The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  But before all this happened Cosette and I went to Walter Admetus’s house, having arranged to meet Ivor there. We went in the big, old, dusty navy-blue Volvo, which gobbled up petrol and which it was Gary’s job, never performed, to clean in lieu of rent. Its interior was like an extension of the House of Stairs, being full of Cosette-style clutter, full and half-full and empty cigarette packets, bottles and sprays of Joy, boxes of pink tissues, new novels with torn dust jackets, shoes to be worn for driving and shoes to be put on after driving, and all those parcels to be taken somewhere that never got there, laundry and dry cleaning, and things to be sewn and things to be mended. I felt excited and my excitement communicated itself to Cosette, who took it for anxiety that she shouldn’t be gulled or lured into parting foolishly with her money.

  “When I’m in danger of not being prudent,” she said gravely, “I think of Douglas. I remember how he worked hard to make all this money for me and it does restrain me.” It was the first time for many months I had heard her mention him.

  Elegant-appearing Georgian houses can be just as messy inside as anywhere else, a fact that was new to me then. Fifteen Archangel Place, though untidy, was not squalid, thanks to the efforts of Perpetua. Walter Admetus’s house was. It looked as if it had never been cleaned and it smelled. The upholstery on the furniture was greasy, or rather encrusted with some kind of sticky deposit, the accumulation of years, to which animal hairs adhered, in places as thickly as the pile on a fur. The smell was of fried onions or sweat—which smell much the same—of clogged sink waste pipes and of old dog and sick cat, though we saw neither animal while we were there. Even Cosette, the least fussy of women, hesitated a little before sitting down on the spot indicated, a stained, hairy sofa cushion on which a blowfly crawled.

  Walter Admetus is the only man I have ever known actually to introduce his girlfriend as his mistress. He was a courtly person, with a small, pointed, and prominent beard, the kind of beard that turns up and sticks out, and she was very prettily dressed in early Laura Ashley with shiny hair and a pink hair ribbon. It was a mystery how people could come out of that place and yet be so spruce and groomed.

  “Admetus,” he said, holding out his hand and close to clicking his heels. He behaved like some German or Scandinavian aristocrat, though he is as English as I am. “May I introduce my mistress, Eva Faulkner?”

  I was wearing the cameo brooch Cosette had given me for my twenty-first birthday, the one with the head of a girl on it that looks like Bell. I found myself fidgeting with this brooch as I sat rigidly on the sticky filthy velvet of my chair seat, watching Cosette hand over the bottle of red Graves she must have secreted in one of her always huge handbags. It had occurred to me for the first time that Bell simply might not appear, most probably wouldn’t appear, might not be at home, and even if she was in was only a lodger here, not a friend. I wondered what I should do. Walter Admetus took the bottle with extravagant expressions of gratitude. His manners were at any rate a far cry from those of Ivor. He insisted on pouring glasses of the wine immediately, although it was very much the sort of stuff to be uncorked in advance, stood about at room temperature, and served with food.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t anything for you and your daughter to eat,” he said.

  Cosette winced. I said quickly that I wasn’t her daughter. Admetus made things worse by saying with extreme cloying courtesy that no doubt Cosette wished I were. Cosette’s face was fixed in that gentle, dreamy smile she could hold for several minutes without relaxing her mouth or blinking her eyes. There seemed absolutely nothing to say. We had arrived rather late, so by now Ivor was very late. The sun poured through the dirty windows, making bars of dull yellow light in which dust motes swarmed like insects. It fell on Eva Faulkner like a purposely directed spotlight and she sat silent and bored, reminding me of the description in Antony and Cleopatra of Octavia as a statue, not a breather. I began to realize that I had made a mistake in not telling Cosette that I expected Admetus’s lodger to be Bell, for how could I now ask Admetus about her without revealing my duplicity?

  I also began to doubt once more. What had I really to go on? A description that I had perhaps distorted in my own mind to suit my wishes and a name I had no real reason to connect with Bell. Cosette had begun a conversation, stilted and very much of the small talk kind, on the amenities of the neighborhood. Rigid in her sunbath, Eva Faulkner made no replies, gave no sign of having heard, but it seemed just the kind of exchange of pleasantries to appeal to Admetus, who responded with a positive eulogy of the backwoods of Notting Hill, so that you wondered why he didn’t immediately move there. His beard wagged and his eyebrows worked up and down and his hands waved like fans. I began to feel angry, we had been there three-quarters of an hour, and I was about to say to Cosette we shouldn’t wait, it was hopeless, Ivor wasn’t coming, when I heard the front door open and Ivor’s voice.

  It was disquieting to observe Cosette’s reaction to the sound of Ivor’s voice in those days. Her expression would become one of resignation, even of stoicism. I couldn’t distinguish the words, nor did I speculate as to whom he might be speaking or, come to that, how he happened to possess a key to this house. I was only wondering if he would break the apparent rule of a lifetime and apologize.

  The door to the room opened and he came in with Bell. Typical of him was the way he pushed his way in first and left her to follow.

  I don’t know if she recognized me, remembered me, or if Ivor, who immediately began telling us how he had encountered her in the street outside, had already told her who would be there when they reached the house. I could have asked but I didn’t, I never did. She looked at me and said very calmly, “Hello, Lizzie,” as if we had last seen each other the day before.

  She was all in black—like James’s Milly Theale. I never saw her in any but dark or dull or muted shades except the time I made her put on the dress of “wasted” red like the one the girl wears in the Bronzino painting. This was before the antique-clothes cult, before the knitted-cotton revolution, before long skirts. Bell’s clothes had probably been bought at a jumble sale, the long, narrow, black wool skirt with box pleats front and back, the man’s black cotton shirt, its sleeves rolled up, its waist defined by a black knitted scarf tied round and round, the rope of black and brown wooden beads. Her fine, thin ankles, the long shaft of the Achilles tendons, just showed below the hem of the skirt. Her feet, brown and long-toed, were in Greek rope sandals. It looked as if she had tied her hair on top of her head with a bit of picture cord. Tendrils of it hung alongside her cheeks and down the long straight nape of her neck, hair that was the color of pale unvarnished wood, but leaving the high smooth forehead bare. She held her head aloft, poised as she always did, as if balancing on it a heavy vessel full of liquid.

  A great deal of marveling now took place on the part of Cosette, Admetus, and Ivor—though not of Eva Faulkner, who apparently took all such coincidences as a matter of course—that Bell and I already knew each other. Once Admetus had gone through the elaborate process of introducing Bell to Cosette, only he called it “having the honor to present,” Ivor began praising Bell’s beauty in her presence, walking round her, his head on one side, pointing out with a curved index finger each exceptional feature, as if she were an item on sale in a slave market.

  “Look at that chin, look at those dear little ears like shells, and that skin. Have you ever seen such a carriage? A plumb line could pass through her from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet.”

  The pointing finger just brushed Bell’s neck. She didn’t recoil. She said quite slowly, almost casually, but absolutely without amusement, “Take your hand off me, you ugly bastard.”

  She was frank and open, you see. Honest, they said, she always spoke her mind. Cosette gasped. Admetus gave a nervous titter. To my extreme pleasure I saw that Ivor had gone quite white. Bell said to me, “Come up and see where I live.”

  I didn’t hesitate. I left the room with her. Therefore I never knew
what actually happened at the tripartite discussion among Cosette, Ivor, and Admetus. I know only that Cosette never handed over any money for the founding of the magazine and Ivor was soon to depart, though we went on seeing Admetus. He became a friend and visitor to the House of Stairs, and for a little while, after Eva had left him, I even wondered if he might become Ivor’s successor with Cosette. That was before Marcus of course, that was before the coming of Marcus put all other men, any other man, out of the question.

  So I went upstairs with Bell and she showed me the little room where she lived, where she had been living ever since she sold the house she inherited from Silas Sanger’s father. There was very little in it apart from the bed and a table and a chair, for Bell, then and perhaps now too, has no feeling for domestic comforts or for the appearance of her home. But Silas’s paintings were there, canvases stacked against the walls.

  “I take them with me wherever I go,” she said. “He was a really shitty painter, but that doesn’t mean a thing. One day there’s a chance he’ll be recognized and then I’ll have an exhibition and sell them for huge sums.”

  She spoke to me as if we were old friends. She spoke of Silas without emotion, coolly, practically, as if she were a gallery owner and he a painter she had discovered and invested in. I was awed, remembering the dead man, the blood on the floor and on her.

  “Did you stay long with Felicity?” I asked her.

  “Two months, one week, and two days,” she said.

  “Then I went and lived in the house the old man left until I sold it.”

  Another question. I asked her a lot of questions that afternoon, though none of the ones I ought to have asked, none of the vital questions. “What do you do? I mean for a living. What do you work at?”

  “I don’t.” She looked pleased to be able to say that. “I don’t work at all and I never shall. I’m never going to work.”

  “Then you’re rich?”

  Her eyes opened wide. They are sea gray, her eyes, and very large and clear. “I’m not, I’m not rich. But I hate working. I’ve got just enough to exist on without working if I live in a hole like this.” She had a way of dismissing subjects when she had had enough of them, turning her head quickly from side to side, lifting her shoulders, changing on to a new topic. “Who’s that shit I came in with? I’ve seen him here before.”

  “He’s a man who lives with my friend you were introduced to.”

  “That’s a relief. I thought maybe he lived with you.” Too bad if he did. It hadn’t stopped her calling him a shit. “What a turd,” she said. “Isn’t he a bit young for her?”

  “A bit stupid for her,” I said. “A bit ugly and selfish and bloody. I don’t know about young,” and, untruthfully, “I never thought of that.”

  She laughed. “I shall have to see what I can find out about him.”

  It was the first time I’d heard her laugh, and it was a surprisingly deep, rich, gurgling sound. Her pale face glowed and she was beautiful. I found her exciting in a disturbing way, a soul-shaking way, without knowing in the least what I wanted of her. That we should be friends? That we should meet and talk and be together? And what did she want? Not of me, but of life? I know now, of course I do, I have known for a long time, but I didn’t know then. It mystified me, later on it did, it puzzled me that someone young and beautiful and healthy and intelligent should be content to live in that mean little room in that dirty house, she and all her sparse worldly goods contained in a space twelve feet by twelve, with no job, no career, no prospects, no apparent aims. She was a childless widow of twenty-seven, skilled at nothing, trained for nothing, but more beautiful than any model whose photograph graced magazine covers, who dressed in rags, who—I discovered this awhile later—had no lover and scarcely a friend.

  Of course she was waiting, looking about her, biding her time. That was what she wanted of life. We opened her window on to the white sky, the plane tree with its branches on which pink-bronze pigeons perched, its threadlike twigs and fine silky leaves hanging still in the windless air. We leaned out onto the broad windowsill. So many of my memories of Bell concern windows, sashes, casements, glass and drafts and drops, but there was no draft that summer’s day. The air smelled fresh from Regent’s Park, it smelled like the air of a spoiled countryside. Bell took a tobacco tin from a drawer in the table and, without asking me, taking things for granted, began to roll a joint. It was the first time for me. She showed me how to draw in the smoke and hold it in my lungs until my head began to swim and curiously to expand, and with the exhalation feel the arrival of a deep, tomorrowless peace.

  That September Cosette and I went to Italy together. She had meant to go with Ivor, but by that time Ivor had gone.

  “You come,” she said to me. “I’d rather it was you than him anyway. Really. I was dreading going with him.”

  I had seen Bell a few times. She had been to visit me at the House of Stairs and we had gone to the cinema together, to the old Electric Cinema in the Portobello Road, and I would have liked her to come to Italy with us.

  “I’ve only once been to a foreign country,” she had said to me, “and that was to France with Silas. We were at a place called Wissant, which is so near it’s practically England.”

  It made me marvel that someone young and fit preferred to forgo so many pleasures rather than work. Bell had enough to live on but not enough for holidays. One word to Cosette and she would have been invited to join us, her fares and hotel bills paid as a matter of course, for it was taken for granted that any friend of mine partook of Cosette’s largesse just as I did. That was the reason why I couldn’t say the word. I couldn’t even mention that Bell had scarcely been abroad or had no holiday plans this year. I even had to go further and, against the grain as it was, say to Cosette, “Bell never wants to leave London. She’s got to make up for those years she was with Silas out in the sticks.”

  In Florence, at the Uffizi, hangs Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi. This is the painting most critics have agreed inspired the one Henry James describes in The Wings of the Dove as hanging in “the great gilded historic chamber” at Matcham and calls “the pale personage on the wall.” It resembles, of course, the doomed Milly Theale in her “eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck …” with its “face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and high.” It also profoundly resembled Bell.

  I wish I could remember whether I saw it there on my first visit to Florence when I went to Italy with Cosette. We must have gone into the Uffizi. I have certainly seen the portrait on subsequent visits, but it is no use, try as I will, I can’t remember whether I saw it that time. It was a print of that portrait that, walking along the Arno with Cosette, near the Trinità bridge, I saw in a shop window. Cosette was struck by the resemblance—remember that only Cosette saw the similarity between Bell’s face and that on my cameo—and, standing in front of the print, said that we should buy it.

  I concealed my enthusiasm. Although I knew how sensitive to the wishes and secrets of others Cosette was, how she would readily have fallen in with any plan of mine concerning the fate of the picture, I somehow imagined it framed in stainless steel by the “little man” in Kensington Park Road, hung on the drawing room wall and pointed out to all comers.

  “A postcard, then,” Cosette said. “Do you know, I have a dress very much like that somewhere that I had made for the Chelsea Arts Ball. I was supposed to be Lady Jane Grey. I wonder if I could still get into it?”

  But Cosette couldn’t find a postcard of Lucrezia Panciatichi. Next morning, while she was still asleep, I went out on my own and bought the print of Bronzino’s painting, which I carried home secretly and for a long while kept in a hiding place.

  9

  I WAS STANDING IN front of my small version of this portrait when Bell phoned.

  For a long time the print lay in a drawer of that desk Cosette bought me. I had it framed as soon as I could afford things like that
and hung it in my bedroom. If Cosette ever saw it, she didn’t remark on it. A little while before the murder I took it down and put it away once more, but I never considered ridding myself of it and it traveled with me, first to the flat I had on Primrose Hill when the House of Stairs was sold, then to Hampstead where it again hung on the wall, out to Cambridge for a year or two during my brief marriage, back to London and this Hammersmith house. Though telling myself I am not superstitious, I nevertheless came to associate displaying it on a wall with the coming of bad things.

  All the bad things but one thing have happened to me, yet I have put the picture back in the drawer. But three days ago, in the study here, I took the framed Roiter poster down from the wall and hung up the Bronzino in its stead. It is many years since I have looked at it and I seemed to see among its reds and blacks and golds things I have never observed before, the fact for instance that Lucrezia, though well bejeweled, wears only a single ring and that with a very dark stone in it that may even be a bloodstone. Her hair, whatever Henry James may say, is not really red but a very pale copper color. Of course, he speaks only of a Bronzino, of a pale redheaded lady in red, not of this specific portrait, and he would have known very well how many people sat for Bronzino, that this Florentine mannerist was as distinguished a portraitist as a painter of allegories. Looking at the picture, I was reminded not only of Bell herself but of other aspects of our life when Cosette had the House of Stairs, of Bell’s interest in The Wings of the Dove, of her surprising request to hear the plot of it, of the conspiracy.