The House of Stairs Read online

  The cameo brooch in the jewel box was one of her birthday presents to me. The face in profile on it, carved from rosy-cream and strawberry-cream coral, is like Bell’s, a classic profile, high of forehead, straight of nose, the upper lip short, the mouth full, the chin of perfect depth, and the hair, loops and tendrils of it arranged in careless Regency fashion, disarrayed and tumbling, ringleted and tangled, is Bell’s hair. I was taken by Cosette to choose this cameo and I chose it because the face was Bell’s, wore it expecting everyone to notice, to comment, to say, “The girl on your brooch looks just like Bell,” but only Cosette noticed, only Cosette remarked on it.

  I shall wear it tonight, going out with this man I haven’t known very long but like well enough. He is taking me to Leith’s, something I have known for days and dreaded. How could I go to Notting Hill, the taxi perhaps passing the end of Archangel Place? How could I, in company, revisit those streets which were once my world, where everything that ever happened to me happened? All is changed and I no longer feel like this. I have been there, I have been back, following Bell. I am even excited. And I know the excitement does not stem from the prospect of sitting in a taxi with Timothy, eating dinner with Timothy, but because, up there, where Kensington Park Road meets Kensington Park Gardens or Ladbroke Square, I may see Bell again.

  Tonight may be the night I shall find her.

  4

  AFTER MY MOTHER WAS dead I went home to live with my father. I hated it and he hated it and both of us, I think now, saw it as our duty, I to be there and he to take me in. The arrangement endured only from the end of June until the end of September, my long vacation. He returned to work long before September came, before August came, I spending my days with Elsa and at Garth Manor with Cosette. Near the end of it my father suggested I go away for a holiday, without thinking perhaps that there was no desirable foreign place to which I could get a package he would pay for at such short notice. Most of the people I knew had already filled up the minibuses and Bedford trucks making for Turkey and India. His dreadful suggestion that he and I should together have a few days in Colwyn Bay caused his voice to falter with dismay even as he was making it. I compromised and went for a week with Elsa to her relations in Essex.

  She used to talk of these relations, an aunt, a cousin and his wife, and their two children, and somehow gave me the impression that it was north Essex where they lived, the Stour Valley, Constable country, or the marshes, Great Expectations land. Or that was how I received it, which is nearer to the truth. Essex is a big county. When we set off toward the Central Line tube, I thought at first this was merely the first leg of our journey, that we should change trains at Liverpool Street, but no, Elsa bought a ticket for herself and a ticket for me to Debden, which is getting on for as far as the line goes. A huge council estate lay outside the station and my disappointment was bitter.

  Elsa laughed and said, “Wait a little, said the thorn tree,” a very nearly incomprehensible remark which was a favorite of hers and had something to do with Africa and the lioness personality she cultivated at that time.

  Esmond Thinnesse came to meet us in a Morris Minor Estate car. He was older than I had expected, fair-haired with glasses and, fortunately with that name, extremely thin. Felicity was thin too and so was his mother, Elsa’s aunt Lois, and I used to wonder if there had ever been a fat Thinnesse and if so what misery and humiliation had he or she suffered. Or did Thinnesses keep themselves thin by rigorous diet and exercise and mortification of the flesh? There was no sign of this while Elsa and I were there, large, lavish meals being provided and partaken of enthusiastically by everyone. And no one was made to go out for healthful country walks.

  For country it was, as deep I am sure as that to be found on the other side of Chelmsford. The Morris Minor took us no more than two miles away from the Debden Estate, but the little redbrick terraces stopped and the straight white dual carriageway stopped, and the shiny opal-green roof of the factory where they make notes for the Bank of England disappeared behind the trees, and the lanes became narrow and winding, the hedges high, the river Roding running between willows and alders. Thornham Hall had no place in the category of disappointing things. It was a real hall, with fifteen bedrooms and a library and a morning room. I sometimes used to think about those houses, so many of them, Jane Austen puts her people in and describes as “new-built, modern.” Thornham was one such, about 170 years old when first I went there, austere, elegant, square, a balustrade running round its shallow roof, wide bays on either side of its flat, porchless front door. It stands on an eminence commanding a view of the winding Roding, of Epping, and the villages, someone of incredible foresight having planted a screen of scotch pines and Wellingtonias, six trees deep, to conceal the houses for East End of London overspill no less-inspired person could have imagined ever being built. Now, I suppose, Thornham also has a view of the M25 motorway cleaving a long white wound through the meadows.

  Its own estate, with vestiges of the feudal, stood near to it: stables, a cottage or two, a farm with barns at the foot of the hill. And there were huge trees, horse chestnuts and limes, fan-shaped screens of elms that must be gone by now, felled by the disease that changed the face of the countryside. I had never before stayed in a house of this size and eminence, have not done so since. It was almost in the class of houses you are taken round on conducted tours. Esmond’s father, a merchant banker, had bought it just before the Second World War, so in no sense was it a family home, he being really the first generation of Thinnesses to live there.

  Today, in similar circumstances, I think we girls would have called his mother by her first name, but then she was Aunt Lois to Elsa and Lady Thinnesse to me. Her husband, Sir Esmond, had been rewarded with a knighthood for some particular merchant-banking service two years before he died. To me she was very old, though I suppose no more than in her late sixties. A rather carping though good-natured woman, she lamented the changes in her environment, notably, obsessively, the building of the Debden Estate. These moans dominated her conversation and went along with an often repeated regret that Sir Esmond, on their marriage, hadn’t bought a house farther out in the countryside. She would ask me, or anyone else who happened to be with her, why he had failed to foresee that the London County Council, as it was then called, would take over some of the most beautiful pastoral land in the Home Counties for their “slum clearance.” I was unused to such reactionary talk and her terms shocked me. She gave the impression that her marriage, at least from about 1950, had been permanently soured by her disillusionment over Sir Esmond’s lack of prevision.

  Also staying in the house was a friend of hers, an old woman called Mrs. Dunne, who came from another, more rural part of Essex, and who was worried about proposals to extend the capacity and area of Stanstead Airport. No conservationist except where her own immediate interests were involved, Lady Thinnesse showed a bored indifference to poor Mrs. Dunne’s anxieties and wound up any discussion of Stanstead with the advice to her friend to move.

  “It isn’t as if you had a big house, Julia. You aren’t trapped like I am.”

  Felicity Thinnesse, who was a tease and liked showing up in company the follies and insensitivities of her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law’s guests, used to enjoy what she called winding up this old woman in front of us. In fact I think Mrs. Dunne liked it, had no idea Felicity was anything but serious, and rather appreciated attention from “the younger generation.” Julia Dunne had once been a Master of Foxhounds and such had been her life and the narrow circle she had always moved in, that she had no notion there were people existing—at any rate middle-class people in England—who might consider blood sports cruel or degrading. At the same time she loved animals. Certain horses had played a more important part in her life than her husband had, as far as I could tell. She had once had a pet fox which she had reared from a cub when its mother had been killed by the hounds.

  “Didn’t you ever think of that as being a bit odd?” Felicity asked her, i
nnocently interested. “I mean, hunting foxes and keeping a fox as a pet?”

  “Oh, no, dear. I was very careful about that. I always shut him up in the stables when the hunt came by,” said Mrs. Dunne.

  Grave-faced, Felicity said she found it hard to understand this new disapproval of the keeping of battery hens when it was obvious they were safest while in those boxes. No fox could get them there. Julia Dunne was enchanted by this defense of factory farming. You could see she was storing it up for future use. Later Felicity told me that back home in north Essex Mrs. Dunne used to crouch behind hedges with a stout stick in her hand, ready to club down any rabbit that might start eating the plants in her flower bed.

  Felicity found the presence of her mother-in-law as a permanent resident, and her mother-in-law’s friends as temporary ones, a cross to bear. Life was a laughing matter to her, sometimes a sick joke, and she demanded amusement, entertainment, as her daily food. Her husband was a quiet, dull, rather clever man, religious in a conventional Anglican way. Just as Lady Thinnesse usually had someone staying so did Felicity, but Felicity demanded more of her guests, far more; she expected wit and stories and even contributions such as young ladies made at Victorian parties, she expected visitors to play or sing or recite something. And she expected us to take part in the quizzes she set and the debates she instituted in the evenings and which would continue long into the nights. Elsa told me that on a previous visit, just before the Act of Parliament that made homosexuality legal between consenting adults in private, Felicity had organized a debate that “this House will abolish outrageous laws that purport to interfere in the private sexual behavior of adults.” Lady Thinnesse had had some other old woman guest with her and this person had immediately said that if this kind of thing were to be discussed it would be “above her head” and she would go to her room. Lady Thinnesse had soon followed her. The debate had gone on until three in the morning, only breaking up when one of the children was heard crying upstairs.

  On that occasion, Elsa said, the people from the cottage had come up for the evening and had taken part. They were friends of Felicity. Silas Sanger had in fact been an old boyfriend of Felicity’s, they had parted on the best of terms, Felicity to be courted by, become engaged to, eventually marry Esmond Thinnesse, Silas Sanger to live with and later marry (or not marry, as Lady Thinnesse appeared to believe) Christabel. He was a painter, but not the sort who ever made much money by his painting, not the sort of “artist” that Lady Thinnesse had known and approved of in her younger days. He had had nowhere to live, had been through some kind of breakdown, and Felicity had persuaded Esmond to let him and his wife, or nonwife, live in one of the cottages near the house, the one that was in the better state of repair.

  There he continued to paint, feverishly sometimes, at others sporadically, gloomily, from time to time doing nothing, lying on his bed all day, suffering what Felicity rather inaccurately called a dark night of the soul. He was a ferociously heavy drinker and the substances he drank were bizarre. What Christabel did no one seemed to know, at any rate no one said, and she appeared as something of a mystery. These people were due to come up to the house for dinner—a dinner that would be cooked by a woman who cycled over from Abridge—and remain to join in the debate, scheduled to be on the subject: This House deplores the present divorce law and would make divorce possible between consenting parties after two years’ separation. Such a provision was to become law in 1973. I couldn’t imagine there would be any dissenting voices, unless Lady Thinnesse and Julia Dunne consented to take part, which they had already declared with shudders to be out of the question, and I was surprised when Esmond said in his mild way that as an Anglican he must disapprove of any kind of divorce in any circumstances. Did Felicity remember that gently uttered but decisive statement when she ran away to Cosette’s?

  The painter’s wife I had already seen. Reading to Miranda, the two of us sitting on the window seat in her bedroom, I could see the garden below and around us, the fans of high elms full of chattering starlings, the small meadow with the two horses and the big meadow shorn of its barley crop, the giant conifers that hid so much, that were always, at any time of the day, black silhouettes. I could see all this without raising my head and it was all curiously like what I was reading, all like the illustrations to Samuel Whiskers, the same sleepy windless pastoral, the same birds going to rest, the same sky of very high, small myriad clouds. To the right, on the slope of the hillside, stood Silas Sanger’s cottage and its garden, a fenced plot of shaggy grass with nothing in it but two clothes posts with a length of dark gray rope sagging between them. The cottage and its surroundings had an air of neglect. If Beatrix Potter had drawn it and been faithful to its true appearance, she would have used it as an illustration of the home of some villain of her animal world, a fox perhaps, or Bad Mouse. Curtains were at the windows, but these were torn or coming down or, in the case of those at one downstairs window, apparently refusing to be drawn back, had been looped to either side of the frame with what looked from my vantage point like string.

  Out of this hovel and into this small wilderness, as the sun was setting and those tiny clouds colored with pink, came a tall girl too thin and too decorative to be one of Millet’s peasants but having an air about her of some Fragonard woman. This was in the carriage of her elegant head with its crown of soft, fair, untidy piled-up hair, in the length of her narrow neck, in the bunching of her clothes, a long full underskirt, an overskirt clenched in at the waist with a scarf wound round and round, a low-necked blouse, a jacket over it of thin clinging stuff, the sleeves rolled up, a ribbon or two hanging in streamers, the whole in a variety of tones of brownish, pinkish, dusty beige. No such personage ever entered the pages of Beatrix Potter. She carried a tray, not a basket, an ordinary tea tray laden with wet washing, which she proceeded to peg out on the clothesline.

  I paused in my reading and said to Miranda, “Who’s that?”

  On all fours she clambered over me. “That’s Bell.”

  “She lives there with the painter?” Lady Thinnesse’s view had almost unconsciously communicated itself to me.

  “Silas is Mr. Sanger and Bell is Mrs. Sanger. Her washing looks as if it hasn’t been washed, don’t you think?”

  It was all the same sort of light gray and there were big holes in something that might have been a pillowcase. I said it didn’t look very clean, only to be reprimanded by Miranda.

  “I’m not supposed to say that and especially you’re not because you’re grown up. Mummy says it’s despicable to say things about people’s washing being dirty. Go on reading, please.”

  The girl in the garden, the girl called Bell, pegged her clothes out on the line with a kind of weary indifference. You could see her heart was not in it. Her whole stance, her attitude, the way she held her body, spoke of something worse than boredom, of encroaching despair. I had the impression those wet clothes had been lying about all day and at last, at an absurd time to hang out washing, at the close of the day, when the sun was setting, she had forced herself to drag the pile of it out here and rid herself of it, committing it to whatever fate awaited it from the dews of night. The tray empty, the line filled, she stood with the tray held loosely against her, stretched to her full height, gazing down into the valley, raising one hand to shade her eyes from the red sun’s glare in a pose so Fragonard-like that she might have learned it by studying a reproduction in a magazine. But somehow I sensed she had no idea she was observed. Miranda reminded me once more that I was supposed to be reading to her and I reluctantly drew away my eyes.

  The debate party was two days after this and neither of the Sangers came to it. There was a phone in their cottage, according to Miranda, but they had had it cut off or it had been cut off due to nonpayment of the bill. A note was put through the letter-box of the Hall rather late in the afternoon, certainly after the time the cook from Abridge had already arrived. Felicity read it aloud to us with a kind of exasperated resignation. She wasn’t cros
s, she was amused—disappointed but amused by the way Bell did things like this.

  “‘Felicity: Sorry, we aren’t going to come. I am not equal to it. Yours, Bell.’ She’s proud of always saying what she means, not telling social lies—well, not any lies really.”

  Felicity smiled at us, flinging out palm-upward the hand that was not holding the note. She truly believed Bell never told lies, that Bell told the truth on principle no matter what the cost or how much moral courage was required. She believed this and we, hearing her tone and seeing her expression, believed too. Thus do utterly false testimonials of character and probity spread.

  “She’d hurt someone badly rather than lie to them,” said Felicity. “She’d involve herself in endless trouble. It’s admirable in a way, you have to admire it.”

  Yes, we had to admire it and did. I am not at all sure that Lady Thinnesse and Mrs. Dunne admired it. They had looked at the small, torn, dirty piece of paper, written on in pencil, and then glanced at each other and Lady Thinnesse said, “What does she mean, she isn’t equal to it? Isn’t she well? Does she mean she isn’t up to it? Your debates can be rather strenuous, Felicity.”

  “Living with Silas can’t be any bed of roses,” was all Felicity said.