Room Upstairs (3 page)

Laurie said that her bills had all been paid, but that could not be so. He'd never find them all. Even she could not remember where some of them were.

Now that she was learning to walk again, pushing the rubber-footed metal frame ahead of her like a criminal in a portable dock, she would wander into the rooms up and down the corridor, and tell the other patients the story of My Accident. The details shifted, but the central theme of heroics held fast.

There I was, running to get help for my brother, who was
ill. He's eighty-two, you know, poor old soul. …

‘I didn't let you down,' Ted said, visiting, hat on knee, nervous of the nurses. ‘I did it for you, Syb.'

‘Did what?' With her best New England aspirated W.

‘Got the doctor.'

‘What doctor?'

And Thelma, who had brought poor old Ted to see her, because they had all expected her to she, said: ‘That Montgomery Jones, lucky for you. No knowing what Uncle Ted would have done, or you either, if he hadn't stopped his car.'

Oh, they were all out to fool her, just because she couldn't remember anything about that day. Or was it night? There was a vague, disturbing memory of Marma's dummy, hatted, glimmering in the blue light from the little train.

‘But there is nothing wrong with me now,' she told Montgomery, who was sitting on the bed next to her bad leg and reading her newspaper. ‘And I want to go home. Indeed, I must go home. There a thousand things to do. The cats—'

‘The cats are in the barn. Laurie has told you that a hundred times.'

He was young enough for asperity, not always the careful patience with which the middle-aged insulted age.

‘But that house can't stand empty. It's not that kind of house, Montgomery. My father built it over a hundred and twenty years ago, for his bride. Once before he shed - not the time he did she, but the time he thought he would - he made me promise it would never be sold. Ted never cared for it that much, and the others - my stepbrothers and sisters - they thought Plymouth was dead.'

‘It isn't now. You can't drive down the street in summer.'

‘Oh, summer people. They don't count.'

Cherish my house, Papa had said. She thought of all the empty rooms, holding their breath. The floorboards trying out a creak to see if anyone was there. The waiting furniture, resting a leg on a matchbox or a wad of paper, like stabled horses.

‘I must go back.'

‘I don't think you should live alone, Mrs P.'

‘Why not? I have for years. Just because I broke a leg doesn't
mean I'm senile, whatever Thelma has been telling you.'

‘You could have a nurse for a while. I know a nice woman who—'

‘Who wants a job. I don't need a nice woman. I'm not a baby.'

‘I don't trust that leg yet.' He laid a clean bony hand on the sheeted hump of it as if he owned it, which he did, just about. Sybil did not count the surgeon. ‘You could spend a few weeks in a nursing home, maybe, till you're stronger on your feet.'

‘Thank you,' she said. ‘I'm not ready to go yet. They take over all your savings, and then kill you off quite soon, so they can have the money. Didn't you know?' For a doctor, he was terribly naive.

*

Later, when Laurie and Jess came from Boston, where they lived in an apartment on the Cambridge side of the river, Montgomery took them to the hospital cafeteria to have a talk among the paper cups and doughnuts.

‘She wants to go home,' he said. ‘And she's ready to go home. But not alone.' He was a tall young man, who stooped over tables. He looked up at Laurie from his stoop, stirring his coffee with a wooden tongue depressor.

In the hospital, she was Mont's problem. Let loose, her independence destroyed, perhaps forever, by that pile of laundry on the second step, she was the family's problem. Laurie's problem, Jess thought. And so mine.

Thelma was in Philadelphia, sponsoring art shows with her new-married money. John was always All Tied Up in the New York office, or the Bridgeport plant, or the status house at Darien, where Anthea and the girls had learned to live most of life without him. Mary was in New Jersey, teaching kindergarten children not to read, because reading started in the first grade.

Laurie was with a law firm in Boston, near enough to come often. He cared much more than anyone else, Jess knew. More like a son than a grandson.

But if I am going to be jealous of an old woman of eighty at this stage of my marriage, I'd better go back to England
and cut Gran's toenails, as a penance. You don't know what marrying is, Mother said. But I do. It is unbearable heights and unbearable depths and long, long stretches that are either content or boredom, you don't ask which.

‘She rejects the idea of a nurse,' Mont said, pursing his lips, trying to look like a family doctor.

‘Too expensive anyway, on top of what she's paid here.'

It was Laurie who took care of Sybil's money now, and the others gladly left him to it.

‘Do what you think best,' his mother had said. ‘Thank God we have a lawyer in the family at last.'

They had opened Camden House one weekend when Thelma came up, and the three of them stayed there. Jess had made Laurie lock the door of Emerson's room. She would not go in that room again. If they ever had to live in this house, she would have the door sealed up and wallpapered over, like that Paris hotel where the woman shed of plague.

What happened? they had kept asking her. What happened to you? But she did not say, even to Laurie. The grandmother had not asked what happened.

That weekend, Jess had cooked, and swept up some of the dust that the cleaning woman was supposed to have been taking care of all these weeks. The cows belonging to the farmer who rented the pasture and barn had broken some fences, and Laurie went out in the rain to mend them. When Jess came out to him, they lay under the pattering tent of the huge weeping beech tree, and later carved their intials intertwined on the elephant bark, where his boy's carving was, and all the family names, the older ones swollen and spread as the tree grew.

Thelma had spent most of the time complaining about the weather, and throwing the cats out as soon as Jess let them in, and wandering about the house condemning the furniture and pictures and ornaments, although she had grown up with most of them.

‘Do whatever you think best,' she said, when Laurie wanted her to go through Sybil's desk with him.

‘Well, she's your mother.' He screwed up his face and ran his hands through his soft black hair.

‘Go on and make like a lawyer.' Thelma said sternly. ‘Power of Attorney. Your father would be proud of you.'

Laurie's father was an alcoholic, drowning without trace somewhere in Europe. Laurie never made jokes about him. Thelma did.

‘She had a fit when I said nursing home,' Montgomery told them. ‘And I figure there's no one in the family she'd live with, even if they would - if they could have her, so—'

‘We'd have her with us,' Jess heard herself saying, ‘if there was room in the flat.' Would she have said that if there had been?

‘Sweet.' Laurie gave her a smile she did not deserve. ‘But she'd never leave Camden House. She wants to be buried there, On the hill where my great grandfather had his plants. I think there's a law against it.'

‘The coloured woman she talks about. Would she stay with her?'

‘Anna Romiza? It's all she'll do to come in and clean.'

‘You'll have to find her a companion, a housekeeper, something like that.'

‘How?'

‘Advertise or something. I don't know.'

They both looked so defeated, although it wasn't Mont's problem, that Jess said quickly: ‘I'll do it. I'll find someone.'

*

The other girls in the office took a long lunch break to get their hair done. Jess washed her short light hair herself, but she could take longer too, and dash back across the river to the flat to interview people in the lunch hour.

But there was no one to interview.

She put advertisements in all the Boston papers, and the Plymouth paper as well, but the only reply was from a desperate woman who asked her to send on the names of anyone she rejected, because she would take just about anybody at this stage, for her stepfather.

Sybil had eventually agreed to a housekeeper. She would not have taken it from her children, or from Laurie, but Montgomery decreed it, and she took it, as long as it was not called
a companion. ‘I am my own companion. I don't want her around me all the time, making silly conversation.'

A housekeeper. Now that she had agreed, she could not wait. She telephoned Jess every morning at a quarter to seven, because the nurses woke her at six, to say she could not understand the problem.

‘There must be dozens of women looking for a good home. Why, they should almost pay me to take them.'

‘The only one I've heard from, Gramma, wants a hundred and twenty dollars a week, a separate apartment with television, and free keep for her fifteen-year-old boy, who is retarded.'

Restlessly, Sybil roamed the hospital corridors, in and out of the rooms of the well and the ill and the boarded up old boshes that were neither well nor ill; sometimes with a stick, sometimes with the metal walker, if she felt regressive. She would not do crosswords, nor read, nor watch television, nór do anything but fuss about getting out. ‘And believe me,' Mont told Jess, behind Laurie's back, ‘there is no one in this hospital who won't raise a cheer when she does.'

No companions. No housekeepers. Not one.

Companion-housekeeper wanted for elderly lady in beautiful country home near Plymouth. Good salary to right person.

In three weeks, Jess spent over thirty dollars on her attractive offer. No one cared.

When the call came from Mrs Melia Mulligan, who would go anywhere, do anything, love anybody, as long as she could bring her little dog, just like a child to her, Jess called Laurie at his office excitedly and said: ‘I'm going to take her, whatever she's like.'

‘Very well. Thank you. That is good news indeed.' The juniors were not allowed to take personal calls.

‘I love you.'

‘Thank you. Yes. I appreciate it.'

*

‘Mulligan?' Sybil raised her bony nose like a retriever, and scented the idea of Mrs Melia.

‘Well, but all the charm of them—'

‘She'll not have long to charm me.' Sybil said. ‘Just till I can go without my stick. Does she want the earth?'

‘Not too bad. Laurie will pay her for you, if you like.'

‘I'll pay her. That way, she'll always know who's boss.'

*

But there was no question of Melia Mulligan not knowing.

She was plump and unpretentious, with long pocketed aprons, and hair drawn neatly back into a small colourless bun like an English muffin before toasting.

After her first shock at seeing the black Priscilla stove -'Don't tell me I've to cook on that!' recoiling as if the kitchen were alive with roaches - she made purring acceptance of everything in the house, and thanked Sybil, almost with tears, for her room over the side porch, which had been done up with new curtains and bedspread by Jess.

She brought a hooded basket for the small dog, and covered its cushion with a piece of material left ova: from the curtains. Tiger was a sharp-nosed weakling with huge waxy ears, who shivered a lot because he had no hair, only a sort of suede pile on his rodent body. He sat in the basket most of the time, peering out of the opening like an owl in a tree, and was no trouble to anybody.

Melia was amiable and sweet spoken, with a ready laugh and a snatch of song to lighten all tasks. She cleaned the windows, and tore down curtains to have at them with bleach and starch, and made little creamy puddings in glass dishes for Sybil, and carried up trays when she went to bed early, which was often, for she still found herself easily tired.

She swept leaves from the walks when the man did not come, and struck geranium cuttings before the frost knocked out the straggled plants, and even turned out all the old medicine bottles from the cupboard at the top of the stairs. On Anna Romiza's mornings, the coffeepot was always on the go, and banana bread, with so little left to do that Anna revised her opinion of the job and stopped telling her son it was time his poor mother retired.

Sybil was not allowed to drive, ‘for a while', they said, but
they had been trying to get her off the road for years. However, Mrs Mulligan drove Sybil's car neatly and safely, and they took little trips to admire what Melia called the foliage, and pottered round the supermarket together, with Sybil pushing the shopping cart to keep herself steady, while Melia popped back and forth with things from the shelves, asking: ‘Do you fancy this, my lady?'

People who met Sybil in the town, where she knew everybody except newcomers of ten years or so, exclaimed at how well she looked.

‘The word went out that you were dead,' Maud Owens told her bluntly, eating Melia's cake, lifting her skirt to warm her bony knees at Melia's red-hot fire. ‘But you look better than ever. I wish someone would find a Mrs Mulligan for me. I'm sick of cooking for myself. And I'm sick of frozen pies and TV dinners. That's a cute little dog too. Here fellow -here stoopid.'

There was nothing cute about Tiger really, but he was part of the picture of cosiness. He was Melia's child, who slept on her bed, and shared her meat, and had never even seen the label on a can of dog-food.

When she was alone, before My Accident, Sybil, like Maud, had seldom bothered with a proper meal. But Melia loved to cook meat, and could do things with potatoes and pastry that began to put back some of the weight that Sybil had lost on the genteel hospital food.

When Montgomery Jones discovered what fine meals they were having in the yellow house down there in the hollow between the road and the rising pasture, his little foreign car would frequently nose down the zigzag driveway at supper time. He was cooking for himself in an elongated apartment over his office, ‘till I can find a wife', though he was not looking, as far as Sybil could see.