The House of Stairs Read online

  No one answered him, no one knew or cared.

  “Possibly because no documents in the Philistine language are extant,” Ivor said. “Equally possibly because the Philistines long held a monopoly in smithing iron, their only known skill.” He looked at Cosette, drawing toward him with his free hand the candle a waiter had just lit. “But how did the use of the term in its modern sense arise?”

  Cosette was very tolerant, very easygoing, so well able to conceal hurt that you might think she scarcely felt it. Betrayal was what she feared and Ivor, who had presumably made her no promises, given her no guarantees, couldn’t betray her. But she liked things to be pleasant, she was one who poured oil on troubled waters.

  “You’ve just told us how, Ivor,” she said. “It’s very interesting. I didn’t know that.”

  “The use of the term for people deficient in liberal culture and whose chief interests are material was first applied by German students in the nineteenth century to those who hadn’t been to a university. People like you.” He might equally have said people like himself, since his claims to have been to Oxford, or indeed any seat of learning after he left Northampton High School at the age of sixteen, were without foundation. The information about Philistines I later discovered he had purposefully mugged up in advance. Cosette didn’t in the least mind these insults, having no inflated image of her own intellect, indeed very much underestimating it. He too saw this, he saw he had misjudged his victim and her vulnerable area, and now, unerringly, he aimed at her tender place. “Not that I blame you for that, you can’t help it. You were born too soon.” He said to the rest of us, “Women of her age just weren’t allowed higher education.” And leaning forward, he thrust the folded note into the candle flame and lit his cigarette with it. “Naturally their chief interests would be material, but there’s no harm in showing them how … little … these … things matter.”

  His efforts were largely wasted, for I think it was only I who saw Cosette’s deep blush. The others were too busy watching, like animals hypnotized by headlights, the consumption in flames of the five-pound note. All except Gary who, in an agony at the wicked waste of it, actually making a wailing sound, lunged forward and tried to snatch the burning paper from Ivor’s hand. All across the restaurant people were looking. Ivor was laughing, holding in his fingers the burned fragments of paper, snuffling smoke out through his nostrils. I looked to see if the strip of metal, allegedly embedded in every genuine bank note, had survived the fire, but could see only rags of dark brown ash. It seemed to me in that moment, as Fay leaned back, resting her head against Ivor’s shoulder, crying, “Oh, magnificent, magnificent!” as Gary with tears on his cheeks sulkily shoveled leftovers into his plastic box and Dominic, thunderstruck, murmured, “Holy Mary and Joseph,” it seemed to me then that I saw in Cosette’s face the flash of fear that says, “What am I doing here, what have I got myself into?” I think so, but I could be mistaken.

  She paid the bill, as always, with the merest glance at it. She added her usual excessive tip. We walked out into the King’s Road and Ivor suggested we all go on to some drinking club he knew in South Kensington, a place called the Drayton. Cosette had a headache and I could see she was being overtaken by pain. Under the harsh acid lights, dressed in the bright colors she now favored—that night a red silk skirt and red silk sleeveless jerkin over a flowered blouse—she looked old and tired. The “lifting” had done little to prevent a droop at the corners of her mouth. It wasn’t for me to resist going to this club, no one would have taken any notice if I had, and besides I wanted to go on there, I was young, I wanted to live. At that time I was passing through one of those phases of recklessness that perhaps come to everyone over whom hangs the sword of a fatal disease that may strike next month or next year or tomorrow.

  Cosette wouldn’t have considered refusing. She had taken on the role of youth and she must play the part in all its aspects. But she was unable to fake enthusiasm, and Ivor saw this at once, he was sensitive in his way; he saw that she was tired and in pain and not able to disguise it, able only to acquiesce. It was one of the things about her that made him angry, her complaisance, which I think he saw as a rich woman’s indifference. If you have that much money, you need scarcely trouble yourself about anything or make yourself interesting, you need merely be supine. I think he saw it this way. He was consumed with envy, with Covetousness for her money, and would without a doubt have married her for it. Someone had told Bell who told me later that he couldn’t marry because he was already married to a Catholic woman who wouldn’t give him a divorce. And this was a couple of years before the new, easy divorce law came in.

  He was angry and anger always made him vindictive or silky. That night he was silky. In the car on the way to Drayton Gardens he began talking about women, about the types of women he admired. For some reason he least admired the type in which I belong, small, slender, dark, brown-skinned. By the time we were in the club, which Cosette was obliged to join and pay a membership fee, for no one could be found to support Ivor’s claim to membership, he was describing this type in detail as anathema to him. Since I disliked him so much I was rather amused, and I was touched to see how Dominic resented it on my behalf.

  Fay’s looks were the kind he most appreciated.

  “Tall and not too thin,” he said, “lots of very light hair but not yellow hair, never yellow. Gray eyes, large gray eyes, and a little short nose, and a sensuous mouth.”

  The ironic thing was that though he was describing Fay and looking at Fay, he was also describing Cosette, or the way Cosette had tried, and with some success, to remake herself. She saw this, if no one else did, and it revived her. Her eyes brightened, she smiled a little. Not, I think, because she much cared what Ivor said, she was passing beyond caring what he said or did, his days were numbered, but because he was after all a man talking about a woman like her, talking of her as desirable, placing her by definition in a stage of youth.

  Fay enjoyed it too. Fay thought she was being individually praised and perhaps knew she was being flattered, for she wasn’t very tall and her nose turned up. We were all sitting round a table, drinking a mixture called Singapore Sling, and a girl had come onto the little stage to sing Edith Piaf songs in what Ivor said was very bad French. It sounded all right to me and I said so. He cast me one of his poisonous looks, so ridiculous as to arouse derisive laughter. I had never laughed at him before. Had I been a coward and did I now sense his star was setting? Perhaps. Anyway, I started to laugh and after a while Dominic laughed too, tentatively at first, then with uninhibited uproarious mirth. Ivor watched the girl leave the stage.

  “I’ve met her,” he said coldly. “I met her in a friend’s house at a party and the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen was there. She rents a room from my friends.” He warmed to this. I thought he was making it up. I was sure he was as his vindictiveness increased. “She would make any woman in this room look a clapped-out old slag.” Cosette grew still, stricken. He had shocked Fay, whose face had become a joke mask of drunken incredulity. A kind of hysterical giggling afflicted me and it took all the control I had to suppress it. “A daughter of the gods,” said Ivor, “divinely tall and most divinely fair.”

  “Did you make that up yourself?” said Mervyn, awestruck.

  “Of course I didn’t, you stupid arsehole. I’m a real poet. I tell you, she has that face I’ve described, only she has it to perfection, as if all the others”—he looked at Fay—“were just bad copies, as if they were waxworks. A Scandinavian face, the face of a Viking maid—‘a face to lose youth for, to occupy age with the dream of, meet death with’—and I didn’t write that either.” I realized he was terribly drunk, but weren’t we all, except Cosette? Something was striking a chord in my consciousness and there came back to me a conversation Cosette and I had once had. I looked at her to see if she remembered, but saw in her tired face only pain and perhaps regret, as if there had come into her mind a memory of peace and of lilies in a garden and he
r high-powered, dull husband.

  “You could imagine her in Smiles of a Summer Night,” said Ivor. “You could imagine her in Strindberg.”

  I said suddenly, “What’s her name?”

  He was too taken aback by the abruptness of it to attempt cleverness. “Christine something. They call her Chris. Why?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s not the same one,” for I had forgotten Bell’s name was Christabel; I had forgotten it entirely.

  They were dancing now to the dull tuneless jungle beat of rock. Gary had fallen asleep with his head on the table. Mervyn was doing a kind of solo caper as if for the edification of the band. Perhaps because Cosette sat staring at the art nouveau wall panels with what looked more like indifference than despair, Fay put out one hand to Ivor, fearful that he would refuse her. But instead of refusing he got up and with his arm round her walked precariously up the length of glassy floor.

  I said to Dominic, “Come and dance.”

  8

  SOMETHING OVER A HUNDRED years ago George Huntington described a disease that he had observed affected families in New England. These people were descendants of seventeenth-century immigrants from the Suffolk village of Bures. I have heard that an ancestor of mine, from far, far back, was a Bures woman.

  There is a test you can have now to determine whether or not you will fall victim to Huntington’s. It is very complicated and involves not only taking a sample of one’s own blood but also that of a number of one’s relatives, at least seven. I haven’t got seven living relatives on the appropriate side of the family. They have all died of Huntington’s.

  Once there were quite a lot of us. My grandmother had six children. Her own father had died aged thirty-five, not of Huntington’s but of poliomyelitis, then known as infantile paralysis. Her mother vaguely remembered her mother-in-law afflicted with what she mistakenly called Saint Vitus’ dance, which made her limbs jerk and her hands fly out, but she didn’t know it was hereditary, she didn’t know her own husband would have succumbed to it had he lived. She didn’t know her children might inherit it. Three did. My grandmother’s choreic movements began soon after her sixth child was born, soon after her thirtieth birthday.

  Of her six children each had a fifty-fifty chance of succumbing to it. That is the genetic ratio, neither more nor less. If one of your parents had it, you are fifty percent likely to have it and fifty percent unlikely to have it. If neither of your parents had it, you can’t have it. My mother showed the first symptoms, inconsistent behavior and malaise, when she was thirty-six. One of her sisters had died of diphtheria as a child. Would she have developed it? Two others did, a brother and a sister, and both died before her. The other sisters never had children, never even married, they dared not, though in fact neither of them have developed it and both are still alive. They alone are alive, though if the test had been in existence twenty years ago, probably enough could have been mustered to supply blood for me: Douglas, who was the son of my afflicted grandmother’s afflicted sister; Cousin Lily, descended from my grandmother’s other afflicted sister; my mother; her sisters; one dying, insane uncle—well, it would have been a near thing, but maybe sufficient could have been found.

  And if they had, if the test had existed, if I had dared take it, if it had shown negative, would it have made a difference to my life? Would I have done more and done less and done differently? Would I have had children, written other, better things? What is the use of talking about it? It didn’t exist and now that it does there aren’t enough people left and I am balanced on the final ridge—only two or three more years and I shall know for good or ill, I shall know forever.

  I wrote my first three books in Cosette’s house. The first one I wrote on Douglas’s old typewriter in the room at the top of the house with the window that had no real balcony and where there could be no noise above my head to disturb me. It was written rapidly and badly and with the maximum injected sensation and violence and crude sex. I couldn’t blame Ivor Sitwell for saying some time later, “Still churning them out, are you, Elizabeth?”

  But all this was a way ahead. I was going to be a teacher. I was going to write a thesis on Henry James. And Ivor was still living with Cosette and sharing her bed and insulting her and trying to squeeze money out of her for his poetry magazine. Over this she proved exceptionally stubborn. There was a stubborn side to Cosette and, surprisingly, a businesswoman side. It must have rubbed off on her from Douglas. At any rate, she wanted to see figures and estimates and meet the people who would be involved with Ivor in this venture before she was prepared to do what she called “come across.” Two others were concerned. One of them was a woman, now married, who Ivor said had once been his sweetheart and who had written a libretto for a musical that had actually been performed somewhere in America in theater-in-the-round. The other, who had some connection with Private Eye, was called Walter Admetus, and it was in his house that the woman who had so enchanted Ivor, the woman called Chris or Christine, rented a room.

  I don’t know why I behaved the way I did, I don’t know why I suddenly became devious. I had already made up my mind the beautiful woman couldn’t be Bell, having got it into my head that my Bell was really Isabel, and yet Ivor’s description tallied with her so closely, matched her feature for feature, coloring for coloring. I could easily have asked Elsa the Lioness, whom I often saw, who was a regular visitor to the House of Stairs, to find out from the Thinnesses if Bell Sanger was still in their cottage. Come to that, I could have rung up Felicity Thinnesse myself. We had encountered each other once or twice since that Christmas, we had all met at a party at Elsa’s. If I didn’t do this, I think it was because I wanted to enjoy a shock of recognition, I wanted some rapture of the heart. I think it was that, but I don’t know. Certain it is that although I had seen her so little, my emotions were already involved with Bell and her life.

  So when Cosette suggested that Walter Admetus and the woman he lived with be invited to dinner in Archangel Place, I opposed it. She suggested it to me first, we were alone with no one there but Auntie, and this was a piece of luck—or so it seemed, so fatefully it seemed—for if Ivor had been there he would have jumped at the chance, as he always did, of getting something, anything, out of Cosette for himself or anyone connected with him. I have often wondered since then what would have happened if Cosette had refused me, if when I said it would be better to phone Admetus and suggest a meeting at his house, then later, if she liked him, he could be asked to dinner, if then she had rejected this idea, as with her hospitable ideas she well might have done, she all too well might have done. Would I have made my way alone to the northern reaches of Gloucester Place where Admetus lived to seek out Bell? I don’t think so. It would have been hard, it would have required a brashness I don’t possess and never did. I would have left it, I would have forgotten Bell—and Cosette would never have been granted bliss nor had her life broken nor come with the rest of us to the high window with the narrow ledge.

  “I don’t think I could do that, darling,” Cosette said. “I couldn’t invite us to someone’s house …” and, doubtfully, “could I?”

  It was so funny coming from her, to whose house everyone invited themselves, that even Auntie laughed. She caught my eye and daringly, fearful of giving offense, she laughed her old woman’s thin, throaty laugh.

  “I don’t mind phoning him,” I said. “I’ll say I’m your secretary.”

  “Oh, no,” said Cosette, shocked. “Then he’ll expect the sort of person who would have a secretary. I suspect he’s very bohemian.”

  This archaic term would have earned Ivor Sitwell’s ridicule and the incomprehension of the other inhabitants of the house. But I was used to it; it had been one of Douglas’s words. “If he’s bohemian,” I said, “he won’t mind us inviting ourselves.”

  Only then did Cosette catch on. “Do you mean you’d come with me, Elizabeth?” There was something touching in the way she spoke, that she who conferred so much love and largesse should
also be shy, be fearful of intruding, be inordinately grateful that I would spare the time to give her my company. “That would be very kind of you.” Her face took on the look it wore when she was making plans of generosity, a mischievousness, an almost youthful anticipation. “We could take him some nice wine. Or Madeira—should we take him a bottle of Madeira?”

  I did my best to persuade her that it would look very odd indeed to take presents of wine to someone with whom she might never be on more than a business footing, someone in any case who would be offering her a glass of lemonade, since Cosette herself rarely drank. She looked doubtful. It went against the grain with her not to be giving; instead to be, as she saw it, taking. But in fact she was to give and take nothing, beyond that lemonade, for the magazine never came into being. The libretto woman disappeared to South America and Ivor went off with Fay. Of course he intended to come back, as Fay also intended. Because Cosette was kind and generous, because she never lost her temper or sulked, because she seemed endlessly forgiving, people who were not very percipient thought her gullible. They thought her foolish and ripe to be deceived.

  Ivor told her he was going to Northampton to see his mother who was ill. Fay just went without a word. I believe they borrowed a room in Putney that belonged to someone they knew who had gone away on holiday. Cosette, taking Auntie out for a drive, saw them lying in each other’s arms in Richmond Park. She showed a side of her character that I had not suspected if I call it vindictiveness. But if I call it something else, not spite, not revenge, but a horror of being betrayed, then I had always known of it.

  She had her man from Golders Green come in—

  Jimmy, the faithful handyman who had done all these odd jobs for her in Wellgarth Avenue and now came to Archangel Place—to change the locks and have new keys cut. However, if she didn’t change her phone number this was because she hardly ever answered the phone herself. I used to think that if she got anything out of having a houseful of freeloaders, it was that there was always someone to answer the phone, an operation she very much flinched from. Mervyn, whom I had never suspected of having a particular dislike for Ivor, took intense pleasure in telling him when he phoned that Cosette had given orders he wasn’t to be admitted. Cosette was horrified when she heard about this, but by then Mervyn, and Gary too, had had enormous fun telling Ivor that Cosette “knew all about him,” had “an important friend at Scotland Yard,” and was at that moment “with her solicitor.” Ivor, supposedly, took this to mean that among other things his deception about his family origins had been rumbled, though in fact none of us then suspected he was not as much a Sitwell as the late Sir Osbert himself, whose funeral the year before he claimed to have been invited to.