The L-Shaped Room

  He laughed again, throwing back his enormous head with such vigour it seemed it must tip him right over backwards. ‘No, ma’am! I more scared of Doris than I is of them bugs! I used to them now, and they used to me. They tired of my taste, they don’t bite me no more ’cept when they’s real hungry. And then they’s welcome.’

  When he’d gone I tried to make myself presentable for work. I was beginning to realize just how ill-managed was the move I’d so precipitously made. I’d brought a few clothes, my sponge-bag, my make-up – and nothing else. No food, no linen, no clothes-hangers even. I changed my night-crumpled clothes for others, almost equally drawer-crumpled, as I’d hung nothing away – indeed, there was nowhere to hang anything.

  I knew I’d have to go home for the rest of my things. I shrank from the thought of it. I knew now how close I’d been, last night, to crawling back to the security of Father’s protection and – well, I wasn’t ready to call it love, but whatever it was which made him cuddle me sometimes and say I wasn’t such a bad old thing. I only had to beg – not even that, perhaps – and he’d give in. He’d help, as he’d helped before – and, as before, I would be constantly aware of an ever-increasing debt to a man I didn’t want to have to respect because he wasn’t my sort of person. But even that seemed preferable to months of coming back to this room every night, with its tribes of bogies, real and imagined.

  The best thing to do, I reflected as I felt my way down the stairs, dangerously dark even by day – the obvious thing was to go somewhere else, somewhere clean and pretty, even if it did cost more. It was worth extra money to stay reasonably sane, not to say unbitten. I bought a copy of The Times at the tube station and read the Personal Column on the way to work, thinking, From the ridiculous to the sublime. Half-way down was an advertisement put in by three girls wanting a fourth to share their flat. Own bedroom, share bathroom and kitchen, £3 10s. It was in Kensington, and there was a phone number. I decided to ring them as soon as I got to work. It would do for a few months, anyway.

  The hall-porter said a pleasant good morning to me as I went in the main door of Drummonds, and so did one of the page-boys who was lounging about. The difference was, the boy, who was a cheeky little devil, noticed the creases in my dress and the fact that my hair hadn’t been pinned up the night before, and smirked suggestively.

  ‘Nice night out, Miss Graham?’

  ‘One of these days, my lad,’ I said equably, ‘you’ll go too far.’

  ‘Never, miss! Not me, don’t you worry.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ I retorted. ‘I can’t say I’d miss you.’

  ‘Drummonds would, though, that’s where I’m safe. They’d never find anyone to fit my uniform.’ This was a reference to his size, which was small, even for his calling.

  ‘Don’t count on it. They’re growing miniatures nowadays, you know.’

  I was surprised at being able to carry on this sort of light-hearted badinage, as if everything were just as usual. It might be just a fluke, a habit of mind held over from before; but on the other hand, perhaps I would be able to keep it up, keep my mind functioning, as it were, on two separate levels. It would be a great help if I could. If I behaved as I felt, everyone I knew would very soon guess something was wrong, and equipped as all my colleagues were with minds like sinks, their first more specific guess would inevitably be the right one.

  My boss, a gentle-hearted giant called James Paige, was already in his office, though it was only just after 9.30. He was talking on one of his four telephones, the red one, which meant an internal call. He winked at me in greeting as I passed, and I heard him say: ‘Well, tell the silly bitch that if she doesn’t think she can find her own way to the Beatrice Room, I’ll send someone up to collect her. Actually, she should have no trouble. Half Fleet Street’ll be howling for her blood in there by twelve-thirty. Or tell her to follow her nose, if she can see round it.’

  I went into my own office and shut the door behind me. As always, a feeling of secret peace descended on me as soon as I was safely inside. It was a nice little room, and it was all mine; no one except James ever came in without knocking. It was quietly but attractively furnished with a desk and a telephone – two, actually – a typewriter, a filing cabinet that locked, a very comfortable chair for me and a less comfortable one for visitors, and various of my personal bits. It also had fresh flowers every three days, and a view of the park. It was my little kingdom.

  Today it was more precious to me than usual because I knew I would have to lose it. I even went around touching things, as if I were saying an immediate good-bye. My desk was in a mess as usual – James was always nagging at me with homilies about untidiness being a symptom of mental chaos; yesterday there had been some excuse, but today and henceforth, there was none. I sorted the scattered letters into trays and collected the various semi-legible (and frequently libellous) notes of instruction from James about current or incipient visitors to the hotel, and docketed them on a row of clips hanging on hooks down the side of my desk. Those hooks were my own unpatented device. They were labelled in code, for example ‘FOP’ stood for ‘Fend off Press’ and ‘NCH’ meant ‘Needs Careful Handling’. There was one hook with the initials ‘MFP’ which was always thick with slips bearing famous names. It stood for ‘Mad For Publicity’. It was a simple scheme, but James and I had a lot of fun with it.

  James and I had a lot of fun altogether. He was a very good sort. He’d taught me all I knew about my job, which still wasn’t a quarter of what he knew, and when I put my foot in it with some big wheel, or made a nonsense, as I sometimes did, especially at the beginning, he always got me out of it, even if it meant storming into the Manager’s office and skating aggressively over the thin ice of a lot of bare-faced lies. Being such a big man gave him an advantage over the manager, to whom he often referred amiably as a ‘ferret-faced little runt’, and he never hesitated to use it.

  My position with Drummonds was a piece of incredible good luck and a constant source of satisfaction. It couldn’t help comparing favourably with the memories I had of previous offices I’d passed through – usually the glassed-in ‘typists’ pool’ variety in the City, or North Kensington, where you clocked in and out and were ‘rung for’. My recollections of these hell-holes were blurred by there having been so many of them. I could never stand any of them for longer than two weeks; the secretarial agents often got tired of my caprices and advised me severely to settle down and join a good pension scheme somewhere.

  ‘I hate being in a pool,’ I would say rebelliously. ‘It’s so anonymous.’

  ‘Ah, but we all have to start at the bottom,’ would be the arch reply. ‘Sooner or later, if you’d just stay on a little and apply yourself, you’d become somebody’s secretary. Then the job becomes personal.’

  But there was never anybody whose secretary I wanted to be; so I continued going to a new office every Monday morning, and usually giving notice every Monday evening, until the agency sent me to Drummonds to be James’s secretary for a week while his regular girl was on holiday. (‘You won’t have to give notice this time,’ said the agency woman acidly.)

  James, on my first morning, in response to some mistake I made, took occasion to inform me at the top of his voice that I was a silly stupid ignorant cow and that all women of my stamp should be lined up against a wall and mown down with flame-throwers. He went on to say that while this was going on he would be laughing and dancing with glee and warming his hands at the merry blaze. All this was such a pleasant change from my previous mealy-mouthed employers that I merely blinked mildly and remarked, ‘Jolly good, why not toast some bangers while you’re at it?’ Whereupon he yelled with laughter and said thank God I understood him, and he’d better offer me a little liquid to put the fire out.

  At the end of the week we learned that James’s regular secretary was ill, and likely to be away for some time, and James asked me to stay on. Of course, I was delighted.

  ‘How much do those vinegary-voiced crones
at the agency give you?’ he asked. I told him. ‘Christ Almighty!’ he bellowed, ‘we pay three pounds on top of that! Lousy blood-sucking parasites! Sitting there on their fat backsides living off your sweat! Right, we’ll soon fix them.’ He telephoned the agency and in a very polite voice informed them that he was highly satisfied with me and wished to take me on permanently. I could hear high, excited squeaks from the other end. I could imagine their relief – £3 a week for doing nothing further about me. The squeaks subsided, though, when James went on to explain that he would in due course send them a cheque for £3 for the current week, and made it clear that that was the last they could expect. There was a shocked pause, followed by a long and voluble protest. James made attentive sounds, meanwhile pulling horrible faces and making busmen’s signs for my benefit. When the protest ran out, James said in exactly the same polite tone as before, ‘Madam, you may get stuffed.’ He hung up, we shook hands, and so the bond between us was formed.

  That was two years ago. My promotion to being James’s assistant had come about six months later. It resulted indirectly from one of James’s infrequent drinking-bouts. He had been boozing with some buddy the night before, and arrived in the morning two hours late with pink borders round his eyes and bevelled edges round his nerves. It so happened that there was a Press reception fixed for noon that day on behalf of a millionaire art dealer who’d come over from New York to sell some pictures at Christie’s. I had laid this on the night before in James’s absence, notifying by phone all the columnists I could think of who might be interested, booking one of the larger Heroine rooms (Drummonds for reasons of intellectual snobbery calls all its salons after Shakespeare’s heroines) and ordering drinks and canapes with a lavish hand, in keeping with the art dealer’s millionaire status. I felt rather satisfied with this, my first solo laying-on of a full-scale Press party, and was dismayed to learn from James, who was shambling round the room bumping into things and impartially heaping curses on his hangover, me and the art dealer, that the latter’s name should have been put, not only on the MFP and NCH hooks, but on another one which was labelled ‘MAH’– Mean as Hell. The trouble was, it was now 11.30 and too late to modify the caterers’ order.

  I had a stiff drink and we settled down to await the explosion which would surely follow the art dealer’s realization that champagne-cocktails and scampi-on-toothpicks for thirty-five ravening journalists would set him back a goodly percentage of what Christie’s was likely to get for his pictures.

  There might well have been an explosion, had it not been for the absolutely splendid publicity the man received, before it was time to give him his bill. Christie’s the following evening was packed to capacity with the cream of Society, who had all read in their Daily Expresses what a hell of a good fellow the art dealer was. Many of them, while probably having no intention of buying, spent a happy evening pushing up the bidding, as a result of which the pictures were sold for a record figure. Another result was that James called me a bloody genius and made me his assistant.

  Well, so there I was – and there I wouldn’t be for long. Looking out across the still-lovely autumn park, with its skeletal trees rising through the faint mist like a Chinese water-colour, I thought that at this moment my greatest regret was that the act, the cause of all this, had not been beautiful. The whole disproportionate aftermath would be a thousand times easier to bear if I could only have felt it was a payment for something I’d truly wanted and enjoyed.

  But I wasn’t ready to think about that yet. I sat at my newly-neatened desk and unfolded my copy of The Times. My hand was on the telephone to call the flat of the three girls when suddenly I thought of something. While my stomach was turning itself inside out that morning, I’d dimly supposed it was the wine which had upset me. It now occurred to me that the undignified heaving of my soul up over a basin might well be a regular feature of my morning routine from now on. Obviously if that was going to happen in a shared bathroom it wouldn’t be too long before my fiat-mates would begin to run their prying little female eyes over my silhouette. I took my hand off the phone and dropped The Times into the waste-paper basket.

  All right, so a room by myself, in a nice clean house and district. But where? And how much? And how long before the nice clean people in the nice clean house started to watch me out of the corner of their eyes and think nasty dirty thoughts? Not long. Three months, at most. At least Toby and Co. wouldn’t turn a hair, and if I had to go on having contact with human beings (which after John’s Good Samaritan act earlier I now saw might have some advantages) I felt it must be with those who wouldn’t raise their eyebrows at me. My own were pitched so near my hairline in shock at myself that I knew I couldn’t endure too much of other people’s opprobrium. After all, I reasoned rather fiercely, it was nothing to do with them. Only Father had any real right to be shocked …

  James came bursting in. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his glasses were slipping down his short, pugnacious nose.

  ‘You’re late!’ he scolded. ‘And you look awful! What the hell do you look so awful for? Can’t you have a home-perm or whatever other women do with straight hair? You look like Medusa. Look, you know we’ve got this opera-singer woman throwing a lunch for a few hundred of her more intimate enemies – just go along and see that nobody slips cyanide into her grapefruit, will you – are you listening?’

  ‘Yes, James. I want to ask you a favour.’

  ‘No, in advance. You’ve had one off already this week. What do you do with all these afternoons off all of a sudden? Why can’t you have your sex-life at night, like everyone else?’ I stared out of the window. ‘Nothing’s wrong, is it?’

  ‘No, just may I be off this afternoon, James please, because I’m moving.’

  ‘What do you mean, moving, for God’s sake? You’ve got a nice comfortable home, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what are you moving for? Why don’t you stay at home with your father? That’s what I’d do if I were a single woman, and Christ, don’t I wish I were, sometimes! No responsibilities, somebody else to worry about slates falling off the roof and the lousy pipes freezing … you must be insane, wanting to move. What do you want to move for?’

  ‘I want to try living on my own.’

  ‘Oh, balls! Who wants to live on their own? – well, I wouldn’t mind it sometimes, nice bachelor life, no worries, not that marriage isn’t okay most of the time; but you! You’ll hate it. Stay with your father and don’t be silly. You’ll think it over, won’t you?’ he coaxed.

  ‘I must move, James. As a matter of fact, I have already.’

  ‘What? When?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘A – a flat in Chelsea.’

  ‘Oh well, if it’s done, it’s done; I suppose you’re old enough to know your own business. Don’t forget to let me have your phone number.’ He went back to his own office and I followed him.

  ‘All right about this afternoon, then?’

  ‘Oh God, do you still want that? I thought you said you’d already moved? Oh, all right, all right. You’re a good girl, you do work late when I insist and don’t grumble too much. I wish you weren’t such a fool, though, leaving home like that. You’ll soon want to beg back, I’ll bet.’

  He didn’t know how right he was. When I stealthily let myself into my father’s house that afternoon and found it all waiting for me, as it had been countless times before when I’d been away somewhere – all the dear or irritating familiarities meeting my eyes in regular and anticipated progression as I walked through it, each object and colour and smell fitting with clockwork precision into the grooves of my memory – it was as if strong hands of habit took hold of me. The feeling the wine had induced in me the previous night – a feeling of the senselessness, the pointlessness of leaving all this at the very moment of life when I most needed it – recurred now, stronger than ever, because here it all was, all the most powerful attachments of my world, the place wher
e I belonged.

  Forgetting the taxi ticking away outside, I wandered about the quiet house, looking yearningly at everything, and asking myself how it was that I’d been able to leave it yesterday without a backward glance. Partly because it had all happened so fast; and partly because I hadn’t really stopped to think what it would be like somewhere else … I seemed to have done about six months’ living in twenty-four hours. The house embraced me now with the slightly reproachful, but forgiving, arms of a mother. Compared to it, the room in Fulham seemed about as feasible a place to live in as the set of a rather sordid play.

  It was ridiculous to think of going back there. Every instinct I had rebelled at the idea. And yet – I can’t explain why, perhaps it was the forces of inertia – I started slowly gathering together the things I had come to collect. The picture, some coat-hangers, books, and ornaments from my bedroom; some towels and bed-linen from the linen cupboard … I plodded numbly from room to room, picking things up without any real intention of actually taking them away, just doing it stubbornly because it was what I’d planned.

  Suddenly I remembered the taxi outside, and began, inexplicably, to hurry. I found an old cardboard box that groceries had come in, and piled my loot into it. When it was stowed in the taxi, I rushed through into the garden – Father’s garden, his pride and joy – where I hastily picked a bunch of late chrysanthemums. On my way back through the house I stole, with only slight hesitation, first a nice heavy glass ashtray, then two wine glasses, then the fire-screen, and then, as I warmed to my felonious work, a waste-paper basket, a spare pair of curtains just back from the cleaners, and last and best (or worst) a large Persian rug which had lain in the hall since before I was born. I didn’t mean to take that, but I thought of the pock-marked lino, so cold to the feet and the eye, and somehow I found myself rolling the rug up and carrying it off.

  The figure on the taximeter was astronomical by now, but I had to leave Father a note to let him know who had taken the things. I scribbled it hastily on the hall pad.