Room Upstairs

by Monica Dickens

  Cookes had come and gone at Camden House, and in the many gaps between them, Sybil had cooked for everyone, and since the war always for Theo and whoever else was there.

  Her cakes had been her triumph. Even when there was a cook, it was ‘one of Sybil’s cakes’ that honoured each anniversary, each special guest. In the doldrums of Saturday afternoon, when Melia and the mangled dog were immured above, she wanted to make a cake. There were no packets of cake mix in the cupboards, for Melia was not that sort of woman. Nor was Sybil, but when she went to the buckled, grease-spattered cook book, she could not follow the instructions.

  Her brain tottered, defeated, and would not make the effort to regiment the ingreshents and tell her how to start.

  She could not make a cake! She, Sybil Camden Prince, feeder of a family, who had made a cake at least every three days when the children were at home.

  That is how she thought of herself, fortyish, as she was in the twenties, those comfortable years when Nancy and Walter took care of what she and Theo did not want to do, but didn’t act funny about what they did want to do, like Anna Romiza if you tried to help by polishing silver. ‘I destroyed myself over that flatware only last week.’

  She was plump at forty - where had all that flesh gone to? - pottering endlessly in the kitchen, pickling, preserving, the children knowing where to find her, knowing there was always something in the oven. She saw herself like that still. Even though you knew you were eighty, addressed yourself as Old Fool, and told people: I’m only a useless old woman, you did not completely believe it. If you did, you would not wait for death to catch you. You would go to meet it.

  So when Melia was locked in the room over the porch, Sybil felt fortyish and wanted to bake a cake, and when she could not, she cried, and could not understand what was wrong. She had always had a hand with cakes. Always something in the oven.

  ‘The children never used to ask: Where’s Mother?’ she told Melia next day. ‘They just came straight to the kitchen.’

  Melia had a hangover and was not speaking. She had made a sketchy stab at a late lunch for both of them, and because she did not seem able to carry a tray into the dining room, Sybil sat down at the kitchen table and said: ‘I’ll have it here with you.’

  The bars were down. Now that it was done, it was a great relief. She would not have to fix her hair before supper and change her slippers for shoes. She and Melia could eat fried chicken in their fingers together, and hurl the bones at the garbage pail, as she had done in the days before My Accident, when Anna had gone home and she was peacefully alone.

  ‘We had a couple then, you see.’ she chatted on to Melia, because she did not want the two of them to sit there masticating in silence, like an institution. ‘Nancy and Walter. Great big people, muscles, both of them. Nancy could turn over that big mattress of mine, flip, just like that. He was in charge of the farm and the nursery, and I’ll bet you never saw such peony blooms as that man raised. For Harvard Commencement, it was never anything but peonies from Camden Gardens. Red blooms as big as your head.’

  Melia laid hers in the flat of one hand, and sighed, pushing potato about with a fork.

  ‘Peonies were always one of our specialities. I think I’ve told you. It’s the soil. When my husband started the gardens again after World War One, some of his red peonies were plants my father had put in, before the turn of the century. The lazy man’s flower he called them, because they hate to be moved.

  ‘There was nothing he didn’t know about flowers and trees, Melia, nothing. The gardens he made here - nothing like it had been seen in New England. He used to go all over the State, lecturing. I wish you could see his notebooks. I have them somewhere, with all his herbal remeshes, handed down from the first settlers and the Indians. It was an old Indian helped my father lay out the gardens when he first built this house. Long before I was born, of course.’

  Sybil smiled, and gave a small laugh as well, because if Melia was not looking, she might be listening, and if she was not listening, she might be looking, in spite of the aspic glazing of her eye.

  Since she seemed to be doing neither, Sybil stood up and said brightly: ‘I’ll clear the plates.’

  There was some meat on Melia’s plate. As Sybil slid it away from between her diconsolate elbows, she suddenly threw back her head and howled: ‘He could have had that!’ and flung her whole torso down on the table with her arms outstretched, and sobbed the starch out of the chequered tablecloth.

  After the benison of tears, the house purred on as before. Melia reverted to the treasure she had always been, the trash men took away the bottles Sybil found feebly camouflaged in the linen closet, and nothing was said.

  One evening shortly before Christmas, Laurie called to ask if they could come for the weekend.

  ‘Ask Melia to make one of her pot roasts. Mont is coming over, and we’ll bring some wine.’

  Wine! Sybil’s thin grey hair stood on end. The word was a sluice gate opening, and memory rushed in.

  Ever since Melia had come stumping in out of the light snow this morning, Sybil had been worrying where she had seen a parcel that size and shape before.

  ‘Melia dear, where are you?’

  ‘Hullo dear.’

  That was the way they talked to each other now, like pigeons on a ledge.

  Sybil went to the foot of the stairs and looked up at Melia’s cheerful face, hanging over the rail above. ‘Laurie and Jess are coming tomorrow. Could you make a pot roast?’

  ‘Yes dear.’

  Something had got to be said. For your sake, Melia Mulligan, I’ve got to brave it out now, because if they find out, you and I are goners both.

  ‘And Melia.’

  ‘Yes dear.’

  ‘I don’t care to say this, but you - you’ve got some liquor in your room, haven’t you?’

  Melia’s pink smile disappeared. Her face closed up.

  ‘Haven’t you?’

  Melia took her pudgy pastry hands off the rail. She was flushed, but steady.

  ‘All I ask is this,’ Sybil said, looking not up, but straight ahead at the photograph of President Harding arriving at Buzzard’s Bay station on his campaign tour, ‘please don’t - don’t make yourself sick while the children are here. Please.’

  I’m not criticizing, she wanted to say. I’m sure you have your troubles. We all do. I’m just lucky that mine don’t take me to the bottle.

  But Melia had gone to her room and shot the bolt, and was seen no more that evening. Good thing they had had supper. Or had they? Sybil was too upset to remember.

  Next morning, Melia did not wake Sybil with hot chocolate, and was not cosily downstairs in her woolly breakfast slippers when she went down to investigate. Sybil climbed upstairs again, slowly, two feet on each step. Her leg was bad today. It was still snowing. Melia would never get the car up the steep driveway to get the meat. Everything was horrible.

  ‘Melia dear.’ The door was still bolted. ‘Are you all right?’ What was she doing? What did people do when they locked themselves in for an orgy?

  The bed creaked, and Melia called out thickly: ‘Go away.’

  ‘I asked you!’ Sybil threw away the pigeon talk, and blazed. Oh, it was too bad. Too bad of her after everything Sybil had done. ‘How could you, Melia, how could you let me down like this?’

  ‘You shouldn’t have said such a terrible thing last night. You shouldn’t have said that to me. You hurt my feelings.’

  ‘So it’s my fault now? Very funny.’ Sybil said bitterly. ‘Very, very funny.’ She made a witch’s face at the door, and then very slowly, like a pallbearer, went downstairs to see what must be done.

  *

  Laurie and Jess left the car at the top of the drive and ran down, sliding and plunging in the deep snow, ending up together with a crash against the back door, the basket swinging.

  They pushed in, laughing, shaking snow, stamping their feet, clinging for a moment to press icy faces together in the little hall.

 
; No Melia in the kitchen, no smell of meat or vegetables. They put down the small basket and went hallooing through the house. It was to be the big surprise. A puppy for Melia, an embryo creature, naked and shivering, which would grow up to be every bit as unattractive as Tiger, now buried with a wooden cross under the mountain laurel.

  Sybil was upstairs, putting sheets on their bed, panting slightly, her lips a little blue.

  ‘Where’s the widow Mulligan!’

  ‘She’s lying down,’ Sybil whispered, and made a mouth for them to do the same. ‘She’s not well.’

  ‘What’s the matter? We’ll have Mont look at her,’ Laurie said.

  ‘It’s nothing. She wants to be left in peace. Let’s go down. We don’t want to waken her.’

  ‘But she’s never sick,’ Laurie objected.

  ‘Well, she is now,’ his grandmother answered sharply. ‘Stop arguing and go downstairs.’

  She had not ordered them about for so long that they were glad, and forgot how strained she looked in the excitement of showing her the puppy, feeding it, and chasing it with a scatter of rugs through the rooms which led into each other round the central chimney.

  ‘What’s this?’ Mont said, when he arrived, whistling sweetly outside the window, like Sybil’s lover. ‘You look terrible, Mrs P.’

  ‘I’ve had a cold.’

  ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘Well, I’m tired. I’ve been wrapping Christmas presents.’ He reached for her wrist, but she pulled it away. ‘Leave me alone, Montgomery. When I want a physical examination I’ll tell you. You are invited to dinner, nothing more. And don’t raise your eyebrows at Jess. She thinks you are too brash for a doctor too.’

  ‘Gramma I—’ She had wanted to come, but if Sybil was going to play at acid old lady, Jess would rather go back to Cambridge.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’ Mont asked briskly, as if he had just come in at the door and no one had yet said anything. He asked it in his rubbing hands voice, bustling Well, well, well! into a sickroom to flatten the aching body ever farther into the mattress by the exuberance of his rangy youth. Jess had seen him in action when Sybil was ill. She was not going to let him deliver her baby, whatever Laurie said. No argument yet. First she had to get pregnant.

  ‘We were going to have pot roast,’ Sybil said, ‘but then Melia took sick, so I called Arthur Davis and he sent me up a nice piece of steak with his boy. I thought Jess could—’

  ‘How long has Melia been sick then?’

  ‘Oh - since yesterday.’

  ‘Has Anna been here? Who’s been taking care of you?’

  ‘Don’t fuss, boy. I took care of myself for years before I gave a home to Melia Mulligan.’

  Jess found a small chicken pie in the stove, thawed but uncooked. Sybil must have forgotten to light the oven. She found several cats crying for food. Two were shut in the cellar, and one was in the little back bedroom off the kitchen, where it had torn up some sponge rubber curlers left behind by one of Laurie’s cousins. She found a blackened milk saucepan, and a cigarette which had dropped out of an ashtray and burned a little furrow in the counter.

  What if Melia were really ill? What on earth would they do!

  After the steak and wine, Sybil looked so much better that someone asked her: ‘What else have you eaten today?’

  ‘Breakfast. Lunch. The usual things.’

  ‘That chicken pie must have tasted good, stone cold with raw pastry,’ Jess said. Sybil remembered, and flagged her a look which asked: Don’t give me away.

  Peaceful old age. What a cheat. It was even more of a battle to keep your end up than when you were young. For the first time since she had come nervously into the unknown kitchen the day before her wedding, and seen at once that she was taking Laurie not from his mother, but his grandmother, Jess felt a rush of love and pity. She put out a hand across the table, and the old woman took it, turning the gold ring on Jess’s blunt finger.

  ‘You bite your nails,’ she said gruffly, but something had been achieved between them.

  *

  Sybil was in bed, and Laurie and Mont were grunting over the chessboard like pensioners. Montgomery was winning. ‘Take the phone off the hook.’ December was always a big month for Plymouth babies, because the opening of the tourist season made April high with sap and hope.

  When Jess went towards the stairs, Laurie looked up and asked: ‘Where are you going?’

  These days, he was very conscious of where she was, all the time. At the flat, if she went down to get the mail without telling him, he would ask anxiously: ‘Where have you been?’ When she went out to buy food in the late afternoon after work, they would come together again among the grocery bags and ginger ale cartons as if they had been parted by a war. It was marvellous.

  ‘I’ll be down.’

  Sybil’s door was ajar, to get the light from the hall. Jess shut it softly, for Sybil woke with the immediacy of age, and would want to come into Emerson’s room with her. Jess wanted just to stand there by herself, and listen, and know that she was not afraid.

  And she was not. Outside the window, the snow was still falling, piling softly on the bare branches, mounding over the bushes like kitchen towels spread out to dry on the goose-berries in her mother’s back garden. A snow plough went by with a noise like a train, lights flashing, and a few cars, which showed the snow in the cone of their lights, before they were gone and it was falling into blackness.

  Jess had left the door ajar, and she did not turn on the light. She sat on the bed, then lay down and swung up her feet. She was wearing red tights, and after she kicked her boots off when they arrived, she had not bothered to put on shoes. She hardly ever wore shoes in the house. Without them, She was just a little shorter than Laurie.

  Woodwork in the room ticked. A radiator rumbled like intestines. Downstairs, Mont laughed, and a chair scraped back, and she heard Laurie at the kitchen sink, banging ice out of the tray.

  Because she felt contented and secure, she shut her eyes and let herself remember that night six months ago when she had lain listening to the cars, and staring wideawake at her dismay. It had seemed such an adventure. To get Laurie’s desperate cable. To plan everything in a rush. To fly to America to be married the next day. What girl she knew had ever had anything half as exciting happen to her? To be free suddenly. Flying to freedom, she had thought, with drama, peering through the plane window to see the listlessly waving figures on the roof in the rain.

  And then the reckoning. She had flown, but from one trap into another. She had committed herself to a stranger, and there was no way out. She had somehow slept at last, and when she woke in a panic of fear, she had thought for an instant it was the same panic of her thoughts, before she realized that there was someone sharing the dark with her. There was someone beside her in the bed.

  That was when she had screamed, and they came in and turned on the light and there was no one there. Nothing but her own sobbing breath, shuddering in her throat.

  In England, Jess had never thought about ghosts. Well, there had never been any. In the kind of houses and flats her family and friends lived in, the only spectre was the landlord or the man collecting payments on the washing machine. In the stately homes she had visited with Rodge, before Laurie upset all her ideas about men: ‘This is where the ghost walks.’ the guide would say, but no one believed it. Most of them weren’t listening. They were speculating how much things were worth, and whether the guide was a poor relation of the Duke.

  You’re daft, her mother would say if she could see her lying on one side of the bed, with her hands by her sides and her red toes turned up like a tomb. What in the world are you lying there for in the dark with all your clothes on?

  To prove something to myself.

  Prove yourself to others first. What will people say?

  Jess laughed, because it was funny when it was three thousand miles away, and even rather dear. From the end of the narrow passage which ran behind her head, as if in answer, came
a disjointed cackle, and a small hollow sound like a ping-pong ball.

  Melia’s door was bolted on the inside. She would not open it, or even answer, so Laurie slid a thin file past the edge of the door, which did not fit any better than the others in the house, and edged the bolt back.

  The bed was neatly made, the ornaments stood pat, the braided rugs were geometrically in place. Melia sat upright on a straight chair in the middle of the floor and recognized nobody. At her feet, the bottles of California red were ranged like candlepins. The only thing out of order was a pink plastic toothmug which had fallen upside down on the floor, seeping a small stain.

  ‘A wino.’ Mont helped Laurie to heave her on to the bed and cover her.

  ‘Darling Melia,’ Laurie said. ‘She was so perfect. Damn her.’

  Woken by the noise, Sybil stood silently in the doorway with her teeth out and a stringy shawl clutched round her like a derelict.

  ‘Don’t cry, Gramma,’ Jess said, as she took her arm to turn her away, and saw that her eyes were dim with tears.

  ‘It was the toothmug. A plastic toothmug. She could have taken any of my good glasses. She knew that.’

  In bed, she turned up the yellowish whites of her eyes at Jess. ‘Please don’t make her go.’ But she was too weak next morning to lie, and when they made her tell them that Melia had done this before, it was pack and out, with the teddy coat and the furry mittens like paws, which Sybil had given her.

  Too big a risk, they said, and Sybil should have been pleased that they cared so much, but she was not. She wasn’t afraid of Melia. Laurie was. He was afraid to be alone in a car with her. She might talk, or she might not, but he would not know what to say either way. Montgomery took her to a brother they discovered in Brockton, who received her without surprise, although Melia had never even mentioned him.

  She took the hooded basket, and the puppy Tiger Two, ‘as a memento of the happiest days of my life’, she said, and totally unmanned Montgomery in Brockton by pressing her pink velvet lips to his cheek.