IT was about the time the baby should have been born that I went back to the house in Fulham for the last time.
I rounded the corner, pushing Dr Maxwell’s pram with my son lying in it. It was only the second or third time we’d been out together, although he’d made a quick recovery from his early birth and now weighed nearly ten pounds and was extremely attractive in a still-slightly-shrimplike fashion. He had a lot of dark hair (not all in the right places, but that would soon go, I’d been assured) and the most amazing little hands and feet, which I never got tired of looking at. His nails in particular fascinated me. They were as small and perfect as pearls. I’d called him David. I’d thought about various names, already held by various people, but in the end I’d called him David. You can’t please everyone.
I stood looking at the house. I wondered if anyone was at home. I listened in vain for the sound of St Louis Woman. John had stayed at the hospital all night when David was born. So had Toby and so had Father. They must have made a bizarre trio, sitting in the waiting-room hour after hour; it made me want to giggle to imagine what the nurses made of it. They were nearly all Irish girls, and I heard they had bets as to which of my male visitors was David’s father. I don’t suppose the odds were very high on Terry; for one thing, he came on to the scene rather late, having been confined (during my confinement) to another part of the hospital with a cracked jawbone. When he came along at last, in the second week, I was disturbed by my inability to feel that he was any more part of the baby than Toby or John. They had had so much more to do with my getting through those dark months; it seemed they were more entitled to a share in David than Terry was.
He was very diffident and quiet, standing beside the bed making awkward conversation. He kept repeating ‘You’re sure you’re all right, then?’ and when I said I was all right, what about him, he rubbed his bandaged jaw and said ‘That chap of yours packs quite a punch – didn’t even see it coming.’ But the note of satisfaction in his voice gave me the clue to the mystery of the one-sided fight, and my impression was confirmed by the fact that Terry no longer seemed guilty, nor talked about marriage. The simple public-school standards relating to crime and punishment can last, I saw, through life. He had allowed himself to be ‘beaten’; the score, in some fundamental, immature way, now seemed to him to be settled.
That was all right with me. His proposal wasn’t any sort of compliment, when you came right down to it; it was simply an attempt at expiation. I was fond of him, but I didn’t respect him, any more than he did me. Which wasn’t much, whatever he might say. To him I was irretrievably that sort of girl for ever.
It was borne in upon me that I would be that sort of girl in most men’s eyes from now on. This didn’t alarm me unduly, partly because Toby didn’t regard me as that sort of girl, and partly because nothing was alarming me at the moment. David, who was creating the causes of alarm and despondency, was also neutralizing them at source. One look at him grinning gummily up at me made the world and its judgements recede. This wouldn’t last, I knew, but while it did I saw no point in arguing.
I rocked the pram gently, remembering how tenderly John’s enormous hands had scooped the baby out of his hospital crib beside my bed. He held him as surely and firmly as one of the nurses, cradling the tiny head in a giant paw that could have crushed it like a walnut. As he held David in his arms, a wide grin splitting his broad black face, I realized something I hadn’t grasped before about John. It gave me a shock, but not an unpleasant one. I waited for a change in my affection for him, the faint revulsion I had felt for Malcolm and others like him in the past. But there was no change. I knew what I owed to John, and that he couldn’t have helped me in the way he had if he had been any different.
Father had stood by while John played with David. I could see it was a peculiar kind of torture for him, but he didn’t interfere. He himself didn’t touch the baby for a long time. It was as if he just wanted to see him, to know that he was there and real, flesh of his flesh, and to examine his own secret pride; that seemed to be enough. Also, I think he was a little nervous that he might damage him somehow.
Dottie came, as she had come before, upbraiding me for not contacting her, her good-natured abuse dissolving into enchanted gurgles every time her eyes fell on the baby. I asked her to be godmother. She accepted with joy. The godfathers, of course, were to be John and Toby. ‘The christening,’ said Dottie succinctly, ‘should cause quite a stir.’
And of course, Toby came. He had shaved the beard off, but I discovered it was not that which made the change in him. The fledgling look was gone for ever; the darting, restless eyes and nervous hands were calmed and still. He’d learned to live alone, to discipline himself and to write. The novel, he told me, had started moving again only after weeks of miserable loafing about, missing me desperately and unable to come to grips with anything. Then one night he had come in from a particularly insipid and boring film and had sat down in front of his table, picked up a pen and said to himself ‘I will write fifty words. Just fifty. It doesn’t matter how bad they are, and I’ll stop after fifty words even if it’s the middle of a sentence.’
He wrote two thousand words that night, and after that he was afraid to stop. He forced himself to work between certain hours each day. He had a superstitious fear that if even one day passed without his adding to the book he would lose himself again in that drab labyrinth of un-doing. He didn’t even give himself a break after the first novel was finished. He sent it off to a publisher at lunchtime one day, and the same afternoon he started mapping out the next.
‘So now you’re not blurred any more,’ I said when he’d finished telling me.
He stared. ‘Fancy you remembering that,’ he said. ‘It’s started to be true. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be so totally absorbed in one’s work that nothing else impinges at all.’
I thought of the feeling I had had while David was being born, and nodded.
‘Why did you send that character to find me?’ he asked suddenly. I sensed his unease. I think he was afraid I’d make some demand on him which would lure him away from his new-found singleness of mind. I hesitated. If I answered ‘Because I love you and need you and feel like half a person without you,’ he would probably respond with the corresponding need in himself and the whole thing would start again. I wanted it to, and in a way I think he did. But it would be a risk. Later, perhaps, when his new disciplines were more firmly established, it would be possible to add a full-time love relationship. As our hungry need for each other diminished, and we grew stronger as individuals, we’d have more to give.
‘Well? Not that I wasn’t glad? I’ve never stopped wanting you.’
‘I’ve got something of yours.’
‘What?’
‘Your typewriter.’
It was lovely to see what happened to his face. All the serious grown-up lines lifted at the edges and his eyes lit up with incredulous pleasure. Even the neatly brushed hair seemed to spring on end as of old.
‘You’ve got Minnie!’ he exclaimed joyfully. ‘You angel!’
You darling blackbird, I thought, yearning for him, my treacherous female arms longing to imprison him for ever.
‘Fancy you saving old Min!’ he kept saying happily. ‘I always felt like a traitor, leaving her in Doris’s bovine clutches. How is the old duck, by the way?’
The moment of weakness – that one, anyway – passed. We gossiped and shrieked until a nurse came rushing up to chase Toby away. I watched him go with a painful stab of advance loneliness. Once he’d asked me if I would love him more if he were successful. Now he was successful, in the way I’d meant when I’d answered ‘yes’ but I realized only now how much more I’d love him, unblurred. I longed for the time when we could safely and un-possessively lay claim to each other. But I felt so happy about him, it didn’t matter too terribly that he wasn’t mine yet, and might never be.
When Father came to fetch us home, I rode in front beside him holding David in my arms. He smelled warm and milky and stared up at me with bleary eyes. Father’s glance kept leaving the road. On the way from the car I said ‘Hold him a second while I get the things out of the back,’ and dumped him unceremoniously into Father’s arms before he could protest. David clutched his finger in a strong, trusting grip. When I wanted to take him back, Father said ‘Do you think I’m going to drop him or something? I’ll carry him upstairs.’ The next evening he was demanding bath privileges.
The yellow look was gone from Father’s eyes. It was gone from the net curtains, too, because I had washed and bleached them. It seemed easy to apply what I had learned in the L-shaped room to the wider field of Father’s house. It was recovering – and so, more slowly, were its inhabitants – from the exigencies of the past eight months and the past twenty-eight years.
But I missed the L-shaped room. Each morning I woke expecting to find myself in it. To have been wrenched away from it so suddenly made me feel like a snail with a broken shell. I was sucked back irresistibly for one last look.
And now here I was; and I could only stand on the pavement and stare upwards. I couldn’t bring myself to knock and ask Doris if I could see the room. It was rented again, I knew. My things had been collected weeks ago, after I’d been taken to hospital, and Doris had lost no time in getting a new tenant. A young lady, John had reported. I wondered if she might be another like Jane and Sonia. But no; customers would never walk up all those stairs. I was filled with curiosity about her, whoever she was. Had she been adopted by Mavis? Had she been frightened by John’s black face in the little window? Had she mastered the bathroom geyser? And most important, what had she done to the room?
Well, it was no good. I would never know. Better that way, perhaps.
I turned the pram round to head for home. My heart was heavy. I hadn’t said good-bye to the room that had sheltered me and taught me so much, and now it was too late and it would have to go on nagging.
At the corner I looked back once more. Mounting the steps was a girl, a stranger. Without stopping to think I called out and she stopped. I bowled the pram at full speed back to the foot of the steps.
There was nothing special about her – just a rather plain girl in her middle twenties with mouse-coloured hair. She carried her shopping in a string bag. Onions, I noticed. Doris won’t like that.
She was looking at me indifferently.
‘Yes?’
‘Excuse me – but do you live in the top front room?’
‘Yes?’
‘I used to live there – before you.’
‘Yes?’ she said again. It was plain she needed more explanation than this.
‘I was wondering – could I see it?’
Puzzled, she frowned. ‘Did you leave something?’
‘No. I just …’ Either one understood that sort of feeling or not. ‘I just wondered how you were getting along in it.’
‘Me?’ She was beginning to look at me sharply, suspecting there was something funny about me.
‘You like it?’
‘It’s all right,’ she said with a shrug that chilled me.
‘I was there for seven months,’ I said uselessly.
‘Were you?’ Her voice was flat and withdrawn. Her eyes wandered and encountered David. In the same flat voice she said, ‘Is he yours?’
‘Yes.’
She stared at him. ‘What’s wrong with his ears?’
‘Nothing, except they stick out a bit. I keep them taped back.’
‘That doesn’t do any good,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘There’s an operation for it; they cut a little cartilage and then they lie flat.’
‘Have you got any children?’
‘I had a little boy. He got run over.’
I became numb in my refusal to imagine such a thing happening to David. The girl came slowly down the steps and stood over the pram. She offered her finger to the baby, who was awake now. He couldn’t focus on it, but when he felt it touch his hand he immediately took hold of it. The girl smiled. When she smiled she looked older; I could see she might be nearer thirty.
‘He’s a dear,’ she said at last. She looked up at me. Her pale eyes were pink-rimmed, but she still smiled and let the baby hold her finger.
‘Were you living in that little room all by yourself, before you had him?’ I nodded. ‘What about your husband?’
‘I’m not married.’
She looked down at David’s face and said, ‘But you’re lucky. At least you’ve got your baby.’ She drew her finger gently out of his grasp and tucked his small hand under the blanket, lingering over the movement. ‘Why did you want to see the room?’
‘I was fond of it.’
She looked at me incredulously. ‘Fond of it? That poky little place? With that black man next door, and the landlady and everything? And the house all dark and smelly – and those two women in the basement –’ I felt depression swoop on me. It was all quite true, and how I had seen it myself at first. ‘Still,’ she said reluctantly, ‘you can come up if you like. I don’t think anyone’s in.’
I left the pram in the hall and carried David up the long, musty-smelling flights. Again, my awareness of the smell was renewed by absence. ‘Can you smell it?’ the girl whispered.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s horrible. Hits me in the face every time I come in. And all these stairs!’
I felt a stirring of unreasonable irritation, a defensive feeling for the house. ‘You get used to them,’ I said, shortly.
But indeed I wondered if I ever had. By the top I was exhausted; my legs ached and the baby felt like a ton weight.
It seemed strange to have someone let me in with my key. And the room gave me a shock. I should have expected it, but my eyes anticipated the room I’d left, and it was completely changed. In many respects it was as I’d first seen it. The plaster Alsatians were back in position, their badly-painted orange faces staring stupidly on either side of the cottage garden. The poor pock-marked floor was again exposed. The brown curtains were drably back. Only the white walls and the afghan struck a familiar note.
‘It needs things doing to it,’ the girl said more defiantly than apologetically. ‘Only I’m not going to do them. I can’t be bothered. Why should I? It doesn’t matter, no one’s ever going to see it. I’ve been here a month and you’re the first person’s ever been up here.’
‘Not Mavis?’
‘Who? Oh, the old duck downstairs. She’s come knocking once or twice. I haven’t let her past the door. She’s all right, it’s just that I don’t want to get mixed up with anyone in the house. I don’t want to get mixed up at all, with anybody, any more. Oh, sorry – keeping you standing there. Here, put the baby on the bed and sit down for a minute.’
I obeyed. David lay framed by the garish squares of the old afghan and gurgled. I think he could see the bright colours out of the corner of his eye.
‘He likes that old woolly thing,’ she said, watching him. ‘I like it too. It’s about the only thing in the beastly little room I do like.’
I sat in the arm-chair. The cover I had had made for it had come back with the rest of my things. It was naked and greasy-brown again.
‘That arm-chair ought to have a cover on it,’ said the girl. Then her mouth tightened as if the words had slipped out in spite of her. ‘Not that it matters.’
‘I’ve got one you could have,’ I heard myself saying.
For a minute she hesitated. Then she said firmly, ‘No thanks. Once you start turning a room into something there’s no stopping. I’m just not bothering.’ She seemed to be embarrassed by my being there. Everywhere I looked she would follow my eyes and say, ‘Yes, those curtains. They’re horrible. Dirty, too. Still, I don’t care.’ Or, ‘It’s gloomy at night – needs another lamp, really.’ Or, ‘Yes, the floor’s awful. Needs something on it, besides that horrid little rug.’
‘My-sister-made-that-rug,’ I said automatically.
‘Your sister did?’ she said incredulously.
‘I mean, Doris’s sister.’
‘Oh.’ We sat in silence for a while. Then, as if driven to give some explanation for her being there, she said, ‘I wouldn’t have taken a nasty place like this if I could’ve afforded better. My husband left me after the baby died. Mind you, I think £2 is too much. She wanted two-ten, but I wouldn’t give her that. Old Scrooge,’ she added bitterly.
‘So you haven’t met anyone else in the house?’
‘Oh, I’ve met them,’ she said. ‘You can’t help it. That John. He looks after me like he was my mother or something. I was afraid of him at first, but he’s so kind you couldn’t hurt his feelings. And there’s an old married couple on the first floor – they’re always sending little notes asking me to have supper with them. And then, there’s a chap just underneath me. He works in a garage. He looks quite nice – must be miserable for him there, doing for himself. But I’m not going to get mixed up with them. I’m just not. It’s like with doing up the room. Once you get started there’s no end to it. They get friendly and soon they find out all about you, and your life’s not your own any more.’
I sat there, savouring an uncanny feeling of omniscience. I could see the future as clearly as if I were sitting through a film for the second time.
‘I suppose you can’t understand how I feel,’ said the girl defensively.
‘Oh yes I can.’
She was watching me now. ‘It must be funny for you, seeing me in this place. Though I don’t know how you could ever have been fond of it …’ She glanced round with distaste. At the same moment her foot was unconsciously straightening the rug.
Just before I left, the girl faced the mantelpiece and said with sudden vigour: ‘One thing I am going to do, and right this minute, is to put those awful dogs out of sight. They really upset me, they’re so ugly.’ She was putting them in a suitcase under the bed as I said good-bye.