She lifted her skeleton’s hand, the sleeve of the nightgown falling away from a wrist you could circle with a finger and thumb, and Sybil put out her hand to take it, the two palms touching like dry leaves.
Still holding her hand, Sybil continued to stand and look down at the woman in the bed without speaking, and May seemed content to lie and look, nodding her head to words that did not need to be said. Even Dorothy was a little non-plussed. Things were not lively enough for her, so she said: ‘Well!’ and pulled up a chair and sat Sybil in it, and then introduced herself confidently to Aunt May, as if the name Dorothy Grue were a household word. She pushed Jess to the other side of the bed and shouted. ‘This is the cute little Britisher that’s married to Laurie. You remember Loll, of course. Oh, sure you do, that’s the girl. Boy, no flies on you, that’s for sure!’
She must have been hell as a nurse.
She made some more rallying conversation, and Jess contributed a little. The old lady in the bed, who was not deaf after all, smiled and nodded and said: Yes, yes, and That’s nice, and God bless you, and was such easy company that it was a few minutes before they realized that Sybil had not yet said a word.
‘Well, come now!’ said Dorothy, still master of ceremonies, especially since the big nurse had gone to the other side of the curtain at a tremulous summons. ‘What do you say to your sister, eh?’
‘My sister?’ Sybil looked up at her, her furry eyebrows drawn in with effort. From the other side of the bed, Jess could see her brain trying to work, like arms straining to lift a rock.
‘Hullo, Syb,’ May said helpfully, as if she were the visitor and Sybil the patient, and Sybil said, very formal, very polite: ‘It’s very nice to meet you.’
‘Gramma - for heaven’s sake!’ Jess looked blankly across the bed at Dorothy, needing her, ueexpectedly, in this predicament.
‘It’s your sister!’ Dorothy bent and hissed into Sybil’s ear.
But Sybil, still with the puzzled frown, leaned forward, still very courteous, and asked: ‘And where is your home?’ the only social conversation she could think of.
‘Why - Springfield.’ May was bearing up better than Dorothy and Jess, as if she understood better. ‘But Plymouth originally, you know that.’
‘Oh, that’s right. I knew I’d seen you some place before,’ Sybil said chattily, and lost interest, looking round the room at the plants, and the family photographs, without recognition, and the towels and plastic bibs hanging behind the door, labelled May and Elsie on adhesive tape. Stricken, clasping her arms as she felt herself beginning to tremble, Jess stared across the bed in horror. Sybil belonged to her life. Her feeling for her was part pity, part protectiveness, part dependence on the stability of her - always there, always welcoming. Now, with the stability disintegrating before her eyes, she realized that part of it was love.
Gramma, come back. I can’t bear it if you don’t come back.
It was the most terrible experience of my life, Jess heard herself gasping to Laurie. She would hurtle back to Cambridge like a maniac, gallop up the stairs and pound on the door and he would open it at once, because he had been waiting for her, and she would fall into his arms and gasp: ‘It was the most terrible experience of my life!’ and he would stroke her hair and be proud of her for going through it for him.
The coloured nurse came round the curtain, her white dress stretched tight across her muscular beam, and said: ‘How’s it going, girls? Having fun?’
‘She doesn’t know her,’ Dorothy mouthed.
‘Well, too bad, too bad. That’s the way it goes. Perhaps next time you come. We have our ups and downs, don’t we, May?’
‘I mean the other one.’ Dorothy turned aside and spoke behind her hand, two nurses together, keeping their sanity by sniggering at the nut cases.
‘I wonder if you ever met my father in Plymouth?’ Sybil asked, still making an effort to be social, although she was clearly bored.
‘Gramma - please!’ Jess blurted out in anguish, although she knew she should have kept quiet and seen this through maturely. ‘You must remember. It’s your sister, Gramma dear. Your sister May. You talked about her all the way here. You knew you were coming to see Aunt May. Please, Gramma.’
Please come back. I can’t just stand here and watch you go out of your mind.
‘She does know you,’ she said to the woman on the bed, who was smiling still, quite calm, her paper hands laid like mouse’s paws on the fold of the sheet.
‘I know,’ she said, very reasonably. ‘It’s all right. I know. Jess. You’re Laurie’s wife. They’ve told me about you. I’m very glad you came.’
She held up her hand for Jess to take, and then held up the other for Sybil, as if they were going to swing her up and away off the bed. Sybil got up, and held out her hand without stretching her elbow, and shook her sister’s hand with the vague, gracious smile she gave to people in Plymouth she thought she knew, but had no idea who they Were. Then she dropped May’s hand and looked round for Dorothy.
‘Want to go already?’ Dorothy said. ‘Well, perhaps it’s just as well.’
Aunt May squeezed Jess’s hand and then let go of it and nodded at her once or twice, her curved eyes hooding over.
‘Goodbye, Mrs - er. It was a great pleasure to meet you.’ Dorothy unhooked the cane from the back of the chair, and as she propelled Sybil towards the door, Jess heard her whisper coarsely to the nurse: ‘Looks like you’ve got the wrong one in here.’
Burning, unable to look at Sybil to see whether she had heard, Jess glanced back at the old woman on the bed and saw that tears were sliding from under her veined lids and over the ridge of her cheekbones.
*
Miraculously, when they got back to Camden House, Laurie was there. He had come down on the bus. Why? He did not say: I couldn’t stand the apartment without you. He laughed and said: ‘Aren’t you glad to see me?’
He was in the back room, with the sunset blazing behind his head and a card table drawn over his knees, strewn with books and papers.
She saw him at once, through the open doors of the kitchen and the hall and the dining room, and while Sybil and Dorothy were fussing at each other on the way in, Jess ran and flung herself at him: ‘It was the most terrible experience of my life!’
‘Watch out.’ He clutched at his papers while she hugged him frantically, until he fended her off and looked at her. ‘What’s the matter?’ But as she began to tell him, he looked over her shoulder and said: ‘Hello, Gramma. How was the trip?’
‘Wonderful, I’m never: scared with Jess.’ Sybil paused in her shuffling trot into the room to see if this had registered with Dorothy, but Dorothy was in the kitchen, turning knobs on the stove in a masterful way.
‘I’d forgotten you were coming, Laurie,’ she said happily. ‘Fancy me forgetting that.’
Jess opened her mouth to say: He wasn’t, but Laurie grinned and said: ‘You forget all the important things.’
‘Don’t I though?’ Sybil dropped into a chair and leaned her head back with a gusty sigh. ‘Pour me a glass of sherry, there’s a good boy. I’m quite exhausted.’
She was exhausted! Who had slept for nearly two hours in the car, going and coming, and only woken long enough to go crazy.
‘Don’t forget to offer one to Dorothy,’ Sybil said, as she always did, for although Dorothy and the sherry bottle were old friends, she pointedly waited for an introduction when anyone else was there.
‘What happened?’ Laurie asked Jess, at the cupboard in the corner. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘Come outside. Please come outside. I’ve got to tell you.’
‘The car?’
She laughed, right in his face as he turned with the bottle. Neither of them cared a straw about the car, except as a boring necessity. When she tore the chrome strip off one side, she forgot to tell him for weeks, and when he found it, curling in the trunk, he threw it away.
‘Come outside.’
He looked at her
through the heavy-rimmed glasses he wore when he was being a lawyer, which Mont swore had plain glass lenses. ‘I’m working.’
‘You were.’ She pulled him through the room and out of the side door. Outside, she leaned against the cypress tree at the corner of the house, breathing with her mouth open, staring at him.
‘She didn’t know her. That’s what happened. She talked about her all the way in the car, and then when we got there, she didn’t know her.’
‘What did you expect? The poor old bat must be over ninety.’
‘Not May. She knew. But your grandmother. She didn’t know her own sister. I’m glad to meet you, she said, and she asked her if she’d ever met her own father.’
Flat. The nightmare that had boiled in her all the way home, waiting to spill over in release, fell flat. He shrugged and said: ‘So what? She never should have gone all that way.’
‘You asked me to take her!’
Who was going crazy? All the way home, she had fermented, saving the story for him as they saved all the incidents of their day to spill out, interrupting, gabbling, in the excitement of coming home to each other at night.
‘I thought you’d want to hear.’
‘I do.’ He put his hands in the pockets of his cotton trousers, although she was aching for him to put them round her, on her. ‘I do, honey,’ he said, with a patience that was worse than anger, since he never called her honey except when he was imitating the kind of married couple they did not want to be. ‘But not if you’re going to make fun of her.’
‘I’m not making fun of her. It was Dorothy who—’
‘Dorothy what?’
The worst thing she had been fermenting for him all the way along the endless, soul-destroying Turnpike was what Dorothy had said to the nurse.
You’ve got the wrong one in here.
And in the car…
‘In the car,’ she began, and pushed herself away from the tree to stand against him.
Sybil had kept silent for a long time, while Dorothy chatted inconsequentially, and rushed the radio full volume from station to station, too fast to get anything but howls and bellowed syllables and claps of song. At last, she leaned forward and asked Jess: ‘Who was that poor woman who claimed she was my sister?’
‘She was. She was your sister May.’
‘Don’t play games with me. I know my own sister, I should hope. I’ll show you a picture of May when we get home, then you’ll know.’
It would be the picture on the stairs, May laughing and shaped like a figure eight, in her wedding dress with a train lice a carpet and her hair cushioned out.
‘Yes, Gramma.’
Dorothy said nothing, but made catarrhal noises in her nose and clicked her teeth a little. They fitted better than Sybil’s, but when they both clicked them at meals, it was like dining in the boneyard.
Whea Jess heard Sybil snore, she glanced over her shoulder to make sure she was asleep, and said to Dorothy: ‘I’m very worried.’
She sounded middleaged to herself, saying that, fusspot. She had a vision of her mother, pressing a hot water bottle at the sink to make the air spit out. ‘I’m very wearied about your father,’ if he sneezed twice.
‘I think she thought to see Montgomery, don’t you? She’s sever been like this.’
‘She doesn’t need Doctor Jones.’ Dorothy never called him anything but Doctor, even on Sundays. ‘She has me to take care of her.’
‘Yes, but—’ Jess stopped being middleaged and fussy. She was young and inadequate and…
And frightened, she wanted to tell Laurie. I thought she was glad. She was glad about what happened to Gramma.
That was the most terrible part of the whole terrible day. But now, suddenly, she could not tell him. It would be petty, mischief making, hysteria. He would think she was trying to make trouble, common, suspicious, like her mother and her friend down the street when they talked with hisses and side glances.
‘In the car what?’ He put his arms round her.
Dorothy opened the kitchen window and went: ‘Yoo-hool’
He swore. He could not stand her, but passively. She was here. She was necessary, He could put up with her. He would never understand the flame of hatred that had leaped in Jess as they were going out of the room in the nursing home, with May weeping silently and the big nurse snickering. And had leaped again in the car when Dorothy said: ‘She has me,’ and smiled.
She could not tell him. He kissed her, but she was chill and passive with disappointment.
‘Well, OK.’ He dropped his arms. ‘Let’s go back in.’
‘How was Aunt May?’ he asked Sybil casually.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why? Did she she before you got there?’
‘Don’t say things like that. May’s not dead. She’s as fit as I am.’
He made a face at Jess that said: You see, and went back to his card table,
‘Did you see her today?’ Jess asked Sybil, loudly, to make him listen.
‘See who?’
‘Aunt May.’
‘What about her?’
Jess took a deep breath. ‘You saw her today.’
‘Well, you say so.’ That was Sybil’s way of agreeing and disagreeing at the same time. ‘I slept so much in the car, I daresay I forgot.’
‘But, Gramma.’ Jess knelt before her and took her dry hands. ‘You remember when we were in that room at the nursing home. And in the bed there was a woman who—’
‘Leave her alone, Jess,’ Laurie said. ‘Don’t bully her.’ He ran a hand through his black hair, rested his head on the hand with the fingers spread, and started to read again, remote, unconcerned.
‘All right.’
Jess went upstairs to their bedroom. Were they staying the night, or what? He had not brought a bag. But they kept a few things here, an old razor, toothbrushes, sweaters, since they came so often. Jess felt heavy and defeated. It was too great an effort to go downstairs and ask him: Do you want to stay the night?
If he was reading, he would not look up. Or perhaps he would look up and through her. She could not reach him. She could not communicate. What had happened? She stood in front of the high bureau that served as a dressing table, and stared and stared at her face in the oval mirror in the dark wood frame on the wall.
Why should he love her? She examined every inch of her face, analysing the structure of the eye, the nose, the way the pale mouth moved when it opened, smiled, dosed over the teeth. She stroked her cheeks, pulled back the corners of her eyes, pushed her light hair back from her rounded, childish forehead, then hit it back down again, pulling it into points impatiently between thumb and finger.
How do I look to him? She tried to see herself from outside, and thought she looked like just another girl, immature, uninteresting. Why should he love you? she asked the unexciting, unexotic face, I wouldn’t, if I was a man. She stared woodenly for a few moments longer, and then, in a kind of flat despair, turned away and went out of the room into the hall over the stair-well.
I never noticed there was a mirror there.
She saw herself, head and neck, a few yards in front of her, very clearly, the round brown eyes surprised, the mouth unsure. The fair hair was untidy, pulled raggedly down in points. Not bad though, not bad at all. Not pretty, an interesting face, exciting, sexual. If I was a man…
She opened her mouth. The mouth of the image opened. She turned her head and saw the other head begin to turn, but when she looked back, it was gone. There was no mirror on the wall.
I saw myself.
Nine
In September, the great trees round the house seemed to deepen, heavy and rich with green, in the pause before they kindled, and the fire crept imperceptibly through them until they ringed the house with a blaze of colour that made motorists exclaim: Why go to Vermont? whether they meant to go or not.
Day by day, the yellow house looked paler among the fantastic scarlet and orange and gold. It was the season when Papa said: ‘We m
ust have the house painted this year.’ But when the leaves faded to ochre and fell, and the house stood revealed on the dying grass for the first time since the start of summer, the yellow paint looked brighter, and brighter still when the snow came, and so he would let it go. ‘Till next year.’ he would tell Marma, ‘when there are not so many expenses outside.’ But she would rather see money spent on the house than on the grounds and nurseries, and there were always expenses outside.
One year, he dammed the stream which ran from a spring under the hill through the corner of the pasture to the pond, and made an ornamental pool, with seats and spouting frogs and water lilies. Sybil worked with him when Ted was away at school. She took a pair of Ted’s corduroys and put them on behind a bush out of sight of the house, and took them off before she went in, and Marma would say: ‘You ean’t have worked very hard, you didn’t get your skirts muddy,’ although she would have been angry if she had.
‘In looking on the happy autumn fields,’ Sybil remarked to Dorothy, panting a little as they went through the gate and up the slope, ‘and thinking of the days that are no more.’
‘You can say that again.’ Dorothy trudged beside her in a pair of stiff blue jeans she had taken to wearing in the garden, rolled several times at the bottom, for anything that would accommodate what she called her waist was much too long in the leg. ‘Though I wouldn’t have my time again, if it was handed me. It was different for you, of course.’
Sybil agreed, although she privately thought that she had worked far harder than Dorothy in bringing up three difficult children and a grandson, and helping Theo with the land all those years.
She was taking Dorothy to see the place where the ornamental pool had been. The stream had long since broken the dam, and destroyed all the stonework over the years, carrying most of it away down the slope to be buried in undergrowth. Now there were only a few lumps of broken masonry, and part of one of the stone frogs, embedded in the tufty grass.
Dorothy was not very interested in the few Roman remains. She was afraid Sybil would start to reminisce about her father, which always aggravated her, so she pottered on farther upstream, and Sybil sat down heavily on a stone and waited for her, trying to look at her beloved house without looking at the cars flashing behind at forty-three to the dozen, as if the idiots did not know that Labour Day was long come and gone.
Room Upstairs Page 9
