The L-Shaped Room

  Terry suddenly said, ‘I suppose there’s not a chance you’d marry me?’

  It came out in a mumbled, apologetic rush. I caught a glimpse of his eyes before he turned them away; I almost said yes to see the desperate appeal for a refusal in them turn to panic. But he hadn’t really deserved that, so I shook my head.

  ‘Can’t really wonder,’ he said, concealing his relief admirably. He rubbed a hand hard all over his face, as if the skin literally itched with embarrassment, ending by pulling at his nose. It was a gesture of his that fitted into a years-old memory groove. I wondered if that sort of personal idiosyncrasy could be inherited. It would bring a special pain, in the future, if your child suddenly rubbed his face like that, and pulled his nose; to have nobody to rush to and say, ‘He did that thing of yours, you know, that you do when you’re embarrassed …’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘My back hurts.’

  ‘I’ll rub it –’

  ‘No!’ That was what husbands did. There must be none of that.

  ‘Well –’ he stood awkwardly. ‘I don’t like to leave you.’

  I told him about Father, and he immediately became gay with relief. ‘I’ll help you pack!’

  I meant to say no, but I was lying down now, my hands under me holding the ache, and I wasn’t at all sure how I was ever going to get up again, so I said, ‘Thanks, darling.’

  Half an hour later, when the rug was rolled, the curtains down and folded, the breakables wrapped in newspaper, and my suitcase lying open on the pock-marked floor, somebody came up the stairs and knocked on the door.

  ‘That’ll be Charlie,’ I said, ‘come to help down with the cases.’ Terry said, ‘I’ll let him in,’ and disappeared round the angle. I heard the door open and a long, unaccountable silence. Then Terry’s voice said shortly, ‘Wait there, will you?’ He came round the angle; his face was set. ‘It’s Cohen.’

  I closed my eyes for a moment and pretended it was only Charlie. I was too tired; I couldn’t cope with all I should be feeling. Then I put my feet on the floor. My back gave a mighty stab that made me grimace with surprise, because the pain had stopped ten minutes before.

  ‘Do you want me to go?’ Terry asked.

  ‘Yes – no, wait. I don’t know.’ I tried to pull myself together but everything kept sparkling in front of my eyes. My hands were shaking.

  ‘You’re white as a sheet.’

  ‘Toby!’ I called unsteadily. ‘Come in, will you?’

  He came in hesitantly. Despite Terry’s description I was expecting him to look as I’d last seen him, but he was quite changed and it gave me a shock. To begin with he had a beard. It made him look ten years older, and completely did away with his vulnerable, baby-blackbird look. The reddish shadows on his face were more marked than ever; his hair was too long, and his jacket – the same green corduroy one – was now worn almost transparent. He had on a clean shirt and tie, but even across the room I could see the frayed cuffs and collar.

  We looked at each other. I don’t know how it would have been if Terry had not been watching. As it was, there seemed nothing we could safely say.

  ‘How are you?’ Toby asked at last. He didn’t so much as glance at Terry, but kept his eyes gravely fixed on me.

  ‘Fine,’ I said inanely.

  ‘You don’t look it. You look frightful.’

  ‘Really, I’m all right.’

  ‘You wanted to see me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Again there was silence. This time Toby did look over at Terry – a sharp, dismissive glance. When Terry didn’t move, he said: ‘It’d be easier to talk if we were alone.’

  Terry said, ‘Is that what you want, Jane?’ Before I could say anything, he went on, ‘Because I can’t say I like leaving you alone with–’

  Toby said to me, ‘Is this a friend of yours?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Terry said. He sounded suddenly aggressive, and when Toby turned to him his expression answered the note in Terry’s voice.

  ‘If you are,’ Toby said slowly, ‘you’ll clear out for a while and let me talk to her. You came to fetch me, after all; you can’t be very surprised to see me.’

  ‘I’m just surprised by Jane’s desire to locate you,’ said Terry.

  ‘Oh? Why?’

  ‘If I’d lost you, I’d let you stay lost.’

  I was dazed by the abruptness of the antipathy between them. They stood glaring at each other across the narrow room, their eyes full of cold, masculine fury. An unreasonable panic took hold of me – the panic one feels when two dogs stand facing each other, their hackles up, growling low in their chests. The pointless, primitive fighting instinct of the male … I watched Toby’s knuckles whiten and sensed my own helplessness.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. Intended as a command, it came out weakly as a plea.

  But to my surprise, Toby paid attention. I saw him forcing himself to relax. He was turning away towards me when Terry suddenly said, ‘I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. I did it to her. So what do you say to that, Jew-boy?’

  I saw Toby’s face sag in astonishment and then tauten in blind anger. He turned back to Terry and swung his fist at him in the same movement. Terry didn’t even put his arm up to defend himself, though Toby didn’t take very careful aim and he must have seen it coming. The blow landed badly, on Terry’s cheek, and he lurched sideways, then straightened up again.

  I said something sharp and meaningless which neither of them noticed. Toby hit Terry again, this time more carefully, and still Terry didn’t resist. He went backwards and fell over the suitcase, and I felt a hysterical desire to laugh because it looked so unreal – a comic stage-fight in which every move is planned. Toby stood waiting while Terry got up. This time as he moved forward he did bring up his fists in a defensive attitude, but half-heartedly, without intention. Toby kicked the suitcase aside and it skidded against the wall. This time he struck out with his left fist, and I stopped wanting to laugh, because this blow landed squarely and made a shocking sound – I heard Terry’s teeth grind together with a horrible squeak as his head went back and he staggered and fell hard against the stove. I could almost feel the sharpness of the gas-taps in a stabbing pain in my own back. One of them must have caught in his jacket because there was a tearing noise as he slumped on to the floor.

  There was a moment’s dead silence, making me realize for the first time what a series of loud sounds the fight had made. Then I heard footsteps pounding up from below, and Doris’s shrill, querulous voice.

  Toby stood looking down at Terry. He was breathing hard and his face was white under the shadows.

  ‘Why didn’t he fight back?’ he said numbly. ‘He asked for it. Why didn’t he fight back?’

  We crouched beside Terry. Doris and Charlie were banging on the door. Just as we rolled him over they burst in.

  ‘Nah then, nah then, what’s going on ’ere?’ said Charlie, looking and sounding like a ponderous policeman in civvies. Doris was more practical. ‘Help us get him on the bed,’ she said briskly, pushing past me to pick up Terry’s feet. ‘I should’ve thought any fool could see what’s been goin’ on, even you.’

  Terry was groaning and his face was starting to swell. I stood looking down at him, trying to analyse the searing confusion of feelings within me. The pain in my back returned deafeningly. I closed my eyes but that shut me into a dark roaring world of pain.

  I groped through the shouting blackness for Toby’s hand, as I had once before, but there was no answer. I opened my eyes. A number of people I knew were standing round the bed. It took me a moment to recognize them. As well as Charlie and Doris, Mavis was there, and John; Toby stood to one side rubbing his knuckles dazedly. I wondered why they all seemed so far away – tiny, insect figures, distant in importance. The important thing was the pain. It was gone for a moment, but it would be back. I knew because it had all happened before.

  I tried to call out, but the microscopic little people couldn’t hear
me across the vistas that separated us. For a second I knew what it might feel like to be alone in the world.

  Then the pain came back. When it had gone the crowd round the bed was vast and close. There seemed to be hundreds of huge figures moving cumbersomely in slow motion. This time if I spoke they couldn’t help hearing, but now my teeth seemed locked together and I couldn’t utter a sound. I was afraid of the next pain, and I was afraid of this sense of being alone. The nearness of this crowd of lumbering, mumbling giants, did nothing to help it. They were all strangers, unaware of me, and obviously uncaring – for it now seemed to me that all the people in the world were packed into the L-shaped room, and that every one had his back turned towards me.

  Chapter 24

  I WITHDREW into a private world. Sometimes it was dark and quiet. Sometimes it whitened like hot steel and there was a thin, high sound above the whitening. My own body was the steel, thrust into a furnace. The whiteness would dim to red, and to black again, and the thin sound would stop, and for a while there would be silence and peace.

  There was movement and hands lifting and pressing the molten steel; it seemed that every touch sank into my flesh and would leave deep holes when it cooled. Sometimes there were voices, but they were just alien sounds. Once there was a long period of jolting and roaring, a sense of motion. I thought that the piece of flaming metal that was my body was being carried along on a conveyor belt towards machinery that would beat and cast it into some strange new shape.

  I opened my eyes to see lights passing overhead one by one. Then they stopped and a face blocked one of them out as it hung over me. It was the face of a man with a beard and he said, ‘I’ve rung up your father; he’s coming.’ I wanted to tell him I had no father, but then I wasn’t sure whether it was a father I lacked, or somebody more important. I didn’t know clearly who the man with the beard was, but I smiled to him, and then the lights started moving again and I closed my eyes.

  The next time I opened them there was another face overhead. This one, strangely, I recognized at once. It belonged to Dr Maxwell.

  ‘Well, well, this is too bad,’ he said crossly, as if I’d got him out of bed. ‘What have you been up to this time?’ I felt terribly ashamed and my eyes filled with tears because he was angry with me. I didn’t stop to ask myself why. Then suddenly he did something that hurt and my shame turned like lightning into fury. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I shouted wrathfully.

  ‘Such language,’ said a woman’s voice above my head.

  I strained my eyes upward to see who was there, but all I could see was a white blur.

  ‘Addy swears,’ I said by way of self-excuse.

  ‘Then she’s very naughty,’ said the maddening, unseeable woman complacently.

  ‘You don’t know anything about it, you silly cow,’ I said loudly, to shock her into silence.

  ‘Keep quiet and bear down,’ grunted Dr Maxwell.

  ‘What?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘Bear down. You know how to bear down, don’t you?’

  The significance of this came sharply into focus.

  ‘Am I having a baby?’

  ‘I hope it doesn’t come as a complete surprise to you?’

  I struggled to remember through thick layers of padding round my brain.

  ‘But it’s not due yet!’

  ‘No, not for another month.’

  ‘Then what are you doing, making it happen now?’ My mind suddenly burst through into lucidity. I clearly remembered that eight-month babies often die.

  ‘It’s not my idea, I assure you. Now, kindly keep your mind on what you’re doing. You’ve just missed a good one.’

  To bear down in the middle of a pain was akin to biting hard on an abscessed tooth. I winced and wouldn’t.

  Dr Maxwell grew exasperated. ‘Oh, come along,’ he said at last. ‘You’re not being one bit of help. Remember your exercises.’

  ‘Sod my exercises,’ I said between my teeth.

  ‘Such language!’

  But when they offered me gas and air my language grew worse than ever.

  ‘Then what do you want?’

  ‘I want to hear it cry when it’s born.’

  ‘Well you won’t until it is, and it never will be unless you push. Come on – now.’

  I clenched my jaw and pushed. I felt the baby move inside me. He was kicking, fighting to get out. He wasn’t dead then. I pushed again.

  ‘No, stupid, not in between. Wait for it.’ But Dr Maxwell sounded less annoyed with me, and the nurse wiped my face from behind.

  ‘Is he the right way up?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes – head down like a diver. Next one –’

  I pushed. It really did hurt.

  ‘Sure you don’t want a whiff of this?’

  I wasn’t at all sure, but I was too occupied to answer. The contractions were coming quickly now, and I knew it couldn’t be too much longer. Silly to give in right at the end.

  As a matter of fact, it wasn’t nearly the end, but as long as I believed that every pain was bound to be the last, I could always put up with just one more. And certain background aspects of it I liked. I liked the way everything else, receded into the distance. When I’d made love to Toby, nothing else had mattered – nothing else had seemed to exist. Tomorrow’s problems, other relationships, discomfort, guilt, money worries – all were suspended. And that was how I felt having the baby. It called for the same complete concentration – dedication, almost. I felt as if I were projecting myself into a new dimension, and it was so important that everything else acquired a new and relatively tiny perspective.

  After a while, though, I got so desperately tired that the sense of elation disappeared. I felt I must stop, I must have peace, and I got a panicky trapped feeling because I had to go on and on. I tried to think about Toby – Addy – my father. Nothing and no one helped. I had only myself. There was a strange, out-of-this-world moment when I understood with absolute clarity why I’d run away to the L-shaped room. I can’t recapture it now, quite, but it was something to do with mirrors. It was as if I had hated my own face and wanted to escape from the mirrors which reflected it … only the mirrors turned into people, and it wasn’t my face that was ugly, but me, as a person. Now that was changed somehow, and the L-shaped room had served its purpose – as a mirror-less house would no longer be needed by someone whose blemish had gone.

  Then the moment of clarity clogged up with meaningless circles. The circle of the light overhead; Dr Maxwell’s glasses; the white blurred circles of faces and bowls and wrist-watches. Even voices made circles of sound in my head.

  ‘One more, now, you’re doing fine …’

  The push was a small red circle of pain with a big white circle trying to get through. But the thing was impossible – mathematically impossible.

  ‘I can’t do it –’

  ‘Yes you can. You almost have.’

  Another circle descended, dark and dome-like. ‘Just take one little whiff …’ said a wheedling female voice.

  I was struggling now, with a full and ecstatic awareness. This was the moment – now – now! I pushed the mask away with a fierce gesture. The stupid cow wanted me to have gone through all this and then be cheated at the last moment! I told her what to do with the mask.

  ‘Such language!’ were the first words my son heard. At least I hope so.

  Chapter 25

  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.