The L-Shaped Room

  She started to go, and then turned back, saying cheerily, ‘Just think how nice it will be when it’s all finished with,’ and then she actually added, ‘Well, I must go and feed my puss-puss now, or she’ll be ever so cross.’ She waved to me encouragingly. ‘Good luck, ducky. Don’t forget to call if you need anything.’ And off she trotted, shawl, knitting-bag and all.

  After she’d left the room I sat still in bed for a while, thinking it really wasn’t so funny after all. Then I picked up the Nescafé tin and prised the lid off. There were about ten pills inside. I remembered them from when Alice – the wraith-like girl in the rep – had showed me similar ones. I remembered other things, too, things she’d insisted upon telling me later – all sorts of unlovely details. I shook out a couple of tablets, rolled them about in my hand, and then put them back, cursing Alice heartily. I’m afraid I cursed Mavis too. Why couldn’t she mind her own business? Throwing in this unbalancing element of bizarre comedy just when I’d got everything settled. I thought about the gin, but that was tarred with the same brush. ‘No tiny tots’ … The wretched woman had well-meaningly reduced the whole thing to the level of bar-room farce.

  Damn it all, you couldn’t just …

  No, I thought, none of that. That way madness lies. If I start thinking of It as a person, entitled to a dignified end, the next thing will be of course that I have no right to end It at all. But all the same – not that way. And not, by the same token, all on my own. Was I respecting the life within me, or pandering to my own healthy terror or going through what Alice went through? I wasn’t at all sure. But anyway, I put the pills and the gin firmly aside, turned out the light again, and tried to go to sleep.

  I lay wide-eyed and wakeful. I didn’t have to wonder why. I was missing Toby. I discovered it’s a very different matter, lying awake thinking it would be nice to have a man beside you, and lying awake longing for one particular man. In one case it’s a feeling of vague discontent. In the other … you might just as well try to go to sleep when your feet are cold or you want to spend a penny, or you’re hungry for a special kind of food you haven’t got. As a matter of fact, all three now applied, I realized, as well as the other. Almost every part of my infuriating body seemed to be nagging at me for some sort of attention. I even had a tickle between my shoulder-blades that I couldn’t reach.

  At last, exasperated beyond bearing, I switched on the light again. It was still only eight o’clock. This seemed to be the last straw – somebody was really gunning for me: slowing the whole bloody earth down now. All right, I thought furiously. I know when I’m beaten. Grinding my teeth with rage at everything, I got up and dressed in slacks and my old trenchcoat. A glance outside told me it was still foggy – getting worse, if anything. Naturally. I knotted a headscarf round my throat so savagely I nearly choked myself, and crept – I had to creep, because of Mavis – downstairs and out into the fog.

  The special food I fancied was – of all things – curry. As I strode along, glaring at the ground, hating everything, I thought: I’m not dealing with this matter a moment too soon. Cravings in the middle of the night? And where am I to find curry, in God’s name, in this benighted neighbourhood? Hammersmith? Hardly. Putney? Loathsome place. Chelsea? Yes, at a price. Oh, God damn and blast, why curry? Why not fish and chips?

  But the vision, complete with mango chutney and mounds of yellow rice, persisted. I got on a bus and grudgingly paid my fare to the King’s Road. There was an Indian restaurant I’d seen there, near Sloane Square. It would probably, I reflected bitterly, be shut when I got there – some Hindu feastday, or something. Probably the only day in the whole year. Almost certainly there would be no curry to be had in the whole of London. I was actually weeping with advance self-pity before I got there.

  The restaurant was, to my surprise (and, in some perverse way, disappointment) open. In fact they were quite busy. Everyone, including the Indians, seemed to be happy and laughing, and in my surly mood I unkindly wished them all in hell – chiefly because no one was in any hurry to serve me and I had to sit and watch a party at the next table consume a feast that looked to me as if it had issued straight from Nirvana, before I was even shown a menu.

  I ordered so recklessly that the waiter looked first surprised, then delighted, then alarmed. ‘Are you sure you can eat all that?’ he asked solicitously. I was, quite sure; even when it began to arrive, dish after khaki-coloured dish, covering the whole surface of the table, I was not daunted. ‘Thank you’ I said confidently, and glared at the man when he discreetly placed a huge jug of iced water at my elbow.

  The first dish was wonderful. I ladled the curried object, whatever it was, on to a heap of saffron rice, smothered it with sauce, rolled up a chipathi and set to. I demolished it without difficulty, though it was extremely hot and I had recourse to the water when no one was looking. Then I tackled the next dish, which had succulent fat prawns nestling in it. After that the jug of water was empty and I was full, but the waiter was smirking in an enigmatic Eastern way, so I toyed with the final concoction, just to prove I could if I wanted to, and that any I happened to leave was just for manners. I was rewarded by several admiring looks as I paid my sizeable bill and blundered out, sweating, into the fog.

  It had got considerably thicker while I’d been eating. I was beginning to feel sleepy, and very cold; the temperature seemed to have gone down, and I was shivering even while I sweated from the furnace-like emanations of the curry.

  At last I got on a bus, which trundled quite briskly to the far end of the King’s Road, but after World’s End, where the streets were darker, the fog seemed to close in and the bus was forced to nose its way cautiously along in first gear. The journey went on and on – before long we were travelling at a walking pace, and I and the few other passengers were anxiously clearing the condensation from the windows and peering into the murk in an effort to see where we were. Passing a street-light came to seem quite an event; one watched their brave little sulphurous smudges receding with a feeling akin to despair, as if we might never find another.

  I asked the conductor to tell me when we came to my stop, and he said, ‘Lady, you think I got X-ray eyes or something? I can’t see the stops, no better’n what you can.’ He sounded irritable, and whenever the bus stopped (which it did frequently) he went round to the front to talk to his mate. A bus had been rammed in the fog two nights before, when it wasn’t nearly as thick as this, and I wondered if he was scared.

  At last I judged it time to get off and start walking. The district was sinister enough at any time; now, with the feeling that any and every form of menace, from a cut-throat to a coal-hole, might be within inches for all I could tell, my small remaining resources of courage were exhausted within minutes. I felt my way along, a few steps at a time, and every time I heard a voice or a footstep I stopped dead, clinging to whatever bit of masonry was under my hand and almost cowering with fright.

  After a while, though, when I’d turned down the side-street where the house was (I hoped), there were no more sounds to frighten me, and as a result of course I grew much more afraid of the stuffed, dripping silence. Far, far away I could hear the slow, grinding sounds of traffic – but muffled, as if I were wearing earplugs. The house was right down at the bottom of the street, and I moved like a ghost from lamp to lamp, tiptoeing for some reason, as if I were in a jungle in dread of attracting the attention of wild animals prowling near me. I couldn’t decide whether I felt safer near the lamps, or in the dark stretches between. The thick patches of light seemed to be focal-points, somehow … I was beginning not to feel very well. The mixture of inner heat and outer cold was making my head light. The lamp-smudges seemed to swim towards me, dipping and swaying off-centre as I approached them. My legs were trembling and when I put my hand against my face it was burning, and yet clammy. The next time I reached a lamp-post I clung to it. It was wet and cold, but it held steady, which was more than anything else seemed to. I put my forehead against it and hung on with both hands
. Then I felt the post begin to slide upwards through my hands, as if more of it were coming out of the ground. It slid up faster and faster, though I tried to hold it down. Then I felt something hard strike my knees, and I smelt a very strong smell of dog.

  ‘… Come on, dearie, help me a bit – put your head forward – that’s it. Are you feeling better? Say something, there’s a love – come on, you can’t sit there all night …’

  The fog had solidified into a strong pressure on the back of my neck. When I opened my eyes reluctantly, I was staring at a small piece of pavement miles below, between two sloping hills. Then I saw that the hills were my legs, and that my head was being pushed between them. In the process my middle was doubled up and it felt roughly as if somebody were squashing it between two metal plates studded with nails.

  ‘Oh God –’ I gasped, trying to straighten up, trying to relieve the intolerable pressure in my inside. ‘Let me up –’

  The weight on my neck instantly lifted, and I straightened my back. Crouched beside me looking anxiously into my face was Jane, the other Jane. The fog had made her eye-black run and it lay in ridges in the lines under her eyes; her hair was hanging in strands from under her hat. I could smell her scent, very sharp and close, through the fog and dog smells at the foot of the lamp-post where I was sitting on the ground.

  ‘You must’ve fainted!’ she exclaimed in awe. ‘Lucky I come along when I did! Whatever happened, then? Did you have a drop too much to drink?’

  I couldn’t answer. Sitting up had done nothing to relieve the cramping agony inside me. I clasped my forearms over the pain and bit my lips.

  ‘You look bad!’ she said suddenly. ‘Come on, you can’t stay there. I’ll help you – it’s not far. On your feet, then – there’s a good girl.’ Coaxing and hauling, she managed to get me upright. I clung to her and tried to keep my nails from digging into her arm. With my other hand I pressed my stomach. It made the pain worse, but I kept hugging it, holding it. With the woman urging me, I put one foot ahead of the other and we started to move.

  The pain died down for a moment, and I relaxed my hold. Then it came again like a whiplash.

  ‘No!’ I felt like shouting. ‘No! I didn’t mean it!’

  I wouldn’t let her take me beyond the door. I waited until a break came in the pain, and then pinned a healthy smile on my face and told her I felt perfectly well.

  ‘Are you sure, dear? Because I could easily take you upstairs …’

  ‘No, really, I’m fine now. I do thank you for finding me –’

  ‘But whatever do you think made you faint? Do you do it often?’

  I could feel the pain beginning again, and my smile was turning into a grimace.

  ‘I don’t know …’ I said vaguely. I couldn’t think up a lie, despite all my recent practice. My mind was fastened on this new and fearful thing that was happening. ‘I think I’ll just go and lie down for a while …’ I managed to get my key in the door and immediately forgot about my rescuer. I must have just left her standing on the steps. I stumbled to the first landing before the recurring cramp forced me to sit down on the floor. I felt the world beginning to drift into the distance again, but I knew what was happening this time and got my head down quickly. With my cheek resting on the worn linoleum things came back into focus almost at once. I was learning. The pain faded, and I pulled myself up immediately with the help of the banisters and gained the second floor in the lull.

  I was probably more afraid than I’d ever been in my life but I was too busy to notice it. If I could just get to my room…I thought of it as a sanctuary, and something more – as if there were some magic property in the room itself that would stop this happening, if only I could reach it.

  The effort of getting up the third and fourth flights, which I tried to manage in one go, muddled me somehow. I hadn’t bothered with landing lights and I wasn’t sure, any longer, where I was – I only knew I had to keep climbing and that somewhere at the top was relief and safety. Then I saw a strip of light. It was more or less at eye level, because I was on the floor at the time, and I crawled towards it with a muffled sensation of triumph. Whatever it was I was trying to do, which was now unclear, I’d done – that line of light was the goal. When I got as far as the door I dragged myself upright again, turned the handle, and lurched in.

  Toby was sorting papers at the table; there was an open suitcase on the chair. Everything became bitingly clear to me as soon as I saw him turn round sharply and stare at me.

  ‘Oh, you’re leaving!’ I said brightly. ‘I wondered when you’d be coming back for your things. Well, I’ll just leave you to pack.’ I turned round to go, but things were blurring again and I misjudged the turn and banged my head against the edge of the door. I closed my eyes tightly because this silly new pain was going to make me cry. Toby’s voice came from somewhere very close. It was loud and harsh.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Are you drunk?’

  ‘Everyone keeps asking that,’ I said conversationally. ‘No, as a matter of fact I’m having a miscarriage.’ Why had I said that, in God’s name? That was the last thing I had wanted to say, especially in that silly, off-hand tone. Then the words rebounded back to my ears and I heard their sound and their meaning, and the pain came back at that moment, too, and it all made sense, the way a policeman’s knock on the door must make sense when you’ve committed a crime. I groped for Toby in the dark and found his hands, and they held on to me, and I shouted again to an unknown listener as I had wanted to in the street: ‘I don’t want this! I didn’t mean it, truly! Stop it, please make it stop!’

  Toby picked me up bodily and carried me to his bed. I wasn’t being good about it any more; it was as if the effort of getting upstairs had used up the last of my good behaviour. I was sobbing and pleading; the tears ran down the side of my face into my hair. When the pain came I twisted away from it and clutched at anything I could get hold of, and swore. But I didn’t shout any more. In the back of my mind I recognized the need to avoid attracting a lot of people.

  In the first lull I opened my eyes and saw Toby’s frightened face hanging over me. He looked more than ever like a baby blackbird, rakish, half-strangled and very dear to me. I tried to smile at him through my tears, but I realized it hadn’t turned out very well, so I squeezed his hand which I was holding.

  ‘I’ll get a doctor,’ he said; his voice was breathy and distorted with shock.

  ‘No –’ I said, shaking my head violently. But I wanted one. He saw it in my eyes. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said, trying not to sound on the edge of panic himself. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  He drew his hand with difficulty out of my rigid grip.

  ‘Don’t leave me!’ I implored him, seeing the pain coming towards me like a shadow.

  ‘Only to phone –’

  I was torn between wanting him to get a doctor, and wanting him with me. ‘In a minute –’ I gasped. ‘After this one –’

  It overtook me, but it wasn’t quite as bad as before. I clenched Toby’s hand and he clenched back, and I could see his face all the time in the middle of the surrounding blackness. When it withdrew I licked my salty upper lip and said, ‘That wasn’t so bad … do you think it might not be that?’

  ‘Did you make this happen?’

  The tears started coming again. ‘Not on purpose,’ I sobbed childishly.

  He saw my eyes begin to widen and his voice changed immediately to anxious concern. ‘It’s all right, darling – hold on – I’ll get someone to help you.’

  ‘Dr Maxwell!’ I got out, feeling alone and rootless now that he had let go of my hand. By a miracle I remembered his number, which was an easy one, and by another Toby had four pennies. I, who had protested I didn’t want a doctor, now called after him, ‘Tell him to hurry!’

  I lay alone under the glaring light. I thought no deep thoughts about the justice of it, or the punishment fitting the crime, or the irony of fate. I thought how the baby would look if it were born n
ow, just a red dead morsel to be wrapped up quickly and thrown away, something disgusting and of no significance, not even fit to be buried as a human being. It didn’t have a chance; not even a tiny chance of living. I hadn’t given it houseroom for long enough. Another pain came. I sobbed again, not because it hurt, which it did, but because I was so helpless against what was happening, and because the small voice was saying blandly, ‘Well? Isn’t this what you wanted?’ and I was answering, ‘It’s not what I want any more! It’s my baby and I want it to live!’

  Toby seemed to be gone a long time, but I wasn’t measuring time very accurately. It felt like an hour, but it was probably only a few minutes. When he came back, his face was so strained with worry that I felt the sting of another guilt, and I smiled properly (having just finished with a not-too-terrible pain) and put out my hand to him to show him I was better.

  ‘Did you get him?’ I asked, trying not to sound as if it were a matter of life and death.

  He nodded and sat down beside me. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Better. Much.’

  ‘You look a bit better.’ He sounded relieved.

  We sat in silence for a while, waiting for the next pain. It was less bad than the one before, but I couldn’t tell if they were dying down for good or if this were the prelude to something else.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked presently.

  ‘He said he’d be along in ten minutes.’

  ‘You were gone ages.’

  ‘I went to the box at the corner.’

  This was something so endearing I couldn’t speak for a moment.

  ‘In the fog!’

  ‘It isn’t so bad now.’

  ‘But you went out … instead of –’

  ‘You don’t want the whole house knowing.’

  I love you, I thought distinctly. But nothing gave me the right to say it now. So instead I said, ‘Mavis knows already.’

  ‘She would. How?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said wearily. ‘It seems people only have to look at me to know. Everybody seems to have known, all the time.’