Blue Bedroom and Other Stories (15 page)

“Yes.”

“Is she nice?”

“Yes.” The silence that followed this single word seemed an indictment against Stephanie, so she added, “She's very young. She's only twenty-nine.”

“I know. My mother told me. She told me about the baby coming, too.”

“Do you mind?”

“No,” lied Emily.

“It must be funny, having a baby coming. Now, I mean. At our age.”

“It's all right.”

They had bought a new cot for the new baby, but Emily's father had brought Emily's old pram down from the attic, and Stephanie had cleaned and oiled and polished it, and made a little patchwork quilt for it, and now it waited, in a corner of the wash-house, for the new occupant.

“I mean,” pursued Portia, “you've never had brothers and sisters. It'll be strange for you.”

“It'll be all right.” The wooden parapet of the bridge felt warm to her hand, splintery and smelling of creosote. “It'll be all right.” She threw a splinter of wood down onto the railway lines. “Come on. I'm hot and I want to swim,” and they went on over the bridge, their footsteps sounding hollow on the planks, and started out across the sandy footpath that led to the dunes.

*   *   *

They swam and sunbathed, lying face down on the sand with their heads turned towards each other. Portia chattered endlessly, about next holidays when she might be going skiing; about the boy she had met who had promised to take her roller-discoing; about the suede jacket her father had said that he would give her for her birthday. She did not talk about Stephanie and the baby again, and for this Emily was silently grateful.

And now, at the end of the day, at the start of the evening, it was time to make tracks for home. The tide was at the turn, a rim of dark sand lay wetly just beyond the reach of the breakers. The sea was a welter of dazzling light, the sky still cloudless and a deepening blue.

Portia looked at her watch. She said, “It's nearly seven. I've got to go.” She began to brush damp sand from her bikini. “We've got a supper party. Giles is bringing his friends home and I promised my mother I'd give her a hand.” Emily imagined the house, filled with young people all knowing each other very well, eating enormous quantities of food, drinking beer, playing the latest discs on their stereo. The image was both enviable and frightening. She began to pull her T-shirt over her bathing suit. She said, “I ought to go too.”

Portia said, with unaccustomed politeness, “Are you having a party?”

“No, but my father's away, and Stephanie's on her own.”

“So it'll just be you and the wicked stepmother.”

Emily said, quickly, “She's not wicked.”

“Just a manner of speech,” said Portia, and started to gather up towels and sun oil, stuffing them into a canvas bag that had
ST. TROPEZ
printed in huge red letters upon its side.

*   *   *

They parted at the church.

“It's been fun,” said Portia. “We'll do it again,” and she gave a casual wave, and sauntered off. The saunter speeded up, turned into a run. Portia was hurrying home, to wash her hair and get ready for the evening's fun.

She had not invited Emily to the party and Emily had not expected to be asked. She did not want to go to any party. She didn't much want, either, to return home and face an evening spent in the company of Stephanie.

Stephanie and Emily's father had been married now for nearly a year, but this was the first time that she and Emily had been left on their own. Without her father to act as buffer and keep the conversation going, Emily was in an agony of apprehension. What would they talk about?

She began to walk in the direction of home. Across the green, under the deep shade of the oaks, down the rutted lane, with a glimpse of sea at the end of it. In through the open white gates, the house revealing itself beyond the curve of the drive.

Reluctant, filled with a strange foreboding, Emily stopped, and stood looking at it. Home. But it had not been home since her mother died. Worse, since her father married Stephanie, it had become another person's home.

What had changed? Small and subtle things. The rooms were tidier. Knitting and bits of sewing, books and old magazines no longer lay about the place. Cushions were plumped up, rugs lay flat and straight.

The flowers indoors had changed. Emily's mother had loved flowers, but had no great refinements as to their disposal. Great bunches were crammed into jugs, just the way they had been picked. But Stephanie was a magician with flowers. Formal arrangements stood on pedestals in huge cream-coloured urns. Spikes of delphinium and gladiola, massed with roses and sweet peas and strangely shaped leaves that no person but Stephanie would even think of picking.

All of this was inevitable, and quite bearable. But what was almost unbearable and had really turned Emily's world upside down had been the total transformation of her mother's bedroom. Nothing else in the house had been altered, or redecorated or repainted, but the big double room that faced out over the garden and the blue waters of the creek had been stripped of furniture, gutted, rebuilt, and made totally new and unfamiliar.

In all fairness to her father, he had told Emily that this was going to be done.

He had written her at school. “A bedroom is a personal thing,” his letter had said. “It wouldn't be fair to Stephanie to ask her to use your mother's bedroom, any more than it would be fair to your mother if Stephanie were simply to take over all her most treasured possessions. So we are going to change it all, and when you come back for the holidays, it will be unrecognisable. Don't be upset about this. Try to understand. It is the only thing we are changing. The rest of the house remains the way you have always known it.”

She thought of the room. In the old days, before her mother died, it had been shabby and comfortable, with nothing actually matching anything else but everything living happily together, like the random sowing of flowers in a border. The curtains and the rug were faded. The huge brass bed, which had belonged to Emily's grandmother, wore a bedspread of crocheted white lace, and there were a great number of photographs about the place and old-fashioned water colours upon the walls.

But that had all gone. Now everything was eggshell blue, with a fitted pale blue carpet, and beautiful satin curtains lined with the palest yellow. The old brass bed had gone, and in its place was a luxurious king-size divan, frilled in the same material as the curtains, and draped in a white muslin canopy that was suspended from a gilded coronet, high on the wall. There were a lot of white furry rugs, and the bathroom was lined in mirror glass and glittering with enticing bottles and jars. And everything smelt of lilies-of-the-valley. It was Stephanie's own scent. But Emily's mother had always smelt of Eau-de-Cologne and face powder.

Standing there in the evening sunlight, with her hair wet from swimming and sand encrusting her bare brown legs, Emily suddenly ached for things to be the way they had been. To be able to run in through the front door, calling for her mother, and to have her mother's voice answer from upstairs. To go to her, curling up on the big hospitable bed, and to watch while her mother, at her dressing table, brushed her short, wayward hair, or dusted her nose with a swans-down puff that had been dipped into the crystal bowl of fragrant face powder.

*   *   *

She could never feel close to Stephanie. It wasn't that she didn't love her. Stephanie was beautiful and youthful and loving and had tried her hardest to find some niche in Emily's heart. But they were both, basically, shy. Both wary of intruding on the other's privacy. Perhaps it might have been easier for both of them if the baby had not happened. In a month the baby would be here, sleeping in the new cot in Emily's old nursery. An entity to be reckoned with, bringing with it more claims on Emily's father's affections.

Emily did not want the baby. She did not much like babies. Once she had seen a television film of some person bathing a newborn baby and had been horrified. It looked like trying to bathe a tadpole.

She longed to be able to go back in time. To be twelve years old again and have none of these disturbing things happen to her. She was always longing to go back in time, which was why she had done badly in her lessons, had failed so miserably at games, had been kept back a year in the same form. Next term she must keep company with a gang of younger girls with whom she had nothing in common. Her confidence had been hopelessly eroded, like the face of a cliff too long pounded by the sea and scoured by the winds, so that at times she felt she would never be able to make a decision, or achieve something, successfully, ever again.

But brooding did no good. The evening stretched ahead and had to be faced. She went on up the drive, and when she had pegged her bathing things out on the line, let herself into the house through the back door. The kitchen was spotlessly neat and orderly. The round, wooden-framed clock over the dresser ticked away at the minutes, making a sound like a pair of snipping shears. Emily dumped the remains of her picnic onto the table and went through the door, and into the hall. Evening sunshine lay in a long yellow beam through the open front door. Emily stood in its warmth and listened. There was no sound. She looked into the sitting room, but it was empty.

“Stephanie.”

She had probably gone out for a walk. She liked to walk in the evenings when it was cooler. Emily started upstairs. On the landing, she saw that the door to the big, pale blue bedroom stood open. She hesitated. From within a voice spoke her name.

“Emily. Emily, is that you?”

“Yes.” She crossed the landing and went in through the open door.

“Emily.”

Stephanie lay on the beautiful bed. She was still dressed, in her loose cotton maternity smock, but she had kicked off her sandals and her feet were bare. Her red-gold hair spread its tangle over the white pillowcase, and her face, innocent of make-up and freckled as a child's, was very pale and shone with sweat.

She stretched out a hand. “I'm so glad you're here.”

“I was on the beach with Portia. I thought you were out for a walk.” Emily approached the bed, but she did not take Stephanie's outstretched hand. Stephanie's eyes closed. She turned her head away from Emily, and her breathing was suddenly long and laboured.

“Is something wrong?”

But she knew that there was. And she knew what it was. Even before Stephanie relaxed at last and opened her eyes again. She and Emily gazed at one another. Stephanie said, “The baby's started.”

“But it's not due for a month.”

“Well, I think it's coming now. I know it is. I've been feeling odd all day, and I tried to go out for a bit of fresh air after tea, and I had this pain. So I came home to lie down. I thought it might just go away. But it hasn't, it's got worse.”

Emily swallowed. She tried to remember everything she had ever known about having babies, which was not much. She said, “How often are the pains coming?”

Stephanie reached out for her gold wristwatch which lay on the bedside table. “That was only five minutes.”

Five minutes. Emily could feel her heart pounding. She looked down at the swollen, ludicrous mound that was Stephanie's abdomen, taut with incipient life beneath the sprigged cotton of her voluminous dress. Without thinking, she laid her hand, gently, upon it.

She said, “I thought first babies took ages to arrive.”

“I don't think there's any hard and fast rule.”

“Have you rung the hospital? Have you rung the doctor?”

“I haven't done anything. I was frightened to move in case something happened.”

“I'll ring,” said Emily. “I'll ring now.” She tried to remember what had happened when Mrs. Wattis's Daphne had had her baby. “They'll send an ambulance.” Mrs. Wattis's Daphne had cut things a bit too fine and very nearly had her child on the way to hospital.

“Gerald was going to take me,” said Stephanie. Gerald was Emily's father. “I don't want to have it without him here…” Her voice broke, and there were tears in her eyes.

“You may have to,” said Emily. Stephanie started to weep in earnest, and then suddenly stopped. “Oh … there's another one!” She grabbed for Emily's hand, and for a minute or so there was nothing in existence except the frenzied clasp of her fingers, the slow, determined breathing, the escaping gasps of pain. It seemed to go on for eternity, but at last, gradually, it passed. It was over. Exhausted, Stephanie lay there. Her grasp on Emily's hand loosened. Emily took her hand away. She went across the room and into Stephanie's bathroom. She found a clean washcloth, wrung it out in cold water, and took it back to the bedside. She wiped Stephanie's face, then made the cloth into a pad and laid it on her forehead.

She said, “I have to leave you for a moment. I'll go downstairs and telephone. But I'll be listening, and you only have to yell…”

There was a phone in the study, on her father's desk. She hated using the telephone, so she sat in his big chair for confidence, and because it was the nearest she could get to him. The number of the hospital was written in her father's desk directory. She dialled it carefully and waited. When a man's voice answered the call, she asked, making her voice as calm as she could, for the Maternity Ward. There was another delay, that seemed to last forever. Emily felt sick with anxiety and impatience.

“Maternity Ward.”

Relief made her incoherent. “Oh … this … I mean…” She swallowed and started again, more slowly. “This is Emily Bradley. My stepmother's meant to be having a baby in a month's time, but she's having it now. I mean, she's having pains.”

“Oh, yes,” said the voice, cool and blessedly businesslike. Emily imagined somebody starched and neat, drawing a notepad towards her, unscrewing her pen, all set to take down lists of statistics. “What is your stepmother's name?”