The L-Shaped Room

‘Yes, I promise! Oh, if only I could tell you –’

  ‘Never? With anybody?’

  That stopped me short. I stood helplessly, staring at him. ‘There’s only ever been one other person,’ I said, stumbling over the words so that they sounded false even to me. I couldn’t add to them. I just willed him with all my mind to believe me.

  He came to me and put his arms round me and said, ‘I’m terribly glad,’ and from the simple way he said it I knew that against all the evidence he had believed me, perhaps because he wanted to. He kissed me; it was intended to be a sealing sort of kiss to show me that he believed me and that things were going to start being all right, but the kiss altered in the middle and suddenly he pulled himself away. His face was drawn and I could feel the tension in his hands holding my wrists. ‘Oh God,’ he said harshly. ‘I want you. I’ve wanted you all the time, that’s what’s been half the trouble, thinking I was never going to have you again.’

  ‘I want you too,’ I said – which was the simple truth.

  Something flared up in his face, and then was quenched. ‘We can’t,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘But – it might –’

  ‘It won’t. I’m sure it won’t

  ‘I’d be so gentle –’

  ‘I know. That’s why it’s all right.’

  This time there were no rum punches and no tears to act as aphrodisiacs, and it was not quite as before. But there are, I was learning, different landscapes in the country of love. If the one we crossed this time was a steep climb and then a pleasant sweep into a warm green valley, and not the mountains of the moon, I was the better pleased, because although it was different it was also wonderful, and because I felt instinctively that the heights must be earned.

  The first words Toby spoke to me afterwards were, ‘I thought that was never going to happen to me again.’ And then a minute later, he said, ‘We must get a double bed immediately.’ He was lying with his head in the hollow of my neck and shoulder, breathing quietly; his voice had a languorous, far-away sound, as if he were rocking slowly in a hammock on a hot summer day. I held him with one arm and the other lay between him and the small bump that was the baby. I was comfortable and very happy. I had nearly dropped off to sleep when he said:

  ‘Am I too heavy?’

  He started to move, but I drew him back. ‘No, stay there. You’re like a rather overstuffed eiderdown.’

  He relaxed with a happy grunt, and we lay peacefully for a bit longer. It couldn’t last, though. It was only comfortable with the afterglow of love-making. He stood up, and I said, ‘Put something over me.’

  ‘Why, darling? Are you cold?’

  ‘No, but I feel silly, half-undressed. If I were completely, it wouldn’t matter.’

  He laughed and said, ‘We’ll soon fix that.’

  I’d always thought it would be embarrassing to have a man undress you, especially the suspenders which are so ugly and comic, but I helped, and except for the girdle which must be the most resistant, unromantic garment since the chastity belt, it was all easy and delightful.

  When I had nothing on at all he sat on the floor beside the bed with his cheek resting on one arm and watched my face while he caressed me. Whenever I smiled, he smiled back happily as if I’d given him something. Once his hand stopped over my stomach and lay there. I covered it with mine and we looked at each other and he said, ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s not complaining,’ I said. It was the first time I’d ever thought of the baby as ‘he’.

  His gentle stroking went on. In a way it was more exciting than the act itself, and I was so physically enraptured that I said: ‘We should have done this before.’

  ‘Before what?’ he said lazily.

  ‘Before making love.’

  He smiled into my eyes.

  ‘I’ve got news for you,’ he said. ‘We are.’

  Chapter 14

  THE next day, walking hand in hand through the festive market, we saw a sandwich-board man pushing through the crowds. He had a cheerful red face which he hadn’t succeeded in making entirely solemn and gloomy, though he was trying hard. On the board over his head was written, in white letters on black: ‘THE LORD COMETH’. The one down his front said, ‘ARE YOU READY TO MEET YOUR MAKER??’

  ‘Frankly, yes,’ Toby answered it. ‘Never more so. Let’s see what it says on the back.’

  We hurried past the sandwich man and looked over our shoulders. On the back board was written: THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH’.

  We glanced at each other, and I pulled a long, apprehensive face.

  ‘Doomed,’ said Toby mournfully.

  But we didn’t feel doomed. We felt, or at least I did, intensely happy, and I found myself looking straight into people’s faces and smiling at them. It wasn’t just being in love, or having made love – it was the feeling of being two against the world.

  Doris stopped us in the hall when we came in, loaded down under a small tree and a carrier-bag full of bits and pieces we’d seen and liked, and, inevitably in our mood of reckless gaiety, bought. She looked a bit different, somehow, old Doris – for one thing, she had a clean apron on, and her hair had been home-permed. I found out later Sonia had done it for her. The girls got on better with her than any of the rest of us did.

  Still, she was in a very good mood that day. She greeted us with a cheerful smile, and whereas we had been anxious to avoid her for fear she should forbid us to bring our tree into the house, she astonished us by saying: ‘Hullo, dearies. Well! Bought a tree, have you? That’s nice. Like a pot to put it in?’ We gazed at her blankly for a moment before recovering and saying we would, please. She got one out of the cupboard under the stairs.

  ‘This is what we always used to have our tree in, when Fred was alive. Great one for a bit of Christmas cheer, old Fred was. Used to tie a bit of red crêpe paper round it, make it look more festive. Put it on the table in front of your window, I should. No harm in sharing your blessings, I always say.’

  I felt stunned by this affability, and stammered my thanks.

  ‘All better now, are you?’ she inquired kindly.

  ‘Yes, oh yes, thank you.’

  ‘That’s right.’ She glanced downwards, just exactly as she had on the day I’d come for the room. Her eyes literally bulged. I was happy enough for this to be more funny than embarrassing. I started to shrink inwardly, and then I thought, well, she had to spot it sometime.

  However, she made no comment. Instead, she said meditatively, ‘You know, I haven’t taken much notice of Christmas, since Fred went. I mean, you don’t really feel like it, do you? But this year it’s a bit different, like.’ She didn’t say why, but went on: ‘Seeing you two with that bit of a tree’s made me feel like celebrating. After all, why not?’ She seemed to be convincing herself. ‘Who knows where we’ll all be this time next year? Who knows but what them politicians won’t have us all blown to kingdom come? It’s a poor heart that never rejoices.’ This seemed a bit of a non sequitur and Toby smothered a giggle in a cough. ‘Why don’t you come down and have a bit of a drink with me on Christmas Eve, if you’ve nothing else to do? I’ll invite the lot, that’s what I’ll do, and the girls too. You don’t mind, do you, dear?’ she said to me, glancing downwards again pointedly. ‘It’ll be good for a giggle, as Charlie says,’ she concluded, with a look which on a lesser woman could have been called coy.

  ‘Who’s Charlie?’ asked Toby. He evidently knew all about Fred.

  ‘You’ll see,’ she said, with a roguish smile. ‘Christmas Eve, then. Bring a bottle,’ she added as we mounted the stairs.

  We collapsed round the first bend. ‘I knew damn’ well there was a catch in it,’ snorted Toby.

  ‘Still, she did give us Fred’s pot. Who is Fred, anyway, or rather who was he? Her husband?’

  ‘Yes, good old Fred. They fought like tigers for twenty years; he drank – talk about liking a spot of Christmas cheer, he liked it all the year round – used to come home and beat
her –’

  ‘I can’t imagine anyone beating Doris!’

  ‘Well, of course she beat him back. It was entirely mutual. Apparently they were black and blue, the pair of them, every Sunday morning. Mavis has told me about it. Doris was always coming weeping and shrieking to Mavis in those days, saying he’d be the death of her, and meanwhile Fred would reel down the cellar steps and visit the tarts for consolation. Then the next morning when he was still sleeping it off, Doris’d go off to the pub herself and have a few, and bring back a quart of mild, and they’d get drunk again together. Then they’d usually sing. Yes, things haven’t been the same since Fred fell down the cellar steps and broke his neck –’

  ‘He didn’t!’

  ‘Well, no, he didn’t actually, that would have been too good a story. He just quietly died one day – about three years ago. Poor old Doris was inconsolable. She’d no one left to fight with, and Fred, on whom she’d always called down curses, turned into a sainted memory. That’s when Doris developed her thing about noise. She seemed to feel that if it couldn’t be her and Fred bashing about and howling and singing, nobody else was bloody well going to. And the funny thing was, how friendly she got with Jane – the other Jane. She just had to have someone to talk about Fred to, and Jane, who’d been through exactly the same cycle of experiences with him as Doris had, only one floor below, was the ideal person.’ We were trying to make the tree stand erect in Fred’s pot and not seeing quite how it was to be done. ‘We’ll have to ask John to fix it.’

  I hadn’t seen John at all since before going to hospital. I hadn’t thanked him for doing the walls. Now I thought about him, and thought about all the unsolved mysteries of his behaviour. I asked Toby why he thought John had reacted as violently as he had to the whole business of our falling in love.

  Toby seemed oddly uncommunicative on the subject. ‘They’re apt to be funny that way,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘Who are? Negroes?’

  ‘No, of course not, not Negroes,’ he said. Then he changed the subject rather clumsily. ‘Well, are we going to Doris’s do?’

  ‘Could you resist? I’m dying to know who Charlie is.’

  ‘I can hazard a guess.’

  ‘Could anyone replace Fred?’

  ‘People are always replacing other people,’ he said with unlooked-for soberness. He looked at me searchingly across the horizontal tree, and I said instantly, ‘I love you.’

  ‘Let’s leave this tree for the moment, I want to talk to you.’ We sat down, I on the arm-chair, he on the floor at my feet. He held one of my hands and played with the fingers.

  ‘Jane, about this baby. Look, I don’t know much about it, but shouldn’t you be going to – hell, I don’t know, classes or something?’

  ‘What, on child-care, do you mean? I certainly have plenty to learn on that subject. I don’t know a bottle from a safety-pin.’

  ‘No, I meant – this other business, this relaxing thing. I’ve read about it, you do exercises and train yourself, and then when the time comes you pop behind a bush and reappear with the baby slung on your hip, and go on toiling in the paddy-fields as if nothing had happened.’

  ‘There are no bushes in paddy-fields.’

  ‘Well, behind a rice-stook, then – don’t quibble. The point is, it doesn’t hurt.’ He looked up at me with a little grin operating on half his mouth only. ‘If it’s all the same to you, darling, I’d a whole lot rather it didn’t hurt.’

  ‘I’ll get a book from the library,’ I conceded. The idea of its hurting or not hurting hadn’t occurred to me before, but now he mentioned it, it did seem preferable that it shouldn’t.

  When Dr Maxwell came along a little later, I asked him about it, and although he pooh-poohed it a bit and said it was all a lot of nonsense, I did get him to admit it couldn’t do me any actual harm to go to the classes and do exercises. ‘Keep you from getting too fat,’ he said bluffly. ‘And why aren’t you in bed? I thought I told you to go straight to bed when I sent you home last night.’

  ‘I did, doctor,’ I said demurely, not elaborating on what happened when I got there.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s a good sign you’re not lazy,’ he said. ‘Now take plenty of fruit and milk. Are you short of money? Because there’s an organization …’

  ‘I know about it. I don’t much want to be a charge on charity if I can avoid it.’

  ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘You want to get a job, something quiet of course. Put a ring on your finger, call yourself Mrs. Now don’t look like that, it just simplifies life, that’s all. What does it matter if it implies something that isn’t quite true? None of their business,’ he said vaguely. ‘Where’s the father, by the way?’

  ‘My father?’ He’d shot the question at me so unexpectedly I had to have time to recover.

  ‘No, no, not your father. Don’t tell me where he is, or I’ll go and tell him what I think of him. The father.’ He prodded my middle to make his meaning unmistakable.

  ‘He’s in Paris.’

  ‘Done a bunk?’ he asked with gruff sympathy.

  ‘Not exactly. He doesn’t know.’

  He looked exasperated. ‘Well tell him, girl, write to him and tell him!’ he exclaimed, his moustache bristling. ‘Doesn’t know, indeed. He’s got some responsibility in the matter, hasn’t he? Not exclusively your doing. I suppose? Good God, give the blighter a chance to do the right thing!’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘You’d rather not,’ he mimicked, and shook his head impatiently. ‘And what are you going to use for money to begin with, eh? Tell me that. Or perhaps you’re going to wash your hands of the whole business? Have it adopted, is that the plan? Because if that’s it, you’ll have to warn them at the hospital, you know. I’ve booked you in there, by the way – twentieth of June, or thereabouts. The point is, if you’re going to give it away, you have to let ’em know so they don’t let you see it. Once you’ve seen it, you’ll want to change your mind, they always do, and that causes a lot of extra bother.’

  ‘I’m keeping him.’ I wasn’t going to call him It any more.

  ‘On what, I ask again? Forgive an old man’s natural curiosity. On what?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Well,’ said Maxwell wearily, ‘I’ve done my best. Come to see me in a fortnight. Plenty of fruit and milk. Oh, I said that before.’ And he stumped out.

  It was too close to Christmas to bother about embarking on any sort of adult education before it, so I pacified Toby by saying I’d got plenty of time and would look into it after the New Year, and we settled down to wallow in being together and getting into the Christmas spirit.

  We were dyeing popcorn, of all things, in two bowls of red and yellow Dolly-dye in my sink the next morning when I heard John moving about. I’d been fast asleep when he’d come in from work the night before. I knocked on the wall and then opened the door and waited for him. He came shambling shyly out of his room, his black face almost coy in the embarrassing anticipation of being thanked. I kissed him. ‘It’s the nicest present I’ve ever had,’ I said.

  ‘I done it all right for you?’

  ‘I can’t imagine it possibly looking better.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure for the right colour; I think in the end, white is safest.’

  ‘It’s perfect. You must have worked like a black.’

  It was one of those unspeakable moments. But to my overwhelming relief, John threw back his head in one of his gargantuan laughs. ‘Like nothin’ else!’ he roared. Then he saw my yellow hands. ‘What you doin’ here?’

  ‘We’re dyeing popcorn,’ Toby said grandly.

  John was fascinated. He moved between us and looked at the bowls of deep colour, and little puffs of red and yellow dotted about the draining-board to dry. ‘But what you do this for?’

  ‘We’re going to string them together and hang them on our Christmas tree.’

  John looked at the tree, and touched it. He said nothing.

  ??
?We were going to ask you to fix it in the pot so it’ll stand up,’ I said quickly.

  He grinned slowly. ‘I make a bargain,’ he offered. ‘I make the tree stand up, if you let me make some of them little colour things.’

  We had such fun with the tree. I don’t know which of the three of us was the more childishly involved in its decoration. John sat cross-legged on the floor with a big needle and some coloured wool threading the popcorn in bright strings – not at random but with meticulous counting, to make regular patterns. He loved it because of the colours and because it needed his nimble fingers. He looked like a mammoth black Tailor of Gloucester, delicately plying his needle. Toby was more reserved at first. I thought he was only joining in to please me, but before long I saw that he was enjoying it too, chiefly I think because to him it was a novelty. I remembered his words: ‘We never celebrated Christmas at home.’ No, I thought. Jewish homes don’t. It was a subject he had never raised.

  As for me, I enjoyed it because it was companionable and because Christmas is a sore on the conscience unless you minister to it. We always had a tree at home, and the family congregated – my two uncles and their wives and their one-son-apiece, and Addy my father’s unmarried aunt, darling strict Addy, who had helped to bring me up. She cooked the turkey and booted the uncles’ wives out of her way when they came cluttering into the kitchen trying to help, i.e. interfere, which they did unfailingly each year. Then they’d come bleating to my father and their husbands and complain that Addy was autocratic and impossible, and the men would say, ‘Why can’t you leave her alone?’ The aunts would reply indignantly that they only wanted to help, whereupon Addy would shout from the kitchen that if either of them could cook worth a damn perhaps they could be something other than a bloody nuisance. The uncles would hide rueful grins, because they knew better than most what sort of cooks the aunts were, and there would follow the inevitable patch of family ‘atmosphere’ before Addy would relent and appoint them to do some menial task like laying the table. The strained atmosphere never survived beyond the first trickling bouquet from the roasting bird, stuffed pot-bellied with chestnuts.