Maud was amusing and the elderly couple were charming, and it was much gayer than Jess had expected. After Maud had driven the others recklessly off up the driveway in a blast of blue smoke, she said: ‘It was a lovely party.’
‘Except for one thing.’ Dorothy’s mouth closed as if she had drawn a string round it.
‘What?’
Dorothy shook her head without unfastening her mouth. ‘Bedtime Sybil,’ Roger whispered raucously, as she took the china mug from the dresser, rattling it purposely, and Sybil said: ‘One of these days I’ll go to bed when I please and not when that bird says so.’
Dorothy went up with her, and when she came down, Jess asked her: ‘What do you mean - except for one thing?’
Dorothy sank the wattles of her chin into her watermelon bosom which had encroached so far on her waist that it was arbitrary where she put a belt, and raised her eyes to fix them on Jess.
‘You should know, dear.’
‘You mean because Laurie couldn’t come?’
‘The first time he’s ever missed,’ she said.
‘It isn’t. Two years ago, he was in England.’
‘The poor old lady.’ You could not argue with Dorothy, because she merely bulldozed on, as if you had not spoken. ‘She took it very hard.’
‘She took it very well. She had a wonderful time tonight. I haven’t seen her so bright and gay for weeks.’
‘Ah - tonight,’ Dorothy said. ‘The juice of the grape hath miraculous powers, hath it not? I wish my herbals would work as quickly.’
‘But he couldn’t come. She understands that. I knew she was disappointed at first, but she’d never try to get in the way of his career. After all, she paid most of his way through Harvard.’
‘Did she indeed?’ said Dorothy. ‘That’s very interesting. I wonder why she never told me.’
Jess did not say: Because it’s none of your business, or: It might give you ideas about her money, although both thoughts occurred to her. She said: ‘But that’s not why he’s good to her,’ which was a thought that might have occurred to Dorothy. ‘He loves her, you know that. I love her too. That’s why I came, and I think it almost made up to her for Laurie.’
Showing some bice green slip and a lot of fat veined leg, Dorothy climbed up on the stool and opened Roger’s cage. He flew on to her shoulder, balancing with a lift of his wing as she climbed awkwardly down, and muttering into her nest of black hair, which she wore pulled up all round into a puffy roll.
‘Listen - why should you worry about it, Jess?’ she said. ‘No man is worth making yourself miserable over. I learned that years ago when I lost mine.’
‘I’m not miserable.’ Sometimes Dorothy made far less sense than Sybil.
‘I wouldn’t blame you if you were. Eighteen months married, and your mother three thousand miles away. Jess will go down to Grandma like a good little girl. Very convenient.’
‘If you mean—’ Jess’s body filled with heat. She could feel it burning up into her face.
‘I don’t mean anything.’ Dorothy mumbled her lips in and out, and the bird pecked bluntly at them, a parody of kissing.
‘What are trying to put into my mouth, you naughty girl? Is that all the thanks poor Loll gets for being so thoughtful and insisting you stay overnight?’
Jess went out. She ran upstairs and into her room, and sat down on the bed, breathing hard. She was very angry. But when she started to think about it, Dorothy had not really said anything. It was she - she herself who had interpreted the silly little digs into full scale scandal.
But it was true he had jumped at her offer to come. And he had insisted on her staying the night. They had not been apart for a night since their marriage. Why now? Her mind churned like dirty wash-water. She hated herself. But the germ of the idea was there. She had let it in. She fought, but it was disgusting that she should even have to fight. If he ever knew, he would kill her.
Or I would kill myself. She got up wearily from the bed and turned to pull down the cover. She felt very tired, drained of strength, the movements of her muscles unreal and meaningless. Before her, on the other side of the bed, she saw the head and shoulders of Jess, her face screwed up and pale with misery, her eyes staring at nothing.
Poor girl. The image made an attempt to smile, as she made her mouth move towards a smile. She was wearing the white blouse, fading out towards the waist. Jess thought of it as She, a separate thing, and yet there was again a sense of possession, almost of power.
She stared at her. The other She stared back. They could stand there staring until the end of the world, eyes trapped in eyes, but with no thought behind them, for thoughts took up moments of time and this was suspended in a timeless space with no relation to past or future.
Touch me. Jess lifted her right hand and reached out. Across the bed, the image reached its left hand forward. Her hand became cold, numb, as if all the life had run from it. The hands met, but there was no feeling. Jess closed her eyes to stop the image staring, and when she opened them, there was nothing there.
It was not until Jess realized that she was standing in a familiar lighted room, staring blankly across the bed at nothing, that the terror invaded her like an icy hand, her own chill hand, feeling its way through all the courses of her nerves into the last secret chambers of her brain.
She heard Sybil’s stick, and through the doorway she saw the old lady, in the quilted rosebud dressing gown that had been one of her birthday presents, navigating slowly back from the bathroom to her room.
‘Gramma!’ Jess went to her.
‘What’s the matter, child? You’re panting.’
‘Am I?’ She stopped, for the panting was not involuntary. ‘I ran up the stairs.’
‘When do the young stop running and start walking? How do you like me in my grand new robe?’ She struck a little attitude of vanity, making the face with which she tried on things before the mirror, and it was all so familiar and safe and dear that Jess kissed her, and hugged her hard, because the chill and the terror had vanished, as if nothing had happened.
But it had happened. And this time she had not been looking in a mirror. She had seen it, and she had not been afraid of it. Not at the time. That was why the fear came afterwards - because she should have been afraid.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ she asked, when she was tucking Sybil into bed.
‘I’d better.’
‘You told me you’d heard Emerson breathing in there.’ She jerked her head towards the room that was now Dorothy’s.
‘Hush,’ Sybil said. ‘They told me not to talk about that. I can’t remember why, but I remember they told me.’
‘Because they thought you frightened me.’
‘Was that it? Oh well.’ Sybil had got her teeth out. She looked smaller in bed, as old people do, as if the mattress sapped her. Her jaws caved in and the sockets of her faded eyes were red with fatigue. Over her brindle hair she wore the familiar turban made of a linen dish-towel depicting the Trooping of the Colour that Jess had sent her from London before they ever met. What can one send Americans that they haven’t already got? And then she had seen the dish-cloth, in dozens of designs, in Boston department stores.
‘They thought I imagined the breathing, you see.’
‘Oh well.’ Sybil’s attention wavered. She reached for the jar of dubious smelling ointment which Dorothy had prepared for the skin on her hands.
Jess asked quickly, to get her back: ‘Have you ever seen a ghost - here, in this house?’
Sybil nodded. She was rubbing the cream in circles, nodding every time the fingers came round.
‘The house is haunted then?’
‘Now then, now then, what’s going on here?’ Dorothy charged in, just like Miss Driscoll charging into Five B although she used to know what was going on because of the spyhole in the door.
‘Is the house haunted?’ Jess repeated, for she had to know.
What did Sybil see? What if it - oh God, what if it was a spec
tre of me, appearing for years, perhaps even before I was born?
Sybil would have cried out at the first meeting: ‘But I know you!’
Jess thought back, and saw Sybil that first day, coming towards her with a smile of welcome. Or of recognition. ‘She’s just what I thought she’d be.’ That’s what Sybil had said, as if she had seen her before. ‘She’s just what I thought she’d be.’
The old lady did not answer. She lay on her back gumming the insides of her jaws and watching Dorothy, who was folding clothes which Sybil had already folded.
‘A haunted house, don’t be ridiculous,’ Dorothy grumbled, shaking out a corset with a rattle and a snap. ‘I’ve no time for such nonsense myself, and I wish you wouldn’t put ideas in Sybil’s head. I’ve trouble enough with her as it is.’
‘Am I a trouble to you. Dot?’
‘Well, it’s not all roses around here sometimes, I’ll tell you that,’ Dorothy said, in case anyone should think she had it made.
Jess was not going to sleep in her room, not until Laurie was there in the bed with her. She would not see anything if he was there. She did not know how she knew that, but she felt sure of it.
She would rumple the bed and sleep on the sofa downstairs and get up before Dorothy came down. First she was going to write a letter. She was going to write to Mary and ask her for the truth.
Mary used to have nightmares in this house. Mary knew all the old legends. Mary had seen the Charity tree weeping under the new moon.
What else that she had not told?
Dear Aunt Mary,
‘I am terribly troubled and disturbed, and only you can help me.
She wrote a long letter, telling Mary everything. She told her everything that she could not tell to anyone else, for they would think she was losing her mind. Mary would understand. She would not pass it off as imagination, or being tired, or gazing in a mirror. The night before the wedding, when Jess had screamed because there was someone lying beside her on the bed, Mary had been the only one who did not tell her it was a dream. She had stood shyly at the back of the crowding, well-intentioned fuss, wearing a raincoat over her nightdress and looked calmly through her owl spectacles at a scene which was no more than she expected.
The letter was almost finished when Jess heard a car crunch on the gravel at the back of the house. The knocker fell cautiously.
‘Jess - Laurie? Anyone up?’
‘Oh - Mont.’ She ran to open the door, which Dorothy had bolted and chained like a fortress for the night. ‘Oh, I am glad you came!’
‘I brought a present for Sybil. I knew it was her birthday, because last year Melia made that marvellous cake, remember? ‘He was holding a box foolishly wrapped with bows and tendrils of ribbon. ‘I’m sorry it’s so late. I saw your light from the road as I was going home, and then I saw your car. Where’s Laurie?’
‘He couldn’t come. He had to go to a dinner with Mr Guthrie, so I came to be at Sybil’s party. I wanted you to come, but I couldn’t get hold of you.’
‘I was at the hospital all last night and most of this morning, I think. I’ve lost touch of time.’ He passed a hand over his face, and as they went into the lighted sitting room, Jess saw how tired he was. His eyes were shadowed, and his face was grey, and pricked with beard.
‘Sit down.’ She pushed him into a chair and picked up the unfinished letter to Mary and crammed it into the pocket of her skirt before she knelt to make up the fire.
‘Babies?’
‘A kid.’
Jess turned her head. His lower lip was pushed out over the top one. His hair, which was never properly cut, stuck up at the back. His eyes were leaden and sad. ‘What happened?’
‘He broke his arm a week ago. Nasty mess it was, but I thought he was doing all right. He came through the operation well, and the fever wasn’t unusual. I didn’t worry about it too much.’
He leaned forward, dangling his bony hands between his knees and talking into the fire. ‘Last night, I got scared. The antibiotics didn’t seem to be touching him. I took him to Children’s Hospital in Boston this morning. I’ve been there all day. They’re still not sure what the bug is. It could be a - well, God, Jess, they were talking about gas gangrene.’
Jess sat back on her heels and looked up at him. ‘Whose fault?’ In England, if something went wrong, most people accepted it as more or less an act of God. Over here, she had learned, it must always be someone’s fault.
‘Not the hospital,’ Mont said quickly. ‘Mine. He was playing near a stable. It was a compound fracture - very dirty. I should have spotted it.’
‘But he’ll be all right.’ She tried not to make it a question.
‘The father came with me to Boston. After the people up there had seen the kid, the father asked one of them whether there was any chance of not being able to save the arm. He said: “Look, Air Dennis, it’s no longer a question of saving your boy’s arm. It’s a question of saving his life.” I wish I hadn’t heard that. I knew it was true, but I wish I hadn’t heard that.’
‘I’ll get you a drink.’
‘Yes, please. Would you make it rather big?’
She poured him enough whisky to knock a horse out, and then sat on the floor again by the fire. He said: ‘This is good,’ and sighed, and closed his eyes. After a while he reached out and pulled her shoulder, and she sat leaning against his chair while he stroked her hair, absently, but with pleasure, as if she were a favourite dog.
‘Why aren’t you in bed, Jess?’
‘I’m not going to -1 wasn’t tired.’
‘What about the Dolly sisters?’ he asked. ‘What would they say?’
‘They’re fast asleep. And there’s nothing to say anything about.’
‘That’s the hell of it.’
Jess turned and looked up at him.
‘You know what I feel.’ He turned her round again so that she was not looking at him, and kept his hand on her neck. ‘Everyone keeps on at me about Mont’s got to have a woman. Montgomery must get married. We must find a good wife to take care of Dr Jones. I used to think so myself. But you spoiled it.’
‘Please don’t.’
‘I wish I didn’t like that guy you married. It’s an immortal situation. What a cliché. The best friend hanging on to the dregs of hope.’
‘We’ll never break up, if that’s what you mean,’ Jess said rather breathlessly.
‘It gets tough though, huh? Marriage, I mean. After the first excitement.’
‘Yes,’she said cautiously.
‘Happy?’
‘Not terribly. Not at the moment.’ She blinked. It would be ridiculous to cry, because she was getting a little sympathy. And treacherous, since the sympathy was not impartial. ‘I hated myself tonight.’
‘I hate myself every night,’ Mont said lazily, ‘and most of the morning too. What was the matter?’
‘It was Dorothy. She started hinting things about Laurie. At least, I thought she was hinting.’
‘Bitch. She won’t speak to me since I refused to give her bird an enema. No loss, but I don’t see Sybil enough. Did you push her face in?’
‘I wish I had. But I listened, and I even thought about what she said, and enlarged on it. That was what was so horrible. The thing is - I don’t know, is there something about this house? We seem to fight when we’re here. Over nothing. Is it the house? Or is it that being with old lashes gets on our nerves? If so, that’s hateful. Do you believe there could be something in the atmosphere of a house that affects people?’
‘Not this one. People are happy here. Remember last Christmas, how marvellous it was? I never had a Christmas like that.’
‘Nor me. I used to look forward to the time when this house was ours and we could live here when Sybil—’ Her mother’s rubric that you brought ill luck to a person by anticipating their death shed hard - ‘eventually. Now, I’m not so sure.’
‘The only comfort I can offer you,’ Mont said, ‘is that with me, you’d be worse off. I’ll
probably never have a decent house, let alone a haunted one.’
Jess got up. ‘Do you think this house is haunted?’ she asked, making it casual.
‘By Dorothy Grue.’ He said her name like a shudder, and closed his eyes.
‘You ought to be in bed. Poor Mont. It’s awful for you about the boy.’
She thought of the child, sweating with fever in the Boston hospital, imagining an arm already putrefied and blackening. And she had dithered introspectively when his anxiety was so much greater.
‘Go on home and get some sleep, if you’ve got to be in Boston early,’ she said, but he was asleep in the chair.
Eleven
Sybil woke in the small hours of the morning, as she often did, and lay for a while telling herself a few of the old stories.
For some years now, she had been talking to herself out loud. Not because she was a raving lunatic, but because she liked the sound of her own voice.
It was not senility. It had nothing to do with the mumbling old men who shuffled along sidewalks wagging their heads at an invisible audience. If I want to talk to myself, I’ll talk to myself, she told her aushence, who were always pulling her up and calling her silly old fool and useless did parson. For reminiscence, it was far more satisfying than mere thinking. Thoughts got confused, but if you put words out on the air, they stayed in place.
The stories she told herself were not the same as the ones she told to Dorothy, which were mostly plain anecdotal recollections, with no moral or motive. To herself, it was a saga of self-justification, an apologia in which Sybil Camden Prince was always right.
It wasn’t my fault … I didn’t break my leg on purpose, after all. Crippled up … but there was nothing wrong with me until I fell. I always took care of myself. Ask anyone. Sybil can take care of herself, they said; it’s a marvel what she gets through. She invented the thirty hour day. Well -1 raised three children and took good care of Theo and nursed him all through the end. No one nursed Theo but me. I could do anything those days. Didn’t I milk the cows right through the war after Benny was drafted? Didn’t I milk for Papa? He said: She’s a better milker than any man on the place, Papa said. I’ve done anything. All my life I’ve put my hand to anything, and if it wasn’t for this leg … nobody knows what I’ve been through with it. They don’t know, and I’m glad for them. I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to suffer as I’ve suffered.
Room Upstairs Page 12
