The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  So Felicity came a few days later. Subdued and chastened at first, fearful that Esmond would find out where she was and come after her, she took to Cosette immediately and poured out her heart to her. A tête-à-tête was virtually impossible, there were always too many people around for that. People used to follow Cosette into her bedroom at some ungodly hour of the morning, at three or four, and continue their conversations or their musical renderings sitting on her bed. But Felicity, undeterred, would commandeer Cosette, corner her and talk, sometimes sprawling at her feet with her head in Cosette’s lap, sometimes opposite her at the table, leaning forward, gazing into her eyes, and snatches of what she said would reach the rest of us, or those who cared to listen, isolated words and phrases: “my bloody husband,” “his old bitch of a mother,” “prison,” “buried alive,” “living death,” “frustration,” “pain,” “misery.”

  At that period there were living in the House of Stairs Cosette, myself, Dominic, Mervyn, Gary, Birgitte, Mervyn’s girlfriend Mimi, Auntie, and now Felicity. Nine people. At Christmas Diana Castle and the man she lived with came up to stay for the holiday and stayed on for several weeks. That made eleven. Those two were obliged to bed down in sleeping bags on the floor of the top front room. Cosette, of course, was prepared to buy a bed to accommodate her visitors, except that no one, not least the shop delivery people, could be found willing to carry it up a hundred stairs. Even Perpetua rebelled, saying darkly that any more lifting would give her a prolapse.

  She and Dominic had transported a convertible sofa bed upstairs for Felicity, for which service they each got extravagant praise and a fiver from Cosette. The room was the one above what Cosette called my “sanctum,” and Felicity, when she arrived, was very politely requested to be “as quiet as a mouse” during the sacred hours of ten till three, while I was working. It had once been for a maid or maids and was a shabby chamber with sloping ceiling, very different from the rooms on the lower floors. By the look of the walls and woodwork, no one had painted it since the house was built. Cosette was all for getting Gary to paint it before Felicity moved in and gave him some sort of extravagant payment in advance, but in fact it was a long time before he got around to the painting and by then Felicity had gone back to Esmond and her children.

  A few days in the House of Stairs and of confiding in Cosette set her up splendidly and she was soon her old self, teasing, fascinated by everything, censorious, dispensing useless, inconsequential information, contemptuous of the slower witted. I was invited up to her room to look at the view and pronounce on whether the dome she could see was Whiteley’s or the Greek Orthodox Church. That window was alarming when you stood close up to it and looked out. Even worse when you looked down through the sheer drop of forty feet or so to the garden, its gray-leaved plants sodden with rain or nipped by frost. Directly below the window was an area paved with York stone that Cosette called the terrace and Perpetua the patio. Somehow the window would have been less frightening if there had been lawn beneath it or a flower bed.

  Felicity said she had been out of the window onto the narrow ledge. You have to understand that this was a window, not a glass door or pair of doors, but coming very low down, to no more than six inches or so from the floor, a sash window that could be opened to create an aperture four feet deep either at the top or the bottom. Outside, Felicity said, on the stone or ashlar or whatever it was surrounding the window frame, there were deep holes, each with a trickle mark of iron stain under it, to which, she was sure, the bars of some kind of cage or grille had once been attached. It was long gone by Cosette’s time. We speculated as to why the foot of the window should be so close to the floor, and Felicity suggested, rightly no doubt, that at some time the floor had been raised. For soundproofing? To make a greater space between the floor of this room and the ceiling of the room below? Because the maids, rising early, might have disturbed a sleeper in the “sanctum”?

  “No one ever opened their windows in those days,” Felicity said very sweepingly, and lingering with relish over the word, “so there wouldn’t have been any risk of defenestration.”

  I don’t believe I had come across the word before. “Haven’t you ever heard of the Defenestration of Prague?” said Felicity. “I expect that was when it was first used. Defenestratio would be the Latin, you know. It was in the Thirty Years War. Some Protestants threw two Catholic bishops out of a window in Prague, but they weren’t really hurt; they fell into the moat.”

  “You mugged that up for one of your quizzes,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you what, Elizabeth, I never did another quiz after the one we couldn’t finish because that woman Bell Sanger came in telling us Silas was shot. It put me right off.”

  “I never heard what happened at the inquest,” I said.

  “Suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. It was more the balance of the gun, if you ask me. He’d been playing Russian roulette.”

  “I don’t exactly know what you do in Russian roulette,” I said.

  “It’s something White Russian officers used to play to alleviate boredom,” she said, true to form. “You’ve got six chambers in the revolver, you see, and you put a bullet in just one, so in theory you’ve got one chance in six of killing yourself, which makes the odds pretty high. But if the chamber’s perfectly balanced the weight of the bullet will generally carry it to the bottom, so the chances of surviving are a lot greater than you’d expect. That’s why they say Russian roulette cheats death.”

  “Only Silas’s gun wasn’t perfectly balanced,” I said.

  “That’s what they said at the inquest, but I don’t know, I thought it was jolly fishy. Silas was mad about guns, he was always messing about with guns, he really knew about them.”

  “Maybe he wanted to die.”

  “Maybe he did, poor Silas. If he’d lived another day, he’d have known he’d inherited his father’s house and have had something to live on.”

  I didn’t tell her I already knew that. She opened the window, raising the sash from the bottom, and we looked down the long drop, I crouching on the floor for safety’s sake, Felicity, who had no fear at all of heights, standing there in her miniskirt, her long, long legs in red tights, glancing idly down as anyone else might at an object dropped on the pavement. The cold drove us back and we shut the window once more on the flurry of sleet the wind carried.

  10

  ONCE I WOULD HAVE held Bell’s hand until she woke, I would have held it the night through. Even though my fingers were numb I would have held it. But not now. Once I would have been fearful she would never phone, no matter what promises she made, but now I knew she would. It changes, as Cosette said. She slept, relieved I think that she had found me and that I was willing to speak to her, visit her, know her. I extricated my hand, touched her cheek lightly with my finger, and went home.

  In the spring I went with Dominic to one of the performances given by a company that called itself Global Experience. I had an idea that poor Dominic would find the whole thing incomprehensible and even frightening and that was why I wanted him with me. Unforgivable this was, shamefully unkind, for what Global Experience put on was the ultimate in audience participation.

  Dressed in cheesecloth robes that were conspicuous for being without buttons or zips, the company danced about and mimed, took partners from out of the onlookers, and each pair then stood or sat gravely face-to-face, experiencing each other by touch, stroking arms and shoulders and hair, but being quite prudishly careful to avoid erogenous zones. Objects were also examined by each couple together, with a view supposedly to seeing them in a new light, and I remember I and my partner (not Dominic) going into raptures over the texture, color, and scent of a very ordinary and rather battered Jaffa orange.

  It was months since I had seen Bell, but she was in the audience at Global Experience that night. For some reason, perhaps because stroking a stranger and exploring an orange demand great concentration, I didn’t see her until afterward, when Dominic and I
were in the theater’s cafeteria, called Food of Love, drinking apple juice and eating sticks of raw carrot and celery. We were just about to leave, poor Dominic by then bewildered to the point of being seriously upset, when I saw Bell sitting at a table in the far corner with two other girls and two men.

  One of these men was very much like her to look at, darker but with the same sort of features, the same straight carriage and graceful way of moving. Before I reached the table and said hello to her, he had got up and gone to the bar or food counter.

  “Is that your brother?” I said.

  She turned to look at him, hesitated, nodded. “Yes. Yes, it is. Good-looking, isn’t he?”

  “He’s like you.”

  “You could say that. D’you fancy him then? Shall I see what I can do?”

  “I’m with someone,” I said, “and I do have to go.” And then I said, “I wish you’d come round, I’d love to see you.”

  That was my first sight of Mark. Perhaps it was true that I fancied him, that I admired him desirously at that first encounter, briefly, for a matter of seconds. Any woman would have. And Dominic took it upon himself to be jealous, accusing me of only going to Global Experience for the opportunities he said it gave for wanton behavior. His words, not mine. He was an Irishman, after all, and though often silent, never inarticulate. I forgot Mark within minutes, hardly supposing I would ever see him again, naturally having no prevision of the part he was to play in all our lives. It was Bell alone I held in my mind, hoping she would come.

  A week or so later she did. There was a crowd of us in the drawing room with Cosette: Diana Castle and her boyfriend, who were back again, Mervyn and Mimi, Dominic, Birgitte, and Felicity. Mervyn and Mimi were one of those couples who can’t keep their hands off each other for five minutes. You seemed to come upon them all over the house—it was almost as if they could be in two or even three places at once—standing on a bend in the stairs kissing, lying mouth to mouth and hip to hip on a sofa or someone else’s bed, just inside an open door, with hands on each other’s shoulders, gazing into eyes. Cosette, true to form, had seemed to like it at first, but by then most of us, for various reasons, resented Mervyn and Mimi. They served to show us what we all lacked. I would have liked someone to love me, but not Dominic. Dominic wanted me and no one else. Diana and her boyfriend were on bad terms, they quarreled all the time. And Cosette, poor Cosette, was no nearer finding the lover she longed for than she had ever been. As for Felicity, she was dying for a love affair but afraid to have one, “woefully out of practice” was how she put it to me, scared all the time Esmond would come and haul her off before she had had a chance to make up for all those years of repression. That evening she was talking to us about Selevin’s mouse. This had been quite funny at first and Cosette, particularly, had been enchanted.

  “It’s a Russian rodent that lives in the desert, and can you imagine, it was only discovered in 1939. I mean, think of them, millions of them probably, little fat animals with gray fur, all living in the deserts in Russia, and no one knowing they were there. They only come out at night, you see. The really amazing thing about Selevin’s mouse is that it can’t stand more than a few minutes’ exposure to the sun without becoming ill.”

  “I don’t believe it, Felicity,” Cosette said. “You’re making it up.”

  “I swear before God,” said Felicity with unnecessary melodrama, “I can prove everything I’ve said. Look it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. That’s all you have to do, look it up.”

  “We haven’t got Britannica.”

  “You can go to the library in the morning and look it up.”

  “I do believe you really, darling, only it seems so odd. I think it’s lovely really. I think it’s enchanting. The poor little loves being ill when the sun shines.”

  This had been a day or two before. Felicity, however, went on and on about it, she couldn’t leave it alone. When Auntie had admitted the day before to not feeling very well, Felicity said that, like Selevin’s mouse, she must have been out in the sun. Someone, Gary I think, happened to mention he was an only child, whereupon Felicity said he was like Selevin’s mouse, the only member of the family Seleviniidae. To her it was all uproariously funny. Dominic sat there eyeing her uneasily, having an unfounded notion that all this was being done to mock him.

  That was the evening Cosette was wearing the bloodstone. I had seen it on her finger only once before. This time she must have put it on to match her rather grand and dramatic new dress, a long-skirted robe of dark green shot silk that showed a red or green gleam according to the way the light caught it. The ring still seemed too heavy for her hand, but it no longer looked out of place. In candlelight—and Felicity was going about lighting candles—the red in it glittered like sparks against the deep green of the chalcedony.

  “Hematite,” Felicity said, picking up Cosette’s hand to look at it.

  Cosette said gently, “No, heliotrope, I believe, Felicity. I think that’s the term in—what do you call it?—petrology?”

  Felicity wouldn’t have that. “Oh, no, absolutely not. It’s from the Greek for blood, as in hemorrhage, hemophilia, and so on. Haema meaning ‘blood’ and tite, ‘stone.’”

  “Yes, but not this stone, darling, that’s quite another kind, a sort of red rock.” Cosette was right, as it happens, I looked it up next day, but she didn’t insist, she wasn’t the kind to insist, having a horror of seeming superior to anyone. She was quite capable of apologizing for being right, just as she was of spending much of her time (as Henry James has it) making excuses for obnoxious acts she had not committed. Afflicted by no such scruples, Felicity was going on in her didactic way about Greek and the ignorance of people now they seldom learned it anymore, going on much as she did about the lifestyle of the Russian dormouse, when the doorbell rang.

  “That will be Walter,” Cosette said.

  It was the time we often saw Admetus, around nine-thirty in the evening. I went to the window. It was the end of April and not really dark. If I appeared on the balcony, the courtly Admetus could be relied on to strike an attitude, to step back, place his hand on his heart, and declare that this window was the east and Juliet the sun. For some reason I liked the idea of that. It came to me in that moment that if Admetus and I were to get something going, it would free me from Dominic. I opened the French windows, stepped out onto the balcony and, looking down over the Ca’ Lanier railing, saw Bell looking up. The lamplight shown on her pale hair. She was in black, but with that mud-and-granite-colored shawl wrapped tightly round her, the shawl I had last seen draped by Esmond over Silas Sanger’s dead body. I swear it was the same. I recognized it at once.

  Bell came upstairs with me and, seeing Felicity as soon as the drawing room door was opened, receiving her rather surprised, “Hallo, there,” seemed thunderstruck.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Thanks very much,” said Felicity. “I suppose I can be here as much as you can.”

  “Is Esmond here too?”

  Nobody answered her. Mervyn and Mimi were lying locked in each other’s arms on the carpet in a corner. Dominic had picked up some musical instrument of Gary’s and sat disconsolately plucking the same note over and over on a string. With a glance at the couple on the floor, Bell lifted her thin straight shoulders, loosened the shawl, looping it over her arms. Rather to my surprise, she went up to Cosette, shook hands with her, and asked her how she was. But no more time to be wasted. She had come to see me and, being Bell, made no bones about it.

  “Can we go up to your room?”

  For some reason I took it that she meant the room I wrote in rather than my bedroom. On the stairs—there were 106, remember, to the top, 95 to my writing room—she said, “They’re all on the make, aren’t they? Getting what they can out of her? Does she know?”

  “I don’t think she minds,” I said.

  “I should mind those two wanking around on the floor. I’d throw them out.”

  “Cosette would ne
ver do that.”

  Bell never read a book. I don’t think she had read a book since she left school, whenever and wherever that had been, but if there were books lying about she would pick them up and scrutinize them in a wondering, curious sort of way, as someone else might examine an ornament. We lit cigarettes and she walked about the room looking at everything, astonished that I was writing a novel, glancing at The Princess Casamassima, which I was currently reading, picking up a couple of works of reference that lay on my desk, surveying the dictionaries Cosette had provided, at last turning her back on literature and its mysteries, back to me and to reality, which was what she understood.

  “I suppose Felicity has left Esmond. When they had rows she always said she would leave him before she was thirty-five. He’ll come for her though, you’ll see, and she’ll go back to him.”

  I couldn’t go along with that. Felicity was adamant that she would never go back. Even if she never saw her children again, she wouldn’t go back. She had even found herself a waitress job at a café in Shepherds Bush. I had yet to learn that when it came to human behavior Bell was almost always right. She knew people and how they were likely to react. Not being addicted to literature, scarcely knowing that literature existed, she had not had her perception suppressed under its narcosis or her assessments of human nature distorted by its false reality.

  “She’s going to divorce him,” I said.

  “Esmond will never let himself be divorced.”

  “Under this new law,” I said, “he won’t have much choice. She can do it without his consent after five years.”

  Bell didn’t answer directly. She had lit another cigarette from the stub of the first, was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall. Comfort never meant much to her. “Who knows where we’ll all be in five years?” she said.

  It was pouring rain when the time came for her to go. I suggested she stay the night, though in the present state of overcrowding that would have meant another sleeping bag. But she wouldn’t stay, though it was nearly midnight. Nor would she tell me where she was living. That is to put it rather too strongly, for of course she didn’t actually refuse to tell me, just as I didn’t ask her outright. I asked her for her phone number and she said she didn’t have a phone. But she had walked, she told me when she first came, to Archangel Place. Now Bell was a great walker, unlike me, and it would have been nothing out of the way for her to undertake three or four miles, which gave a pretty wide radius for her to be living within.