The House of Stairs Read online

  In a moment, I thought, I will make that phone call. I will call that number on the six-two-four exchange and put an end to the fearful impasse I have been in this past week, for it is nearly a week now, put an end to procrastination and doubt and persuading myself it is too early or too late to phone, that she is bound to be out, that it is too soon, that it is not soon enough, that tomorrow is the best, destined, most appropriate day. Lucrezia was returning my regard with her calm, reposeful look—not “handsome in sadness,” surely, not “livid”—was meeting my eyes with her own large, limpid eyes so that I now saw a resemblance there not only to Bell but also to the young Cosette of early photographs, when the phone rang.

  It never crossed my mind it would be Bell. But although all she said, when I had given the number, was “Hello,” I was in no doubt even for a second who it was. My silence was due to the stupefaction of shock, a shock I felt even though I was prepared, even though I had seen her and knew she had asked for me.

  “It’s Bell.”

  “I know,” I said. “Oh, I know.” I sat down, feeling a sudden great tiredness. It was a few seconds before I realized I had closed my eyes. “I saw you,” I said. “I followed you but you disappeared.”

  Bell was never one for explanations if she didn’t want to make them, never one to apologize. It was much later I learned that Felicity Thinnesse had rung her up and told her I wanted to be in touch with her.

  “Will you come and see me?” she said.

  Which is why I am here facing her now across a room that is very like the room in Walter Admetus’s house where I was first alone with her. There is a bed with a dirty white cotton cover and a table and a wicker chair and a couple of suitcases as well as two tea chests. It is a warm spring day and Bell has opened the window, but no fresh breeze from Regent’s Park penetrates here, there are no plane trees outside and no Georgian terraces. This house is squeezed up against a railway bridge, crushed so close as to be absurd, all light surely excluded from its front bays, while the back rooms, of which this is one, overlook a scrap yard. Bell tells me that when she was first released from the open prison where she served the final year of her sentence, she was obliged to live in a hostel. Then her probation officer found this room for her. This woman has also found her a job. It is due to start next week and is in a shop where the owner has of necessity been told who and what she is.

  “I don’t know if I shall be equal to it,” she says, but whether this is because she has scarcely had a job before or because the job is in, of all places, Westbourne Grove, I don’t know and she doesn’t say. She is very changed in appearance, though still slender and straight with that high-held head on her long neck. Her hair is iron gray and coarsened by its graying. A tracery of lines lies on her face as if a cobweb had been spread there, and I remember what James said about the portrait in relation to Milly Theale as “a face … that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own.”

  She wears black, a skirt and a sort of tunic that seems to be no more than a length of material with a hole cut for her neck and the sides sewn up, sandals, no stockings. Her legs have become very thin. I haven’t touched her yet, I haven’t shaken her hand or kissed her. Shock prevails, and pity and wonder. Will I ever get used to her? Will I ever be able to say calmly to myself, This is Bell.

  When I came to the door and she answered it and brought me up here, when the door was shut, she remembered. All these years she has remembered. And she said to me, “Are you out of the woods yet?”

  I was immensely grateful to her. It seemed the greatest kindness, more than any valuable gift.

  “Coming to the edge,” I said.

  She nodded. I haven’t yet seen her smile. “I often thought about it,” she said. “I used to wonder.”

  She sleeps a lot. She told me she couldn’t sleep in prison and since she has been out—over two months had passed before she got up the nerve to phone Felicity—she has slept all night and half the days. “That’s why I mayn’t be equal to this job.”

  “I don’t work at all and I never shall,” she had once said to me. “I’m never going to work.”

  On the evening I saw her she had been to see the therapist in Shepherds Bush she goes to for her counseling. On the way back she got out of the tube to look at the shop where she is destined to work, vanishing into a tobacconist’s in Queensway as I emerged. For while the rest of us gave up cigarettes in the seventies, Bell still smokes. Living on the social security, she goes without food to buy cigarettes. Her clothes smell of them and her hair and this room, just as they must have done in Admetus’s house, only we all smelled of smoke then, so none of us noticed it.

  “Do you mind if I sleep for a while?” she asks me. “You can stay if you like, or go. I know where you are now and you know where I am.”

  But as she stretches out on the bed under the open window, as she curls up and lays one hand under the pillow, she reaches out with the other and takes mine. Like a sick person or a child she means me to hold her hand while she sleeps.

  When we came back from Italy, Cosette and I, Bell had moved away from Admetus’s house and disappeared. She had gone, leaving no forwarding address, no message for me. To this day I don’t know where she went and I no longer care, it no longer matters. Perhaps she was with a man—or a woman—or the simple truth may have been that she could no longer afford the rent Admetus asked.

  Somehow, though, I knew she would reappear and find me, that out of the blue or by some other kind of coincidence we would confront each other again. And yet, apart from Felicity, I knew no one who could be called a friend of Bell’s. I had never then heard her speak of any friend, or, come to that, of mother, father, siblings, any relatives. She had been married, been widowed, had never worked, always spoke her mind with what seemed like transparent honesty, and that was all I knew of her. Whereas, so thoroughly already had I confided in her that she knew all about me, my family and, yes, my horrible inheritance, my dead mother, my special regard for Cosette and hers for me, and even the affair, though I am afraid I called it a relationship in those days, I was having with Dominic.

  I shouldn’t have done it, I know that now. It was one thing to flirt with him, to dance with him, quite another, when we all reached home in the small hours after that dinner at the Marco Polo and that visit to Ivor’s club, to go up to his room with him almost as a matter of course. I fancied him, you see. He was so beautiful. It not only didn’t seem important then that he was Perpetua’s brother, a country boy nearly illiterate, naive, lacking in almost any kind of sophistication; I also didn’t even think about it. I must have known he was a devout Catholic, too. Hadn’t I seen him go off to mass every Sunday, every Day of Obligation? I didn’t think of that, either. I made him my lover because he was slim and tall and straight, because he had the bluest eyes I ever saw and the silkiest raven’s-wing hair (the kind that turns gray before any other kind) and a face like one of El Greco’s young clerics. Also, and this is more excusable, because of the terror and the bore, because of the thing that hung over me, so that I believed I must take everything I wanted, do everything, live, before an end was put to living forever.

  We were drunk that first time. We didn’t talk. But in the morning we made love again and afterward he said, “How can someone like you love me?”

  I felt a little chill, for I didn’t love him, but I didn’t understand then, either. I didn’t understand his simplicity, that from his innocence and his strict life he believed not only that a woman would sleep with a man solely if she loved him, but also that this man would be the one she had chosen forever, to be her life partner, almost as though human beings were as monogamous as certain birds who, imprinted in early youth with the image of a mate, remain exclusively bonded to this one for always. Instead, I asked him what he meant. Humble, shy, without self-confidence, his attitude of mind entirely at odds with his splendid, even arrogant, looks, he said that I was clever, educated (had “been to college” was what he sai
d), was of a “different class.”

  “I’m just an ordinary working fellow,” he said in that voice that was like the Playboy of the Western World, that was like Christy Mahon’s.

  “What,” I said, with incredible insensitivity, “does any of that matter?”

  Later on I made him read that bit out of Synge about the holy bishops straining the bars of paradise to catch a glimpse of Helen of Troy, and her walking abroad with a nosegay in her golden shawl. Only he couldn’t read it very well, he stumbled over the words, and I had to help him. Oh, I have been too fond of literature one way and another, and produced too little of it myself!

  So when I came back to the House of Stairs there was Dominic waiting for me like a husband, calling me “dear” and telling me he had changed the sheets on the bed for my homecoming. And my heart sank as had begun to happen whenever he came home to me or I to him, for I had wanted a sensuous, tumultuous adventure lasting a few weeks and he, it grew ever more obvious, wanted an exclusive lifetime’s partnership. Cosette, romantic and with that Wife of Bath side to her, who had rather encouraged our affair in the beginning as she would have encouraged almost any affair, especially one between the young and good-looking, now saw it all.

  “The next thing will be he’ll want you to marry him,” she said. “In Brompton Oratory, I expect, or even the cathedral.”

  “I thought it was women who clung and men who wanted to be off,” I almost wailed. “How can someone look like Don Giovanni and have the soul of a milkman?”

  “You can’t judge a sausage by its overcoat,” said Cosette.

  She had shifted her enthusiasm from my sex life to my career, or at any rate to my immediate project. The idea that I should write a book in her house was delicious to Cosette. What kind of book hardly mattered. Almost without critical judgment, she came close to worshiping anything made by someone she was fond of. Thus, Diana’s typing was the fastest and most accurate in London, Gary was the world’s greatest virtuoso of the sitar, and the section of the underground tunnel dug out by Dominic was the best bit. To her the only flaw in my writing project was my insisting on having a job as well, though working in an after-school play center wasn’t much of a job, and if I am honest about it I shall have to admit it brought me in enough to live on only because I lived rent free.

  The writing room was created in secret during the two or three hours I spent at work in the early evening. It was almost the only room in the house vacant at that time. Gary and Mervyn having one each, Dominic his and I mine—I had never consented to move in permanently with him—Cosette with her grand chamber, and Birgitte, the new Girl-in-Residence, a real au pair girl this time, in Fay’s old room. The top floor of the attic, where the high, balconyless window was, remained unfurnished, an depository for cardboard crates and tea chests. The room Cosette and Perpetua prepared for me was directly below this one, its window having one of those narrow balconies without a railing that overlooked the gray garden.

  A quiet woman with an intense devotion to Cosette, Perpetua would have probably done anything she asked, did in fact put herself out tremendously for her, traveling all that distance daily by bus and cleaning up after a troop of careless, untidy people. Otherwise I doubt if she would have consented to carry furniture upstairs for my benefit, lay carpet and hang curtains for me. She saw what everyone but poor Dominic now saw, that I had been using him and was not in the least in love. And twenty years his senior, a sister grown up before he was born, she resented it as a mother might. Her resentment took the curious form of her ceasing to use my Christian name when she spoke to me. How I was to recall this later when the woman who failed to use my name meant so much, so infinitely much, more to me!

  Instead of, “Coffee’s ready, Elizabeth,” she would say, “There’s coffee if you want it,” or, calling upstairs, “Are you there?” and waiting until the appropriate voice answered.

  The desk was delivered and the typewriter unearthed and dictionaries placed in a new bookcase. I stood and admired, was effusive in my gratitude. Cosette, a good as well as a generous giver, took a simple, innocent pleasure in being thanked and enjoyed an enthusiastic reception of her gifts. It was then that I said how much I should like a dictionary of classical Greek (which I intended to teach myself and later did) and then that Cosette promised me one for Christmas, failing, producing instead a modern Greek dictionary, and earning from me those unkind reproaches I am forever ashamed of having made.

  So that winter, the winter that was the bridge from the sixties into the seventies, I sat down to write my novel, beginning on a glorious day at the end of October when it was as hot as midsummer. With the example of Henry James before me, knowing James as thoroughly as I did, I might have at least tried to write something that was an examination of the human heart, but I didn’t. I wanted money, I was after the fast buck, the quick return, because I was an inheritor of Huntington’s chorea and I had to live while I could, I had to have it all now. So I embarked on a cheap, sexy, romantic adventure story about people of the kind I had never met and set in places I had never been to but could mug up well enough for my purposes from travel books and other people’s novels. That is the sort of book I have been writing ever since.

  Cosette treated my endeavors with reverence. In her eyes I had become almost overnight an “artist” and she had the attitude the French have toward those who create, almost irrespective of what they create. My work must be looked on by others as the most important activity going on in the house; they must creep up the stairs, forbear to play their records and musical instruments, lower their voices, and never, never interrupt me by coming to my door. Naturally, after a while, this discipline slackened and the old hubbub returned, but Cosette herself never changed, continuing to treat me in this area of my life in a way appropriate to a Balzac, say, or at any rate Graham Greene.

  One afternoon, when I had been writing for most of the day and was nearly due to go off to my play-center job, I had a phone call from Felicity Thinnesse. She sounded excited and distrait.

  “I got your number from Elsa. The woman whose house you’re living in, she takes paying guests, doesn’t she?”

  I was unreasonably incensed. Poor Felicity of course had asked me in good faith, probably like most people being unable to imagine anyone giving board and lodging to a host of freeloaders like Gary and Mervyn and Fay and Birgitte.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve left Esmond. Well, I will have left him when I’ve found somewhere to go. I have to find a room.”

  I don’t know why I thought of the children. I remembered Miranda repeating her mother’s strictures on right behavior. “For three of you?” I said doubtfully.

  “I can’t cope with Jeremy and Miranda. They’ll stay with Esmond. Then,” Felicity added very oddly, “he won’t have so much to make a fuss about.”

  I told her I would ask Cosette, promising to call her back “before Esmond gets home or after he’s gone out to the Conservative Association.”

  I found Cosette in the drawing room accompanied only by Auntie and Maurice Bailey from Wellgarth Avenue. Now that he was a widower he would spend a lot of time pottering about in Harrods and the big Kensington High Street stores, and at teatime take a taxi through the park and look in on Cosette for half an hour. The purpose of these visits seemed to be to make comments on the wretchedness of Cosette’s lifestyle by contrast to what she might have had. Therefore the question I had to ask Cosette only served to inflame him further. I made it in his presence because I knew, or thought I knew then, that Cosette rather enjoyed what Felicity would have called “winding him up.”

  “Another sponger,” he said. “This place must be notorious as the local doss-house.”

  Auntie, enjoying it, looked timidly from one to the other of them. Cosette appeared rather splendid in a totally unsuitable blue brocade caftan. Since the departure of Ivor Sitwell she had been wearing less makeup and had regained some of her lost weight, so that she looked younger and quite we
ll and flourishing. Her hair was by then a very pale silvery blonde. I told her, quoting Wilde, that at the loss of Ivor it had turned quite gold from grief, and she liked this so much that she repeated it to everyone. Now, mildly to rile Maurice Bailey, she began to enthuse over the coming of Felicity.

  “Of course you must tell her she can come here, darling. How awful to be obliged to stay with a man because you’ve nowhere to go. Can you imagine?”

  “I’ll call her back, then, shall I?”

  “Yes, do that, and tell her she’ll be most welcome. I don’t know where we’ll put her, one of the rooms at the top, I suppose. Perpetua will organize that, you know how marvelous she is. Don’t look at me like that, Maurice.” She put one of her beautiful hands out to him, lightly touching his jacket sleeve. Unused all her life, Cosette’s hands were still girlish, plump and white, taper fingered, with nails like blanched almonds, heavily beringed. “Maurice,” she cajoled, “haven’t you a smile for me? Felicity will pay me rent, you know, or at least she’ll make it up in kind. There’ll be all sorts of little jobs for her to do.”

  As there were for Mervyn and Gary, who had long since ceased to carry out their functions of floor polishing and car cleaning; as there were for Birgitte, the Danish au pair, who, perfectly willing to work for her living when first she arrived, had rapidly been persuaded by her employer that there was nothing for her to do, told it was a shame for someone so young and pretty not to have a good time while she could, and why not enjoy herself in Carnaby Street and down the King’s Road?