Room Upstairs

by Monica Dickens

  No companions. No housekeepers. Not one.

  Companion-housekeeper wanted for elderly lady in beautiful country home near Plymouth. Good salary to right person.

  In three weeks, Jess spent over thirty dollars on her attractive offer. No one cared.

  When the call came from Mrs Melia Mulligan, who would go anywhere, do anything, love anybody, as long as she could bring her little dog, just like a child to her, Jess called Laurie at his office excitedly and said: ‘I’m going to take her, whatever she’s like.’

  ‘Very well. Thank you. That is good news indeed.’ The juniors were not allowed to take personal calls.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Thank you. Yes. I appreciate it.’

  *

  ‘Mulligan?’ Sybil raised her bony nose like a retriever, and scented the idea of Mrs Melia.

  ‘Well, but all the charm of them—’

  ‘She’ll not have long to charm me.’ Sybil said. ‘Just till I can go without my stick. Does she want the earth?’

  ‘Not too bad. Laurie will pay her for you, if you like.’

  ‘I’ll pay her. That way, she’ll always know who’s boss.’

  *

  But there was no question of Melia Mulligan not knowing.

  She was plump and unpretentious, with long pocketed aprons, and hair drawn neatly back into a small colourless bun like an English muffin before toasting.

  After her first shock at seeing the black Priscilla stove -’Don’t tell me I’ve to cook on that!’ recoiling as if the kitchen were alive with roaches - she made purring acceptance of everything in the house, and thanked Sybil, almost with tears, for her room over the side porch, which had been done up with new curtains and bedspread by Jess.

  She brought a hooded basket for the small dog, and covered its cushion with a piece of material left ova: from the curtains. Tiger was a sharp-nosed weakling with huge waxy ears, who shivered a lot because he had no hair, only a sort of suede pile on his rodent body. He sat in the basket most of the time, peering out of the opening like an owl in a tree, and was no trouble to anybody.

  Melia was amiable and sweet spoken, with a ready laugh and a snatch of song to lighten all tasks. She cleaned the windows, and tore down curtains to have at them with bleach and starch, and made little creamy puddings in glass dishes for Sybil, and carried up trays when she went to bed early, which was often, for she still found herself easily tired.

  She swept leaves from the walks when the man did not come, and struck geranium cuttings before the frost knocked out the straggled plants, and even turned out all the old medicine bottles from the cupboard at the top of the stairs. On Anna Romiza’s mornings, the coffeepot was always on the go, and banana bread, with so little left to do that Anna revised her opinion of the job and stopped telling her son it was time his poor mother retired.

  Sybil was not allowed to drive, ‘for a while’, they said, but they had been trying to get her off the road for years. However, Mrs Mulligan drove Sybil’s car neatly and safely, and they took little trips to admire what Melia called the foliage, and pottered round the supermarket together, with Sybil pushing the shopping cart to keep herself steady, while Melia popped back and forth with things from the shelves, asking: ‘Do you fancy this, my lady?’

  People who met Sybil in the town, where she knew everybody except newcomers of ten years or so, exclaimed at how well she looked.

  ‘The word went out that you were dead,’ Maud Owens told her bluntly, eating Melia’s cake, lifting her skirt to warm her bony knees at Melia’s red-hot fire. ‘But you look better than ever. I wish someone would find a Mrs Mulligan for me. I’m sick of cooking for myself. And I’m sick of frozen pies and TV dinners. That’s a cute little dog too. Here fellow -here stoopid.’

  There was nothing cute about Tiger really, but he was part of the picture of cosiness. He was Melia’s child, who slept on her bed, and shared her meat, and had never even seen the label on a can of dog-food.

  When she was alone, before My Accident, Sybil, like Maud, had seldom bothered with a proper meal. But Melia loved to cook meat, and could do things with potatoes and pastry that began to put back some of the weight that Sybil had lost on the genteel hospital food.

  When Montgomery Jones discovered what fine meals they were having in the yellow house down there in the hollow between the road and the rising pasture, his little foreign car would frequently nose down the zigzag driveway at supper time. He was cooking for himself in an elongated apartment over his office, ‘till I can find a wife’, though he was not looking, as far as Sybil could see.

  ‘Just stopped by to see how it’s going, Mrs P,’ and Melia would come through from the kitchen, rosily beaming. ‘If’s a funny thing, Doctor, but I’ve a roast in my oven only wants ten minutes to carving.’

  Laurie and Jess found Montgomery very much at home, mixing martinis for them when they arrived on Friday night for the weekend.

  He stayed for dinner. ‘He always does.’ Sybil said, and afterwards she brought out some of the old blackberry brandy, and they played cards before the fire. When Jess helped her up the stairs to bed, she was able to look Emerson’s green door in the face for a moment, before turning quickly away.

  ‘You mustn’t be afraid, Jess dear,’ Sybil clung to the rail above the stair well, getting back her breath. ‘Come into the room with me,’ she said, more gently than she had yet spoken to Jess. There was a tenuous suspicion between them still. Not dislike, and not quite jealousy, but strangely to Jess, she was the only one who made her feel an alien, although Sybil was less American than anybody else.

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come.’ Sybil rapped her cane on the floor. She had said she would have Melia only until she could abandon the cane. It was beginning to be doubtful whether she would abandon either of them. Melia had turned her into a cosseted old lady. The cane had provided her with a whole new stock of old lady gestures. She could swish with it at the tall dying weeds along the driveway, point it at the cars like a gun, sit with it between her knees in a witch’s pose, chin on her hands curved over the handle, thump its rubber tip to emphasize or command.

  Gently, for she was not imperious, in spite of the cane, she took Jess’s hand and pulled her to the door of the front bedroom.

  ‘Open the door.’

  ‘You open it.’

  Because the house was not square any more, the door sloped and stuck a little. Jess caught her breath as Sybil pushed briskly, then let it out on a short laugh. What had she expected to see? The room was just the same. Faint breath, like an old book, from the wallpaper whose faded pattern did not fit the ceiling line. The shining black fireplace, with the glassed over picture some child had painted on the wood above. The posted bed, with the soft rays of colour, quilted like the sun in silks and prints and chequered gingham.

  Jess put a hand on the bed, and then sat down. The terror of the night before her wedding seemed far away. Had she imagined it? Had it been a dream?

  After switching on the light, Sybil crossed to the window, stepping carefully on the uneven floor. The lights of a car flooded the sky between the bare branches of the trees, and she shook her fist at it ritually, with the thumb up. She turned round, still wearing her road grimace, and let it broaden into a smile.

  ‘You see. There is nothing to be afraid of here.’

  ‘But you said… you know----’

  ‘Oh yes, I know,’ Sybil said matter of factly, and it did seem absurd to imagine fear in the homely, lighted room.

  But Jess had to ask, whispering it so that there was a chance that Sybil might not hear, and she would not have an answer: ‘You know there is a ghost.’

  ‘The only ghosts in this house are happy ones, my dear,’ Sybil said, quite casually, as if she were speaking of the wiring, or the drains.

  *

  ’Of course, there aren’t really any ghosts here at all,’ Laurie said downstairs, ‘happy ones or sad. She makes them up to give the
house more antiquity. Don’t let her scare you, darling. She’s only trying to impress.’

  ‘I’m not scared.’

  Mont moved across the sofa to let her sit by the fire, and said: ‘I should think it’s rather hard to impress an English person with anything less than five hundred years old. Or scare them.’

  ‘I was though.’ Jess looked at him, her eyes round. One day she was going to tell someone. It might be Mont.

  ‘Not of the ghost,’ Laurie said. ‘She was scared of marriage. That’s why she yelled. No one’s ever been frightened here. Except my poor Aunt Mary, and she’d be frightened in a washroom. It’s always been a happy house, full of family, and people at home with each other. Not like the house at Northampton, when my parents were together. It bulged with hate. You could see it as you walked down the street. I always came here whenever I could. When I was at Harvard, Mother was courting whats-his-name, so I could come here all the time. I brought all my friends, and they used to feel it too. Everyone was always happy here.’

  And Jess was happy that weekend. More steadily happy than she had been since she and Laurie had known each other. Even in London with all she first excitement of love, it had been too unpredictable. Experimenting, misjudging, saying things too quickly, not guessing they would hurt.

  Until Laurie, the boys she had known had hurt her. They had all been too casual to let her hurt them. Laurie was vulnerable, wary as an adolescent. It had been baffling at first to lose him suddenly, without knowing why.

  And those first months at the flat with someone else’s furniture and saucepans, nothing they had acquired together, setting up provisional house like strangers almost, because there had never been enough time in London for discovery. Finding joy. Finding disappointment. Disappointed with him for being himself and not a projection of her. Disappointed with herself because marriage did not automatically sweeten and soften her, as she had expected. Watching from the high window to analyse her feelings when his head came out of the cave of the subway. Getting out of bed and going into the other room in she dark, because she dared not let him wake and find her crying stupidly for England.

  That weekend at Camden House, everything was right and clear, and they were perfectly in love.

  November was like September, with sun and birds and soft damp earth, and Laurie and she wandered all over the land, enchanted with each other and the easiness of life together. He showed her all his childhood places. The rabbit bank. The half-dozen boards nailed askew for a lookout in the pine tree from whose top you could sometimes see Provincetown. The dusty seedhouse with the rotting shelves and broken chairs, too far away from the house to hear a grown-up calling.

  Drawn into his boyhood there, they fished in the pond, thick with closed lily pads, and spent hours in the old nursery garden on the hill, pulling the choking vines away from the bushes and plants that had survived the many years of neglect, tearing the dry grass from the wilderness of the herb plot, until the pattern of brick edges and paths began to reappear.

  ‘When we live here,’ Laurie said, ‘we’ll bring this garden back again. We’ll get back the barn and have our own cows. Clear the pond and stock it. Make over the tennis court. We could bring the place back to what it was, and our kids will do all the things I did.’

  When the roadway was hacked out across the parkland, across the dirt track that wandered in from the road to the barn and then on to the house, there was no way to get the cows to pasture on the other side. So the engineers had made a tunnel through the embankment, slightly higher and broader than a cow.

  Laurie and Jess went through to clean out the bottles and litter that the teenagers left in summer, sneaking in at the barn end which was on the town side.

  Standing in the middle of the tunnel, with her shoulders hunched against the corrugated roof to see if she could feel the cars, Jess was suddenly so perfectly happy that she said: ‘I’d like to have a baby,’ and they ran crouched through the tunnel together, shrieking at the echo, stumbling out through the bushes into the sun.

  If this place were theirs, even the road, even the noisome, insolent road, could not spoil their life. When they kissed Sybil goodbye, they asked her, asking Melia too, for she was part of the friendliness and warmth: ‘Can we come next Friday?’

  Four

  The cats had long ago all come back to the house, to cry round Melia at the chopping board, and take swats at Tiger’s rat tail, which was why he spent most of his time in the basket, looking out at them with bulging sticky eyes.

  Having discovered the mice while Sybil was in the hospital, the cats often went back to the barn by way of the tunnel under the road, coming and going like subway commuters under the whining snow tyres of the sparse winter traffic. But Tiger was too stupid to learn about the tunnel. Mousing was his only blood sport, and when he wanted to visit the barn, he followed his eyes instead of his senses, and went under the fence and across the road, hoppity on three legs if it was a particularly nervous day.

  When the doorknocker pounded one Saturday morning, it did not sound like doom. It sounded like the newspaper boy wanting his money.

  Sybil went to the back door, which was the one everyone used, since the front door was at the opposite end of the house from the hew driveway that was made when the road was built. She opened the door looking down, for the newspaper boy this year was very small, and looked straight at the dead body of Tiger, bloody in the arms of a man who said: ‘I couldn’t do nothing about it, lady. He run right out. It wasn’t my fault. There wasn’t nothing I could—’

  ‘Nobody is blaming you,’ Sybil said tartly, marvelling at her calm, but Melia pushed past her with a shriek to get to the dog, and the wake was on.

  She did not cry. Sybil would have liked to comfort her, and share her grief, but Melia would not even let her talk about it.

  Tight-lipped, she wrapped the dog in Sybil’s new red, white and blue roller towel, and laid him in the hooded basket, and took it up to her room.

  She came down wearing her brown coat with the teddy bear collar, and without a word, took the car keys off the hook at the back of the cellar door.

  Gone for some blackcrepe, perhaps. Sybil wandered about, unable to settle, ashamed of herself for wondering what was for lunch, feeling the loss, for Melia had no husband (if she had ever had one), no children, no friends or family who took any notice of her.

  Only me. This is her home. I will be extra kind to her. Get her another dog. Montgomery will find another one like that.

  When Melia came back with a longish parcel under her arm (crucifix? tombstone?), Sybil said kindly: ‘Don’t bother about cooking lunch. I don’t feel very hungry today.’ Which was just as well, for Melia stayed shut up in her room all day and all night, and did not answer any of the times that Sybil called anxiously through the door.

  *

  That first time that Melia Mulligan got drunk, Sybil told no one. It was not Melia’s fault. It was because of the dog. Anyone might get drunk if they lost a child. Even Theo, with his hard head, had got a little tipsy when his brother’s boy went down in the Astoria, and told Sybil that he had liked his nephew better than any of his own children.

  She could not tell anyone, because she was afraid they would fire Melia and put her in a nursing home, or the Old People’s Housing Project. Senior citizens. On the edge of the town, half a mile from the shops, two lines of dun coloured cabins created by the Town Fathers, whose dream of dear old lashes nodding feebly to each other from their doorsteps had materialized into a collection of rather masterful old persons with all their faculties, and a perpetual feud on with their neighbours.

  John? Impossible. Thelma - ha, ha. New Jersey with Mary, in that half a house, with the sullen girl roomers up top. An apartment with Laurie and Jess. But she did not want to live in an apartment. And they would not want her. The girl - the girl was all right. She was not admitting yet that she liked Jess. Might even say: I love you, if the girl would only say it first. They would be close, as long
as they were apart. Sybil as a liability would finish it. The British had no mercy.

  With Laurie alone, it could have worked. They had even talked of it, before he went to London. She could have looked after him. … Idiot, what are you saying? You can’t even look after yourself. Silly old senior citizen.

  While Melia was up in her room all those hours, out for the count, Sybil had found out the truth. They were right. She could not manage alone. The accident, the pneumonia, the long weeks in hospital had taken something from her.

  Her memory had been tricky for years. That happened much earlier than people thought, but at fifty, you could pasg it off as absent-mindedness. Later, she began to forget things that had happened five or ten years before, remembering in crystal detail events like Ted’s disastrous wedding, fifty years ago.

  She could remember much of the past, filed away when her brain was young and athletic; but now there were things, not only of five or ten years ago that she could not remember, but five or ten minutes.

  She would find herself in a room without knowing what she had come to fetch. She had to ask Melia: Where’s my cane? half a dozen times a day. Once when she was tired, she forgot she had had supper.

  She still tired easily. Her leg, ‘good as new’, according to the surgeon, though Montgomery was never so visionary, still gave her a lot of pain. Shall I ever walk to the top of the hill again and see the woods and ponds and the waiting sea?

  In the four years since Theo shed, she have lived by herself. How can you stay alone in this spooky old house all night? Anna used to say, slapping her great hand over her mouth as she heard the wind making oboe music in a drainpipe, or a sharp crack of old boards in changing weather. But Sybil had never been afraid of anything Now, to her disgust, she was sometimes fearful. What of? She did not know. Melia never took a day off, since she had nowhere to go and did not fancy Boston, but if she went out to the shops or the post office after dark, it always seemed as if she was gone longer than necessary. Sybil would turn on all the lamps in the downstairs rooms, and Melia would roll the car carefully down the drive to a house ‘All lit up like Christmas!’ and Sybil lied: ‘I thought it would look cheerful for you.’