The House of Stairs Page 10

  “That sensuous, tender curve,” he said, indicating the side of one of the milk bottles with a dirty finger, “don’t you find that almost unbearably exciting?”

  Cosette smiled at him and agreed. “Yes, it’s lovely, darling.” I knew that smile. It indicated only a sympathy with the inquirer, a desire to please, to be kind.

  “Lovely, yes, but doesn’t it make your juices flow?”

  I thought I detected a movement from Auntie, a start of astonishment, but then I saw that she was fast asleep, she had jerked in her sleep. Ivor picked up the book and set it in Cosette’s lap. She was to look, she was to study it. He stood behind her instructing her, holding the candle. It was soon after this that the candle grease spilled. People used to think Cosette clumsy, probably because she did things slowly, but in fact she never was, she was manually dexterous, delicately so. She reached up the hand with the green and red ring on it and Ivor made to thrust the candle into it. Perhaps it was not for this reason she raised her hand, perhaps it was to take his, but whatever it was, between them they dropped the candle onto the open book, letting it fall before it went out with a long stream of grease.

  “You clumsy cow,” Ivor shouted. “Look what you’ve done!”

  That was when I knew he was her lover.

  A mere visitor to the house wouldn’t have spoken like that. Of course it was indefensible in Ivor to do so and I wasn’t yet used to his ways. But Auntie must have been, up to a point. His voice woke her up and I saw her sleepy old eyes fix themselves on him in a kind of innocent bewilderment. Neither the people on the floor nor the two at the table who were setting out the tarot took any notice. Cosette said, “Oh, darling, I’m terribly sorry. I can’t think what made me do that.”

  Ivor was holding the book up close to this face. “Do you know what I sometimes think? I sometimes think you’ve got one of those nervous diseases, Parkinson’s maybe, something like that.”

  Inwardly, I trembled. How could I not? Cosette caught my eye, as she would, she must, when such things were said. I knew her look of anguish and the faint swift shake of her head were for me, but he took them as a reinforcement of her apology.

  “A normal woman wouldn’t be so awkward, even a woman in the throes of the menopause.”

  Auntie got up, gathered together her book, her bag, her glasses, and began making her way to the door. I had never before known her to signify disapproval of anything and perhaps she wasn’t disapproving, perhaps she was only tired. Cosette, of course, intercepted her with a strained fluttery, “Are you all right, Auntie? Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thank you, dear. I’m off to bed.”

  The door closed the way Auntie always closed it, extremely, exaggeratedly slowly, with the faintest whisper of a click, as if the house were full of sleeping invalids. I sat at the table, watching them, Cosette and Ivor. She was telling him in her most soothing tone that she would replace the book, she would buy him another copy tomorrow. I didn’t know then that the one damaged by candle grease had been her gift, as was almost everything portable Ivor possessed, including the clothes he stood up in. If this didn’t of course justify her spoiling it, it did make his abuse the more outrageous. But I sat there dwelling on my discovery, the revelation that had been made to me. I was shocked.

  My reaction, I suppose, was close to that of a child who finds out that its mother is having a love affair. The foundations of life are shaken, security slips from under one’s feet, is pulled away. Did it make a difference that this lover of Cosette’s was such an odious person? Perhaps, but not entirely. Anyone in that position would have been shocking, for the position itself was shocking. Cosette might have told me she would like to be a “manizer,” to be thirty again and steal husbands, but I supposed there was a natural gulf fixed between wishes and reality. Naively, I believed the slimming and the hair dyeing and the face lifting undirected to any other end but her own self-esteem. A curtain was lifted and I looked out into a world for which I felt distaste, a world where those I thought of as old had desires and excitements to “make juices flow.”

  She never told me he was her lover in so many words. And certainly he never said he was. His attitude was one I had never seen before but have seen since. She was thirteen years his senior and therefore had no rights, no claim upon him, and he no obligations of fidelity or the duty even of courtesy. In other words, she was lucky to get him and he had the right to use her as he chose and get out of her what he could.

  A while later, when he had decided I was worth taking a little notice of, not so much due to my daughterly role in Cosette’s life as to the fact that I was young and good-looking, he remarked to me in one of his pensive moods, “You see, I have no sweetheart at present, no one to make music with.”

  Cosette, supposedly, didn’t count. Yet they shared a bed, the big, new oval bed in Cosette’s bedroom. I even saw them together in it. One morning a man came to the front door delivering a piece of furniture I was sure had been mistakenly sent; it seemed very unlike Cosette’s taste, the old taste or the new. Cosette, of course, was still asleep. Like her young guests she so much wanted to resemble, in this new life she slept late and was seldom up before noon. I went upstairs, up the four flights to the second floor, and knocked diffidently upon her door. I was actually shrinking at what seemed to me the enormity of what I was doing, the intrusion.

  But Cosette, of course, wasn’t sorry to see me. Had she even feigned sleep so that I was obliged, when I had knocked repeatedly, to open the door and go inside? She was gratified that I should see her with her young lover, in a situation to prove their sexual involvement. He lay on his front, bundled up in bedclothes, a selfish man who grabs the sheet and blankets to himself, his bald head showing. Her hair, which she had formerly been in the habit of pinning up overnight, flowed loose onto her shoulders. She wore a nightgown designed for a young mistress, black lace and thin straps.

  “Don’t make a noise, darling. We mustn’t wake Ivor.” Her finger to her lips, she climbed with exaggerated care out of bed.

  He turned over, snorting as he did so. I felt quite shaken by the sight, by this encounter. Sometimes, in the past, as adolescents do, I had tried to imagine Cosette and Douglas in bed together. And I had succeeded in imagining the two of them engaged in the sexual act, a lovemaking carried out in a stately way with the minimum of movement, without speech, in darkness, to their mutual, quiet, unexpressed satisfaction. It is only recently, in the past couple of years, that I have come to understand this is the way most children imagine their parents making love.

  To envisage Cosette and Ivor together—this was harder, this was to be shied away from. And I was too old to indulge that kind of curiosity. I pictured Ivor as merely servicing Cosette and with less enthusiasm than an animal at stud, but I may have been wrong. In the light of what happened later with another man I may have been quite wrong. Ivor may not have been in love with Cosette, may have been waiting for some young “sweetheart” to come along, but he could still have been attracted by her. That languor can be very attractive, that slow sweet gentleness, that air of issuing invitations to love in idleness. And no doubt the pains Cosette had taken with her appearance had paid off. I alone still saw her as she had been before the transformation, stout, gray-haired, in her tailored suits. I alone saw her as a mother.

  Nor was she in love with him. At the time I couldn’t face so bleak a notion, but now I know she wanted a man of her own, a man to show off to others, a man to go about with, perhaps too a man to sleep with. Strange that I could accept such a concept quite naturally when it applied to my contemporaries, to myself, to Diana Castle, say. Diana and Fay, the pretty floor-cushion girl Ivor flirted with, had taken full advantage of sixties morality to sleep with anyone they fancied. Love didn’t come into it. Why should it? They had discovered it isn’t necessary to love someone in order to enjoy yourself with him. And that was all right, I understood that, I felt the same. But that Cosette might feel the same—that was too much for me,
that was something I didn’t want to confront. I know now that while Cosette had loved Douglas dearly, had been a good and faithful wife to him and mourned his death with great bitterness, she was only in love once in her life, and that was neither with Douglas nor Ivor.

  I wish, I really do wish, I could say something in Ivor Sitwell’s favor, could have found in him some redeeming feature. It would have reconciled me to his presence in the House of Stairs, it would have gone some way to explaining Cosette’s unaccountable partiality. He was ugly and mean-spirited, ungrateful and rude, as discourteous to Auntie as he was to Diana and me, capable of caressing Fay in Cosette’s presence and then walking up to Cosette and asking her for money in front of all of us. He did nothing to help in the house and used Perpetua as if she were a servant in a Victorian household. Perhaps he was a good poet. I can’t say, I don’t know. Cosette had shown me, as she promised, a volume of his verses. They had been published but had he, as I was sure at the time, paid to have them published? Or, rather, got some woman, some predecessor of Cosette’s, to pay for their publication?

  These verses weren’t bad in the way Patience Strong is bad. They weren’t doggerel, they didn’t express stale emotion in clichés. That I found them incomprehensible is nothing against them. I might not do so now if I was ever able to get hold of any examples of them. After all, people in the sixties found Pinter incomprehensible and fraught with non sequiturs. Once or twice, in the evenings, Cosette read them aloud to whoever might be there. It was only while she was reading his poetry that I ever saw Ivor look at her in a loverlike way, look at her, that is, with neither indifference nor anger.

  That spring I stayed with Cosette for several weeks. I had teaching practice to do as part of my course and had, by a lucky chance, been sent to a school in North Kensington. Times had changed, but even then it was a rough area, shabby and sordid by day and dangerous by night. The children, then as now, were a mixed lot and in order to teach them satisfactorily one should really have been proficient in Gujarati and Bengali. But it had the great advantage of being within walking distance of Archangel Place.

  In the evenings Cosette often used to take us all out to dinner. Perhaps the truth was that Ivor didn’t especially want to spend time alone with her. They hardly ever went out alone. Instead Cosette would gather up whoever happened to be around, myself and Fay, who had become the Girl-in-Residence since Diana had gone off to Cornwall to live with her boyfriend, the boy with the sitar and the boy with the ocarina, Perpetua’s brother—an Irishman from County Leix who had come to London to seek his fortune and been given a room in Archangel Place, “just until you find somewhere, darling”—and, of course, Ivor. We always went to expensive, exclusive places: the Marco Polo in the King’s Road, San Frediano’s, The Pheas-antry, the Villa dei Cesari. On the few occasions Cosette found herself dining at the Hungry Horse in the Fulham Road she thought she was slumming.

  She had brought the big old Volvo with her from Wellgarth Avenue and she left it parked in the street. It was still possible to do this at that time in the little streets of Notting Hill. An old-fashioned woman in some ways, she never drove the car herself when Ivor was with her but handed the keys to him before we left the house. He was a terrible driver. Already the Volvo, which Cosette’s years of slow, skillful driving had left unscathed, was scarred and marked and chipped and one of the rear lamps smashed. To drive eastward to the Edgware Road and then south along Park Lane is neither the easiest nor the shortest way to get to Chelsea, but it was the way that Ivor took. Perhaps he took it in order to drive along Moscow Road and give himself the opportunity of pointing out to all of us the house in which Edith Sitwell had once had a flat. Cousin Edith, he called her. To other Sitwells he referred in a similarly familiar way, speaking of Sachie and Georgie. I didn’t then know that he had absolutely no right to claim this relationship. Interested, I even asked him if he had any special memories or anecdotes to relate of the celebrated three. He then told several tales which I later came across pretty well word for word in Osbert Sitwell’s Laughter in the Next Room.

  It showed me one thing. That if you wanted to put Ivor in a good mood you either had to praise his poetry or ask him about these people we all believed were his relatives. Nothing else would do it. We went to the Marco Polo that evening, as we often did then, and it was there that I received, without knowing it at the time, news of Bell.

  Chinese restaurants were not common then as they are now. At least, good ones were not. It felt very grand to sit round a table big enough to accommodate us all and fiddle about with the dishes that make up what was then a rarity for London, Peking duck. I sat between Dominic and a boy called Mervyn, and on the other side of Dominic was Fay and on the other side of her, Ivor. I sat there enjoying it but thinking how strange it all was, recalling the decorous dinner parties at which Cosette and Douglas had entertained her relations and the Wellgarth neighbors. Some of those people had occasionally called at Archangel Place and their astonishment, expressed in wandering eyes, hesitant inquiries, was greater than mine. They were older and more set in their ways. They thought Cosette had gone mad.

  Eating at the Marco Polo, or wherever it might be, produced the same sort of astonishment in some of Cosette’s young guests. You could see they wondered what it was all about, why Cosette did it, and in the case of some of them, what price were they going to have to pay? This was especially evident in the Irishman, youngest of Perpetua’s large family of siblings. Dominic had come to London to find work and, when his sister told him she had found a place for him to stay, must have expected a miserable room in a comfortless house, an exigent landlady, a shabby neighborhood. He could scarcely believe his luck or overcome his terrible suspicions. Like the streetwise beggar picked out of an alley to attend the rich man’s feast, he seemed always on the watch for the reckoning. Sooner or later Cosette’s motive must emerge. What was surely some gross and elaborate practical joke would end in his humiliation, or else she was mistaken in him, believed him other than he was, and when she discovered the truth, that he was a laborer by necessity not inclination, poor and nearly illiterate, accustomed to a diet of fried bread and chips at his mother’s kitchen table, she would expose him and fling him out-of-doors.

  Or so I suppose. This is what his expression told me, for at that time he never spoke except to say thank you, and later on when I might have asked him, I didn’t. His wild, beautiful dark face was anxious in repose, marvelous when he smiled, as he did whenever he was spoken to, his eyes, the bluest I have ever seen, positively glowing with gratitude and apprehension. On the other hand, the boy called Mervyn was out to get what he could. I think Fay was too. I think it now, though at the time I never quite believed in people actually and purposefully having an attitude of this sort. I thought it was something come upon in old novels whose authors were not conversant with the subtleties of human nature. I had never read Balzac. I hadn’t yet begun reading Henry James.

  So when I saw Fay raise and lower her long eyelashes at Ivor Sitwell, stretch her bare arms behind her head to lift her breasts, smile at him and whisper something indecent and provocative, having apparently waited for the moment Cosette left us to go to the bathroom, I thought it done in innocence and by chance. And these factors of accident and random acts I thought operating again when she later turned her back on him and concentrated on Cosette, pinning up

  Cosette’s back hair that was flopping out of its pins, complimenting her on her perfume, sniffing with eyes closed as if ravished by it, going off to find a waiter and demand a jug of water because Cosette had asked for it. Mervyn had different methods: eating and drinking as much as he could get, far more than any reasonable person would want to eat and drink—Cosette always asked for the bill and paid it without a word, with scarcely more than a glance at it—remarking that he had run out of cigarettes, observing loudly and often how much he liked the jacket some man on the other side of the restaurant was wearing or how he had always longed for a certain kind of pen or
cigarette lighter. I believed it all artless, but I learned.

  At Cosette’s table, whether at home or in a restaurant, there was always excess, too much food, too much wine, a bottle or two left half-empty, cigarettes stubbed out half-smoked, cigarettes left in packets on the cloth, liqueurs left in glasses, chocolates on dishes. If Gary, the boy who played the various exotic musical instruments, was there, he would gather up all these leftovers and put them into a carrier bag he carried with him for this purpose. For all I know, this may have been the first doggy bag to make its appearance in London. As well as the bag, Gary carried a Tupperware box to put bean sprouts and noodles in, including those that other people had left on their plates.

  It was a few days after this that I first witnessed this spooning up of leftovers, and saw him, green in the face after drinking four glasses of kirsch, stagger to the bathroom to be sick. On this occasion Ivor burned the five-pound note to show his contempt for money.

  “Can you let me have a fiver?”

  Cosette didn’t hesitate. The bank note, worth so comparatively little now, would then have paid a week’s rent of a better room than Dominic could have afforded. Ivor took it out of her fingers. He had been discoursing on the wealth of “his” family and how happy he was that, due to some legal mix-up, none of it had come the way of the particular branch to which he belonged. He talked about money corrupting and about selfishness. I have since then noticed that it is only deeply selfish people who point out the selfishness of others. Earlier that day, it appeared, he had proposed that Cosette should back the founding of a poetry magazine of which he would be editor. She hadn’t refused outright, only said it would be hard for her to lay hands on such a large sum at short notice.

  “Now, why do you suppose we refer to people who oppose innovations in the arts as Philistines?” he asked us, still holding up the bank note in his fingertips.