The House of Stairs Read online

  It never occurred to me that this often-repeated remark might be hurtful to Cosette. I saw it only as profoundly silly and said rudely, “Why not, if they worry you so much?”

  She looked shocked, as well she might. “One day you’ll have a baby of your own and then you’ll feel differently.”

  “I shall never have a baby, never.”

  I had spoken very abruptly, and I felt Cosette’s eyes on me.

  “I’d like a pound for every girl that has told me that,” said Mrs. Castle with her hard little laugh, and after that she went home, being one of those people who are only at ease in an atmosphere of small talk and are quickly frightened away by what they call unpleasantness.

  Cosette said, “That was fierce.”

  “It’s cruel,” I said. “People ought to think before they speak. If she doesn’t know about me, surely she knows about you. She knows Douglas is my mother’s cousin.”

  “In my experience no one ever remembers about other people’s family relationships.”

  “Cosette,” I said, “Cosette, is that why you never had any children? Didn’t you want children?”

  She had a way of smiling in reply to a question she intended not to answer in words. It was a slow, mysterious smile that overspread her face, vague and gentle, but it somehow always put an end to further probing. I got it into my head then, for no reason, that Douglas had married Cosette without telling her of his inheritance. There was no foundation for this belief, you understand; I read it or thought I read it in her rueful eyes, in a kind of resignation. Adolescents do that, weave impossible romances around the lives of their older friends. I taught myself to believe Douglas had deceived Cosette, denied her children when it was too late for her to retreat, had attempted to compensate by showering her with opulence. That winter they went to Trinidad and I went home, where I found myself watching my mother in an almost clinical way. One day she dropped a wineglass and I screamed. My father came up to me and smacked my face.

  It was a light slap, not painful, but I received it as an assault.

  “Never do that again,” he said.

  “And you never do that again to me.”

  “You had better learn to control yourself. I have had to. In our position you have to.”

  “Our position? What position? You’ve got one position and I’ve got another. I’m the one people are going to scream about, not you.”

  Strong stuff for a fifteen-year-old. In the spring I went back to Cosette and Garth Manor from where I could walk to school across the Heath Extension and where I had in my large bedroom with its view of the woodlands of North End such luxuries as my own television and electric blanket and bedside phone. Though I must say, in my own defense, that it was not these things which attracted me. Why do young girls, at this particular stage of their development, enjoy the company of an older woman? I should like to think it wasn’t stark narcissism on my part, it wasn’t that Cosette, very nearly thirty years my senior, presented no competition, or that my own good looks showed up more delightfully by contrast to her aging face and body. For as aging I certainly saw her, aged in fact, past hope as a woman and sexual being. The truth was that I had made Cosette into another mother for myself, the mother I had chosen, not had thrust upon me, the mother who listened and who had infinite time to spare, was prodigal with a flattery I believed and still believe sincere.

  In those days she never seemed to mind being taken for my mother. That came later, in Archangel Place, when though she might not express it aloud, the pain she felt and a kind of humiliation at the frequent assumption made that I (or Bell or Birgitte or Fay) was her daughter showed in her eyes and the wry twist of her mouth. But Mrs. Cosette Kingsley of the Townswomen’s Guild, the Wellgarth Residents’ Association, school governor, purveyor of Meals on Wheels, and occasional volunteer social worker, had no such vanities. Sometimes, in the holidays or on Saturdays, we would go shopping together and in Simpson’s or Swan and Edgar, then still dominating the corner between Piccadilly and Regent Street at the Circus, an assistant would sometimes refer to me as her daughter. The same thing happened in the restaurants we dropped into for the cups of coffee Cosette seemed to need every half hour in order to survive.

  “That would suit your daughter,” said an assistant in the Burlington Arcade, and across Cosette’s face would come an almost adoring look of appreciation and pleasure.

  “Yes, that would suit you wonderfully, Elizabeth. Why not try it on?” And then, as happened so often, “Why not have it?” which meant she would buy it for me.

  I had no impression then that she wanted to appear younger than she was. But would I have had, at fifteen? She dressed in suits that she had made by a tailor, an unheard-of thing today, and something that was old-fashioned even then. They were formal suits, “costumes” made of cloth very like that which Douglas himself wore, with square shoulders and box-pleated skirts, the kind of garments least suited to someone of Cosette’s type. She should have worn floaty dresses, cloaks, and draperies. Later on she did, and not always to happy effect. On the shopping expeditions it was underwear she bought for herself, cruel ineffective girdles and slips of shiny pastel satin, clumping lace-up shoes with two-inch heels, blouses with big bows at the neck to show between the lapels of those worsted suit jackets.

  As I grew older I, who had never judged Cosette but loved her in a simple unquestioning way, became critical of her appearance. I never put this into words, or at least not into words I uttered to her. Sometimes, though, I am afraid I would make these comments to my friends and there would be giggling in corners. Cosette was one of those people whom others laugh at secretly, behind their backs. How cruel that it should be so, how painful! I wince as I form the words. But I am trying to tell the whole truth and it was true that when I brought a friend home (you see how I was then thinking of Garth Manor as home) and Cosette appeared, flushed and hot perhaps, untidy as she often was, that bird’s nest of graying gold hair a mass of fluff and strands, collapsing and shedding pins, the hem of a silk blouse escaping from the waistband of a tailored skirt too tight over her jutting stomach—then we would glance at each other and giggle with sweet soft contempt.

  Quite often, and especially when Douglas was away on a business trip, Cosette would take me and the friend out to dinner in Hampstead. First, though, a preening session took place in her huge and sumptuous bedroom (white four-poster with organza-covered tester, curtains festooned and window seat cushioned, dressing table with organza petticoat and triptych mirrors). There in her admiring presence we tried on, like little girls, the clothes Cosette no longer wore, her fur capes and stoles and scarves, belts and artificial flowers and jewels. I always took care never verbally to admire, for I knew from experience what the result would be. But my friend, out of ignorance or concupiscence, exclaimed, “Oh, I love it! Isn’t it lovely? Doesn’t it look nice on me?”

  And Cosette would say, “It’s yours.”

  It was among these treasures of Cosette’s that I first saw the bloodstone. It was a ring, the dark green stone flecked with red jasper embedded in a setting of densely woven gold strands. A ring for a strong hand with long fingers, Cosette said it was, and when she put it on it looked clumsy on her very feminine hand with the shiny pink nails.

  “It belonged to Douglas’s mother,” she said. I knew what had become of Douglas’s mother and the cause of her premature death, but said nothing. I only smiled, the smile that grows stiff as the lips are held unwillingly stretched. “She was born in March,” said Cosette, “and heliotrope is the birthstone for March.”

  “I thought heliotrope was a flower,” said my friend.

  And Cosette smiled and said, “Heliotrope is anything that turns to face the sun.”

  I may not have been as kind to her as she was to me, but I loved her, I always loved her. The nastiness of adolescence is ironed out as the senior teens are reached and, just as I now regret with a kind of agony the lack of compassion I had for my mother, so then I looked back wit
h shame on my laughter and contempt. I was able to feel relief that Cosette had never known. For she asked nothing from those she loved except to be able to trust them. Perhaps that is not nothing, perhaps it is a great deal. I don’t know, I can’t say. She only wanted to feel she could surrender herself, her heart and mind, into the loved person’s keeping and be safe there, not be betrayed. Years later, when I saw a college production of The Maid’s Tragedy, two lines especially struck me, reminding me of her: “Those have most power to hurt us, that we love. We lay our sleeping lives within their arms.”

  Douglas she could trust. Whatever earlier doubts about that I had manufactured, he had never deceived her. He had loved her and made her safe and in exchange she had only to accept the way of life he had imposed on her: the neighbors to dinner and dinner with the neighbors, meetings of the Wellgarth Society in her dining room, Perpetua coming daily to clean, Maggie to cook, and Jimmy to weed the lilies, a view of North End in one direction and the Heath Extension in the other, inexhaustible money and unending placidity, Dawn Castle running in to drop platitudes from clacking lips, a surrogate child, and six bedrooms. Of course it was not unending, nothing is. Cosette was fond of a story supposedly about the dying Buddha and I often heard her tell it in that soft, unhurried voice.

  “His disciples came to him and said, ‘Master, we can’t bear to lose you, how can we live when you’ve left us? At least give us some word of comfort to help us after you have gone.’ And the Buddha said, ‘It changes.’”

  I used to smile because nothing ever changed for Cosette. Or so it seemed in those years while I lived most of the time with her and Douglas, her life an unvarying round of small, pleasant tasks, the high spots those holidays in conventionally exotic places, her excitements the dressmaker’s delivery of a new evening gown for some livery company dinner or, I selfishly flattered myself, my own satisfactory A-level results. It changes, but in some lives change is a long time coming.

  One autumn morning, when the traffic was particularly heavy in Hampstead and the Rolls-Royce stationary in the queue above Belsize Park station, Douglas looked up from the document he had been reading, laid his head back against the seat and died.

  The driver knew nothing about it. Douglas was not in the habit of talking to him unless something untoward happened and a traffic jam would not qualify as that. He had heard a sigh from the back of the car and a sound like throat clearing, which was later how they were able to pinpoint the time at which death came. When they were down in the City, in Lombard Street, the driver came round to open the door and saw him reclining there with his head back as if asleep. He touched him and the skin of his face already felt unnaturally cool.

  Douglas was fifty-three and therefore had almost certainly passed the time when his inheritance could have appeared in him. His death had nothing to do with this particular hereditary disease, for it was quick and merciful, not the long drawn-out torture that awaited my mother. Some kind of vascular catastrophe had wrecked his heart. The doctor told Cosette it happened so fast he would have known nothing about it.

  3

  THEY STOOD IN THE rain, Cosette and her brothers and their wives, a reception line of mourners under black umbrellas. Douglas, naturally, had had no brothers or sisters. We shook hands with the brothers and sisters-in-law and kissed Cosette on her cheek. I saw everyone else do this, so I did it too. I was there at Golders Green Crematorium with my father, my mother being past going to funerals by that time, or indeed going anywhere. A great many relatives of Cosette’s were pointed out to me, but there was only one member of Douglas’s family there apart from myself, his and my cousin Lily, an unmarried civil servant, who at the age of fifty was so deliriously happy at realizing she must now have escaped the scourge that even on an occasion like this she could scarcely suppress bubbling high spirits. She came up to my father and laid a hand on his arm.

  “Tell me, how is poor Rosemary?”

  No one ever asked a man after the health of his dying wife in more cheerful tones. Me she eyed with unconcealed speculation, for she knew, none better, that you can’t get it unless one of your parents has it, that if the parent who carries the gene reaches fifty without it, you too will never get it.

  Perpetua, who was there with a grown-up son, had told me when I called to see Cosette that she had screamed and sobbed at the news of Douglas’s death, had wept hysterically and threatened to kill herself. When I saw her she was crying. I was no longer staying at Garth Manor even part of the time, for by then I was twenty and away at college. If you are at university in Regent’s Park, you will scarcely live in Golders Green if you can help it. But I rushed to Cosette as soon as I heard Douglas was dead, yet once there hardly knew how to comfort this woman who had nothing to say and who cried without ceasing. I come from a family that makes almost a fetish of not showing emotion and although I would have liked to be able to show it myself, I didn’t know how. A friend that I envied—it was that same friend who had benefited from admiring Cosette’s jewelry, a girl whose name was Elsa and whom naturally we called Lioness—used to tell me that throughout her childhood her parents shouted and raved at each other, all barriers down, all claws bared, but at least they showed their feelings. From this she believed she had derived the ability to show her own.

  So I watched Cosette warily as the tears streamed down her cheeks, without an idea of what to say or do. And a week later her face was still red and her eyes still swollen. Standing there under her elder brother’s umbrella, wreaths and crosses of dripping flowers at her feet, she looked as if she had been crying until the moment she entered the crematorium chapel, to stop abruptly only when Douglas’s coffin disappeared and was consigned to the fire. She was in deepest black. Her suit was not one of those timeless tailor-mades, but dated from the period of the New Look, postwar, contemporaneous with my own birth, a long flared skirt which I suspect she could only have got into with the zip undone, a jacket with a peplum. I think she must have bought it for the funeral of her own mother, who had died about that time. It smelt of mothballs. Cosette, who was a rich woman, who had inherited from Douglas something in the region of a million, a huge sum in 1967, had not thought to buy a new suit for her husband’s funeral. She disliked black, Perpetua told me later, and refused to waste money on something she would never wear again.

  This was the first thing about Cosette that ever surprised me. It was the forerunner of many surprises.

  There was speculation as to what she would do now. I have since learned that relatives and neighbors are invariably ready with advice for a woman in her situation, while never suggesting the kind of things they would want to do themselves. The courses they propose always seem designed to keep the subject out of mischief.

  No one less likely to get into mischief than Cosette could be imagined. She was forty-nine, but she looked older. Her hair was iron gray. Her face was drawn and haggard, but she had put on weight, being a woman who ate for comfort. It was Easter and I went to stay with her. Once there, I made up my mind I would follow the example she had set me and be a good listener. I would listen and let her talk about Douglas and her life with him, for some intuition told me she would want to do this, that it would be a catharsis. My intuition was wrong. Bemused, looking slovenly and distracted, breaking off pieces of chocolate and putting them absently into her mouth, she asked me in a vague way what I had been doing, what my plans were.

  “I want to know about you,” I said.

  She responded with that mysterious smile, slightly shaking her head. It was as if to say her affairs were not important. I read into her look and her gentle insistence on my talking and her listening an abnegation of a future, as plain as an utterance that her life was over, all that remained was a slow decline to old age and death. And this attitude seemed supported by the visitors who came in a constant stream, relatives and friends, the usual widow’s advisers with their glib counsel to move to “a little place by the sea,” a country cottage, a “nice flat” in a suburb.


  “Not too big,” Dawn Castle said. “Something compact for just you on your own. You won’t want to wear yourself out keeping the place clean.”

  Perpetua was even at that moment using the vacuum cleaner out in the hall, which made me think Mrs. Castle must be deaf or else (more likely) one who never gave a second’s thought to the sense of what she said. Cosette’s brother Leonard suggested she move nearer him and his wife. They lived in Sevenoaks. A small house or bungalow near Sevenoaks, preferably a bungalow, said his wife, because as Cosette grew older she wouldn’t want to climb stairs. She might not be able to climb stairs, this woman hinted darkly, watching Cosette helping herself from a biscuit tin. The other brother lived in one of those huge barracklike blocks of flats in St. John’s Wood, an enormous place with four bedrooms he always called an apartment.

  “There’s a compact little one-bedroom apartment just come on the market in Roderick Court.” He added persuasively, “It’s on the ground floor, so you wouldn’t even have to use the lift,” as if Cosette would soon be too decrepit to step across a hallway and press a button.

  She listened and said she would think about it. I never once heard her protest when they treated her as if she were on the threshold of senility. Of course women were older then than they are now, even twenty years ago they were. Middle age then began at forty, but today at nearer fifty. The women’s movement has had something to do with this change by altering the significance of beauty. It is no longer vested in youthful bloom, it is no longer even an essential part of attractiveness, and attractiveness itself no more the essence of female existence. Cosette had never worked for her living, she had never even worked in the home, her life had been very near that of the concubine, and for twenty-eight years she had been the comfort and support of Douglas, his to be loved or left, to await his homecoming, and listen while he talked. They would have been shocked, those callers with their advice, if they had heard this put into words, but they all knew it in their hearts. With Douglas’s death Cosette’s usefulness was over, just as the harem woman’s is over when her lord dies.