The L-Shaped Room

by Lynne Reid Banks

  ‘Do you mind?’

  Two girls in overalls at the next table turned round, twisting their mouths and rolling their eyes at each other. I stopped drumming. It wasn’t doing any good anyway. But there was one thing – I could work as a waitress in a place like this, if I had to. And do it well enough so that I needn’t be too ashamed of it. I wondered how much they paid waitresses now. Or perhaps it would be better to be a cook, in the kitchen where nobody would see me. I picked up the menu and saw that Frank only did sandwiches and snacks. It wasn’t important. I didn’t have to start worrying about a job yet. I had one that I wanted to keep for as long as I could.

  I left Frank’s and walked back to the house. As I walked, I thought about my job. It was a good one. I’d had it for two years. I was assistant to the public relations officer at Drummonds Hotel, which is not so big as Grosvenor House but more expensive. Because it’s so small it’s considered exclusive and a lot of big wheels who used to go to the Savoy and the Dorchester were now fighting for the privilege of paying a few extra guineas a day for a suite at Drummonds. My job was to arrange Press receptions for the ones who wanted publicity, and fight the Press off for those who didn’t. There were a lot of sidelines to the job too, but that was most of it. It was largely a matter of keeping people happy. I had a small office to myself next to the large plushy one my boss had on the ground floor of the hotel. My salary was twelve hundred a year and expenses. There were a lot of perks, too – quite legitimate ones. And it was great fun and very interesting. Not the way acting had been, of course. But I couldn’t have earned twelve hundred a year on the stage if I’d hung on for the rest of my life.

  Sooner or later I’d have to tell my boss. I couldn’t predict how he would feel about it. Perhaps he would make me leave at once. On the other hand, he might let me stay on until the last moment. That seemed more likely, in view of the sort of man he was; but even the most broadminded men are apt to be funny about things like this.

  I wondered how long it took to be really obvious. Three months? Four? I could save quite a bit in four months, living as I was going to live. That was the reason I gave myself for choosing such a scruffy place to live in; there was another reason, but I hadn’t explained that to myself yet. On the other hand, some women begin to show almost at once. I was no sylph, but I was flat across the front. As I walked, I put my hand through the slit in my trenchcoat pocket and felt my stomach. It didn’t feel any different. It seemed incredible that there was the beginning of a baby in there.

  I wondered, too, when you start being sick in the mornings. That would make it more difficult to keep on working. Perhaps morning sickness was a mental thing, like travel sickness. Some women went through pregnancy without being sick at all. I decided it was necessary for me to be like that. I had to keep on working as long as possible at the job in the hotel. Whatever job I got after that, it couldn’t pay anything like the same money.

  But then there was afterwards. I hadn’t let myself think too much about that. It was hard enough to imagine how I was going to get through the next eight months. I’d thought through every minute of it when I first began to worry – before I knew for certain. I didn’t sleep for five nights; just lay awake until four or five o’clock, thinking, imagining. The days weren’t so bad because I had plenty to do, but the nights were very bad. Each one was worse than the one before, because at first I could tell myself it would be all right in the morning. When in the morning nothing had happened I’d tell myself it would come during the day. Then another night would arrive and it would be that much more difficult to sleep than it had been the night before, because my doubts seemed that much nearer to becoming certainties.

  On the fifth night I began to think about afterwards and I panicked. I began to cry aloud and I couldn’t stop myself. My father slept in the next room. Both our doors were open and as my sobs rose I knew he must hear. I knew he would come and ask what was the matter, and I knew I would tell him. It was stupid because, although I felt sure, I couldn’t be completely sure, and what was the point of telling him before it was necessary? I knew how he would feel about it. But in that moment I felt as if I were alone in a trap. Nothing mattered if only I could tell someone. If only I didn’t have to be alone with it.

  That was how it seemed before I heard him call from his room, ‘Is that you, Jane? What’s the matter?’ And when I didn’t answer, ‘What are you crying like that for?’ Then I heard him getting out of bed and grunting and fumbling for his slippers and my sobs stopped. I lay without moving and felt the ice of real fear freeze the artificial panic which had made me want to tell him. I lay still, with my face in my pillow. I didn’t move or breathe. I felt him standing over me. He had never hit me in his life. I wasn’t afraid of him that way. I was afraid of his disgust. I would have preferred anything now, anything at all, to telling him what I had so much wanted to tell him two minutes before.

  ‘What were you crying about?’ His voice was gruff and sleepy, and sounded kind. But I lay, motionless, frozen, willing him to go back to bed.

  He put his hand on my shoulder and shook me a little.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘If you didn’t want me to come in, what did you cry so loudly for? What’s the matter, lost your job?’ He squeezed my shoulder with his fingers. ‘Mm? Is that it?’ I was trembling and he could feel it. He sat down beside me on the bed. I thought, Let me just die … I dug my face deeper into the pillow. I felt as if I were suffocating.

  ‘Come on,’ he said again. ‘That damned shyster sack you? If it’s that, don’t worry. I’ve kept a roof over your head before when you were out of a job.’ Yes, I thought, yes, you’ve done that. For months on end you’ve kept me, and every day of those months I’ve been aware of it. I felt you were wondering if I had no self-respect: not that you grudged the cost exactly, but I knew you were asking yourself what sort of person could live on her father when she was over twenty-one, rather than give up calling herself an actress. Which it seemed nobody else did … When I’d come back from an audition you would say, ‘Don’t contact us, we’ll contact you’– an old theatrical joke I foolishly told you once, which stopped being a joke when you had said it a few dozen times. And when at last I gave in and started going to secretarial school, do you think I wasn’t conscious all the time that this was the second career you’d paid to train me for? The day I took my first secretarial job you told me I’d never stick it, that any girl who could be content to sit behind a typewriter all day must be a cretin … What do you want of me, Father? I thought fiercely. What have you ever wanted?

  Not this, anyway. Not a scandal, not a bastard grandchild. This won’t go far to make up for my shortcomings, like not being a son and like killing my mother by getting born.

  I turned on my back and looked up at my father through the half-darkness. His big square head with the strong hair sprouting unbrushed above his forehead was outlined against my window. His ears were big and stood out. Mine do that too. I have to wear my hair in a special way to hide them. I thought if my baby had ears like that I would stick them back while it was little and malleable. My father could have saved me a lot of misery if he’d done that with mine, but he hadn’t bothered because he’d lost his chance of having a son. I had a sudden feeling about my baby, not just as something terrible that was going to happen to me, but as a potential person with feelings of its own. It was the ears that made me think of it – lying there looking at the silhouette of my father’s big ugly ears.

  ‘Well?’

  He wasn’t sleepy any more, and his voice was more querulous than kind. I lay on my back and said clearly, ‘No, I haven’t lost my job, Father.’ I know you keep expecting me to lose it because it’s such a much better one than you ever thought I’d get, but the fact is that I’m good at it and I don’t think I’ll ever lose it through inefficiency.

  But I only said the first sentence aloud. That was how it always was when I talked to my father.

  ‘Then what was all the noise about?’ />
  It occurred to me he was disappointed with my answer. It always galled him, I believed, in some subtle way when I actually succeeded in anything. It gave me an odd sense of advantage to be reminded of this.

  ‘I’m unhappy about something. It’s something private.’

  ‘Not so private you’d be bothered to get up and close your door before you wake me up with your weeping,’ he said. He stood up and pulled his dressing-gown round him. ‘You seem to forget that my job lacks the advantage of frequent mornings in bed.’ He said that because sometimes I work over the week-ends when someone important arrives at the hotel, and I’m given mornings off in lieu. My father has been at work at nine o’clock every week-day morning for thirty-two years. He’s a civil servant. The only time he stayed away from work was when my mother died. Even then he worked on the day of the funeral, in the afternoon; he went straight from the crematorium to his office. He told me that himself; he was very proud of it, for some reason.

  So the moment was put off. I fell asleep with a sense of overpowering relief; but it was gone in the morning.

  I decided I must go and see a doctor. I was still only five days overdue, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I’d never been ill in my life, so I hadn’t got a regular doctor. There was a man whose name I had heard; I couldn’t remember in what connexion, but it stuck in my mind because it was the same as mine, Graham. I looked him up in the phone book and was relieved to find his surgery was in Wimpole Street. I didn’t know why I should feel relieved about that. Perhaps there was something about the way I’d heard of him in the first place, which I didn’t actually remember, but which made me suspect there was something wrong about him. But if he practised in Wimpole Street, I thought, he must be all right.

  I rang him up. His secretary, or perhaps it was his wife, answered the phone and when I said I wanted to come at lunch-time I could hear the superior smile in her voice.

  ‘The doctor can’t make any new appointments for three weeks,’ she said. I knew it would be better to wait three weeks, then he could tell me at once; but I couldn’t wait three more days. I had to know, so that I could start thinking properly and stop praying for something that wasn’t going to happen. I said, ‘Please, it’s very urgent.’

  The woman said, ‘Are you at work?’ and when I said yes, she said, ‘It can’t be as urgent as all that, then, can it?’ I felt myself begin to loathe her unreasonably. I thought, He’s not the only doctor in London, I’ll find one who isn’t so busy, and who hasn’t got a wife like this. I said, ‘All right then, never mind,’ and was surprised that my voice sounded so strange, as if I were crying.

  I was just going to hang up when the woman said, in a completely different voice: ‘Just a moment. Are you married?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a pause, and then she said, almost affectionately, ‘Why not pop along at about one-fifteen? I expect the doctor could squeeze you in.’

  I got there at one. It was a tall, sober house with black double doors and brass name-plates, the names worn illegible with polishing. A smart white-haired woman let me in, and showed me into the waiting-room. It had a high ceiling and deep leather chairs; there was a big round table in the middle of a red Persian carpet, covered with magazines, the society type, neatly stacked. On the Adam mantelpiece was a single tasteful ornament, reflected austerely in a huge mirror. My eyes kept going back to the mirror. It was wrong in that room with its elaborate gilt frame and fat-bellied cupids. It was more the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a brothel.

  I sat on the arm of one of the leather chairs. I almost never smoke, but now suddenly I wished I had a cigarette. I was very nervous, wondering what to say to the doctor. I hadn’t really worked it out, and now it was too late to. I couldn’t even think of a false name. All the names there are in the world, and the only one I could think of was my own. I tried to concentrate, but my mind wouldn’t work properly. I was terribly nervous. I was even sweating a little. That made me think that he would want to examine me. I hadn’t thought of any of that. I stood up suddenly and almost ran to the door; but it opened in my face, and the white-haired woman stood there smiling.

  ‘What name?’ she asked pleasantly.

  ‘Jane Graham.’

  ‘How odd – the doctor’s name is John Graham.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know.’

  She led me up the curved staircase and knocked on a white door. Everything was carpeted into silence. Even her knock hardly made a sound. There was a faint, unpleasant smell of hospitals. I was very frightened.

  The doctor was very ordinary-looking, like a stage doctor. Small and comfortable, rather bald, with pudgy hands. He was sitting behind his desk making out a prescription. The woman smilingly showed me into a chair and went out. The doctor said, ‘Won’t – be – a – minute –’ in a slow voice, and went on writing. His fountain pen was gold and he had a big gold signet ring on his little finger with a moonstone set in it. The leather on his desk – the blotter corners, the ink-stand, the appointments book – were all green Florentine leather. There was a gold cigarette box.

  I looked at the doctor. His bald patch gleamed domestically. The signet ring gleamed too, on his little fat hand. I hadn’t seen his face, and I couldn’t understand why I didn’t like him.

  At last he finished writing and put the cap on his pen. He looked up, already smiling. He was pink and jolly-looking, with small eyes behind glasses.

  ‘You haven’t been to see me before, have you, Miss – er –’

  ‘Graham. No.’

  ‘Graham? Really? Fancy that – no relation, I suppose?’ His smile spread into a laugh, but my face felt frozen. ‘Well, now. You look healthy enough. What seems to be the trouble?’

  ‘My period’s late.’

  ‘How late?’

  ‘Five days.’

  He smiled again. ‘Well, you know, that’s nothing. Nothing at all. Are you usually regular?’

  ‘Yes, I think so, fairly.’

  ‘Five days, you know – it doesn’t have to mean anything’s wrong with you. Could be caused by anything – change of air – change of diet – emotional upset – cold in the head …’ He was watching me closely; at least I felt he was. With the light on his glasses I couldn’t really tell. But I felt he was trying to drive me out into the open.

  I said nothing. His smile was as steady as ever.

  ‘Unless, of course,’ he said, in the same cosy voice, ‘you’ve got any reason to worry … ?’

  I wanted to shout at him that of course I had reason to worry, or what would I be doing here? Instead I said awkwardly, ‘Yes,’ praying he would understand, or rather stop pretending not to understand.

  He took off his glasses and wiped them, exactly like an actor playing a doctor, and said, ‘Oh dear oh dear oh dear.’ Then he looked up at me reproachfully. I stared back at him, feeling suddenly angry. I hadn’t come to him to be looked at like that. He wasn’t my father, it was nothing to him. But I couldn’t think of any stinging words to say; I just sat there, feeling angry and humiliated. I thought he was trying to make me drop my eyes, and I wouldn’t. I was ashamed to my very soul, but I was damned if I was going to let him see it. I stared back at him and finally he sighed heavily and put his glasses on again.

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘On the twenty-third of last month.’

  ‘And you were due five days ago? My dear child –!’ He leaned forward, wearing a tolerant smile now. ‘Don’t you know anything about your own body? Don’t you know you could not have picked a worse day – or rather, night?’

  I felt a wave of disgust, as if he’d made a dirty joke about it.

  ‘Took no precautions at all, I suppose?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh dear me no. “It couldn’t happen to me” – that’s what they all think. “Don’t let’s bother with all that nasty nonsense – it would spoil the wonder of it all.” ’ He twitched one eyebrow and slumped back disdainfully.

  ‘I
didn’t think anything of the sort!’

  ‘I’m not deaf, Miss Graham, so please don’t shout.’ He ran his fingers along the shaft of his fountain pen, watching me. I looked at his banana fingers and dreaded the moment when he would tell me to undress.

  ‘Well now,’ he said, his voice abruptly cheerful and cosy again. ‘What’s the young man – the proud father-to-be – going to do about this, eh?’

  It was like watching a film in which there is suddenly a large, clumsy cut, and you’re left not knowing what has been missed out, not quite understanding what’s happening now. I said bewilderedly, ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  The doctor said blandly, ‘Well, it’s a not unimportant aspect of the situation, is it?’

  I said, ‘I don’t see that it’s an aspect which concerns you.’

  He swayed forward sharply and landed with his elbows halfway across the desk. There was no smile now, and he held the gold pen pointed at me like a pistol.

  ‘Now let’s just get ourselves tidied up about this,’ he said hardly. ‘You’ve come to me for help. There’s no need to be on the defensive. You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. But you must clearly understand that it’s not as simple as buying a pound of sugar. I have my own position to protect.’

  I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. I shook my head, and then, when he stiffened angrily, I quickly nodded instead, hoping vaguely that that would please him. It seemed to, because he lowered the pen and sank back again, his face softening. ‘You really must trust me,’ he said. ‘I’m not just a nosy old man, you know. If the young man could be persuaded to marry you, obviously that would be a better solution, wouldn’t it?’