The House of Stairs Read online

  I tried to see between the houses, to make my eyes penetrate brick wall and high hedge, black, nearly solid, masses of evergreen foliage. But if the eucalypt had still been there, its thready branches with fine-pointed gray leaves would by now far exceed in height the hollies and the laurel, for gum trees, as Jimmy once told me, grow tall quickly. If it was still there, it might even by now have reached close to that high window. It wasn’t there, it couldn’t be, and before I turned my eyes away I imagined its felling and its fall, the powerful medicinal scent that must have come from its dying leaves and severed trunk.

  These are two balconies only on the facade of the House of Stairs, on the windows of the drawing room and principal bedroom floors, and they are copies of the balconies on the Ca’ Lanier, bulbous at the base, somewhat basketlike. This disciple of Ruskin was not averse to a hotchpotch of styles. As I stood there the central window on the drawing room floor opened and a man came out onto the balcony to take in a plant in a pot. He didn’t look in my direction but down at his plant and, reentering, swept aside the curtain to afford me a glimpse of a gold-lighted interior, mainly a tiny twinkling chandelier and a dark red wall no more than ten feet inside the window, hung with mirrors and pictures in white frames. It was a shock of a physical kind, clutching at the center of my body. And yet I knew the drawing room must have been subdivided; must, for it had been thirty feet deep, now compose the whole flat. The curtain fell and the window was closed once more. I had a sudden vivid memory of returning from some time away, some visit to Thornham perhaps, and of climbing the first flight of stairs to open the drawing room door and seeing Cosette seated there at the table, her head at once turning toward me, that radiant smile transforming her wistful face, her arms out as she rose to receive me into her unfailing welcoming embrace.

  “Darling, did you have a good time? You don’t know how we’ve all missed you!”

  There would be a gift for me from that clutter on the table, a homecoming present carefully chosen, the strawberry pincushion perhaps or one of the gemstone eggs. And she would have wrapped it in paper as beautiful as William Morris fabric, tied it with satin ribbon, perfuming it as she did so by chance contact with her own skin, her own dress …

  My eyes were tightly shut. Involuntarily I had closed them when the tenant or owner of the first-floor flat allowed me a sight of his living room, and I conjured up Cosette where the red wall now was. I opened my eyes, took a last look at the changed, reordered, spoiled house and turned away. It was dark by then and as I began walking toward Pembridge Villas, refusing for some melodramatic reason to look back, a taxi came out of one of the mews and I got into it. Leaning back against the slippery upholstery, I felt curiously tired and worn. You will think I had forgotten all about Bell, but she had only temporarily been pushed out of my mind by remembering Cosette and by all the other emotions the House of Stairs had awakened. What I had truly forgotten was the pain in my legs and this had gone. I was reprieved. The bore and the terror would be gone for a week or two.

  Of Bell I now thought in a new mood of tranquillity. Perhaps it was all for the best that I had lost her, that there had been no confrontation. Again I wondered if she had seen me over the heads of those people in the lift and again I couldn’t make up my mind. Had she fled from me or, innocent of my presence behind her, left the station and gone directly into one of the Queensway shops? It might even be, and this was disturbing, that, emerging, she had followed me, unaware of who I was. Or indifferent? That too had to be faced. Perhaps she would want to know no one from those old days but start afresh with new friends and new interests, and that (as I now decided must be the case) was borne out by her living in Bayswater or Paddington, areas of London I believed she had never lived in before.

  But all this made no difference to my decision to find her. I would find where she was and how she lived and what she now called herself, and obtain a sight of her, even if I took it no further than that. My heart sank a little when I contemplated the prison years, insofar as I could imagine them, the waste of life, the loss of youth. And then, just as I had had a kind of vision of Cosette at that drawing room table, loaded as it always was with books and flowers, sheets of paper and sewing things, the telephone, glasses for seeing through and glasses for drinking from, photographs and postcards and letters in their envelopes, so I seemed to see Bell as she was almost the first time I ever saw her, walking into the hall at Thornham to tell us that her husband had shot himself.

  2

  I WAS FOURTEEN WHEN they told me. They were right, they had to tell me, but perhaps they could have waited a few more years. What harm would it have done to wait four years? I wasn’t likely to have married in those four years, I wasn’t likely to have had a baby.

  Those were the words I used to Bell when I told her this story. She is the only one I have ever told, for Elsa doesn’t know, even my ex-husband, Robin, doesn’t know. I confided it all to Bell on one dark winter’s day in the House of Stairs, not up in the room with the long window, but sitting on the stairs drinking wine.

  It wasn’t that my mother’s illness was apparent. They weren’t even sure she was ill, not physically, that is. Mental changes, which is how the books describe her condition, could be attributed to many causes or to none in particular. But they had set fourteen as the age, and they stuck to it and told me, not on the birthday itself, which is what happens to the heroes and heroines of romances who are initiated into family rituals and family secrets on some preset coming-of-age, but two months later on a wet Sunday afternoon. They must have known it would frighten me and make me unhappy. But did they understand what a shock it was? Did they realize they would make me feel as much set apart from the rest of humanity as if I had a hump on my back or were destined to grow seven feet tall?

  I understood then why I was an only child, though not why I had been born at all. For a while I reproached them for giving me birth, for being irresponsible when even then they knew the facts. And for a while, a long while, I no longer wanted them as parents, I no longer wanted to know them. The rapid progress of my mother’s illness made no difference. There is no time in our lives when we are so conspicuously without mercy as in adolescence. I turned from them and their secret, her distorted genes, his watchful eyes and suspenseful waiting for the appearance of signs, to someone who was kind and didn’t cause me pain. I turned to Cosette.

  Of course I had known Cosette all my life. She was married to my mother’s cousin Douglas Kingsley, and because we are a small family—naturally, we are—the few of us in London gravitated toward each other. Besides, they lived near us or near enough, a walk away if you didn’t mind long walks and I couldn’t have cared in those days. Their house was in Wellgarth Avenue, which is Hampstead but almost Golders Green. It faced the ponds and Wildwood Road, a thirties Tudor place, huge for two people, which was meant to resemble, but didn’t quite, a timbered country farmhouse. When people told Douglas that Garth Manor was very large for just two people he used to reply simply and not in the least offensively, “The size of a man’s home doesn’t depend on the size of his family. It’s a matter of his status and position in the world. It reflects his achievement.”

  Douglas was an achiever. He was a rich man. Every morning he was driven down to the city in his dark green Rolls-Royce to join the queue of cars, even then, in the fifties and sixties, rolling ponderously down Rosslyn Hill. He sat in the back going through the papers in his briefcase, studying them through the thick lenses of glasses in dark solid frames, while his driver contended with the traffic. Douglas had iron-gray hair and an iron-gray jowl and the shade of his suits always matched hair and jowl, though sometimes with a thin dark red or thin dark green stripe running vertically through the cloth. He and Cosette led a life of deep yet open and frank upper-middle-classness. When I was older and more interested in observing these things I used to think it was as if Douglas had at some earlier stage of his life compiled a long list or even a book of upper-middle-class manners and pursuits a
nd chosen from them as a life’s guide those of the more stolid sort, those in most frequent popular usage and those most likely to win reactionary or conventional commendation.

  All this was reflected in the magazines that lay on Cosette’s coffee table, the Tatler, the Lady, Country Life, in the food they ate—I have never anywhere else known such an enormous consumption of smoked salmon—the clothes from Burberry, Aquascutum, and the Scotch House, his Rolls-Royce, her Volvo, their holidays in Antibes and Lucerne and later, as the sixties began, in the West Indies. But at fourteen I didn’t see it like this, though I couldn’t help being aware of their wealth. If I thought about it at all, I saw this life-style as the choice of both of them, willingly and happily entered into. It was only later that I began to understand that their way of living was Douglas’s choice, not Cosette’s.

  I began going to see her in those summer holidays just after my parents told me of my inheritance. Cosette had invited me while on one of her visits to our house. I was a child still, but she talked to me as to a contemporary, she always did this to everyone, in her smiling, vague, abstracted way.

  “Come over next week, darling, and tell me what to do about my garden.”

  “I don’t know anything about gardens.” I must have said it sullenly, for I was always sullen then.

  “My lilies are coming out, but they’re not happy and it seems a shame, because they have such lovely names. Gleaming Daylight and Golden Dawn and Precious Bane. It says in the catalog, ‘Thriving in all garden soils, tolerant of both moisture and drought, they can be grown in full sun or partial shade …’ but I must say I haven’t found it so.”

  I just looked at her, bored, not responsive. I had always liked Cosette because she took notice of me and never fussed or inquired, but on that day I hated all the world. The world had been injuring me without my knowing it for fourteen years and I had a lot of revenge to take on it.

  “We won’t have to do anything,” said Cosette, evidently seeing the offer of idleness as a great inducement. “I mean we won’t have to dig or plant or get our hands dirty. We’ll just sit and drink things and make plans.”

  They had told her I had been told and she was being tender with me. After a while she wanted my company for myself and kindness didn’t come into it. But at that time I was just a young relative who had been given a terrible burden to bear and whom she felt she could uniquely help. Cosette was like that. She welcomed me to Garth Manor and we sat outside the first time on the kind of garden furniture the other people I knew didn’t have, chintz-upholstered sofas that swung gently under canopies, cane chairs with high backs that Cosette called peacocks.

  “Because they are supposed to look like the Peacock Throne but without all the jewels and everything. I wanted to have a pair of peacocks to strut up and down here—imagine the cock bird’s lovely tail! But Douglas didn’t think it would be a good idea.”

  “Why didn’t he?” I said, already resentful of him on her behalf, already seeing him as an oppressive, even dictatorial, husband.

  “They screech. I didn’t know that or of course I wouldn’t have suggested it. They screech regularly at dawn, you could set your clock by them.”

  There was a glass-topped table of white rattan, sheltered by a big white sunshade. Perpetua brought us strawberries dipped in chocolate and lemonade made out of real lemons in glasses that by some magical means had been coated with actual frost. Cosette smoked cigarettes in a long tortoiseshell holder. She told me how much she liked my name. She would have called a daughter of her own by it if she had ever had a daughter. It was she who told me how it was that Elizabeth became a perennially popular name in England. Since then, though not at the time of course, I have often thought of the trouble she must have been to, gathering this information and a great deal more, just to please me and put me at my ease.

  “Because if you say it over and over to yourself, darling, it really is quite a strange-sounding name, isn’t it? It’s just as strange as any other from the Old Testament, Mehetabel or Hephsibah or Shulamith, and any of them might have got to be as fashionable as Elizabeth if a queen had been called by them. Elizabeth became popular because of Elizabeth I and she was called Elizabeth because of her great-grandmother Elizabeth Woodville, that Edward IV married—so you see? Before that it was as rare as those others.”

  “Cosette must be very rare,” I said.

  “It means ‘little thing.’ It’s what my mother always called me and it stuck. Unfortunately, I’m not a little thing anymore. I’ll tell you my real name, it’s Cora—isn’t that awful? You must promise never to tell anyone. I had to say it for everyone to hear when I got married, but never, never since.”

  I wondered why Douglas hadn’t given her an engagement ring and a wedding ring made of something superior to silver, not knowing then that the element was platinum, the latest fashion when Cosette was married. The big diamonds looked somber in their dark gray setting. At that time Cosette’s only excursion into cosmetics was to paint her nails, and these were the bright reddish pink of one of the clumps of lilies. The gesture she made when she pointed was peculiarly graceful, and somehow swanlike—only that is absurd.

  Swans don’t point. But we think of them as moving with a slow fluidity, a delicate poise, and this too was Cosette.

  The flower bed she indicated was shaped like a crescent moon and the lilies in it looked perfect to me with their red flowers and yellow flowers and flowers snow-white printed with a coffee smudge. The gardener had planted them and ever since tended them. Cosette might direct operations here and in the house, but I never saw her perform with her own hands any domestic task. I never heard anyone, not even my father, who was rather carping, call her lazy, and yet lazy she was with an unruffled, easy idleness. She had a tremendous capacity for doing absolutely nothing, though her sewing was exquisite and she could draw and paint, but she preferred to sit for hours in quietude, not reading, without a pen or needle in her hand, her face gentle and serene in repose. For in those days, and she must have been rather older than I am now, something over forty, the sadness I have spoken of had not come into her expression. Simone de Beauvoir, in some memoir, laments age which causes the face to droop and therefore take on a sad look. It was this sagging of the facial muscles that later gave Cosette an almost tragical appearance, except when she smiled.

  To me, then, she was old, so old as almost to seem of a different species. Unimaginable that I might live to be as old as that—and unlikely too, as I sometimes thought with bitterness. She was then a large fair woman, overweight, fat even, though in those days she never showed signs of minding about her weight. Her eyes were a pale greyish blue that seemed to look at you uncertainly, with a wistful and perhaps timid regard. For there was shyness in Cosette as well as confident generosity.

  “You think my hemerocallis is quite happy there then, darling?” she said. The names of plants presented her with no difficulty. She might never plant them or pull out the weeds that threatened them but she knew exactly what each one was called. I said nothing, but that did not deter her. “I suppose I’m being unduly impatient, expecting great things when the poor dears have only been there six months.”

  Even I, young as I was, miserable as I was, couldn’t help smiling at the notion of Cosette as an impatient person. Her tranquillity was the essence of her. In her company, because of this almost Oriental placidity, I—and others—inevitably felt eased of burdens, curiously enfolded by a sweet meditative calm. It made you think in a strange way of its opposite, of the restless briskness so many women of one’s mother’s generation had and which made people of my age feel nervous and inadequate. She was always the same and always there, always interested, always with nothing better to do.

  I soon began visiting her three times a week at least, then staying overnight. I was at school in Hampstead Garden Suburb and it was easy to explain that it was far more convenient for me to live at Cosette’s during the week than to go home to Cricklewood. Or that was how I did expla
in it, an explanation that would sound absurd to anyone aware of the distance between the Henrietta Barnett and Cricklewood Lane. Only the existence and frequent presence of Douglas stopped me attempting to live at Garth Manor. Everyone knows couples of whom one is congenial, the other unsympathetic. For me the return home of Douglas each evening, heralded by the sound of the Rolls’s wheels on the gravel drive, cast a blight over the companionship I enjoyed with his wife. He was so male, so stiffly elderly, so stockbrokerish, much of his talk incomprehensible, and he seemed, without actually asking for it, to require a measure of grave silence in his house while he was in it. And at the weekends he was there all the time.

  Cosette changed not at all in her husband’s company. She was the same sweet, smiling, calm yet effusive creature, the same woman whose great gift was as a listener. To his accounts of deals and negotiations she would listen with the same rapt attention that she gave to my own outpourings, the retelling of my dreams, visions, frustrations, and resentments. And she really listened. It was not that she closed off her mind and wandered in thought to other regions. I marveled at the intelligent replies she made to his mysterious diatribes and looked with suspicion and lack of comprehension when, getting up from her chair to move swanlike across the room, she allowed one plump white hand to rest softly against the side of his face. When she did this he would always turn his face into it and kiss the palm. This caused me a furious embarrassment. I know now that I didn’t want Cosette to have any life of her own, any private life, that was not directly concerned with making mine easier and happier.

  She didn’t mention the terror and the bore but waited for me to do so. Cosette seldom raised subjects or showed curiosity. I spoke of it—it burst out of me in a passion rather—after a neighbor of hers, a woman called Dawn Castle, had been in the garden with us on a warm October day when the lily flowers were dead and gone and it was the late dahlias that Cosette and I were admiring. Dawn Castle was always talking about her children, what a worry they were, the youngest had just been expelled from school, something like that, and another one had failed an exam. She finished, as she always did, with the old cliché. “Still, I suppose I wouldn’t be without them.”