The L-Shaped Room

by Lynne Reid Banks

  ‘Thank you, but I’m fond of this room. I’ll manage somehow.’

  ‘Ah well, but that’s the thing. I’ve had rooms empty so long, I’ll have to raise the rent on this one – well, bring it back to what it was, like, before Mrs Williams. Two-ten I used to charge for it then, plenty of people glad to pay it for a nice cheerful little place like this.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. All desire to laugh had left me.

  ‘Well, you think it over, dear,’ she said comfortably, heaving herself out of her chair. ‘Two-ten for this room, or three-ten for the nice big one on the first.’ At the door, she stopped to say, ‘I dare say you’ll want to fix it up a little, according to your own taste. I don’t mind, dear, not a bit. You just do what you like.’ And when I’ve done what I like, I thought, I’ll get kicked out of that one into another, in the hope that in due course I’ll transform the whole bloody house.

  When she’d gone I sat still. My heart was pounding and my hands were sticky. I looked round my room. I wondered why it hadn’t struck me before that I would have to leave it. I’d grown to love it and depend on it so much that perhaps I’d worked on the basis that it would magically stretch to accommodate the baby. Now I saw that it was only a little room, really; it had just seemed adequate to all contingencies because of its importance to me.

  I got up heavily and walked the few steps needed to traverse my kingdom. I touched the table whose scars had been decently hidden by a tablecloth ever since I arrived. I patted the walls in their proud new whiteness; I stood on my-sister-made-that-rug and stroked the friendly afghan. I thought that Doris would get a shock when she saw it without the trimmings which were mine – the flowers, the chair-cover, the curtains, the picture. Despite the walls and the wardrobe shelf, it would be a scant thirty bob’s worth again. I would have thought this funny if it hadn’t been for the sudden clarity with which I could picture the denuded room, as it would look when I left it.

  I went to an estate agent and obtained a long, deceitful list of flats. I walked my feet off. I told my first real lies, the lies implied by the situation, the lies made necessary by the innocent recurring questions.

  ‘What does your husband do, madam?’

  ‘Where’s your husband, dear? He shouldn’t let you do all the walking, should he?’

  ‘Oh, it won’t be big enough for three, madam.’

  I told them I was a widow. I got overwhelming sympathy which was worse than being despised. But I justified it to myself in a hundred ways until one day I went to look at a flat in a private house. It was far better than anything I had seen until then – it was lovely, in fact, but rather too expensive. The lady who owned the house was gracious and charming. She didn’t ask questions, just took it for granted that I had a husband; she spoke about him without a suspicion in her mind. I told her what I’d told the others. She didn’t doubt it for a second; but she became much more gentle and kind –even offering me the place at a ludicrously reduced rent, offering to look after me and the baby. She was making all sorts of plans in her kindness and sympathy, while I just stood there, facing my lie in growing agony.

  At last she noticed my unresponsive silence; she was too sensitive not to notice.

  ‘My dear, I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m making you unhappy with my fussing. Frankly, I don’t know how you can bear the situation at all; you’re the bravest person I’ve ever met. You must come here, that’s all I’ll say now. You will come, won’t you, and let us look after things, just at first?’

  She looked at me with her calm honest eyes, seeking so sincerely to help me, and I think she guessed the truth before I told it, because her face changed a little just before I began to speak.

  When I’d finished, she still looked at me, and not all the sympathy had gone. She thought for a little while, and then said: ‘You’re still welcome to come here.’

  I wanted to cry, but she was so dignified and so ready with sympathy that I felt it would be like begging. I told her it would be impossible now. ‘Perhaps if I’d told you the truth at first …’

  ‘Yes,’ she said sadly. She even understood that.

  At the door she shook hands with me and wished me luck. ‘May I give you a piece of advice?’ she asked gently. ‘I know how difficult it must be to tell people the truth. But do try. I’m sure it’s better.’

  I’d known all the time that it would be. But one always has to try the easy way, to prove that in the long run it’s harder than the other.

  I came home that day rather more tired than usual. It was two weeks since Billie Lee’s letter came – a month since I’d met Terry. I had been expecting to hear from Addy or Terry from day to day, but there’d been no word. I had been counting on finding a letter from Addy today. I was so sure there would be one that I’d let myself look forward to it. I hurried eagerly to the hall table before I had even closed the front door. There was nothing for me. I felt preposterously disappointed and hurt, as if Addy had let me down on purpose.

  The toil up the stairs was really a burden now, especially at the end of the day. I sat down several times and had trouble getting started again. I had a silly weak feeling that there was no point in going any further. Suddenly I was unbearably depressed. How could Addy not write? Now I stopped to think about it, why hadn’t she written ages ago, or come up to see me? Perhaps she’d been up, but hadn’t come by. Nobody ever came. You couldn’t blame them, but the fact remained – I hadn’t a single friend in the world, not one.

  I was sitting in despair half-way between the fourth and fifth landings when John started down the stairs and nearly fell over me.

  ‘Hullo, Janie,’ he said. ‘What you doin’ sittin’ there?’

  ‘Just sitting here,’ I said in a muffled voice.

  He bent closer. ‘You been cryin’?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said drearily.

  He sat down on the narrow stairs beside me. ‘You feelin’ lonesome?’

  ‘Yes,’ I gulped.

  He put his big arm round me. ‘Why you don’t come in to me when you feelin’ on your own? I play you my records, you see, cheer you up.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like me any more,’ I said childishly.

  ‘Who say I don’ like you?’

  ‘You never come to see me – nobody ever comes –’ I caught my breath in huge self-pity and began to weep afresh.

  He squeezed me in a brotherly way. ‘You silly. Someone come today.’

  I stopped crying and blinked. ‘What? Who? When?’

  He grinned at me. ‘You have a guess who.’

  I stared at him, Toby’s name forming in my mouth. But any mention of Toby always seemed to upset him, so I said instead, ‘A man or a woman?’

  ‘A man.’

  Could it be? ‘Toby?’ I asked tremulously.

  ‘No,’ he said, his face going sad. ‘Toby don’t come back to us no more.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘Your father.’

  It was the utter unexpectedness of it that knocked me endways. I couldn’t speak. I sat staring at John blankly, trying to take it in.

  ‘My father?’ I echoed at last, unbelievingly. ‘He came here?’

  ‘He come up the stairs, knock on your door. I come out of my room. Boy, was he surprise to see me! If he sees a elephant behind him, he couldn’t be more surprise!’ John evidently was not offended. He choked with laughter at the memory.

  ‘What did he want? What did he say?’

  ‘He say he want to see you. Say he’s your father.’ He stopped.

  ‘Well? What else?’

  ‘Nothin’ else. I tell him you out, be in later. He go off again.’

  ‘Didn’t he say anything? That he’d be back?’

  ‘Didn’ say nothin’ else, just went.’

  ‘How did he – did he look –’ I realized the futility of asking John that sort of question. I got to my feet, with him helping me solicitously. I still couldn’t qu
ite get used to the idea.

  ‘I wonder if I should phone him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Why not indeed? But I didn’t. I sat around all evening waiting for him to come back, or telephone me, or something. Nothing happened. I couldn’t really believe it, without the evidence of my own eyes. Suppose John had made a mistake somehow, or invented it out of a wish to cheer me up – if I phoned, what a fool I should look! Father would think I was crazy. On the other hand, if it were true – if he really had made the first move …

  I slept at last, but uneasily, waking up every now and then, half-thinking I’d dreamed what John had said. In the morning I thought of something.

  I knocked on John’s door. He appeared, baggy-eyed and in his underwear, still half-asleep.

  ‘The man who came yesterday – what did he look like?’

  ‘You don’ know what your own father look like?’

  ‘I’m not sure it really was my father.’

  ‘I don’t remember much – he was just a ordinary-type man.’ He rubbed his hand hard over his thick frizzy hair. ‘Nothin’ special about him. Oh –’ceptin’ his ears. Real big stickin’-out ears he had. It was that made me reminded of a elephant.’

  Chapter 22

  IT was time to go home.

  Suddenly I was in a hurry – an almost unendurable hurry to get there. But I made myself walk. Buses kept passing that would take me to the door, but I let them go. I must go slowly. I had to think, and be ready. I’d already made enough mistakes to be getting on with.

  In my pocket was the note Father had written me soon after I had gone to live in the L-shaped room. It still carried the myriad creases I’d inflicted on it in my self-pitying hurt because Father hadn’t crawled all the way to Fulham on his stomach to fetch me home. When I reached the Bridge – the boundary of home territory – I stopped near the middle and read the note again.

  Dear Jane,

  As you can imagine I find this letter hard to write. We haven’t been very close these last years, which may have been my fault, I suppose, though I don’t see where I went wrong …

  I looked out across the river. It was such a familiar view, the green towpath on one side, the old houses and angular blatant factories on the other. Above my head, gulls wheeled about the grey graceful spires. A bus rumbled across behind me, making the Bridge jog gently. I closed my eyes, and the sounds and smells – the rank mud, the yeast from the brewery – were more familiar still, carrying me back into my childhood. It took no effort of memory to shrink till my head was below the level of the rail, my hand firmly embedded in Father’s. He was telling me a story – my favourite story, the one about the brass plate.

  In his slow, serious voice he would read out, from the unpolished plate screwed to the wooden rail, the brief memorial to the brave South African lieutenant who had dived ‘from this spot’ into the Thames to save a woman’s life. ‘From this very spot?’ I would always ask, awed by the pinpointed locale of tragedy. ‘Yes,’ Father answered gravely. ‘Here he stood, and saw the woman float out from under the Bridge, shouting for help, and without even stopping to take off his coat he dived straight in.’ For years I thought Father had been there at the time, so convincingly did he invent details in response to my importuning. ‘He couldn’t swim very well himself, but he managed to get the woman to the bank, and then he died.’

  ‘But why? Why did he die?’ I remembered feeling almost frantic with anger that God should have let him die and spoil the story.

  Father never hid the facts of life or death from me. ‘Perhaps he’d swallowed a lot of water, or perhaps he had a weak heart. Anyway, I don’t suppose he minded dying,’ he would add to comfort me. ‘After all, not many people get a chance to save a life and be remembered for ever.’

  My eyes were still closed and I found my hand clenching hard on itself, as it used to grip Father’s, happy because it was the mythical lieutenant who had died and not anyone I really loved. The pattern of feeling came back to me so clearly, it was impossible not to remember at the same time how much I’d loved Father in those days – completely and trustingly and without complications.

  I tried to remember when I first began to feel he was failing me – or I him, because now I was no longer sure which was at the bottom of my resentment. It must have been when I left school without matriculating. I wanted to be an actress, and anyway I was bad at almost everything at school and so hated it. Several of my friends wanted to leave early too, and aggrievedly compared notes about their parents’ reactions – which were all along the lines of how much we would regret not getting a proper education. I boasted that my father was different; he would understand that I was an artist and that to stay on at school would be a fruitless waste of time. But when I confidently put this theory to the test, I got a terrible disappointment. Father refused to understand. His reaction was the same as all the other parents’. I was ashamed and angry, and from then on nothing went right. Everything I wanted to do, he seemed to disapprove of. Every time he proved to have been right, I resented him more. Any time he proved wrong, I scored a point for myself.

  So whose fault was it? Who started the race, who kept it going? I glanced at the note again.

  ‘I’ve always done my best …’ That had sounded so self-pitying when I had first read it. Now it seemed no more than the simple truth. ‘I think any parent would have felt as I did, being told a thing like that without any preparation. You almost seemed to enjoy telling me …’

  I had enjoyed it. It had been another point scored, the decisive victory. It had proved hollow immediately, but at the moment of telling, I’d relished it. It had been war between us for so long. Or perhaps I’d been fighting alone …

  Was it possible that I had formed a disillusioned mental picture of Father and fed it with misinterpretations of everything he did and said from that time on? Once I’d got it into my head that I was a disappointment to him, that he disliked, patronized, begrudged me … might not everything that happened tend to feed that belief? Had I, perhaps, wanted to feel ill-used, misunderstood? I read the last part of the letter.

  ‘I am still your Father and I don’t enjoy thinking about you alone somewhere. Your home is here and if you want to come back to it, you should feel free to. It’s not right for you to be among strangers. You are still my responsibility …’

  It was difficult to understand why I’d been unable to see anything in this but frozen patronage and a loveless charity. Now I could see nothing but an undemonstrative man struggling to pull his world together, with pride and prejudice on one side and love on the other. Before, I’d always imagined he saw me as the murderer of my mother. Now I realized that never, in reality, had he indicated that he felt this. Wasn’t it more likely that he regarded me as something saved from a disaster, all the more to be cherished and perfected because I was all he had left?

  I left the plate and walked on across the Bridge. I was getting tired now; I knew I should get on a bus, but it wasn’t far to go. I walked on, past the shops, past houses and pubs, past a montage of faces and gardens and windows and dogs, most of which I recognized remotely, like recollected bits of dreams. At last I came to the house, the house I’d been born in, as solid and brown and honest as ever, with its windows and front door so symmetrical and square-set, still making a face – a shocked, comically reproachful face – which I made back at it from force of old habit. ‘Don’t you say “Oh!” to me!’

  The front garden was, as always, tidy and well-dug; the drive was clear of bus-tickets and weeds. Only in the windows were there signs of neglect. The white net curtains were yellow, their ruffles limp. They gave the eyes of the house a tired, morning-after look.

  My mind winced from the prospect of this difficult meeting; but as soon as I came through the gate I couldn’t have turned back. It was like being passed from hand to clutching hand between two lines of people. As I climbed the steps heavily I found the right key ready in my hand.

  But I didn’t have to use i
t. The door was opened from inside and my father stood in front of me. He seemed very tall because he was two steps up from me, and his face, in the shadow of the doorway, looked only half familiar and much, much older than I remembered. He was not dressed for the office and for the first time it struck me that I shouldn’t have expected to find him at home on a Thursday morning.

  ‘Jane,’ he said without surprise.

  ‘Hallo, Father, aren’t you at the office?’ I could hardly speak, I found. The fatuous words barely seemed audible over the beating of my heart.

  ‘I stayed at home, hoping you’d come,’ he explained simply.

  He stepped back and I came into the hall. It was dim in there after the hard bright sunlight; dust-motes moved lazily in the ray from the fan-light. Everything had that only half-recognizable look. Nothing was actually changed, but there were no flowers; the mirrors had films over them, the carpet looked grubby and faded.

  ‘Place needs doing,’ said my father vaguely, seeing me glance round. ‘Come into the garden, I haven’t let that go.’

  He had always been a good gardener, loving the dullest chores and often, I remembered, boring me over meals with details of manures and blackfly and suckers on the lilac. Now, after so long without a garden, I felt a rush of nostalgia as Father led the way down the steps at the back and I saw the clusters of narcissi and tulips growing straight out of the grass under the blossoming pear, and the clumps of new green on the cut-back perennials, standing out sturdily against the well-turned earth. As we walked along the path I picked a sprig of baby mint and rubbed it in my fingers to breathe the soft spicy smell of coming Summer. As I straightened again, with difficulty, I saw Father look quickly away.