The House of Stairs Read online

  But then, after Silas had been covered up with that shawl (a shawl Bell later calmly went on wearing) I went back to the house and left them there, Bell and Esmond Thinnesse. And after a long while, several hours, after the police had been there and a doctor, and all sorts of adjuncts of the police, Esmond brought Bell back to the house and she walked into the drawing room where we all were. It was almost palpable in the air, the embarrassment everyone felt, everyone that is but me and Felicity, who doesn’t know what embarrassment is, and Elsa. I could tell the others were wondering what they were to talk about, how the rest of the evening was to be passed, now Bell was among them. But their difficulty was momentary. She stood there and said in a voice of cold disdain, a voice that made nonsense of what she said, “I am sorry to be the cause of so much trouble.”

  An odd thing to say, wasn’t it? Surely poor dead Silas was the cause, he and what he had done? She said it and immediately turned and went upstairs. Felicity was later obliged to go after her and ask her if she wanted anything, a drink, for instance, or something to eat, a share in the supper of cold Christmas leftovers we were all picking at downstairs. Bell refused everything. Next day the police were back, talking to her, and after being closeted with one of them for a long time in Esmond’s study, she walked in among us.

  She was all in black. But I later came to know she often was, it had nothing to do with mourning for Silas. I had never seen anyone like her, never before encountered that air of indifferent confidence and tragic poise. Sorry for her, pity for her, I never felt, though perhaps I ought to have felt it. After all, she was a widow, she had lost her husband only the day before in the most appalling circumstances of violence and horror. I felt only admiration, the kind of hero worship I had not had for anyone since I had a crush on the music mistress some seven years before. What I would have liked was for the two of us to go away somewhere and talk. I would have liked to be with her, alone with her, to talk and learn about her and tell her about me.

  Of course this was impossible. Elsa and I were going back to London, were due to be driven to Debden tube station by Esmond in about half an hour’s time. Felicity’s sister and her husband and children had already gone by car, taking Paula and her daughter with them. Bell came close up to the chair where Felicity was sitting with the little boy Jeremy on her lap. She laid her hands lightly on the back of the chair, holding her head high, that mass of untidy fair hair, hair the color of tarnished brass, plaited and tied up on top of her head with a piece of string. Without looking at Felicity, looking at the plaster moldings on the ceiling, the cornice, the elaborately pelmeted tops of the windows, she asked if she could remain at Thornham a little longer.

  “Not in the house. In the cottage. Just until I find somewhere.”

  Felicity was beginning to say, “But, my dear, of course, of course you must, I wouldn’t dream—” when Bell interrupted.

  “I know Esmond doesn’t like me. I know none of you like me.” Did I imagine her roving glance coming to rest for a moment on me and the slightest change, a softening, in her expression, as if she made an exception of me? “But I have,” she said, “nowhere else to go.”

  She had a reputation for being honest. On the way to the station Esmond said to us, “It’s true I don’t much like her. Frankly, I didn’t like him. But one can say for Bell that she’s a totally honest person. She is incapable of deceit.”

  It is interesting how such reputations are built. They come about through confusing the two kinds of truth telling: the declaration of opinion and principle and the recounting of history. Bell always expressed her feelings about things, her beliefs, with frank openness. It wasn’t in her, for the sake, say, of politeness or social ease, to say she was pleased about something when she wasn’t or that she liked something or someone when she didn’t, or that she didn’t mind when she did mind. And because of this, because of this well-known honesty of hers, it was assumed—no, taken for granted—that she also told the straightforward transparent truth about what she had done, what her past was, what had happened. I came to know, and it was a hard lesson, that Bell was in fact one of the world’s grand liars, who tell lies from choice and, I think, for pure pleasure.

  On that occasion she told Felicity she had nowhere to go, and Felicity, first denying for all she was worth the plain truth that no one at Thornham much liked Bell, offered her the cottage rent-free for as long as she might want it. Bell nodded and said thanks in that laconic way of hers that she could make sound as if she had little to be grateful for.

  “What shall I do about the blood?” she said.

  Felicity nearly screamed. She put her hand over her mouth. Jeremy was staring, big eyed, mouth open.

  “Someone will have to clean it up.”

  “The police will see to that, Bell,” Esmond said. “You can leave that to the police.”

  That was the last time I saw her, as I have said, for more than a year. Elsa told me that she had no relatives to take her in. Her parents were dead. She had no profession, was trained for nothing, her life since she was nineteen had been the wretched sharing of Silas Sanger’s poverty and the homes he had contrived for them, a cottage that was no more than a hut on an estate in the Highlands of Scotland, a room in south London, a coach house loft in Leytonstone, finally this cottage of the Thinnesses. The knowledge that she was to inherit Silas’s father’s house took her away from Thornham and translated her to that house, first to live in it, then to sell it and realize from the sale a skimpy income. She moved out of the orbit of Esmond and Felicity and such lesser moons as Elsa and Paula who circled about them, and for quite a long time was lost among the unnumbered galaxies that made up the youth of London in the late 1960s.

  It occurs to me as I wait for the phone to ring that it is possible Bell herself will still phone me. When the phone does ring it may not be Felicity, whose voice I long for, but Bell, who would be much the greater prize. In moments of stress, when alone, I always talk aloud to myself. Does everyone?

  “Are you mad?” I say aloud to myself. “Are you mad to care like this, to need like this? What do you want and what do you need after so long, after receiving so little, after knowing everything? Are you mad?”

  But I don’t pursue that one. Madness is something we don’t speak of lightly, frivolously, in our family, for madness of a kind we are also heirs to, the schizoid delusions associated with our inheritance. I don’t pursue it and, strangely, when it gets late, too late for anyone reasonably to phone, much too late for Felicity, I feel a curious, unexpected lightening of the heart.

  6

  OF THE FIGURES WHO come into our dreams, according to the Jungians, the only ones whose identity we can be certain of are ourselves. When I first read of this I wanted hotly to deny it, for hadn’t I often encountered Bell in my dreams? And Cosette and even, once or twice, Mark? But I came to see that they were not in fact themselves, but only figments that exhibited aspects of those people, that often metamorphosed, changing into unknown personages or half-forgotten acquaintances or even animals. Why this should be, taking into account how little we really know of those who are closest to us, is no mystery, but a warning not to be hasty with our assumptions about the nature of others or complacent about our knowledge of the human heart.

  So it wasn’t Felicity I dreamed about last night but only someone who looked and sounded like Felicity, and that not for long; someone who, once she had led me into the gray garden in Archangel Place, turned her head and showed me a changed face, the face of someone I can’t name but connect with that time, a face I find it hard to say was a man’s or a woman’s. Before that happened we had been in the House of Stairs together, and from Cosette’s table Felicity had picked up the sheets of paper on which her quiz was typed. Some were untouched, some half-completed. She said, as I never remember her saying at the time, as I would remember if it had happened, “That woman is such a fool, she has identified Huntington’s chorea as a geography book. I suppose she thinks the islet of Langerhans i
s off its coast.”

  Freud’s dream theory has been much ridiculed. But no one disputes the wisdom of his suggestion that in trying to understand our dreams we should write accounts of them as soon as we wake up, keeping pencil and paper beside the bed for this purpose. Felicity’s remark didn’t pain me in the dream as it would have done had I been conscious and she real. I was amused by it in the dream, and hastened to write it down when I awoke. Then I reflected on the rest of the dream, how she and I had gone outside where the plants in the gray garden were taller and more luxuriant than I remember them, where even the flowers were not yellow or white but a metallic, silvery gray. We stood looking up at the back of the house, a tall house of five stories and a basement, but not as tall as in the dream, in which it had become a tower whose pointed top was half-obscured by the lowering London sky.

  But the windows were the same. These wide apertures, one on each of the four middle floors, pairs of glazed French doors really, opened onto narrow balconies with low plaster walls. But on the basement floor and on the top the windows were simply long narrow sashes. It wasn’t Mark who came out onto the fourth-floor balcony from the room that was once mine, it wasn’t Bell or Cosette. The figure who stood up there leaning perilously over the wall was a child’s, a child I didn’t recognize but that Felicity knew, that Felicity or the possessor of the changed face she turned to me recognized as one of her own. She began shouting at the child to be careful, to go back.

  “Go back, go back, you’ll fall!”

  And now I am reading my account of this dream along with Felicity’s remark, which no longer seems so brilliant to me, so witty, as it did at first. Written on the paper too is Bell’s phone number which she gave me when she phoned me this morning, accosting me with her cheerful, “Hallo, there!”

  I asked her what I had not been able to bring myself to ask her yesterday. (How much joy do we miss through cowardice?) I asked her why Bell had phoned her.

  “Oh, Elizabeth, I thought you knew. Didn’t I say? She wanted your number.”

  Joy, indeed. Immediately I reproached myself for feeling such a surge of happiness. I should know better, I should have learned something in all those years, after so many friendships, a marriage, and other loves.

  “Didn’t you give it to her?” I realized as soon as I said this that there was no reason why she would have known it. It is a long time since we have spoken, though something to Felicity’s credit perhaps that it doesn’t feel long, that she, maddening woman though she is, has that quality of taking up the reins of friendship and driving merrily along as if no lapse of years had ever been. “No, you couldn’t have. I’m in the phone book in my married name. My publishers wouldn’t give my number.”

  “I didn’t try them. Frankly, I thought Bell would be the last person you’d want to be in touch with. After all that happened.”

  I realize now, after some hours have passed, that she thinks I was in love with Mark. Maybe others thought so too. That, they suppose, is what accounted for my unhappiness and my withdrawal. I contemplate this number that begins with the three digits six-two-four, the Maida number, but I do nothing more with it, I only look. Strangely, the last thing I need to do at this moment is dial it, speak to Bell. I am so supremely content to know she wanted mine, that her sole purpose in phoning Felicity was to ask for my number, that I feel no need to proceed further—yet. I feel, sitting here in my workroom in front of the typewriter, rather as I felt on the very few occasions in the House of Stairs when I smoked the cigarettes Bell passed to me at the window’s edge: at peace, serene, there is no tomorrow, or if there is, it is of no significance, there is only the everlasting, delicious, tranquil now.

  In which to recall Cosette seems to come naturally.

  She didn’t mean to live alone in the House of Stairs. She was going to have Auntie with her and Dawn Castle’s daughter, Diana.

  If I haven’t mentioned Auntie before, it isn’t because she was unknown to me or played a small part in Cosette’s life, but because it is so hard to know what to say about her. She was a cipher, a little old woman who seemed without character or opinions, almost without tastes, who seemed to dislike nothing yet enjoy nothing. I have never known her Christian name. Cosette always called her Auntie, though she wasn’t her aunt but I think her mother’s cousin. We—I mean the crowd of the young—were supposed to call her Mrs. Miller, but no one ever did for long and she became Auntie to us too. To her we were all “dear,” because our names eluded her memory, even Cosette’s.

  Two or three years earlier Auntie had been living in a miserable room in a run-down part of London. Somewhere in Kensal Rise I believe it was. She was being harassed by a landlord who wanted the house vacated so that he could sell it, and was plagued too by the four-man jazz band who occupied the top floor. Cosette had always looked after her, paid her some sort of allowance, had her shopping done, taken her out. She and Douglas rescued Auntie and bought her a tiny one-room flat near them in Golders Green. From this flat Cosette removed her and carried her off to Notting Hill.

  She gave no reason for doing so. Auntie had seemed quite happy where she was, though it was always hard to make any sort of assessment of the state of her emotions, and if Cosette could have gone from Golders

  Green to Kensal Rise to tend to her, she could probably have made the journey equally often in reverse. It may have been a simple act of kindness. I shouldn’t express surprise at Cosette’s kindness, which was so frequent as not to be remarked, and yet I came to believe there was another motive. I came to see that Auntie was needed in the House of Stairs for her role in the attempted recapture of Cosette’s youth.

  Her presence had no effect on me one way or the other. It was different with Diana Castle. My reactions to her being asked to live there, given a room there, were I am afraid those of jealousy and resentment. You have to understand that, without being fully aware of it then, I had replaced my mother with Cosette—and this not just since my mother’s death but long, long before. Of course I should have known that Diana’s being there didn’t exclude my being there, that I was always welcome, that there would always be a place for me, that Cosette took it for granted and supposed I did too, that her home was my home whenever I chose to make it so.

  I sulked a little. I had my degree and I wandered about Europe, meeting nomadic people like myself, thinking of the books I meant to write. The first of these was in fact written in Cosette’s house, but not yet, not then. Instead, I went off to do a year’s postgraduate teacher training, something I have been glad of since, but which was undertaken as a result of the injury I felt Cosette had done to me, a result of sulking.

  The House of Stairs I had seen once or twice and had responded to it in a way that might have been more justly expected from my own father, say, or Mrs. Maurice Bailey. I saw it as big, old, dirty, and cold, the stairs a curse and a handicap, the arrangement of the rooms—the kitchen was in the basement, all the best living and sleeping space loftily high up—seemingly designed to be as inconvenient as could be, the steep staircase and windows dangerous. The second time I saw it Cosette had moved in, had been in three weeks, but the furniture still stood about where the movers had stuck it, the crates of books and china and glass remained unpacked, the windows uncurtained and the phone not yet connected.

  But the third time I went there all was changed. I had been away and Cosette had been busy, though this is the wrong word to use about someone so gently and contentedly indolent. Others had been busy on her behalf: Perpetua, who still came to her, traveling down each day on the 28 bus; Jimmy, the gardener and handyman; a troop of carpet fitters and curtain hangers. The rooms hadn’t been repainted, that was something she refused to have done, and their faint faded shabbiness suited them, keeping them from a glossy Homes and Gardens look, though there was never much danger of this chez Cosette. But the windows had been festooned with curtains in slub silk and curtains in velvet, with Roman blinds and Austrian blinds and Chinese bead curtains that were melees o
f rainbows when they moved and showed pastoral pictures, remote and Oriental, when they hung still. I don’t think Cosette any longer knew there were such colors as brown, as beige, as fawn, as gray. The house gleamed with rich blues and reds and purples, with emerald green, with dazzling white. And in her own wardrobe gone were the tailored suits and gone the cotton tents in tablecloth patterns. That day when I came in, when I used the key she had sent me and mounted the stairs, carpeted now in bloodred, came to the top and found her seated at her table, she was in yellow silk on which blossomed white daisies and red roses and sprays of green ferns. And that was by no means the only change in her.

  She put out her arms and without a word I went to her and into that embrace and we hugged each other. Being sent the key had touched me, had moved me near to tears, the trust it implied. I hugged Cosette and felt her warmth and smelled her scent and felt the new thinness of her under the slippery silk.