The House of Stairs Read online

  She made no promises. Cosette hardly ever rejected any suggestion categorically, but she had her own kind of stubbornness. A refusal to study orders to view, to telephone estate agents, to be shepherded around show houses, is just as much a refusal when indicated by a smiling shake of the head as by an outright no. She was listening more and speaking less then than at any time I could remember. Grief had stricken her dumb, I thought, but later I came to understand she was silent because she had so much on her mind. She had so much to think about, and it was not her past with Douglas. She was making up her mind how to manage what she had set her heart on.

  Men call to visit widows in the hope of getting into bed with them. Widows are ready, widows are grateful. Men who have been married for twenty years to the widow’s best friend, apparently faithful husbands who have scarcely up till then ever called the widow by her Christian name, turn up sheepishly and make a pass at her in the kitchen while she is putting the tea bags in the pot. Or so I have heard.

  If this happened to Cosette, it wasn’t while I was staying there. Perhaps my presence put them off. The only possibilities anyway were Dawn Castle’s husband, Roger, and the president of the Wellgarth Society. I have a photograph of Cosette taken in the garden that summer, and it looks like the kind of thing women’s magazines use of some reader who wants advice on her appearance. On the opposite page is the same woman after the depilator and hairdresser and makeup artist, and plastic surgeon maybe also, have been at work. I can produce that photograph of Cosette too.

  But reclining on the swinging seat, under the floral canopy, she looks blowsy, with her features taking on a blurred look and her hair hanging in disordered loops, lipstick apparently applied in a dark, mirrorless room, sunglasses hanging around her neck on what looks like a piece of elastic. She wears a dress like a cotton tent. At least she had abandoned the tailored suits, perhaps she could no longer get into them, the only change she seemed to have made in her appearance or way of living. For she still sat on her board of governors, went to meetings of the society, had the neighbors to dine and went to dine with them, they making a point of inviting her as if conferring on her enormous favors. No one, however, she later told me, went so far as to produce an unattached man for her. She was fifty, her birthday was that August, and we were living through a period of the cult of youth.

  The notion of Cosette having a man friend, a lover, to me was grotesque. For that you had to be young. You might not have to be exactly good-looking, but you had to be attractive in some indefinable way or somehow charming, young, and not fat. I had no idea I might be insulting Cosette in having these thoughts about her; I would never have had them at all, I would have supposed attracting a man as alien to her wishes as adopting a child or beginning a career might be, had Dawn Castle not said to me, “The only thing for poor Cosette would be to marry again.”

  Like a Victorian, I was shocked. “Douglas has only been dead six months.”

  “Oh, my dear, it’s a well-known fact that if people are going to marry again, they do it within two years.”

  “Cosette would never want to marry again.”

  “That’s what you think, but you’re young. Someone who’s been married that length of time, of course she wants to be married.”

  That conversation I remembered when a year later or less Cosette, alone with me, said in a burst of frankness, “You’re always hearing of men being womanizers. I’d like to be a manizer. Do you know what I’d like, Elizabeth? I’d like to be thirty again and steal everybody’s husbands,” and she laughed a soft, hopeless, bitter laugh.

  But there was no hint of this on the fiftieth birthday she quietly celebrated with a dinner in a restaurant to which she invited my father and me, her brother Oliver and his wife, Adele. The Sevenoaks brother was away on holiday. In the taxi back to North End I was alone with her; she cried for Douglas and I put my arms round her, thinking of what Dawn had said, the absurdity of it.

  In this house where I live in Hammersmith, in Macduff Street, are things which Cosette gave me. There are probably more things Cosette gave me than came from any other single source, certainly more than any other person ever gave me. For a long time they reminded me of her so sharply, with such pain, that I put them all away so as never to see them, but things changed, as things do—“It changes,” said Cosette—and I got them out again and spread them about, in the living room, in the bedroom, in the room where I work. This is a little house, mid-Victorian, in a terrace. There is a garden which I am thankful to say is small, a box enclosed by walls like all the other gardens in this street and the next street, so that looking down on them from a helicopter would be like looking into a grocer’s box when all the tins have been taken out. The two cats come and go over the walls, never venturing out into the front where the Great West Road threatens, not even knowing it is there or that it is possible for cats to go near it.

  The three eggs Cosette gave me, one of chrysolite, one of agate, one of amethyst quartz, sit together in a round glass bowl on the living room windowsill. I had once had an idea of collecting gemstone eggs, but never collected more than these three. On the bookcase is Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid in Royal Copenhagen porcelain, a copy of the one in Copenhagen, which Cosette gave me for my twenty-fifth birthday. The original one comes in the category of disappointing things, she said, the things that are so much smaller and more insignificant than we expect.

  “The Mona Lisa,” Mervyn said.

  Gary said, “The Commons Chamber, a little green box.”

  “Niagara Falls,” I said, “especially now that they can turn them off.”

  “The Central Criminal Court,” said Marcus.

  We all looked at him.

  “The Old Bailey, to you,” he said. “Inside. It’s little, it’s not imposing. You expect something much grander.”

  Strange, aren’t they, these remarks of appositeness, of lighthearted, mild cleverness, uttered without thought that they may have an awful appropriateness, with no knowledge of the long shadows they cast before them?

  “When were you at the Old Bailey, Mark?” Cosette asked him, and she looked so concerned that we laughed. Well, Bell didn’t laugh, but the rest of us did. I think Bell had stopped laughing by this time. Mark said a friend of his who was a journalist, a crime reporter, had got him in. It was a manslaughter case, a man had killed his girlfriend.

  “I thought it would be awe inspiring,” said Mark. “I wasn’t exactly disappointed. I kept thinking about people being there on criminal charges and how it would make them feel less frightened, not more.”

  “And would that be a good thing?” Bell stared intently at him.

  “Of course it would be a good thing,” he said. “Of course it would.”

  In the room where I work is a pen jar made of agate, a hollowed-out lump of red and purple and brown and green striped stone, which Cosette brought back from a holiday in Scotland, and in it, among the pens, is a curious paper knife whose handle, also striped in those colors but somehow a different kind of stripes, Cosette swore was carved out of a heather root. Or a bundle of compressed heather stalks or a fossilized heather root, something like that. In this room too is a cigarette lighter with a blue-and-white Wedgwood base that Cosette gave me because she had it and I saw it and said I liked it. The old generous “It’s yours” response, which savors of the lavish hospitality of some clan chieftain or head of an emirate. On a table in the corner is the old manual typewriter on which I wrote my first book at Archangel Place. This machine, a Remington, had belonged to Douglas. When I said I meant to write a book Cosette got a room ready for me, without telling me in advance, she just got it ready for me, she and Perpetua, and led me up there, showing it to me proudly, the desk she had bought in the Portobello Road, the swivel chair, the sofa for “resting between chapters, darling,” and on the desk the ream of paper, the agate jar full of sharpened pencils, ballpoint pens, the heather-root paper knife, and Douglas’s typewriter.

  I no long
er use it. I use an electronic one, not having yet moved on to a word processor. Douglas’s waits there for when I run out of cassettes for the electronic one, or it breaks down, or for the power cuts that seldom come, though they were frequent enough in the Archangel Place days. The bookcases in this house contain a lot of books Cosette gave me. A complete Remembrance of Things Past, a complete Dance to the Music of Time, the complete novels of Evelyn Waugh. A whole set of the novels of Henry James, with The Wings of the Dove present, showing no sign of special wear, bearing no marks of time or pressure or pain. But why should it? It was not this copy in tooled blue leather, stamped with gold print, that Bell picked up and looked at, idly turning the pages, inquiring of me indifferently what it was about, Bell who never read anything more demanding than the Evening News or a fortune-teller’s manual.

  The Complete Works of Kipling, the Macmillan red-leather edition, tooled in gold. How Cosette loved sequences and sets! They enabled her to spend more money, be more giving, to overwhelm with a multiplicity of gifts. A dictionary of obscure quotations, a dictionary of psychology, a dictionary of modern Greek that Cosette bought me one Christmas, being unable to get a classical Greek one. And I was cross, I remember, I wasn’t grateful or even resigned.

  “But I told you,” I said, “I told you over and over. I said not to get modern Greek. I told you not to get anything at all. What am I going to do with a dictionary of modern Greek?”

  And poor Cosette said humbly, “I’ll get you the one you want. I’ve ordered it. They’re going to get it in for me, they’re going to get it next week. You’ll have two that way. Wouldn’t you like to have two Greek dictionaries?”

  I stand here in my room looking at the dictionaries and at the sets and novel sequences. I look at my pictures, the watercolors my father gave me from our old house when he moved, the Fulvio Roiter poster of the Venice Carnival, the Mondriaan reproduction, and the Klee reproduction—and I look at the space where I tried hanging the Bronzino but couldn’t, couldn’t face the sight of it. Douglas’s typewriter is dusty and should be covered up, but there is no cover for it, the cover was lost long ago, probably while Cosette was still living at Garth Manor—pretentious, absurd name; if ever there was an instance of belonging in a category of disappointing things, this was it!—or lost in the move. On the desk, which is not the one Cosette bought in the Portobello Road, I have a London telephone directory and a list of numbers, not in London, that I wrote down from other directories while I was in the public library this morning. The London directory is an old one, but Cosette Kingsley isn’t in it. I don’t know why I look for her name, for something so impossible, but I do.

  The Castles’ number I have found, at the same old address in Wellgarth Avenue. It would be useless to phone them anyway, they won’t know. But I could ask them for Diana’s number, I could ask them where she is now, if she has married. I don’t want to speak to them, that is the truth of it, I don’t want to have to parry their innocent inquiries or offers of help. Fay’s number is written on the piece of paper and so is Ivor Sitwell’s. Fay lives in Chester and Ivor in Frome, in a kind of farming commune, I gather, a place where they grow organic vegetables. I couldn’t find the dancers’ number, there was no number either for Llanos or Reed. There is only one Admetus in the phone book, initials M. W., but it must be Walter and he must have moved from Fulham up to Cholmeley Crescent in Highgate. But why should any of them know the whereabouts of Bell, whom they have no reason to care about, whom they may hate?

  Also on the piece of paper is Elsa the Lioness’s number, not because she lives outside London, but because she is ex-directory and I have had a succession of secret, closely guarded numbers of hers written down in my personal phone book for years. The latest is on the paper now because it seemed more convenient to have all the numbers together. I have not seen her or spoken to her for a while, a month or two, but it is not the first time months have elapsed without our seeing or speaking, and when I do get to speak to her it will be all right, there will be no reproaches or accusations or grumbles, I know that. The Lioness has been married and divorced and married again and now lives on her own in a flat in Maida Vale. I dial her number but get no answer.

  Her cousins, Esmond and Felicity, with whom we used to stay, she and I, live outside the area covered by London phone directories. Or they did and probably still do. I find it hard to imagine anyone willingly leaving that house. But then, of course, people leave houses unwillingly, they leave because they must, as Walter Admetus may have done, because they cannot afford them anymore, or find them impossible for physical reasons, because of their staircases and steps up to the front door, their different levels, long passages, heavy doors. I should know that if anyone does. I should know. Then I remember that these cousins had a pied-à-terre in London, a studio in Chelsea they hardly ever used, the address of which I don’t know, have never known, but in this case that doesn’t matter because these cousins have a name so odd, so unique even, that in any phone book in the entire world anybody named Thinnesse is going to be one of them or closely related to them.

  It is quite hard to pronounce correctly, that is to pronounce with both those middle n’s separately enunciated as Esmond and Felicity always did. “Thinnis” is the best other people usually attain to. I find their Chelsea number in the phone book and dial it and, miracle of miracles, someone actually answers. It is not really a miracle at all, it is only what I should have expected. I knew their children must be in their early twenties by now, must be of an age when people are desperate to find accommodation in London away from parents, hostels, tiny furnished rooms. Perhaps I am not very happy admitting to myself that those Thinnesse babies who were three and six when I first went with Elsa to Thornham Hall are now grown up, are of an age to be taken by shop assistants and waiters for my children, just as once I was taken for Cosette’s child.

  It was the girl who answered my call, the girl Miranda. It is amusing to think that if this girl reads Beatrix Potter to her children it will be because I read Beatrix Potter to her when she was six. Of course we do not mention the Beatrix Potter sessions in the bedroom whose window overlooked the garden of Bell’s cottage. She has forgotten them and I have forgotten everything about them except that they took place and that once, while reading The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, I saw Bell come out into the garden and peg ragged-looking grayish washing out on a clothesline.

  She tells me, this girl Miranda Thinnesse, that her parents still live at Thornham Hall and she gives me their number, a number that I wouldn’t have been able to find in the directory for Outer East London and West Essex (or whatever it is called) because it has recently been changed to deter an anonymous phone caller who said obscene things to Felicity. For all she knows, since she can’t remember ever having heard the name Elizabeth Vetch, I might be the obscene phone caller myself.

  I can’t bring myself to speak Bell’s name to her. As she talks about her parents and her brother and the first her brother has just taken at Cambridge, I tell myself she will never have heard of Bell, her parents will have forgotten Bell. And then she says, what did I want to ask her parents? Did I just want to have a chat? Or was it something about that woman who killed someone—what was she called? Christine something?

  “Christabel Sanger,” I say, and my voice sounds all right, sounds quite normal, as it might if I were speaking any other name, any name at all. And I say it again, to hear myself say it. “Christabel Sanger,” and then, “but we called her Bell, everyone called her Bell.”

  “Did you want to talk to my mother about her?”

  I sound remote, almost indifferent, or I think I do. “I want to ask your mother if she knows where she is living.”

  “Well, all I can tell you is she phoned my mother. She’d just come out of prison, an open prison, I think, and she phoned home. I don’t know why. It was awhile ago now, I mean weeks. I think she phoned a lot of people. My mother could tell you more. Now you’ve got the number why don’t you phone my mother
?”

  I say I will and thank her and say good-bye. It is strange what it does to me, this confirmation that Bell is back among us, that it really was Bell I saw. It makes me feel a little sick, nauseous, no longer looking forward to the dinner I am being taken out to. Weeks ago she had phoned Felicity Thinnesse and “a lot of people,” but she hadn’t phoned me. Me she had fled from along the streets of Notting Hill, had hidden from to elude, had seen and stared at without smiling, seemingly without recognition. Or had not seen, had never seen, had not eluded, had merely gone into a shop outside Queensway station to buy a paper or a pack of cigarettes or a flower. Me she had perhaps tried to phone, had dialed my number many times while I was away. For I have been away, was away first in Italy and then for a week staying with my father, who lives in a bungalow at Worthing now, the kind of bungalow they wanted Cosette to buy when she first became a widow.

  I have gone upstairs into my bedroom to change my clothes, telling myself that I have no time now to speak to Felicity, telling myself that when I do speak to Felicity she will want to know all kinds of things I may not want to talk to her about. She may, for instance, ask me about Marcus, or even something about what the setup was in Archangel Place just before Bell did what she did. She may invite me to Thornham Hall, and I am not sure whether or not I want to accept such an invitation. Probably I don’t. Or suggest a meeting when next she and Esmond come to London. I move about my bedroom opening cupboard doors, opening drawers, looking at the phone extension and deciding to postpone this call until tomorrow morning. Now I have in my hand a pincushion Cosette made me. It is in the shape of a strawberry and made of red silk, with the seeds of the strawberry’s satiny outside embroidered in pale yellow thread. The pincushion is heart shaped and fatly padded and it has never been used for the purpose it was designed for because I have been afraid to spoil the texture of the silk.