The L-Shaped Room
I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Well, thanks very much, but don’t feel like that. I thought I was perfectly all right, and then it chose yesterday to catch up with me again suddenly … you’ve been quite right to ignore it; it’s helped, truly.’
He grunted, obviously unpacified. ‘Well, anyway, you’ll go home now, won’t you – I mean, to your father’s? You can’t possibly be ill in digs, you might die and nobody’d know anything about it –’
I said I thought it better to stay where I was. ‘I’ve got friends here,’ I said, my cheerful voice belying a heavy heart. ‘Anyway, I’m not going to retire to bed or anything, I’m just going to laze around. Please don’t worry, James.’
‘I think I’ll come round and make sure you’re all right,’ he said suddenly.
‘No, don’t, don’t do that!’ I said, too urgently.
‘Why not?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Is there something wrong with the place? It’s a nice flat, isn’t it? You told me it was.’
I was getting in deeper and deeper with my lies. Never having foreseen James would suddenly develop a sense of extra-office responsibility for me, I had rather let myself go describing the flat of a rich friend which allayed James’s earlier mild concern about where I was living.
Now I protested that it wasn’t properly decorated yet and that I’d rather he came when I had it looking its best. So far I’d managed to avoid giving him the exact address, but now he asked for it with a determined note in his voice – ‘Just in case I’m down that way’ – and I was forced to invent one, praying that he’d never check up on it. ‘I’ll invite you one of these days soon, James, and a thousand thanks for everything.’
‘Keep in touch,’ he ordered sternly. ‘I shall ring you every few days anyway, to make sure you’re okay.’ I knew the chances were he wouldn’t remember to do this, and said good-bye with a lightness which was a piece of very good acting. In fact, I felt it was pretty sure to be a final good-bye. I knew I would never have the courage to go and ask for my job back after the baby was born, even if circumstances allowed it; it would soon be filled again, and it’s always horrible to go back to a place where you’ve been happy in your own little niche and find somebody else in it.
I put the phone down, wondering how many people had been listening in on the extensions, and went back into my room. It was looking a mess because I hadn’t had the heart to tidy it; the sky outside had a yellow-grey sameness, without a hint of where the sun might be, and in that light the flowers on the dirty brown wallpaper looked sadder than ever. It struck me suddenly we were within two weeks of Christmas. It was a depressing thought. There’s nothing more depressing than facing Christmas without having anyone to buy presents for.
But that was morbid. Toby would come back – of course. I went down again to his room to make sure he hadn’t returned in the night. Everything was the same as it had been when he left it to go to the club the night before last. I picked up a towel off the floor – it was still damp – and his ordinary clothes, the creaseless grey flannels and aged corduroy jacket which he wore day in, day out, were slung across the bed. Only the table where he worked was orderly, the piles of flimsy and top-copy paper lined up neatly, the newly-typed draft face-down beside the covered machine.
I put my hand on the last page, and hesitated. Toby had never offered to read me any of his work; but now I had a sudden longing to know whether or not he could really write. I turned the page over.
It was not clean and tidy as if the thoughts had flowed easily; it was double-spaced, and the spaces were larded with corrections in type and pencil, crossings-out, insertions, changed words … it was very hard to make it out. It seemed to be about a young woman, thinking aloud as she went about her home doing her chores. Her children were both obviously too little to understand more than the tone of her voice, and as she dressed them to go out with her to the shops she was saying ‘… and when Daddy comes home, we’ll show him, shall we? We’ll show him we’re happy, and comfortable, and safe, and we’ll pretend our happiness is enough for all four of us. Because that’s all he’s got, his knowledge that we’re happy; it’s got to make up for hating what he does every day to keep us safe. And wouldn’t it be awful if he ever realized that it’s not very important to us, that we’d rather not be safe if only he had the courage to take our safety away …’
I remembered what he’d told Mavis and me about the book and more than ever I thought it sounded like a good idea – the story of a man rationalizing his own lack of self-belief … Mavis! I thought suddenly. She might know …
I ran down the next flight of stairs and knocked on Mavis’s door. I found her bustling about with a feather duster looking as if she’d been up for hours.
‘Hullo, dear, not at the office today?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve lost that job.’ I tried to sound as matter-of-fact about it as possible, and she picked up my tone.
‘Oh dear, well you’ll have to get another then, won’t you?’ She was tenderly dusting all the objects on the mantelpiece. ‘Clever girl like you, I don’t expect you’ll have any difficulty,’ she added comfortably.
I knew it would be wiser to settle down and chat for a while, and drop my question casually into the conversation, but I couldn’t wait. ‘Mavis, have you any idea where Toby is?’
‘Toby? Isn’t he in his room?’
‘He hasn’t been home all night,’ I said, trying to keep the anxiety out of my voice.
‘Now I come to think of it, I haven’t heard him moving about. Well now, fancy that, I wonder where he could have got to? Perhaps he’s gone to visit one of his friends – he does that sometimes.’
‘Does he stay away overnight?’
‘Well, he has done. Not very often, though. Still, you’re not worried, are you, dear? He’s all right. He couldn’t get into any trouble, he’s not the sort that attracts it. Some sorts do and others don’t. Now, you, for instance,’ she said, her vague look suddenly sharpening into pinpointed attention, ‘you, I should think, do. Draw it like a magnet, your type does. If you were missing from the house overnight, I would be worried. Almost anything could happen. But Toby, no.’ She resumed her vague look and her dusting. I excused myself and went back to my room, not feeling very reassured.
I sat there, restlessly, until late afternoon. I forgot about lunch. John was next door. I was unhappily aware of him all day, moving about his room, occasionally muttering to himself. When it began to grow dark I noticed through the little connecting window that he didn’t put his light on; this alarmed me, somehow. It didn’t seem natural to be sitting there in the dark. What could he be doing?
Round about four o’clock he did a thing I’d never known him do since I got there – he started to play his guitar. He beat out ten minutes of pain-filled, throbbing rhythm, sometimes accompanied by low, anguished singing, before Doris came stamping and puffing up the stairs and banged on his door and told him to stop it at once. I expected him to answer her back – there was such a passion in his music, he didn’t sound like himself at all, any more than he had looked like himself yesterday – but he just struck the wires of his guitar into a tortured discord and after that there was a beaten silence, and Doris stamped off downstairs again, talking all the way about her poor legs and her poor head.
We sat on the opposite sides of the partition and sensed each other’s misery.
After a long time I heard him get up and come over to the long wall, near to where I was sitting listlessly in the arm-chair. Then there came a knock, very light and tentative, the sort of knock one might make accidentally, brushing against the wall. I reached out and knocked back.
We met outside on the landing. The tears were streaming down his face; I could see them in the light from my room. For a second something stopped dead in me, as if paralysed by feeling his pain on top of my own; then we groped forward in one mutual movement and fell into each other’s arms.
Even in that very emotional moment,
I felt a little twinge of uneasiness at being embraced by this huge, odd-smelling, odd-coloured man. It was a very strange feeling, and the strangeness didn’t come entirely from his being of a different, a ‘forbidden’ race. It came from there not being even that trace of sexuality which there always is between men and women, even those who are just friends. I tried to remember when I’d been held like that before, and by whom. Then I did remember – it was Malcolm, the little queer who had scratched my face all those years ago. But the contrast was so ludicrous that the thought flashed straight across my mind and was gone.
We went into my room and sat down on the floor together, and dried each other’s tears; then I began to laugh a bit, ruefully, because I suddenly imagined how we must look, a hulking great coloured man and a girl sitting snivelling in front of a gas-fire mopping up the tears with dozens of paper hankies. John’s tears were so enormous it was like trying to stem a leak in the plumbing.
‘Please do stop,’ I begged at last. ‘We can’t go on like this, I’m running out of Kleenex.’
‘I sorry, I very sorry,’ he kept on saying.
‘I know. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Please forgive me.’
‘I forgive you.’
He stared at me tragically, the yellow whites of his eyes bloodshot. ‘But I call you a whore!’
‘Yes. Well, there are worse things you could have called me.’
‘Worse name than whore?’ he said incredulously.
‘Whores aren’t so bad,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I’m not one, and you know it and I know it, which is all that matters.’
He hadn’t quite understood this, and hastened to assure me, ‘You not a whore! I was angry when I say that.’
‘I know. I know I’m not a whore,’ I said. That at least I knew now. I might still get called one, but it would never hurt again.
‘And you forgive me?’ he repeated, just like a child.
‘Yes. Now let’s have something to eat. I haven’t eaten all day.’
While I got us some bread and butter and milk he sat on the floor with his great head bent, staring at the carpet and tracing its patterns with his forefinger. When I brought him the food he pushed it away and suddenly burst into tears all over again.
‘John, for heaven’s sake! What’s the matter now? It’s all forgotten and over!’
‘Not over!’ he blubbered. ‘I haven’t told you – you will be angry and this time not forgive me!’
A sudden fear gripped me. ‘Toby –’
He turned to me, grabbing both my wrists and shaking them beseechingly. ‘Say you forgive me now!’
‘Tell me what you’ve done.’
‘Forgive first!’
‘All right, I forgive you. Now tell me.’
He dropped my wrists and began picking at the bread, rolling bits of it into little grey balls.
‘He come to my room when you go,’ he said. ‘He say he don’t want to be alone. Play to me, he say, Doris don’t hear nothing, please play. I don’t play for him. I don’t speak, even. I am sick, sick in my head like you see me yesterday, for what I hear in the night. He say, like you, what’s the matter, what’s the matter.’ He stopped, squeezing two balls of bread into a pancake between his giant fingers. ‘I tell him you a whore,’ he whispered.
‘What did he say?’
‘He call me liar. He say you no whore. He say because you let him stay with you, that don’t make you whore. He very angry.’
‘And then what?’
‘I get angry too, angry he call me liar. So I tell him.’
‘Tell him what?’ I said, utterly bewildered.
He shook the bread into the broad palm of his hand and closed his fingers over it gently, as if it were alive. ‘Tell him about the baby,’ he said softly.
I seemed to shrink into myself. I could hear the gas-fire hissing away in the silence. John and the rest of the room seemed to be miles away – even my own voice, when I produced it finally, sounded as if it were coming down a long-distance telephone.
‘How did you know – about that?’
‘I know a long time. Each morning you sick. I think all the time you going to have a baby. Then you begin to get big; after that, I know for certain.’
I sat stupefied. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘At first,’ John went on, obviously bent on making a clean breast of everything, ‘at first when I tell him you a whore, he don’t believe me, so I got to make him believe. I say to him, why do you think she come here, a girl like her, to a house like this? You think she like to live here? And I see he beginning to believe, and so I go on, I say, what work do you think she do? He say, she work in an office. Funny time she work, I say. This is Sunday, office not open on a Sunday. So, where she go to? He say, I stand beside her, hear her talking on the telephone; her boss call her, say come to work. He say, I listen other times when her boss call her. I say, how you know that her boss? Does he talk like a boss? Then I see, in his eyes, he got a doubt now, a big doubt. Then, when I see there is the doubt, that when I tell him about the baby. And this time, you see, he believe.’
‘And then he went away.’
‘Yes …’ After a long pause, he said pleadingly, ‘You think he come back?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said dully. Why hadn’t I told him myself? Why hadn’t I?
‘But you forgive me?’
‘What? – Oh, yes.’
We sat in heavy silence for a long time. The gas-fire ran out of money and dropped abruptly into the five little blue blisters; then it died altogether. The room chilled quickly. I couldn’t seem to be bothered to move. I sat in the arm-chair, gazing at the bed, wondering drearily why it was that you couldn’t crawl away anywhere and hide, why there were always people wherever you went, new people to get involved with and to create new meshes of unhappiness and responsibility.
John was very gradually edging along the floor towards me, and at last he was near enough to put his head down on my knee, like a penitent dog creeping to its angry master when it thinks he’s had time to forget its offence. Poor John. I knew he loved Toby. I stroked his big woolly head, and after a while it got very heavy and I suspected he’d dropped off to sleep.
Chapter 11
WITHOUT another mind ticking away in the room, I was able to think more clearly. So, Toby knew about the baby. He’d got it all wrong, thanks to John – he had some mad idea James was my lover. Could he honestly believe that when I went off to work at nine o’clock each morning I was really heading for some regular-as-clockwork day-long love-nest? Probably not. But in a way, even that wouldn’t be more difficult to credit, perhaps, than the truth.
For the first time I saw clearly that it would be impossible to go through the rest of my life with a barrier in my mind between the baby and its conception. The child itself would want to know who its father was, and the fact that I could get no comfort from the circumstances would be no excuse for hiding them from – him, her? (It was a painful effort to personalize It even to the extent of apportioning sex.) And however much I hated the idea, sooner or later I would have to tell somebody about it – Toby, perhaps – either the truth or a lie I would have to tell, because I couldn’t any longer pretend it was nobody’s business but mine.
With the weight of John’s head slowly reducing one leg to numbness, I decided to try and explain it to myself. Truthfully, of course; I’d see how it sounded, and if it were too reprehensible, well, I’d just have to think up a good lie, that was all, right now at the outset, and stick to it until perhaps I’d begin to believe it myself. I’d never been very good at big lies, and the thought of living one terrified me, but it was important that not only I, but the baby, should have some self-respect about its origins. However, a lie might not be necessary. After all, something must have made me do it, pointless and unjustified as it seemed now; perhaps if I went over it all again carefully, I could find out that the truth didn’t condemn me out of hand. I might find some excuse for myself, however inad
equate.
Where to begin? In fairness to myself, eight years ago, when I was twenty and in love with the actor, in that repertory up North. We weren’t really in love, but it seemed a very great deal like it at the time, before we spoiled it; we both thought we were, and how can you tell for sure when it’s the first time and you’ve nothing to compare it with? Anyway it was very strong and we longed and longed to go to bed together. There was every possible opportunity and we discussed it; he was keen but not importunate, which naturally made me love him more and be more inclined to give him what he was so sweetly not insisting on, but something held me back. Part of it was my upbringing, of course, but I could easily have had a violent reaction away from that if it hadn’t been for the inhibiting atmosphere in the company itself. Three separate couples were sleeping together in the most overt and sordid way, one pair on a mattress in the theatre itself (we called it ‘the bed of Sin’). Another girl, who looked wretchedly unhappy and as if she might be going to fade away at any moment, practically had a miscarriage on stage one night as a result of some pills she’d been made to take by her awful lout of a lover. Then there was the complication of Malcolm, and one way and another it wasn’t the most ideal setting for the consummation of young love.
Afterwards I was very glad that we hadn’t, still being at an age to believe that there is something intrinsically precious in virginity, and I decided to carry mine intact to the altar. But I didn’t go to the altar; to be honest it wasn’t for lack of offers, but because they always seemed to come from people I wouldn’t have been caught dead at an altar with. I wasn’t completely heart-free during those years; sometimes I allowed myself to be fooled that I loved someone, but when it came to the point of saying ‘yes’ to anything final there was always the small honest inner voice which jeered ‘For life? Are you mad?’ or ‘Bed with him? Is that the best you can do, after you’ve waited so long?’ – and sometimes to this the voice would add irritatingly – ‘and after saying No to that darling actor?’ The truth was, I never again experienced that warm, urgent magic I had felt with the actor – I never again saw an ordinary, or even ugly face change and become Apollo-like through the intervention of love. If they were plain, I might get fond of them and no longer notice, but they stayed inescapably plain and I, despite my best efforts, stayed stubbornly unenchanted.