked on it as her last, since it seemed that she would have to leave Camden House, and nothing then would be the same again.

  Sybil pottered, laying the table backwards and filling pepper mills with salt. She seemed to think that Melia was coming back. When she’s better, she told visitors, even Montgomery, as if the myth of illness had never been exploded.

  In the attic, Laurie found strings of coloured lights, unused since his grandfather could no longer climb ladders to decorate the house. He strung them round the gutters and gables, and decked the Norway spruce like a giant Christmas tree, staining the snow below it with light.

  ‘Give em a treat on their way to the Cape. Next year,’ Laurie said, forgetting, or pretending, ‘let’s floodlight the house.’

  ‘If she can’t live here, will they make her sell this place?’ Jess asked.

  ‘Would you mind?’ ‘I know how much you would.’

  ‘But you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have, at first. I didn’t like it. I don’t like you having more than me.’ Jess risked honesty, because she knew he could stand her faults, and because she was going to add: ‘But you know how it’s grown on me. I thought it would keep us apart, this place, and your grandmother. But they’ve drawn us closer, haven’t they?’

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ Laurie said.

  ‘About time. I used to dread it at home. My brothers, they’ve married awful women. They’d stuff, and then get into a fight, and the kids were sick into paper hats.’

  *

  Laurie had plenty of friends around Plymouth, and over the Christmas days they had parties and people in for drinks and meals, and boys came whom Sybil had not seen for years, and girls who had been children only a minute ago it seemed, now with young husbands who were clumsily charming to her.

  She forgot to be tired, and her leg hardly bothered her in the excitement of having the place full of young people again, with all the fires blazing and the ice-box filled, and Jess and the other girls giggling in the kitchen, handmaids to a perpetual feast.

  It would seem very quiet when it was just her and Melia again, with the cut up fryers and the knitting and the regular television programmes which accented their day. But of course, Melia was not coming back. They thought she had forgotten that, but most of the time she had not. She did not want to talk about it, or think any more about things like senior citizen housing. So she pretended that Melia would be coming back after Christmas.

  On Christmas evening, when Laurie and Jess had gone to see friends, Sybil was messing about with the dishes in the sink, so that Jess would be pleased when she came home from the cocktail party.

  The lights of their car came round the bend of the driveway and across the back window sooner than she expected, and she broke a cup, agitated, wanting to be done before they came in.

  When the knocker of the back door thumped, she stood frozen, with her mouth open, the handle of the cup still on her finger.

  Keep quiet and they will go away. Old lashes did not answer the door these days, unless they wanted to get their brains bashed in.

  The knocker fell again. Montgomery always whistled, and the young people usually shoved right in, clamouring like seagulls.

  ‘Who is it?’ she called uncertainly, wishing the bolt was across, but the voice which answered was so cheery that Sybil went to the door, still holding the cup handle.

  Outside on the stone mill wheel doorstep stood a shortish, stoutish lady in high red shiny boots and a topheavy hat of some harsh grey fur like kangaroo hide. Beneath it was a fair amount of dead black hair which would fool nobody, for she was sixty-five if a day, and a brightly lipsticked smile pushing up cheeks that were coloured high with broken veins.

  All this Sybil saw with great clarity, which was unusual, for since My Accident, she was usually a little flustered meeting new people, and did not register them in detail until later.

  ‘You’ll think I have the devil’s own cheek,’ said the lady, putting a boot confidently on the doorstep, ‘but the truth of it is this. I was driving by on the other side of the road and saw your house with all the pretty lights. The first sign of cheer since I left the Canal. Such a picture in the snow, it looked, I just had to turn off and find my way across the road to tell you.’

  ‘Why, how nice. Do come in.’ Sybil stepped aside and the visitor came in, scented rather strongly, but not unpleasantly.

  ‘Aren’t I absurd?’ she said. ‘I’ve never simply obeyed an impulse like that. I don’t know why I did.’

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ Sybil said, and meant it. Although Laurie and Jess were only just down the road, she had been getting a little jumpy at the sink, undecided whether it was worse to draw the curtains and not know what was outside, or to risk the pale turnip face of a Peeping Tom pressed suddenly against the black glass. ‘My grandson will be back any minute, and you must stay and tell him, because he was the one who put up the lights. Although it was my husband, of course, who bought them, several years ago before he shed.’

  ‘I’ll introduce myself. I’m Dorothy Grue. I’ve been spending Christmas with my sister in Provincetown, but it’s a small house, and her husband - well, one doesn’t want to outstay one’s welcome.’ If Sybil could tell life histories before they were even into the kitchen, so could she.

  ‘I am Sybil Prince.’ She put out her hand, saw the cup handle, and they both laughed.

  ‘I’m very glad to know you.’ Miss - Mrs? (no ring) Grue put her feet apart and bent from her broad hips, knees out and forward, to pick up the broken china. Yes, she was no chicken. Only her hairdresser knew for sure. But Sybil knew. That colour at that age.

  She had for some years been surprised to find how spiteful one became as one grew older. In her prime, tinted hair would have been a matter of interest, perhaps admiration, if it suited the face below. But not a thing to crow over, and project a vision of herself asking Jess: Did you note the hair?

  This was the first time since her illness that she had had a visitor without Melia or the children there to officiate, so she extended herself in hospitality. She hung Miss/Mrs Grue’s coat up herself on a broad wooden hanger, not a mere wire one from the cleaners, and took her into the long living room at the front of the house, not the cosier room at the back hall from the kitchen, where most of the living of the house was done.

  She brought the sherry and cigarettes, and some crackers, making so many small journeys back and forth that her visitor said, ‘You shouldn’t put yourself out for me.’

  ‘I’m glad to do it. I’m not allowed to do much.’ She laughed. ‘They think I’m helpless, since my accident.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  When she took off her coat, it had been revealed that Dorothy Grue had an enormous shelf of pouter pigeon chest. Cardigan buttons ran down the front of it in a grand curve, over which she nodded and smiled most genially, shaking her Christmas bell earrings as she invited: ‘Do tell me about it.’

  *

  It was all settled. By the time Laurie and Jess came back, a little silly from the party, it was all settled.

  Warmed by the sympathetic interest of the kindly stranger who sipped her sherry with her elbow held far out to reach past the bosom, and chain smoked with genteel compulsion, Sybil told about Melia. Not all of it.
One had one’s loyalties. Melia had been an angel and she would have her back tomorrow, wino or no wino, if they would let her. But enough to set the scene.

  Lulled by sympathetic wags of the marsupial hat, Sybil confessed that she could no longer manage on her own, and that her future was in jeopardy.

  ‘No housekeepers? It sounds like a very fine offer. One I would jump at, at any rate, and not shed a tear for the retail trade. When you’ve worked all your life to keep yourself, as I have’ (Miss Grue then; bad luck not to get a husband to change your name, if nothing else), ‘you begin to wonder what it’s all about.’

  Hold your horses, Theo used to say, to her crazy, unpractical notions, like taking all the children to Canada for the weekend. When Sybil was a child, her father called her Musket Camden, because she was always shooting off. Musket shot off now with all the old rashness. Had not Miss Grue proved herself a fellow Musket by suddenly swinging her car off the highway to go calling on a stranger?

  ‘Come and live here.’

  ‘Oh, come now, I—’

  ‘They’re going to make me leave the house, I know they are.’ Sybil leaned forward, knowing she was gabbling too much (it was the sherry), hearing in her voice the gossipy hiss she hated, but was too old to control, like the mean triumph over Dorothy’s hair. Dorothy? Hold your horses, Syb.

  ‘I’m not saying I wouldn’t be tempted. I’m not saying that at all. I wonder. …’ She chuckled and slapped her thick thigh. ‘It would make my sister sit up though. Our place on the Cape, they call it. A few boards knocked together by a carpenter’s apprentice. You push a thumb tack in to hang a calendar, and the house practically falls down. But this house.’ She nodded round the long room, pursing her lips at the dark family portraits, the deep faded sofa, the carved panelling in the alcove where John Camden’s cumbersome desk still stood, because no one had ever been able to move it. ‘If I lived in this house, know what I’d do?’

  ‘What would you do?’ They had turned in their chairs to sit facing each other, bony knees almost touching cushiony ones, Sybil’s skirt drawn too far back in her eagerness, her eyes fixed on Miss Grue’s eyes, which were prominent, with shiny whites like hard-boiled eggs.

  ‘Make new curtains for that big window, for one thing. Velvet Something rich. Wax up these old floors.’

  Anna would be furious.

  ‘Recover the chairs, if you like. I’m good at that kind of thing. I like to keep busy.’

  ‘Oh, so do I.’ Sybil was fortyish, bustling, domestic. ‘We could work together. Every hour that fleets so slowly has its task to do or bear. Luminous is the crown, and holy, when each gem is set with care. Adelaide A. Proctor. I’d forgotten I remembered that. Funny how the real poetry goes, and the ©Id trash stays with you.’

  ‘I’m a push-over for verse too,’ Miss Grue said, and sighted her eye at the sherry decanter, so that their pact might be sealed in wine.

  And so when Laurie and Jess came back home, with another equally silly couple, who stopped off in the kitchen to see what they could find to cook, the fait accompli of Dorothy was presented.

  All the things that Sybil had feared they would say, they did not, but Dorothy answered some of them anyway. She spoke of references. Of past jobs and family connexions. Of her nephew who was Chief of Police in some town in Rhode Island.

  They liked her. Sybil could see that they did, although they were not saying much that was sensible. She liked them too. She laughed good naturedly when Laurie tripped over the corner of a rug. And when Jess said: ‘You shouldn’t have had that last martini, darling,’ and Laurie suddenly blazed: ‘Cut it out - what’s the matter with you?’ she laughed again. But it occurred to Sybil that she had never heard him speak like that to Jess. Or to anyone.

  Five

  ‘Is that really her name?’ Montgomery whispered.

  Dorothy heard. Would she hold it against him? But she said brightly: ‘Grue by name and grue by nature,’ which did not mean a thing, although she said it as if it did.

  She had quite a gift for making meaningless remarks sound significant. Even the little common exhortations, like Here we are and There you go, with which she boosted Sybil through the ploys of the day, acquired new depth. When, being one of those people who talk only medicine to doctors, she told Montgomery that she was never sick nor sorry, her heavy voice, harsh with cigarettes, made it almost a warning, or a threat. No more big meat and gravy meals? Poor Montgomery had better start looking for a wife again.

  ‘I’ll stop by in a couple of days to check that lung.’ He put his long, strong hand on Sybil’s shoulder, and she reached up and patted it. She was very fond of him, and believed that he had saved her life, although at the time, if she remembered right, it had seemed easier to she.

  ‘No need to worry about her? Dorothy said cheerfully. ‘She’s in good hands now, you know.’

  ‘Mrs Mulligan was nice enough,’ Montgomery said mildly, but Dorothy capped him.

  ‘An alcoholic.’ She had been a practical nurse in the days before they were called that, and had as little use for doctors as a Christian Scientist.

  ‘I’ll stop by in a day or so,’ Montgomery repeated, for it would take more than a nurse to put him off. He was the only doctor at the hospital who had no dread of the charge nurse in Obstetrics. ‘But thanks for taking such good care of her.’

  Bless you, Sybil thought, for being nice to her. Dorothy was her discovery, and she wanted everyone to like her and be pleased that she was there in the side room over the porch, with yet another new spread, because Melia’s had to be burned. The poor woman had led quite a sad kind of life, what with one thing and another, and her fiance being killed, and there being nothing to sit on behind the ground floor counters at Merricks, to whom she had given her best years and her arches, industrious fool that she was.

  On his first visit after Dorothy moved in, with enough baggage for a siege, Laurie had said: ‘Don’t let her treat you like a child,’ because Dorothy had been a little assertive about vegetables. But she would grow on him, just as she was growing on Sybil, with her energy and her loves and hates nothing in between for anybody - and her decisions made like a knife, swift and clean so that Sybil had no worries.

  Melia Mulligan had been a lovely woman, but she had always been consciously a servant, expecting orders, paid to keep her lady comfortable and content. Dorothy Grue was a friend. Someone who shared the house and just happened to do most of the work because she was the strongest. She took no orders. If you wanted something done, you had to say: ‘We’ll have to think about cleaning out the spice rack,’ or: ‘I think I’ll change my sheets today,’ and Dorothy would chip in at once: ‘Thinking never got anything done. It’s on my list for this morning.’

  At the beginning of the month, although the cheque-book would be lying handily on Sybil’s desk among the welter of clippings, old letters and indecipherable memos to herself, there was no direct transaction. Sybil had to leave the cheque in a stamped envelope on the table in the hall, and on her next trip to the post office, Dorothy would mail it to herself, and collect it the following day from their box. Heaven knew what Frances and Bea thought, for they had been at the post office for years and knew Sybil’s writing, but there it was. There were these niceties about Dorothy, and they would never chew drumsticks together within range of the garbage can; but Sybil could accept prim dining room meals with the applique cloth which cost seventy five cents to launder, and the pretence that Dorothy drank prune juice because she liked the taste.

  It was worth it.

  Melia had been a delightful accessory, but Dorothy was a whole outfit. She brought to the house a feeling of life and activity which Sybil, waning, craved. The young people brought a sense of beginnings. Dorothy brought a sense of something accomplished. In the evening, as they sat with their ritual sherry, she would swat her rubbery thigh and say: ‘Well, we’ve had quite a day of it!’ And even though Sybil had done almost nothing, she would feel she had been busy all day.


  To understand Dorothy, as Sybil pointed out to Laurie and Jess, you had to understand about Roger. He was the most important thing in her life, her lover and her child, and if anything should happen to him, it would be worse than Melia with Tiger.

  Roger Grue was a budgerigar, a male of brilliant oily green and yellow plumage. He lived in a vast domed cage like the concourse of Pennsylvania Station, hanging high in the kitchen above the cats, who sat in a Druids’ ring below, convinced that they could hypnotize him.

  One of Dorothy’s first acts of self assertion, after she had finished praising everything in sight, including the Priscilla stove on which she threatened to cook, had been a sweeping: ‘The cats will have to go.’

  Sybil refused. Whose house is it? her mind prompted her, as if there were some danger of forgetting. She had always had cats, even when her mother was alive, and allergic - only it was called nerves in those days. Even when she and Theo were in that dreadful plum-coloured house at Amherst, where John and Thelma had scarlet fever, before the war.

  When Sybil announced, with all the old vehemence she was afraid she had lost: ‘The cats are staying,’ she thought for a moment that Dorothy would pack. Her impressive chest went even further up and out as she drew in breath through nostrils that were cut back and blood-shot, like a racehorse.

  They measured eyes, and then she let out the breath on a laugh, and the cough which always followed it. ‘Anything you say. It’s your house, after all.’

  There you see, said Sybil to the unseen aushence of critics. Nothing to worry about.

  So the farmer’s son Bobby, who did odd jobs for Sybil after school, fixed a hook in the ceiling near the sunniest window, too high for the cats, or for the head of anyone except Montgomery, who would not bump it twice. To reach the cage, Dorothy bought a chrome and plastic stool with a shiny red seat, which converted to a little pair of steps. It was hideous in the kitchen, where everything was old wood and wallpaper, but there it was.

  When the cage door was open, the bird perched on the outside of the bars, rattling them with his beak like a boy with a stick and railings, or made clattering tours high up the wall, alighting on Dorothy’s shoulders, where he could mumble her face with his Armenian beak and deride the cats with his flat unfocused eye.