‘Eureka!’ Dorothy came sturdily back down the hill, the same shape as the frog in those pants, holding in one fist a plant with a thick hairy stem and big dark lily leaves. ‘Hellebore. Why didn’t you tell me it grew here?’
‘I didn’t know you wanted it.’
‘You did so. What do you think I’ve been dusting the roses with all summer? You won’t catch Dorothy Grue buying those expensive chemicals when Nature has given all her resources into her hand.’ (She got that bit out of Will Camden’s herbal notes.) ‘Itchweed, they call it. Here I’ve been making do with those few roots I found by the old rain tank, and had to go so easy with it the Japanese beetles sat up and laughed at me. Listen here - with this little lot by the stream, time I get them dried out, well have enough rose dust to last us for life. Your life anyway.’ Dorothy planned to live a whole span after Sybil. In this house? Sybil sometimes wondered.
But she was a worker, you must give her that. This summer and fall, she had spent so much time outdoors that Sybil had often been lonely, sitting idle under the trees in the long chair, or alone in the house with Roger and the watching cats, who were not nearly such relaxed pets since they had the bird on their minds.
Some companion, Sybil would think to herself, some housekeeper, as she poked about the kitchen, looking into the icebox and the oven to try to guess what Dorothy was planning for lunch. Some companion. And yet when the weather was bad and Dorothy was in the house all day, talking, knitting, bossing, putting dustcloths into Sybil’s hand, or settling her on the ugly plastic stool with ironing board at sitting height, ‘to keep you from getting rusty’, Sybil would wish she could get her out of the house.
There you were. There was no pleasing some people, she thought, meaning herself. ‘That’s what happens to you when you get old,’ she told the bird, slyly rattling the bars of its cage with a spoon, which Dorothy forback her to do on account of Roger’s nerves, ‘You don’t know what you want.’
Like a baby. But if you had to become a baby, why couldn’t life be arranged the other way around? If you started as an old woman, people would put up with you as a novelty, knowing you would improve. Then you could end up as a fragrant baby, and everyone would dote on you and never think you were a nuisance, however much attention you demanded.
Sometimes when she was too much alone, she would think about telling Laurie or Jess that Dorothy neglected her. But when she saw them, she forgot. Or if she remembered, it did not seem to matter anyway, once there were people around. It only mattered when she was alone for so many hours that her thoughts curdled; but then there was no one to tell.
Just as well. Since they had taken her to that sad place where the old man did not dare touch the television and the little monkey lady did not dare step out of her room, Sybil had got to be extra careful.
If Dorothy quit, she herself might end up in a place like that, caged in a bed like that poor woman upstairs, with a stranger using the commode right under her nose.
Why had they taken her? Not Jess’s fault. Sybil was sure of her now. She was on her side, and Sybil was ashamed to remember that she had once imagined her an enemy. She could remember that. One did not forget the contemptible things.
It had been Dorothy’s idea, obviously. Something that was said - in that bedroom? in the car? - gave it away. They had taken her there to try to trap her into saying that poor woman was May - May, with her bounce and style! - to prove she was senile. Then they could put her away like that, in a place where people went out of their minds, because it was expected of them.
But she wouldn’t be caught like that, oh no. Didn’t know her own sister! But she must be very careful. Hold your tongue, Musket; so she did. Laurie would not understand anyway. He did not understand things like he used to, in the old days when he was her boy. She had always fought for her own company. He would think she was jealous now of Dorothy’s strength and energy. Which she was. But the woman had a right to her own time, and you couldn’t help admiring her for what she achieved. All talk and no do, shan’t be said of Dorothy Grue, was one of her dictums.
She had done wonders with the flower garden and the rose bed, and her herbal project was going ahead splendidly. Apart from the rose dust, which she made, following Papa’s notes, from the dried root of the plant called false hellebore, she had prepared a medicine for her cough, using the old bilberry and wild parsnip mixture which Sybil and her father had tried on the cows, and she intended to exorcise with the juice of milkweed the honeycomb wart which had recurred on her thumb for years, like the bloodstain in a room of murder.
She also had a cure for the ache in Sybil’s leg, which she made by boiling chopped horseradish, mixing it with barley and oil and applying it as a plaster. Very soothing, when she did not put it on too hot. The time she did, she was quite pleased, since it gave her the chance to try out her burn treatment of stewed ivy leaves.
She was currently working on a project to get rid of the liver spots on the backs of Sybil’s hands with the juice of wild carrot tops mixed with powered pumice. ‘Will remove any marks on the skin whatsoever,’ John Camden had written. It had done nothing so far but give Sybil a slight itch she never had before, with which Dorothy could deal as soon as she had gathered enough sorrel.
She had made a good harvest this autumn, laying out her leaves and pods and roots to dry in the old seedhouse. Some of them, like the milkweed and the hellebore, which were poisonous, she crushed and pounded up there, but she brought most of them down to the house, which pleased Sybil, for she had not felt like climbing the hill for months. Be honest, Syb. You haven’t felt capable of going up there for over a year. Since you broke your fool leg.
She enjoyed the herbal project, and did not mind being experimented on in the cause of science. It kept Dorothy happy, and when Dot was in a good mood, life was fair. When she was in a bad mood - well, there it is, we all have our off days.
And when it was an on day, she could be so great, joking, easy-going, spoiling Sybil with extra comforts and little surprise presents. When Laurie and Jess made faces about Dorothy, or laughed at her, Sybil found herself defending her abruptly, although in solitude, with Dorothy pottering on the hill and forgetting lunch, she had imagined the three of them cosily discussing her.
Once when Dorothy had a weekend mood - unexpectedly, for she was usually amiable when, the children were there -Laurie asked Sybil with a serious face: ‘Are you really happy?’
That would have been her chance to say … what? There was nothing to say.
And she did not say much about the remeshes. Laurie and Jess were sceptical, and Montgomery disapproved (’Natch,’ said Dorothy), so at weekends they stored away the equipment, and used aspirin and mercurochrome, as if they had never heard of such a thing as being Pilgrim herbalists.
But when the young ones were not there, ‘We work like clam diggers,’ Dorothy told Maud Owens. ‘Sybilla has burned the bottom out of three pans, making syrups.’
‘You really mess about with that stuff? What’s in this jelly?’ Maud put down her hot biscuit.
‘Don’t be silly, Maud. Melia made that batch,’ Sybli usually loved visits from old friends like Maud, with snatches of recaptured anecdotes and allusions that did not need explaining. But today, she found herself almost wishing that Maud would go, so she could start crushing bilberries.
Dorothy allowed her to do all the simpler operations, like crushing and bruising, and pressing out on the little corrugated board strips of paste to be rolled into pills. She would sit in contented peace at the kitchen table, pounding the pestle in the mortar, while Dorothy stirred, glassy-eyed at the stove, with the bird perched on a warming shelf above, whispering and chattering like a witch.
Dorothy always made her decoctions and syrups on Priscilla, although it was a trouble to light, and the kerosene made her wheeze. But if they were to be Pilgrim maids, they could not make herbal remeshes on a gleaming white electric stove with enough buttons on it to run a battleship, although some of them
were fakes. On each side of the black central stovepipe, graceful wrought iron trivets could be swung in and out to warm dishes over any of the hot plates. Here Roger perched, exchanging banalities with Dorothy, and picking up his feet nervously, like solshers marking time, if the stove below was too hot.
One evening when Dorothy was going to brew the borage syrup which had replaced her morning prune juice, she stood on the stool and opened the door of his cage, but he would not come out, even when she put her thick finger invitingly at the entrance, like a waiting taxi.
He was huddled at the far end of a perch, his plumage ruffled and dull, his flat bright eye lidded Mke a syphilitic.
Dorothy put in her hand and pulled him out, which he hated. He liked to go everywhere under his own steam. When he obeyed one of Dorothy’s chirruped orders, it was because he wanted to do it anyway, not because ‘he knows everything I say’.
Holding him tightly, for he would fly back to the cage if she let him go, since it was not his idea to come out, Dorothy brought him under the light. His eyes were gummy, the lids swollen.
‘Oho. That’s how it is. Poor fellow’s been in a draught again. He wishes some people would close the door when they make all those trips to the trash can.’ But it was her ashtrays that Sybil was constantly taking outside, since Dorothy never emptied them until they were brimming. ‘Hold him a minute, Sybil, while I go and consult the good book.’
Sybil did not like holding the bird’s smooth, curiously muscular body, any more than she liked the feel of him clutching her finger with his feet that had a reptilian texture, but a surprising animal heat.
While she was holding him, he struggled, and she let him go, afraid of breaking a wing. He fluttered clumsily because of his eyes, dropped down instead of soaring up, and in a streak of black, the big panther cat had half his tail.
There had been some bad moments in Sybil’s life, but this was one of the worst. When Dorothy came into the room, Roger was back in his cage, scolding like a blue jay. The feathers wore on the floor. The cat crouched, yellow-eyed. Sybil’s hand was empty. No good making excuses. She had been given the bird to hold. She had let him go. Trembling? You crazy old fool. She can’t kill you. What are you afraid of?
And Dorothy, a casket of surprises, did not say a word. Her globular glance took in the whole story. Her crimson mouth tightened, the lipstick running off in little tributaries in the creases of the skin around her lips.
‘I’m sorry, Dot.’ Hellfire on being eighty, when you couldn’t control your voice! ‘It will - it will grow again quite quickly, won’t it?’
‘Bay leaves,’ Dorothy said, in her normal, grue cigarette voice. ‘For a cold in the eye, make a lotion of bay leaves.’ She had a bunch hanging over the stove. She picked off a few, and got to work without another word.
Dorothy did not speak much for the rest of the evening. Despising herself, Sybil found herself making bright, sycophantic conversation. Who was it? Mary. Poor Mary, when she was a child, used to do that with her to try to find out if she was still angry.
Dorothy was non-committal, neither angry nor mollified, picking her teeth thoughtfully behind her hand. When the bay leaf lotion was cool, she applied it deftly to the affronted bird, then unhooked his cage from the ceiling and carried it upstairs to her room, his special treat, hitherto reserved for his birthday and for the Fourth of July, to show Jess that even a bird could celebrate release from the British.
Nobody said: Bedtime, Sybil. She waited for a while to see if Dorothy was going to make her hot drink, but although she could hear her moving about upstairs, she did not come down. Feeling about a hundred, Sybil found her cane, which seemed to have a life of its own these days, and started up the stairs.
No wonder her mother was waiting for her at the top of the stairs in the plumed hat and the busty paisley button-through. Bella Camden had never missed an opportunity to make a bad situation worse. In the brief moment, when she knew for certain that her mind had gone, Sybil heard Dorothy’s chuckle and cough, without registering it.
‘Just a bit of a joke.’ Dorothy stood in the doorway of Emerson’s room with her hands folded in the sleeves of her harsh scarlet robe like an Oriental. ‘Just a bit of a joke to liven things up.’
*
The bay leaves did not work on Roger. Two days later, he was still rheumy, and sneezing on a note disconcertingly like Dorothy’s. She told Sybil: ‘Your father evidently didn’t know much about birds.’
‘He did. He knew all their calls. I remember one winter - you should have seen the snow we had those days - something very rare came to the bird table for the suet. A yellow something or other. He wrote to the Audubon Society.’
‘What did they say?’ Dorothy often missed the point of a story, carrying it on beyond its denouement to anticlimax.
‘They said good, I suppose, I don’t know. Who are you calling?’
‘Dr Jones. It says in my budgie book that infection of the eye can be cleared with penicillin lotion.’
‘Why not the yet?’
‘All vets are butchers.’
When Sybil had a sore throat and Montgomery had given her penicillin tablets, Dorothy had washed them away down the sink and given her rose hip linctus.
But the bird, that was different. The bird must have penicillin.
When Montgomery arrived that evening, tired and in a hurry, for he was fitting the visit in quickly during a slow labour at the hospital, he was surprised to find Sybil sitting at her desk writing a letter.
‘She said she was very worried. What’s she playing at?’
‘Didn’t she tell you who it was for?’ Sybil began to laugh. She took off her glasses and mopped her eyes with her sleeve. It was really excruciatingly funny, especially Montgomery’s face when Dorothy came bustling in like a hospital nurse specialling a VIP and asked - no, told him to prescribe penicillin for the bird.
‘You’re out of your mind,’ he told her brusquely. Imagine daring to talk to Dorothy like that! ‘I’m up to my neck in babies and tonsils and a flu epidemic, and you call me out for that moulting carrion^ Take him to the vet.’
‘Dorothy doesn’t like vets,’ Sybil said, pulling her mouth into seriousness.
‘Dorothy can go—’
‘Hush, Montgomery,’ Dorothy had marched out of the room, but she would still be listening. ‘Come on now, it’s good to see you, anyway. You haven’t been near me for two weeks, you know that?’
‘You haven’t invited me.’
‘You never used to wait to be asked.’
‘She doesn’t like me.’ He made a face and jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
‘Of course she does. She likes everybody,’ Sybil lied. ‘It’s my house anyway,’ she added, compounding the lie, but she drew courage from Montgomery with his untidy cow-lick hair and his long restless limbs. ‘Get yourself a drink, dear.’
‘I can’t stop. I’ve got a woman—’
‘Just a minute or two.’ Sybil did not want him to go. Dorothy would be upset about the penicillin.
He telephoned the hospital to see if he could stay a short while, then poured himself a large whisky and fell into a chair with legs stuck out and his shoulders almost on the seat, and closed his eyes.
‘Poor fellow.’ Sybil came and sat by him. ‘You work to© hard.’
‘I’ve been up a few nights. It’s nothing.’
‘Not at your age. In ten years’ time, you won’t be able to drive yourself like this. I’ll have to find a good woman to take care of you, after I’m gone.’
‘Aren’t you going to be here in ten years?’
‘Not the way I’m going.’
It was strange. When she was a long way away from being as old as this, she had thought it impossible to contemplate her own death, much less talk about it. Now, she did not mind. In fact, Montgomery said, she talked about it too much.
‘It gets very boring,’ he said, ‘when people keep on about dying years before they actually do it.’
‘
I know.’ She had learned that to say: When I’m gone, or: I shan’t be here much longer, gained you no sympathy.
‘You’re a smart woman, Sybil Prince,’ he said. ‘I wish my grandmother had been like you.’
‘What was she like?’
‘I’ve told you.’
‘Tell me again.’ She like to hear about Montgomery’s wretched grandmother, who used to insist on coming to his mother’s parties, and then sat around in the living room with tears rolling down her face, telling everyone how miserable she was. She liked the comparison with herself, for Montgomery’s whistle on the driveway was always for her, and he would come ambling through the house calling: ‘Where’s Sybil?’
When he had to go, Sybil went with him to the kitchen and gave him a spoonful of parsley to chew, so that the woman in labour should not be gassed by his breath. He said goodbye cheerily to Dorothy and told her to try boric acid, and he kissed Sybil, and she stood at the back door to wave him away in his little roaring car.
‘You know what I think about that young man.’ Dorothy said, in statement, not question.
‘You mustn’t mind about the penicillin, Dot.’ Sybil had her pacifying voice on again. ‘Perhaps it’s unethical for him to treat birds.’
‘Nix on that,’ said Dorothy, harking back to Junior High. ‘I was going to try boric acid anyway, so there, Mr Know-it-all. But that wasn’t what I was going to say.’
‘What then?’ She forced you to lead her on, even if you would rather let it drop.
‘I think he’s after your money.’
Sybil laughed. ‘That’s really funny, Dot. That’s really a laugh. I haven’t got much, anyway.’
‘But would you leave it to him?’ Dorothy asked intently. Did she have designs on it herself?
‘It’s for Laurie. Everything. Not that there’s much of anything. But Montgomery - good heavens, Dot. Fancy you thinking—’
Room Upstairs Page 10
