Room Upstairs by Monica Dickens

Author:Monica Dickens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1966-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Ten

The bad weather came early that year. It had been possible in some years, Laurie said, to sit outside in the midday sun at Christmas. But already, by November, great lashing storms of wind and rain had driven in from the sea to strip the trees of their last colours, and litter the lawn round the yellow house with broken branches.

By early December, it was already cold, and the sages of Plymouth, which meant anyone who had been there five years and had a gift shop or a bar with driftwood and fishing nets on the ceiling, prophesied a Long Hard One.

The weather was the reason why Laurie and Jess did not come down so often. There was not the same point in escaping from town if you had to stay shut up in the house with Dorothy’s catarrh and the bird’s imitation sneezes and the old trees groaning like a ship, and scrabbling at the roof.

Once one of the tall sycamores blew down across the drive, way, and they had to leave their car there and go back to Cambridge on she bus.

‘Why do they never blow the other way?’ Sybil complained. ‘Why couldn’t it have blown down across the road and wrecked a few cars?’

‘Because the wind comes from the sea,’ Dorothy explained equably. She could never be persuaded to join in vituperation against the scourge. Brought up in a city, she could not see the tragedy. The cars going by through the night past she front bedroom were company, she said, when she could not sleep. (What about Emerson?) She liked to think of all those lucky people going to quaint Cape Cod. Although she never went across the Canal herself, since to her the Cape spelled her brother-in-law, and that was bad news.

So when Sybil called and asked when they were coming, or when Laurie said to Jess or Jess said to Laurie: ‘We must go to see Gramma,’ the weather was a safe excuse for putting it off. Not only an excuse to Sybil, but to each other. There were certain things, even at this stage of their closeness, that were not spoken, and Jess did not know whether Laurie had faced the curious fact that at Camden House, his real home, it was easier to hurt each other.

When this realization first intruded on Jess, it seemed absurd. But looking back, it became more true the more she thought about it. Did he know? She wanted to ask him, but she could not. Why is it, she wanted to say, that our life together in this cramped, shabby apartment is so perfect, but at Gramma’s house, which is old and beautiful and stuffed with years of happiness, we spoil it?

They hardly ever fought at the flat, and if they did, it was half comic, never vicious. But at Camden House, beloved, familiar, Laurie’s boyhood skin, they seemed to have at least one small piercing fight every time they were there.

On their last weekend, it had rained all Saturday.

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