It was the first time she had spoken about that. Jess had thought she was too confused to remember.
‘Why did you, Gramma?’ she asked on an impulse, taking Sybil by her thin upper arms. ‘Why didn’t you tell someone, when you knew that she was dead?’
‘You should know why.’ Sybil looked into her face, her pouched eyes drawing up towards the furrows in the middle of her brow. ‘I couldn’t tell, because I knew that if there was no Dot, no one to look after me, I’d have to be shut up in one of those places where they put the crazy old lashes.’
Small tears began to trickle down her cheeks and into the folds of skin at the corners of her trembling mouth. She did not bend her head nor raise a hand to her eyes. She just stood looking into Jess’s face and crying feebly.
When Thelma heard that Laurie and Jess had decided to let the rest of the lease on the Cambridge apartment go, and move into Camden House with Sybil, she said: ‘You’re insane. But you will do what you want, I suppose. You always have.’
Laurie would drive to and from Boston every day, and Jess would leave her job in the college admissions office, which she had planned to do soon anyway. The future? That would take care of itself. For her summer, she would take care of Laurie and Sybil and the house, and wait for her baby.
Sybil was happy, brighter and more sensible than they had known her for some time. Laurie and Jess were more deeply in love than they had ever been. Jess felt well and strong and so securely content that it was hard to imagine this house as the place of ghosts and fear which her sick imagination had made it. She was not afraid. The house seemed once more like a place that she could love as home.
Emerson’s room was shut up and would not be used again, but she did not mind passing the door, even in the dark, testing herself by not turning on the light. Roger was back on his hook in the kitchen, seducing his reflection in the mirror with kissing noises and chirrups. He had not spoken a word since Dorothy was taken away, and with any luck he never would again.
Laurie had wanted to wring his neck or gas him in the oven, but Jess refused. ‘It wasn’t his fault.’ She put a finger to his open door, but he had not been out of the cage since they caught him upstairs under a waste-basket and put him back in.
‘What wasn’t his fault?’
‘Everything. Dorothy poisoning herself. Sybil going so queer.’
‘I’m not so sure. I’ve never trusted that bird. If he really is the reincarnation of poor Grue’s boy friend, I’d say Henry was a man who was better dead. The cats will soon fix Roger anyway.’
The cats were back. Jess had brought them down from the barn. Some of the younger ones were too wild to stay in the house, but the black panther who could make bird noises moved back in, and a striped female, and the old ginger who slept on the radiators.
Laurie bought Jess a little car, so that she would not be stranded when he was in Boston. Sybil was so active and walking so well that she took her to the replica of the first Pilgrim village, and while she was there, she found out that they were short of a guide, and went to the manager’s office to ask if she could have the job.
‘How much do you know about the early settlers?’
‘My husband’s family came over in she Mayflower? She had not seen that as an advantage before.
‘Yes, we know.’ The manager laughed. He knew Sybil’s family quite well. ‘But the British have got so many centuries of their own history to learn, they don’t get around to learning much about ours, even their own part in it.’
‘I don’t know much about anything,’ Jess said cheerfully. ‘But we have all the books at home, and I’ll read it up. You can give me a test if you like.’
‘We shall anyway,’ the man said, ‘and you’ll have to take lessons from one of our senior guides on how to talk, and how to handle the public’
‘Do they riot?’
‘They ask dam-fool questions, which is worse.’
One of the things they said to Jess, after she got the job and stood there in her long brown dress in the Myles Standish house, telling the tale to all who cared to listen, was: ‘But you’re British!’
‘So were the Pilgrims.’ Her sweetest smile, docile, maidenly.
‘Well, how about that? I guess you’re right. Funny thing, I always thought of them as Americans.’
Anna Romiza agreed to come every afternoon to stay with Sybil while Jess was at the Pilgrim village.
‘Let me see you!’ Sybil always called out from her bed where she was resting when she heard Jess come out of her room, so Jess had to go and stand in the doorway in her cap and her big white collar and her dark green bodice and long brown wool skirt, so bunchy at the waist that all the guides looked pregnant, whether they were or not, so it did not matter about Jess.
‘Dorothy would have liked that’ Sybil chuckled. ‘Poor Dot, she always wanted to be a Pilgrim maid. She liked to brew herbs and simples, you know, like they used to. Did I tell you?’
‘Yes, Gramma, you told me, I must fly. I’m late’
Laurie took a picture of her driving off in the little sports car in her Pilgrim outfit. It looked very funny, like nuns in a station wagon. The guides were not allowed to smoke while they were driving in costume, and if the manager could have made them go to work on horseback, he would.
The village was called Plimoth Plantation, because that was the way they used to spell it. It was a street of small wooden houses with reed-thatched roofs, laid out just as the settlers had built, with a college boy on vacation firing an ancient flintlock on the fort roof, and a man in a woollen hat pushing a primitive saw philosophically back and forth in the same broad piece of timber.
The whole exhibit was so meticulously authentic that some people, already confused after seeing the Mayflower II, believed it was the original village, and touched carefully ‘antiqued’ beams reverently and said: ‘I’ll bet this could tell a tale or two.’
Jess smiled her Pilgrim smile, and did not always disillusion them, if that was what they Wanted.
It was curiously peaceful, in spite of the crowds. Sometimes she felt as if she actually lived here, and would be climbing into the little wooden bed sunk in the wall after the people had gone away. The wax figures of the settlers became familiar friends. She was proud of them.
In her own family, there was no talk of ancestors, no speculation about those long dead weavers from the North, no interest in anything beyond one’s own life span. The pride of Laurie’s family had seemed exaggerated, difficult to share. Now she began to understand.
‘We are not descended from fearful men.’
She began to understand the courage that had hacked a living here out of nothing. It had taken the English.
Once she had to go back at dusk after the village was closed to fetch something she had left behind. Shall I be afraid? But the figures were relaxed, waiting harmlessly for daylight. The boy with the toothache, the sweating surgeon about to plunge his knife into the artistic swelling on the man’s leg - she patted them serenely, as if they were animals bedded down for the night, and went back up the deserted street unhurriedly, relishing her freedom from the imagery of fear.
The only place in which she felt uncomfortable was the booth with the herbal medicine exhibit, which had first started Dorothy on the road to her own destruction. Although it was outdoors in a perpetual east wind from the sea, the herbs and roots and the powders and pestles and pills evoked once more the sweet smell of death which lurked, ready to haunt Jess forever.’
When she was tired, she sat on a bench in the sun, with her round-toed shoes drawn neatly under her skirt, and added local colour, and people would stop and ask her questions, and exclaim about her English accent, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with mild affront, as if she was cheating.
Sometimes instead of asking questions, they would give her the answers to questions that had not been asked. It was wonderful how much Americans knew about their own history, although as the manager had said, there being so little of it m
ade it easier.
But she could not imagine her father and her mother, nor either of her brothers, stumping round Penshürst or Longleat and handing out bits of information to the guide. They had all been to Blenheim once, and her mother’s ankle had turned in the courtyard, because she had insisted on wearing her ‘illusion’ heels, and one of her sister-in-law’s children had wet on the staircase.
It was a very happy summer. Jess loved her job at Plimoth Plantation, and loved wearing the anonymous costume and being able to stand with her stomach stuck out, resting her clean Pilgrim hands modestly on the baby.
Sybil was no trouble. She was placid and content, and apart from remembering very little except stray incidents from her ancient history which bubbled inconsequentially to the surface, she was quite sensible.
She lost things all the time. Once when it was her glasses again, she said: ‘Dorothy took them.’
Jess looked at her.
‘I found them in her room, wrapped up and hidden. She used to hide my things to make me think I was stupid. She took my glasses, and I couldn’t see.’
‘I’ll find them.’ Jess began to poke in the seats of the deep chairs. ‘Dorothy isn’t here now, remember.’
‘No, she isn’t here any more.’ Sybil nodded. ‘That’s right, she isn’t here.’
Friends began to come again almost every weekend. They swam and sailed and had great meals and great irrelevant discussions lying on the lawn in the dark after the twilight insects had gone. Some of the young men and Laurie and Montgomery cleared the tennis court, and bought a load of clay, and they were levelling it down and tearing out and rebuilding the rusted wire netting that had collapsed long ago into the arms of the ramblers.
It was like those first months when Melia Mulligan was there, and the house had been alive and alight with love and friendship, and Laurie and Jess had planned their future here, and marked out the space for their children’s names on the grey prehistoric bark of the weeping beech.
Jess had been afraid of what would happen when Montgomery came back, but he and Laurie were just the same as before, the madness and the jealousy vanished as if it had never seeped in to poison their lives.
Montgomery was quite interested in a girl who was somebody’s sister, a tall girl with light hair and gentle eyes, who never wore shoes and never hurried.
‘She’s lazy though,’ Jess said, pursing her lips like her mother. ‘She wouldn’t make him a very good wife.’
‘Mont hasn’t got as far as that. He only likes her because she looks a bit like you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know he’s been in love with you for ages.’
‘I didn’t know you knew. Poor Mont, it was only because - if I had known, I would have told you he was here that night.’
‘That was what hurt. You not telling me. I never really believed what she said. But thai you hadn’t told me, that’s what I couldn’t understand. And that woman, she planted the idea in me like the seed of something horrible that grew and choked me. I couldn’t think straight.’
‘She tried to tell me something about you too, when you weren’t here. She was cunning. She didn’t exactly say anything, but she hinted about why you hadn’t come. I should have hit her in the mouth, plugged my ears, run away. I didn’t want to listen, but I had to.’
‘Why?’
‘She made me. There was something about her. She made me listen, and think about it. That was the worst thing, that I was thinking about it. That was when I—’ She would not tell him about the image that had hung across the bed from her, and reached out its icy hand. That was in another life, another Jess, neurotic, brooding, afraid.
‘She made you. Yes, that’s how it was. I wouldn’t listen to her. I went away. But I had to come back. She was sitting in that chair, waiting. She knew I would come back. She made me listen to her filth.’
‘Do you think she had some kind of evil spirit? Could she? Everything went wrong. Gramma went to pieces. We fought. I was so unhappy, and you were too, weren’t you?’
He nodded, staring at her.
‘Haven’t you noticed - it seems a dreadful thing to say -but Laurie, haven’t you noticed that everything began to be all right after she shed?’
Involuntarily, they both glanced at the chair where Dorothy used to sit and sip her sherry, with a fuming ashtray on her knee and the bird on the edge of the peanut bowl.
They looked back at each other, and Jess whispered: ‘I’m glad she’s dead.’
*
Going through her winter clothes, to see what there would be to wear after the baby was born, Jess found the letter she had written to Aunty Mary in the pocket of her grey flannel skirt, where she had pushed it, unfinished, the night Montgomery came.
Afterwards, when everything fell about her ears, and she had fled to England, she had not thought again about her cry for help to Mary.
Lucky that she had never finished the letter and sent it. Mary would have thought she was mad, and she must have been.
‘The house is haunted. It is full of ghosts. There is a ghost of myself that has been here since long before I was born. Have you ever seen it?’
Poor Mary. Think what you were saved. It would have scared you to death. She tore the letter into small pieces.
That evening when it was growing dark, and Sybil was moving comfortably through the ground floor turning on lights and drawing curtains and talking to the cats, Jess was upstairs putting on a clean smock before Laurie came home. She stuck out a mile.
‘You’re wearing it very low,’ Montgomery had said.
‘Mind your own business.’ He was only allowed to discuss things like the baby’s name, or where it would go to school. Nothing professional. Jess was still going to her obstetrician in Boston, where the baby would be born.
Apart from her shape, she did not look too bad. She did not look so unformed and childish any more. Perhaps she was going to mature gracefully through motherhood. I like myself, she thought, looking into the same mirror where a year ago she had stared and stared and hated herself.
An experiment. She turned out the light in the room and in the upper hall, and took a risk.
‘I’m glad she’s dead,’ she said aloud in the dim room. Then she stared and stared at herself in the mirror until her eyes swam and the lines of her reflection grew blurred. Moving like a sleepwalker, with her eyes fixed, she went out into the hall towards the place where she had first come face to face with a vision of herself.
Nothing. There could never have been anything. A fantasy which seemed ludicrous now as she walked right up against the empty wall where her face had hung, and laughed against the musty wallpaper.
Fifteen
About the ead of July, Roger began to talk again.
For two days, the threat of thunder had oppressed the air. Sybil was limp and querulous. Jess and the baby sweated in the homespun Pilgrim dress. The cats panted under bushes like dying stoles.
When the storm broke over the day, great shafts of jungle rain came sweeping in to wash the yellow house, and a pail and basin made music all night under the two weak spots in the roof.
The parched earth, cracking like an old woman’s skin, relaxed in dark brown fragrance. On the driveway, the birds took baths in puddles instead of the dust. The phlox revived, and Sybil felt so well that in the afternoon, she took Dorothy’s secateurs out to trim off the shattered roses.
Japanese beetles, stronger than the wind and rain, were dinging to the dead heads, and eating their way disgustingly into the tight buds that had ridden out the storm. Dorothy used to spray them vindictively, murdering them as they gorged, gritting her teeth as she directed a specially vicious shot at the couples who were getting married on Henry Ford and Mrs Sam McGredy.
Rose spray. Sybil went to the toolshed, but the sprayer was empty. Dorothy used to mix powder in a bucket under the out’ side tap.
Sybil could see her clearly, vast from behind like a square triumphal arch, bending in
the broad jeans. Where did she
keep the powder. It was hard to remember, when people simply went off and left you trying to find where they put things. There should be a big jar like a gallon jar for Coca-Cola syrup somewhere. It didn’t matter. Sybil stood vacant-eyed and slack-mouthed by the rose bed, trailing the empty sprayer.
‘What’s the matter?’ Anna Romiza called through the open kitchen window.
‘I wanted to spray the beetles.’
‘What with?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You can use the spray can I got for the flies. I’ll bring it out. Just wait while I dry my hands.’
‘No dear, I’ll come in. You’ve got your work, I’ve got mine.’
Always so thoughtful. In the old days, with Nancy and Walter, she would work right along with them, and Nancy said, pretending: ‘I don’t know what good we are, she’d never miss us.’
In the spring when it was bedding-out time, she and Nancy worked side by side up on the hill all day, and when Theo came up to see who was going to make dinner, he would say they were better than men. Nancy was like a man. She picked Sybil up once, and Theo said: ‘That’s more than I can do.’ They laughed then. They were always laughing. Now there wasn’t much to laugh at. When the young ones threw away a joke and she asked them to repeat it, they said it wouldn’t be funny any more, but then looked at each other and burst out laughing again, which showed it was.
April April laugh thy girlish laughter. ‘What month is this, Anna?’ When she went into the kitchen, she had forgotten what she came for. Poor Roger looked very droopy. He couldn’t be moulting, if Anna was right about it being July. There was a roast in the oven and the kitchen was too hot.
Room Upstairs Page 17
