‘Oh, hullo dear,’ she said without any detectable emotion.
‘I’m coming home today,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes? That’s nice.’
I waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t, so I asked to speak to Toby. I heard the buzzer go four times. My heart was behaving as if I were going before a judge. He was a long time answering.
‘Hallo?’ he said at last.
‘Hallo. It’s Jane.’ My voice would hardly come out.
There was a pause, and I heard him take a deep breath.
‘Hallo,’ he said. His voice was cool, but not cold.
‘I’m coming home today, in about half an hour. I thought I’d ring you up and tell you.’
‘Well, thanks.’ There was another long pause, I was breathing heavily and so was he. It was awful.
‘Will you be there?’ I asked at last. My hand holding the receiver was shaking; I pressed it against the corner of a door to stabilize it.
‘Well, I don’t know, I might be going out this evening,’ he said casually. Then he said in a slightly different voice, ‘Are you all right?’ Before I could reply he took himself up quickly, as if angry with himself for asking. ‘Silly question, of course you must be or they wouldn’t have let you out.’
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ I said. It occurred to me for the first time that he might not know whether or not I’d lost the baby. I gathered my courage. ‘Toby, please don’t go out. I want you to be there.’
There was another long pause and then he said unsteadily, ‘All right.’ He sounded far away, as if he had partially covered the mouthpiece with his hand.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I thought this phone call had been going on for hours. I wondered suddenly how many of the household were listening, and as if he read my thoughts Toby said, ‘Mavis is out for the evening.’
‘That’s good,’ I said, ‘How’s John?’
‘He’s fine.’
There was another throat-drying pause, and at last I said, ‘Well – I’ll see you.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and then added carelessly, ‘How are you getting back?’
‘Ambulance.’
‘Get you!’ he said dryly, and a little hope trickled back.
We said good-bye, and I went and waited in the hall, which was ablaze with the Matisse colours of Christmas decorations. Two enormous red paper bells hung from the centre of the ceiling, and from these radiated countless paper-chain ellipses dripping with silver icicles. It was all overdone, like the decorations in the ward, but even while I was having a superior little mental scoff, they were making me feel obscurely uneasy and near to tears. The hospital and all that went with it had been such an oasis in the alarming wilderness of doing everything for, and chiefly by, myself; now it came to the point of leaving it, I was scared. I blamed Christmas. Why, of all times of the year, did it have to be Christmas? It just wasn’t a thing you could ignore, and being alone at it was to combine the worst elements of being alone at any other time, and multiply them by two hundred and fifty.
The ambulance came. It was the sort you sit up in, and there were two other people being taken home at the same time, so we didn’t go straight to Fulham but did a detour through Kensington. The other two had evidently been in hospital longer than I had, and they were like children let out of school, peering through the unblacked-out part of the window at the bright lights in the shops and rejoicing that they would be home for Christmas. I sat in a corner and the uneasiness grew. Why hadn’t I taken Dottie at her word? Christmas in her nice, cheerful flat, with her gay company and no empty hours to fill, no guilty feeling about letting Christmas pass without recognition … I realized I was getting extremely slushy, and tried firmly to pull myself together. If a week of being looked after had gone such a fair way to turning me into a drivelling weakling, it was just as well I hadn’t let Dottie tempt me to any more of it.
Because there were very serious considerations ahead. Now that I’d definitely decided to welcome the baby, I’d have to start planning with a bit more efficiency than in the past, when, so far as one could see, I had been working vaguely on the basis that God would provide; and why the hell He should in a case like this was probably more than even the most devout believer could have told me.
Dr Maxwell had assured me that I shouldn’t be troubled by any more sickness. So now I needed a job that I could do for approximately four months – something well-paid, light, congenial, preferably among colleagues with a physical inability to drop their eyes below shoulder level.
The trouble was, I didn’t feel like working. I felt like sitting about with my feet up, knitting. I astonished myself with this realization. I must have accepted the prospect of this baby with a vengeance, if I were seriously thinking of knitting as a desirable occupation. Anyway, it was out of the question. Work I must, and for money. A hundred-odd pounds wouldn’t take me very far.
We dropped the others off, and now the big shops would be left behind as we waded through the gloomy streets of Fulham. I looked out. Not so gloomy; even here, the small shops were gay with holly and fairy-lights, and once we passed the end of a market street which was as bright and rowdy as a fairground. In the windows of some of the dark, staid villas, usually so depressingly uniform, were the marks of individualism – small trees speckled with colour, or a silver ball with streamers, or a holly wreath, or nothing. Even the absence of a Christmas token seemed like a personal statement and stirred the imagination to wonder why.
We drew up at the house at last, and the man came round to help me down. He treated all his passengers with the same cheerful courtesy; if you had VD or had lost an ear in a knife-fight, it would all be the same to him. He said, just as he had to both his other passengers: ‘Home for Christmas, eh ducks? Manage all right? Bon Noël, as they say in Jamaica.’
He saw me up the steps and then bounded down them and drove away. My last link with the false security of the hospital was broken. Now I had to start ‘facing up to things’ again. I grimaced at the phrase. What a grisly expression, like chins-up and stiff-upper-lips. But then it was a pretty grisly necessity. I put my chin up and tried to stiffen my upper lip, but found I didn’t seem to have any muscles in it. So I put my key in the door and went in more or less as I was.
The house was as quiet as a tomb, and twice as dark. The first thing I was conscious of was the smell; I’d ceased to notice it when I was in and out all the time, but after a week away from it, it hit me in the face. Then I switched the dim hall light on, and experienced again the initial impact of the tobacco wallpaper and chocolate paint, the threadbare linoleum, the high gloomy ceilings that you were reluctant to look at for fear you should see bats hanging there. I groaned inwardly as I climbed the narrow stairs and was plunged in darkness when only half-way up. I thought hungrily of the scarlet-and-white cleanness of Dottie’s self-decorated flat, with all mod cons and an atmosphere of spanking modernity. I really must have been insane. Perhaps even now it wasn’t too late to change my so-called mind …
Then I came to the fourth floor landing and Toby’s door opened and there he was.
I put my small but suddenly very heavy suitcase down for a rest, and we stood looking at each other. His hair was untidy; his long thin hands hung below the leather-bound sleeves of the green corduroy jacket, dangling awkwardly as if he didn’t know what to do with them. The main light was behind him, but I could still see the shadows on his face; they were more marked than ever, and I had the foolish illusion that I could remove them by stroking them with the tips of my fingers. At the same time I felt so inordinately tired that all I wanted was to lean my face against that corduroy and shut out the world.
Then the light on the landing went out and he was in silhouette. I couldn’t see his face any more with its closed, guarded expression which had kept me from going towards him; now he was just a figure in a doorway, a symbol of home-coming. I shut my mind to the facts and thought, idiotically: ‘I’ll put my trust in love.’ Afterwards
I thought that that, after all, is what religion is – the pinning-up of faith across the ugly vista of logic and reality, to fulfil a need. Maybe it works in the case of God; I’ve always been so afraid it wouldn’t that I’ve never tried it. But Toby wasn’t God, except to me for just that second, and he’d been hurt. So when I stumbled against him and threw my arms round his neck he just stood there, unmoving except for a slight step backwards to keep his balance – though I thought I felt his hands touch my waist for just an instant as if they had made an automatic move to hold me which he had cancelled.
I drew back immediately and gasped, ‘I’m sorry –’
He said, ‘I’m sorry, too,’ in a quiet, dead voice.
I was so hurt it was like a serious wound, it would start being painful soon but in the meantime there was just an apprehensive numbness.
Toby put the light on again, and his face was set. He picked up my suitcase and carried it up the last flight, putting it down outside my door and turning to me. I couldn’t look at him.
‘John’s done some work on the room,’ he said. ‘He got the key from Doris. He’s worked on it every day you’ve been gone. He wanted it to be a surprise for you, and I’m only telling you in advance in case – in case you should think it might have been me.’
I wished I could have felt any sort of advance enthusiasm, but I couldn’t have cared less if John had spent the week transforming the room into the Crystal Palace, or even if he’d been laying everything waste with a meat-axe.
‘Toby,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t talk about it.’
‘Supposing it had been your baby. Supposing all this had happened three months from now.’
We were still standing on the landing. I had my eyes closed to do this, but I heard him catch his breath.
‘Would you have thought I was a whore then?’
‘Shut up,’ he said in a queer, strangled voice.
‘You must have known that you weren’t the first. That didn’t seem to make any difference to you. Were you able to pretend to yourself then that it wasn’t true, and now you’re not? Is that it?’
‘Why can’t we leave it?’
‘Because I love you,’ I said. ‘And this isn’t fair!’ Before either of us could react to this confession, unexpected even to me, I ploughed on. ‘I’m twenty-seven years old. Did you think I was a virgin? If it could happen like that with you, why should you think it couldn’t happen with someone else? And if you accept that, why does a baby make it so much worse? A baby doesn’t have to mean a girl’s been whoring – it can come from a single night. It could have come from what happened with us, even if we’d never seen each other again!’ I stopped, out of breath and out of specious logic.
Toby said quietly, ‘I can’t help it if it’s not fair. I know it isn’t. It’s not a matter of fairness, it’s a matter of feeling. You’ve got another man’s child in you. That’s all I can seem to think of. You say you love me. Well, I love you too. How would you feel if I told you there was a girl going to have a child of mine – some other girl, some stranger? You’re probably quite prepared to stomach the fact that I’ve slept with girls before you, you’d think it odd if I hadn’t, but if you can’t see that a baby makes a difference to how much other affairs matter, I can’t explain it to you.’
He tried to walk past me down the stairs, but I stopped him.
‘Toby, please wait!’ The hurt was beginning from when he had stood unmoving when I put my arms round him, but I drove myself through it. ‘If we love each other, surely something can be done!’
‘Like what? Do you want me to marry you?’
He had been driven to bitterness through pain, but I didn’t see that then. I only died a small death at his words and the way he said them. I shrank away from him, feeling a coldness run out all over me as if I really had died.
He stood there for a moment and then said, in a gentler voice, ‘I didn’t mean that the way it sounded …’
‘You did!’ I cried accusingly, lost in misery.
‘All right,’ he said quietly, ‘I did. But only for a moment. Forgive me.’
‘No!’ I shouted from the depths of my hurt. ‘What’s the good of forgiving each other! If I forgive you for being male and cruel and unreasonable, you must forgive me for being female and for carrying another man’s child and wanting you at the same time. The whole thing’s unfair, life’s unjust and people are continually hurting and hating each other, and forgiving doesn’t help – why should I forgive you anyway, when you’ll never forgive me?’ I was crying outright now, and he made a move towards me which I sensed in the darkness, but I lashed out with my hand and knocked his arm down, and cried, ‘Leave me alone, that’s what you want to do!’
‘I don’t,’ he said painfully. ‘I don’t want to leave you. Why do you think I’m still here?’ He reached out slowly, as if with a conscious effort, and took hold of both my arms. I was stiff and shaking and I had my face in my hands, crying unrestrainedly. But the touch of his hands released something in me and the crying began to ease. ‘Don’t,’ he kept saying. ‘Don’t. It’s bad for you to cry like that.’ Very gradually he drew me closer until our bodies were touching. His was trembling too. My arms ached to go round him, but I kept them rigidly at my sides for a long time, punishing him for what he’d done to me earlier. But now he was cuddling me and whispering in my ear with helpless pleading, ‘Hold me – hold me–’ Suddenly I was hugging him with all my strength; our bodies were strung tight together and we were kissing each other’s cheeks with little frantic kisses – we couldn’t bear to draw apart even enough to find each other’s lips.
We went into my room at last, with our arms round each other, and in the doorway I stopped dead because I’d forgotten what Toby had said about John and for a second I thought I was in the wrong room. There was no more ugly brown wallpaper; it had all been stripped off, and the walls were white-washed. It made the room look bigger and lighter and altogether different. He’d tidied everything up and put back all my things, even the picture. Over the picture was a spray of holly. It made the room bright and welcoming and almost beautiful.
I turned to Toby to exclaim about it, but he was standing there staring round with a look of desolation. ‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘Don’t you think it looks wonderful?’
‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘I just wish to God I’d had something to do with it. I heard him working away up here alone, and he kept coming down all eager and excited and asking me to come and look, and I wouldn’t … of all the ridiculous, petty … I could kick myself.’
I understood perfectly. ‘It doesn’t matter. Truly it doesn’t.’
He sighed and moved into the room. He couldn’t stop torturing himself by examining the room’s new look from every angle. He even switched on the blue urinal lamp to see how its light looked against the clean walls. I could see he was going to be unhappy about it for a long time, and that there was nothing I could do about it.
I drew back the curtains and stood looking out. After a moment Toby came up behind me and rested his chin on my shoulder. In an upstairs window across the street was a small Christmas tree. It had no lights of its own, but the lights from the room behind glinted on its bits of tinsel.
I put my hand up and rested it against Toby’s cheek. ‘Do you realize it’s nearly Christmas?’ I said.
‘I’ve been dreading it,’ he said.
‘Do you still?’
He turned his head and kissed my wrist quickly, almost shyly. ‘No.’
‘Couldn’t we make some concessions to it?’
‘Do you mean, get a tree?’
‘Perhaps that’d be going too far,’ but I must have sounded wistful, because he said, ‘I don’t see why. We could go out tomorrow and get one in the market.’
‘What would we put on it?’
‘We could pick up some cheap stuff at Woolworth’s.’
‘Woolworth’s! That’s about the most expensive place you can go!’
‘Well, or perhaps we could make some. I’ve always thought it would be fun – We never celebrated Christmas at home.’
I realized I knew almost nothing about his background. It would be fun to find out all that, slowly and at leisure. But first there was the other thing, which we seemed to be glossing over and which couldn’t be glossed over. I turned to him and said deliberately, ‘There are other things I’ll have to start making.’
The flinch was only in his eyes, and he didn’t turn away. He just said, ‘You’ve faced it, haven’t you? Completely, I mean.’
‘Yes, I think so,’ I said.
‘And I’ll have to, too, won’t I?’
‘It would help.’
He walked away to the fireplace and stood with his head bent, thinking. After a while he said, ‘There’s such a lot I don’t know.’
‘I’ll tell you –’
‘No, I don’t think I want you to. I only want to know one thing; I know it shouldn’t be all-important, but deep down it’s the thing I’ve thought about most.’ He looked up and his eyes were dark, and we were both embarrassed in a way that we wouldn’t have been if we’d been close together, but it was better that we should stand on our own for this.
‘What is it?’
‘You said just now – if it could happen like that with us, why should I think it couldn’t happen between you and somebody else? But I can’t – I mean, I don’t want to believe it could happen – with anyone else – the way it was with us. It’s the same act – basically – but it’s so different each time, and I’ve never felt with any other woman what I felt with you. I’m getting tied up in what I’m trying to ask – it’s simply this – was it – the same – no, that’s not the word. Was it –’
‘Oh darling –’
‘– as perfect, as –’
‘No, Toby, please stop! There’s no comparison, none! You don’t know, it’s like asking me how hell compares with heaven, it’s just absurd! If that’s all –’
‘Is that really true?’
The L-Shaped Room Page 20
