‘Why don’t you go to bed, Dot dear?’ Sybil suggested, after she found her vomiting raucously into the potato peelings in the sink basket.
‘Never sick nor sorry,’ Dorothy said without conviction. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. ‘But I do feel a bit low, Syb. Maybe I will lie down for a while, if you’re sure you’ll be all right.’
‘Me? There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘Why else do you suppose I’ve fought to stay on my feet all day?’ Dorothy asked piteously, thus charging Sybil neatly with whatever consequences might come of her own stubbornness.
She unhooked Roger and took him upstairs. Sybil spent an hour pottering and fiddling and weaving aimlessly back and forth between sink and stove and refrigerator, and achieved a tray of supper for Dorothy of which she was as proud as a banquet.
Chicken soup, little finger sandwiches, ice tinkling in a glass of orange juice. Who can say useless old person now? I shall take care of Dorothy, and she will know how clever and able I am, and how much she needs me. She thinks I need her. Well, now we shall see.
But all we saw was Dorothy putting a tousled black head round the door at Sybil’s knock and asking how a person was supposed to eat supper when they were coughing their lungs up like a gas victim of World War One.
She did not ask it angrily. She asked it quite reasonably and patiently. Too patiently. As if the impressive feat of preparing a tray supper had not altered one jot her opinion of Sybil’s senility.
‘Shall I bring you some milk later?’ Sybil was still gasping from the climb upstairs with the tray.
‘I may be asleep. If I live so long.’
‘But if you’re not?’
‘You can leave it outside the door.’
In all the time that Dorothy had been here, Sybil had never been in her room. No invitation for a tour of the ornaments and family photographs. She had no idea what Dorothy had done with Emerson’s room. She could be sleeping on spikes or printing counterfeit dollars for all she knew. When Dorothy was downstairs, the door was locked. Sybil had tried it once or twice.
She took the tray back to the kitchen, and ate the supper herself. The soup was cold, but she could not raise the spirit to put it back on the stove. She was lonely. She wandered, watched the television without registering what was on the screen, looked at pictures of smashed and twisted cars in the newspaper. She had thought it would be nice to be on her own for once, but it was impossible to settle. She wanted to ask Dorothy: Which programme? Which book? Where are my nail scissors, my glasses, my slippers? The things she had lost in these last few months! They walked off on their own, just as if they too had got sick of her, sick of belonging to somebody who forgot where she put them and then did not really care if they were lost.
By the time she was ninety, she would be living in a barren shack, uncluttered, with a spoon tied around her neck and her name on a label.
With no Roger to tell her when it was time for bed, she dozed off in front of the television, and woke hours later when all the programmes were finished and only the President and Old Glory keeping the screen.
Stumbling and mumbling, she warmed up some milk and left it outside the door with skin already forming and said: ‘There you are, Mother,’ loud enough for her to hear if she was awake, but not too loud to wake her if she was asleep.
‘Don’t make over her, Miss Sybil,’ Polly had said in the kitchen, unkindly. ‘It’s you has had the greater loss, pet.’
Bella locked herself in her room after Papa’s funeral; and then came downstairs in a blazing temper and criticized everything that had been done. Polly gave notice again - it was her way of getting a few weeks’ vacation - and Sybil did the cooking. I cried into the meringue, she remembered, sitting on the edge of her bed next morning open mouthed with her stocking halfway up her good leg, arrested by a vision of the past more clear than she had enjoyed for a long time.
She took such a long time dressing that Dorothy opened her door and yelled healthily: ‘What does a sick person do to get a bite of breakfast around here?’
‘Oh hullo, Dot. Aren’t you better then?’
‘If you call having a golf ball on each side of my throat, and an iron band round my head like mesheval torture being better, then yes, I am better. Thank you.’
She was wearing her long stiff dressing gown with the buttons like giant raspberries arching down the front and the hem standing on the floor all round, so that if her feet had dropped off in the night, you would never know it. Sybil had never seen her in pyjamas. She knew that Dorothy wore pyjamas, because she had seen them on the line, square, short-legged, slapping at the wind.
‘I’m so sorry, Dot. Have you tried your pills?’
‘The box is empty. I want you to bring me up some more.’ Dorothy had not combed her dry black hair, but she had put on lipstick. She always put on lipstick as soon as she Woke up, or else she went to bed in it. There was a stain of it on her teeth, carnivorous.
‘Of course, dear,’ Good, she was needed again. ‘I’ll bring them up with your breakfast.’
But when she looked in the cupboard where they kept the herbal remeshes, the jar where Dorothy stored the parsnip and bilberry pills that stood between her and lung cancer was empty.
What to do? Make some more? I could. I’ll bet I could. But it would take time. Tell her first? Get breakfast? Start the pills?
In a confusion of indecision, Sybil bumped round the kitchen, picking things up and putting them aimlessly down, pouring prune juice and spilling it, bending with a groan to get out the old wooden mixing bowl, starting for the stairs and coming back again, for if she reported no pills, Dorothy would be angry. She would set the cords of her neck and pull her lips back, and Sybil would see the lipstick on her teeth.
‘Sybil!’
Well, she was angry now anyway, so there it was. Sybil went to the foot of the stairs and looked up. Dorothy was standing over the stairwell, hands gripping the rail, face scarlet as she leaned forward in a paroxysm of painful coughing.
‘Where are my pills?’ she croaked. She leaned over Sybil with her red face and her bulging eyes, and Sybil thought that she would fall on her and smother her with the crimson robe, the wooden raspberry buttons biting into her face.
‘There aren’t any.’
‘Dear God alive,’ said Dorothy in a towering rage, although it was she who had eaten the pins. ‘So now you expect me to drag myself down there and mix up some more.’
‘I’m sorry, Dot.’ Sybil stood at the bottom of the stairs forlornly, with her eyes turned up to the heaving scarlet pouter breast, the staring, pitiless eyes.
‘I’m coming down.’ It sounded like a threat.
*
That evening, Dorothy was dead. Sybil knew that she was dead, because although she was lying there on the bed with her eyes open, she did not say a word when Sybil went to the dressing table and picked up a photograph in an ornate gilt frame of a lot of grown-ups and children with faces like pigs standing round a wheelchair where an ancient baby glowered.
She picked it right up and held it near her eyes because she had not been able to find her glasses for days, and examined it closely before deciding that the pig in the billowing shirtwaist was Dorothy, centuries ago. She put it down again, with all those ugly faces to the wall.
‘Hullo Sybil.’
She turned in a flash, the blood running out of her like an emptied bath so that her feet were lead, rooted, and her head swayed empty and dizzy.
Roger was in his domed cage on a table near the bed, regarding her sideways with his papery seed-shaped eye. Dorothy was still lying there with her eyes rolled back, her jaw dropped, and the top half of her teeth dropped with it across the cavern of her mouth.
Get her teeth in, quick Bridget.
When Sybil was in the hospital, a young nurse had come flying in with her hair all at odds, and cried to the older nurse who was dressing Sybil’s leg: ‘Mrs McKenzie’s gone!’
‘Get her teeth in
, Bridget. If you leave it, you’ll never get ‘em in.’
So Sybil went over to the bed where she had so often made Emerson lie and breathe for her, and tried to push Dorothy’s top teeth back against her gums. It seemed like a liberty, especially as Dorothy had always preserved the fiction of: Thank goodness I’ve still got all my teeth, but she was dead now, and dethroned.
Another of the fictions had been: ‘I’m happy to say I haven’t a grey hair.’ Bending closer now, touching the clammy skin with curious, daring fingertips, trying to turn the head on the stiffening neck, Sybil saw that the roots of the dead black hair were coming in snow white.
‘You should have thought of that before you shed, and given yourself a treatment,’ Sybil told her in a schoolmistressy voice.
After a while, if Dorothy went on lying there and could not use the colouring bottle, her hair would all be quite white, and she would look as old as Sybil.
‘You don’t look like any young girl now, Dot, I’ll tell you that,’ Sybil said. Her voice sounded weird in the empty room. Roger was silent, scrabbling under his wing as if he had lice, and then shaking himself up into a ruffled ball and letting the plumage gradually subside into sleekness before he started all over again, scrabbling and ruffling.
It was no wonder that Dorothy was not looking her best, for she had had a rough passage that day. The first time Sybil ventured into the room, emboldened by her cries for help, she was vomiting all over everything, and doubled up with her hands over her stomach, screaming that somebody was slicing her in two.
‘Oh dear, poor Dot.’ Sybil went down to look in the herbal to see what was good for that, but she could not read the small precise writing of her ancestor. She looked in the herb remedy cupboard aimlessly, ran a few plates under the tap, and then sat drumming her fingers at the table, wondering what day of the week it was, and why she was there, and what life was all about in any case.
Whisky, that was the thing. Dot liked her glass - well, don’t we all? She poured a stiff shot of bourbon, made a new pencil mark on the bottle, and climbed upstairs to Emerson’s door.
‘May I come in?’
A groan.
Sybil opened the door cautiously. Dorothy was still on the bed. Her face was green and blue, like Danish cheese, and she was groaning faintly with each expiration.
‘Here’s for what ails you!’ Sybil said brightly, fancying herself as a bustling nurse-figure. She would have to look out her old sneakers.‘This will hit the spot.’
That was what Dorothy said when she gave Sybil fearsome concoctions like the sour wine and willow leaves. But this was the best bourbon. Old Somebody-or-other - Grandpa, Uncle, Cousin - they gave them these names.
‘Drink up Sybil Sybil,’ the bird said when he saw her hold out the glass.
‘No, this is for your mother,’ Sybil told him.
Dorothy shook her head feebly. ‘I can’t move my arms.’
‘You’re just weak. Here, Sybil will help you. Trust old Syb. You can depend on good old Sybilla. You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse.’ Keep cheerful, that was it. She put down the glass, and with a superhuman effort, pulled Dorothy forward a little and propped the pillows behind her.
‘No—’ she protested, as Sybil picked up the glass again, but Sybil said: ‘Naughty, naughty,’ and as an afterthought picked up a few of the mud coloured cough pills from the open box and popped them into Dorothy’s mouth before she poured in a drench of whisky that made Dorothy gasp and choke and retch. But she swallowed, her eyes streaming, and Sybil forced in another pill for good measure, and another swallow of liquor to wash it down, and left her.
It was a pity that Dorothy had vomited so much. All that good bourbon. When Sybil came back later, she looked as if she were in some kind of a fit, putting it on most likely, to get attention. There was too much mess to clean up, so Sybil put sheets of newspaper down over the worst places in Marma’s hooked rug, and got a clean sheet from the linen closet and spread that over the rigid body, which seemed to be locked in some kind of conflict with itself.
A doctor? The thought of Montgomery flitted through her mind, his long bony limbs spreadeagled on some faraway tropic beach. But Dorothy would never see him, even if he flew straight to her in his swimming trunks. She would not let any doctor into her room. Even old Matson with his mumbling and grumbling and his: ‘That gall-bladder should have come out years ago.’
Sybil stayed upstairs and turned out her handkerchief drawer and her purse drawer, so as to be nearby in case she was needed. But she might as well be dead as far as Dorothy was concerned. There was no sound from the room, and when Sybil went back in there late that afternoon - how bold she was getting, popping in and out just as if it were any room in the house! - Dorothy seemed to be asleep. You could not hear her breathing. The mound of sheet that was her bosom did not seem to move at all, and although her eyes were open, they stared blankly when Sybil stood before her in the failing light.
Sybil put out a finger and touched her cheek. It was clammy like a toad. She went into Dorothy’s old bedroom over the side porch to fetch a blanket, forgot what she had gone for, and became interested in the fat chestnut buds unfolding just outside the window.
When she went back eventually with the Mexican blanket that Theo had brought back from somewhere or other -Mexico? - Dorothy did not wake when she laid it tenderly over her. Sybil switched on the light, and Roger began to chirp and mutter, as he always did when a room was lit up. Still no news from Emerson’s bed. It was then that Sybil picked up the family photograph, knocking a jar of face cream to the floor, and knew that Dorothy was dead, because she just lay there and did not say a word.
*
In the days that followed these strange events, Sybil veered between being lucid and quite confused.
When she was confused, she could not remember what had happened to Dorothy. She expected to see her in every room she went into, stirring gravy, bending hippily to lay the fire, polishing a table with a hand fat and purple from the pressure she put into it. When she went into the front room upstairs to feed Roger, or to kneel at the window in a luxury of hate for the cars, it was quite a surprise to find Dorothy still there on the bed, looking a little worse each day and smelling, let’s face it, Dot, terrible.
When her head was clear, she knew quite well that Dorothy was dead. But there it was. Nothing could be done. Inscrutable are Thy purposes, Lord.
The morning after she shed, Anna Romiza arrived and found Sybil in the kitchen brewing a cup of instant tea, which she had always pretended to Dorothy was an offence against the traditions of her English ancestry, but which she really rather liked.
‘Where Miz Grue then?’ Anna’s broad, dark-fleshed face with the magenta mouth spread all over the bottom of it was a comfort to see. Sybil realized that she had been very much alone for hours. Had she been to bed? She could not remember. Her skirt looked somewhat wrinkled. She might well have slept in it.
She was on the point of telling Anna that Dorothy was dead, for Anna would know what to do, since she spent as much time visiting people in funeral homes as other women spend having coffee with the neighbours, when she was arrested by an extremely clear vision, like a sign from heaven, of that flat old lady with the rails around her bed as if she were a wild beast.
With Dorothy dead, that’s where Sybil would go. They had taken her there to show her what would happen if she did not behave. They had taken her there to try and trap her into being crazy enough to be locked up for good.
‘She’s sick, Anna,’ she said casually. ‘She’ll have to stay in bed for a while.’
‘That’s too bad.’ Anna started for the stairs. ‘I’ll go up and see if there’s anything she wants.’
‘Oh no.’ Sybil jumped up with an agility that surprised herself, and put a hand on Anna’s muscular arm. ‘She doesn’t want to be disturbed. She told me. I don’t believe you’d better go upstairs at all, Anna. We can let the cleaning go up there just for now.’
‘You�
��re the boss.’ Anna said cheerfully. She did not like hauling the bulky old vacuum cleaner upstairs any better than she liked the idea of waiting on Dorothy.
‘Sybil Sybil Sybil.’
As she opened the door of Emerson’s room, she half expected to see Dorothy sitting up in bed, demanding bran flakes and rose-hip syrup, but it was Roger, carrying on like a madman in his cage, with a stream of incoherent comment about Roger Grue and double double toil and trouble, which was what Dorothy always said when she stirred decoctions on Priscilla.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Sybil asked him crossly, for he had startled her, which everyone knew was not good for her. ‘Do you want to go out?’
The bedroom window was shut. Dorothy had never thought much of the night air. Feeling clever, Sybil bent to check that the damper was across the chimney, and then opened the door of the bird cage.
Roger flew to the top of one of the bare posts at the head of the bed and stayed there. He stayed there all day, clutching its rounded top with curved claws, while Dorothy lay silent below, and Sybil fancied that her hair was growing, for when she lit the bedside lamp, she thought she could see more white coming in at the roots.
Anna had made lunch for her, and had left her something to heat up in the oven for her supper.
‘What about Miz Grue?’ she asked before she left. She despised Dorothy, but she was not going to see the poor woman starve to death.
‘I’m taking her up some soup.’ Sybil took a can at random from the cupboard, opened it, and began to heat it on the stove.
‘You better dilute it with water,’ Anna said, watching her narrowly.
‘Of course, ha ha, how silly of me.’ Sybil took the saucepan to the tap and splashed in what she guessed was the right amount, for she had thrown the can away.’
‘You sure you going to be OK?’ Anna was still standing by the door in her mauve coat and her shoes, her working slippers in her hand.
Room Upstairs Page 15
