The House of Stairs Read online

  I was disappointed. I had looked forward to meeting the Fragonard woman who carried her washing about on a tray and hung it on the line at dusk.

  “Wait a little, said the thorn tree,” said Elsa.

  “That’s all very well,” I said, “but we’ve only got two more days here. Can’t we go and call on her?”

  “I don’t think we could do that, I really don’t. He is rather strange, Silas Sanger. Rude, you know, and often drunk. He wouldn’t ask one in if he was in one of his moods, and he mostly is. In a mood, I mean. He doesn’t like anyone much except Felicity—he adores her.”

  “Doesn’t he like this Bell?”

  “I’ve only seen them together once,” said Elsa, “and he didn’t take any notice of her at all, not any notice. He didn’t speak one word to her.”

  “Are they married?” It was more important in 1968 than it became soon after that.

  “Frankly, I wouldn’t think so.”

  The debate was postponed and we went home without meeting Bell or Silas Sanger, Elsa promising to take me there again soon. This I didn’t take very seriously. I knew I should have to spend the Christmas holiday with my father. Or try somehow to maneuver my father to spend Christmas at Cosette’s. For Cosette was still at Garth Manor, withdrawn, quiet, grieving, it seemed, and apparently unable to make up her mind whether or not to move. Then she told me she meant to take the holiday she and Douglas had intended to spend together in Barbados. It was arranged for Christmas and the New Year. She had never cancelled those arrangements, and she would go. This announcement was curious in that it was a preparation for another announcement she was to make as soon as she returned, something far more momentous, something to stun us all. In the meantime I could comment to Elsa and to Dawn Castle’s daughter, Diana, how very odd it was of Cosette to return to the hotel on Barbados where she and Douglas had stayed twice before, to return there alone and a widow, anticipating the pain and bitter nostalgia surely such a revisiting must evoke.

  I thought I was condemned to sharing my father’s Christmas, and then he told me, with apparent insouciance, that he had been invited to spend it with my mother’s cousin, that Cousin Lily who had been in such high spirits at Douglas’s funeral. And he wanted to go, he was looking forward to it. I hadn’t been asked, he said, but he would inquire if he could bring me. This was spoken in such a tone of gloom and grudging unwillingness that I almost laughed out loud. “Please don’t,” I said. “Please don’t trouble, you’ll have a great time without me, you’ll be better on your own.” He gave me a sidelong look, he asked if I thought it would be all right. And then I understood he felt he was doing a daring thing, a thing likely to give rise to gossip, for my father belonged in that generation, the last perhaps to think this way, who believed there was something improper and even scandalous in sleeping under the same roof alone with a member of the opposite sex. “Times have changed,” I said. “No one would care.” He seemed disappointed.

  Thus I was free to go to Thornham Hall with the Lioness.

  Two memorable things happened that Christmas. The first was Felicity’s quiz.

  Felicity was apparently as famous for her quizzes as her debates. She composed them herself, using the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Steinberg’s Dictionary of British History, and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The quiz forms were typed by her and she did as many carbons as the typewriter would take, this being before the days of ubiquitous photocopying. We were to undertake this particular quiz on the day after Boxing Day, December 27.

  The Thinnesses’ house was full. Mrs. Dunne was there and Lady Thinnesse had also invited an ancient brigadier and his wife. He had risen to this rank during the First, not the Second, World War, which gives some idea of how very old he was. Felicity had her sister and her sister’s husband and their twins and a friend she had been at college with and the friend’s daughter and every day local people from Chigwell or Abridge or Epping came as well. On the day in question there would be fifteen of us doing the quiz, the children being excluded. No mention was made of the Sangers, Silas and Bell, and I concluded they hadn’t been asked. I concluded more than that, that a coolness now existed between the Thinnesses and the Sangers, and this was confirmed by Jeremy Thinnesse, aged three.

  “My daddy wants Mr. Sanger to go away and live in another house.”

  “Really,” said the Lioness. “Why would that be?”

  “It’s despicable,” said Miranda loftily, “to wheedle information out of children who are too young and innocent to know better, Mummy says.”

  It was not clear whether she referred to Elsa’s conduct or possibly Silas Sanger’s, but it had the effect she aimed at, that of stopping the conversation. No more inquiries were made. I found myself often looking in the direction of the cottage but saw no one. The clothesline had gone and the two posts and the place looked unoccupied. Whether Silas and Bell celebrated Christmas I didn’t know and don’t know to this day; their life inside there was a mystery, their ways secret and surely wildly unconventional. Sometimes smoke could be seen rising from the cottage chimney and this fretted Lady Thinnesse, who seemed to think the house would catch fire.

  After lunch on December 27 we all sat down in the hall to do the quiz Felicity had prepared, our twenty questions typed on two sheets of paper, foolscap size. This room, rather than the drawing room, was chosen because the latter being enormous took a great deal of heating and the weather was very cold. The hall at Thornham is itself very large with the two-branched staircase mounting to a gallery at the back of it, but this area can be closed off with double doors, making a cozy chamber at the front where the fireplace is. A big fire of logs had been lighted and chairs and two sofas drawn up in three hundred degrees of a circle round it.

  Thornham Hall has no porch and there is no inner lobby or vestibule, so drafts tend to come in round the front door. The long windows on either side of it rattled in the wind, but it was warm enough round the fire. Lady Thinnesse wore only a thin silk dress and seemed to take it as an insult to her household arrangements that Mrs. Dunne had a shawl round her shoulders and Felicity’s sister had put on fur-lined boots. I remember precisely where I was sitting in the circle: on the right-hand side of the fireplace and directly facing the front door. Felicity’s brother-in-law sat on one side of me and her college friend on the other. It had been tacitly arranged that the old people should have their seats nearest to the fire, and between the college friend, Paula, and the fireplace were sitting the ancient brigadier, the ancient brigadier’s wife, and Mrs. Dunne, with Lady Thinnesse and an old couple from Abridge facing them. The children were all up at the other end of the hall playing with their Christmas presents and warmed by a portable electric radiator.

  Felicity handed out the papers, our names written on the tops of them. I think it was at this point that I began questioning what I was doing, what we were doing, taking part in an examination we were not obliged to sit, giving up our leisure to an absurd general knowledge test, vying with each other in a pointless contest. And for what? For what? A quarter bottle of brandy was the first prize and a box of chocolates the second. The force of one woman’s personality dictated our obedience. No one had considered demurring, though those old ladies certainly must have feared failure and humiliation, that, in Bell’s curious phrase, they would not be “equal to it.”

  Felicity had a chair at that point of the circle farthest from the fireplace, directly facing the fire, where for a few moments she had ensconced herself between her husband and Elsa the Lioness. To that chair she never returned, but stood watching us as we turned our eyes to our papers, a tall, strongly built yet slender dark woman, Juno-faced with massy black hair and the faintest black down on her upper lip, miniskirted as was the fashion, though not a fashion designed for a woman as strapping as she. Thirty minutes we could have, she said, precisely half an hour, the maximum possible score fifty points. Then she went over to the children, turning on lights as she pa
ssed the switch.

  It was three-thirty but already dusk. The red light from the fire had been inadequate to see by. Some of the contestants were already writing, but I did what I had been taught to do and read through the questions on the paper before I began. I don’t remember all the questions, only the first and the fifth. The first inquired what were Germinal, Brumaire, and Fructidor and what did they have in common? I think the second question was something to do with architecture, the third with Second World War battles, and the fourth with Shakespeare. The fifth question required contestants to explain what were Pott’s disease, Klinefelter’s syndrome, and Huntington’s chorea.

  It gave me a shock, I felt the blood rush into my face, and that everyone must see that crimson blush. Inescapably, paranoically, I thought it was deliberately set for me, geared for me, designed as some kind of mockery of me. At the same time almost, or immediately afterward, I knew that it couldn’t be, that Felicity was not a cruel or vindictive woman, and moreover she didn’t know, couldn’t know, no one knew but my father and his cousin Lily and my mother’s doctor and Cosette. Elsa the Lioness didn’t know. There was nothing to show, nothing in my appearance, my face, eyes, bodily movements. I had even been told (and my mirror told me) I was good to look at, beautiful even. If it was there waiting for me, as it had waited for my mother, my grandmother, her father, it lurked silently in my central nervous system, hidden, static, resting, biding its time.

  I looked up to meet the eyes I expected to see fixed on me, but all of them were looking at their papers with varying degrees of comprehension, lack of comprehension, pleasure, dismay. Most of them were writing. My eyes returned to the paper. Huntington’s chorea. The words stood out of the rest of the text as if executed in boldface. My hands were shaking, the hand that held the pencil and the hand that, trying to grip the sheets of paper, failed and trembled as if Huntington’s had already struck, had sent its first tremors down the nerves.

  For once, of course, when experiencing trembling or lack of coordination or ordinary failure of manual dexterity, I had no real fear that this was the onset of Huntington’s. I knew it was the effect of shock. But I told myself that I must exercise control, I must behave as if nothing had happened. And, after all, nothing had happened, everything was the same as before I read the questions on the paper, nothing had changed. Huntington’s chorea were words I repeated to myself if not every day of my life, almost as often. But for all these reassurances, trying to steady my still-shaking right hand, I found myself quite unable to answer the questions, unable to write a word. I knew, for instance, that Germinal, Brumaire, and Fructidor were months in the French Revolutionary calendar, knew even (because I had had occasion to look this up not long before) that these names had been invented by Gilbert Romme, but when I brought the pen to the paper my hand felt paralyzed. I tried to read the remaining questions, but the print danced before my eyes, and when I forced myself to eye the lines of type as coolly as I could, the sense of what was there failed entirely to communicate itself to my brain.

  It was almost funny. I didn’t see it at all like that then, but later on, much later, I did. I saw it as an extreme irony that I, whom Felicity had certainly picked along with Elsa and Paula and her brother-in-law, Rupert, as her white hopes, her high scorers, would end up with a blank exam paper while the brigadier’s wife, a self-confessed ignoramus, would certainly have answered three or four questions correctly. And this had happened to me not through simple exam nerves or drinking too much wine at lunch but solely as a result of the emotive, almost occult power, of a question composed by Felicity with a view only to demonstrating the superiority of intellect of those she saw as her own personal friends over her mother-in-law’s cronies.

  I looked up. I met Elsa’s eyes and she winked at me. She had been busily writing away and I could see she had a good chance of winning the brandy. I was wondering what to do, whether to admit to a sudden onset of blankness of mind or, more deceitfully, feign illness and escape upstairs to my room. I was wondering this and at the same time letting my gaze wander vaguely about the room, from Felicity kneeling on the carpet and helping her nephews build a fort from plastic bricks, to the tall, overdressed, candle-laden Christmas tree in the corner diagonally opposite the fire, to the two long windows and the unrelieved misty dusk outside, back to Elsa feverishly scribbling, her head bent and her lower lip caught under her upper teeth. The room was silent but for an occasional crackling from the fire, a clearing of the throat from Felicity’s sister, who had a cold. Even the children, raptly attentive to new toys, made no noise.

  I had decided. I would stay there and face it out. What did it matter? People are made happy by such defeats of others. I had turned the papers over, so that that name would no longer leap black lettered out at me, was reaching out to return my pencil to the box of pencils on the low table where the triumphant Elsa, her quiz completed, had already returned hers, when the front door flew open to let in a gust of wind and Bell Sanger.

  The front door at Thornham was locked only at night. I expect things are different today. Then it was always unlocked and everyone knew it, but still Bell’s eruption into the hall was a shock. The wind blew the papers the contestants were holding and actually blew Lady Thinnesse’s quiz out of her hand and straight into the flames of the fire. She jumped up with a little shriek. Bell stood there, on the rug, in fact some kind of animal skin, just inside the door, her clothes and hair blown by the wind, a wild woman with staring eyes. Felicity got up from her knees and said rather crossly, “For God’s sake, shut the door.”

  And Bell did. She reached behind her and pushed the door, which slammed. The whole house seemed to shake. Bell said, “Would someone come, please? Silas has shot himself.”

  Someone said, “My God,” but I have never known who it was, one of the men. Esmond got up, pushed his chair aside to let himself out of the circle, and took a few steps toward her. Bell didn’t wait for him to speak.

  “He was drunk,” she said. “He was playing one of his games. He shot himself. I think he’s dead.” She hesitated, looking at us all with a kind of dawning dismay, realizing who we were, as if we were the last people she would want to communicate this to, to share this with. But what could she do? What choice had she? We were there, we were the only people, it was unavoidable. “He was playing,” she said, addressing these words to Felicity. “You know what I mean,” and, incredibly, it seemed that Felicity did.

  She nodded, one hand going up to her mouth. Esmond said, “Felicity, phone Dr. Thompson, will you? And perhaps the police, yes, we have to phone the police.”

  Felicity said, “Christ, what a thing! What a thing!” She seemed to realize she was surrounded by staring children. “Come with me, all of you,” and she scooped children up, putting each arm around two or three of them.

  My eyes met Bell’s. She looked at me, I thought, as if I might be the only one there she could like, who might have some sort of affinity with her. Or that is how I took it, how I received her steady, aghast, long, gray-eyed stare. Esmond opened the front door and held it for Bell to precede him out into the dark. I got up and followed them.

  5

  STILETTO FATALIS, FAR FROM being some sort of weapon, is the Latin name for the flaw worm, an agricultural pest. The entomologist who devised it must have had a sense of humor. There were posters in the Thornham village shop warning farmers to beware of this creature, and Felicity got hold of the name and made a tremendous joke of it. That Christmas, at any rate before the shooting of Silas Sanger, she was always talking about stiletto fatalis. If she had included a question on it in her quiz, everyone would have been able to give the right answer. Stiletto heels were in fashion that winter and at parties, especially in houses with wood-block floors, you were given little plastic heel caps to keep the spike heels from making stab marks. All the floors at Thornham Hall were of wood, scattered with small carpets and large rugs. Felicity always examined the shoes of newcomers and gave a verdict on them, whether they
could be classed as stiletto fatalis or not.

  This aspect of her, which I thought I had forgotten, which I hadn’t thought of for fifteen or sixteen years, the last time I saw her, comes back to me in the morning as I am making up my mind to phone her. I remember stiletto fatalis and how it and all its successors had given place, by the time Felicity was taking refuge at Cosette’s, to a new conversational obsession with Selevin’s mouse. Nothing much had evidently occurred in Felicity’s life since then if she was, as it appeared, still married to Esmond, still chatelaine of Thornham, no longer perhaps much resembling the dramatic intense girl in a miniskirt who had confided in Cosette evening after evening. I regard the piece of paper on which I have written down the number Felicity’s daughter gave me. I dial it. For last night, though I went to Leith’s, though I got the taxi to drop me on the corner of Pembridge Road and walked the rest of the way, I didn’t see Bell, of course I didn’t.

  Felicity answers the phone herself, using, as soon as she knows who it is, her unchanged characteristic greeting.

  “Hallo, there!”

  I once heard Esmond introduce himself to some newcomer as “There,” saying his wife had rechristened him. She sounds just the same and as if the last time we spoke were a couple of weeks ago. There is no marveling that I haven’t been in touch before, am in touch now, am still alive, and there are no reproaches. She doesn’t even say what a surprise it is. I have no recollection of her being so wrapped up in her children twenty years ago or when she abandoned them for nine months to the care of their father and grandmother. But now she talks of them. She talks of them immediately after she has been through the polite requirement of asking how I am, taking my “How is everyone?” au pied de la lettre and telling me all about Miranda’s amazing job with BBC television and Jeremy’s history first. She even follows this up with genius’s mother cliché number one: “And do you know we despaired of him, he didn’t do a stroke of work!”