The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  “You aren’t going to walk back?” And I added,

  “To wherever it is?”

  “Sort of that way.” She waved in a vague northeasterly direction. “I could get a cab, only in my budget I don’t allow for cabs.”

  We would phone for a cab, I said. Cosette was always phoning for cabs.

  “Then she’ll pay for it. I don’t want that.”

  I was struck by this, a very rare attitude for anyone in Cosette’s orbit to take. There was a purity about Bell, I thought, a rectitude. She gave me one of her cool smiles. All she wanted, she said, was for me to lend her a mac or a raincoat or even just an umbrella. And that was how we came to go into my bedroom.

  Descending, we encountered on the third-floor landing, standing within an alcove like a pair of statues in the half dark, Venus and Adonis perhaps, Mervyn and Mimi locked together. I opened the door of my bedroom, having forgotten for the moment what hung on the wall facing us. The light came on and Bell, entering, looked straight at the Bronzino. She approached it slowly, stood silent in front of it while I grubbed around in the cupboard for something to cover her. Then, “That’s me,” she said.

  I prevaricated. “It was painted about four hundred years before you were born.”

  “It’s still me. Where did you get it? Did you put it there because it looks like me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I held out my thin, silky black raincoat for her to put her arms into. She drew it round her, shawl and all, her back still to me. I had never closed the door, it still stood ajar. From downstairs came the weird plucked notes of the sitar. Bell took my face in her hands and kissed my mouth. It was a mouth-to-mouth kiss, but it might just have been received and interpreted as a woman saluting another woman in friendship and affection, except that it lingered rather long and I thought—I was not quite certain but I did think so—I felt the tip of her tongue touch the rim of my upper lip. The sound of a door opening downstairs and the volume of the sitar music increasing parted us. In a little while, after she was gone, I would begin to tremble, but not then, not then. I said, very lightly, “There’s an umbrella down in the hall. You mustn’t get wet.”

  But she changed her mind about the taxi, one happening to come cruising along Archangel Place as we splashed out into the wet, windy dark. I hadn’t a key and I let the door close behind me so that Cosette had to come down and let me in.

  “Darling, you’re cold,” she said. “You’re shivering.”

  Until they came and took her away I never lost Bell again after that. Let me correct that and say she never went off again and disappeared.

  A lot of things happened that summer. My book was accepted by a publisher. Felicity found a lover. Cosette gave the first of her big parties. Birgitte left and went home to Odense. Mervyn and Mimi departed to set up house together in a caravan.

  Cosette said she never had any doubt I would find a publisher. She had read the typescript and went about telling everyone, to my mild embarrassment, what a wonderful book it was. A sort of cross between Gone With the Wind and Murder on the Orient Express, she said, without irony and intending high praise. She wasn’t, in fact, far wrong. Now, I thought, having received a much bigger advance than I expected, I should be able to get down to my critical work on Henry James. That was before I had really looked at my contract and seen my publishers had an option on my next work of fiction, which they had been led to expect within twelve months. I hadn’t known until then that in life there are traps in which one gets caught where one is obliged to pedal around and around in a squirrel cage.

  Birgitte had been caught shoplifting in the food hall at Harrods. It can’t have been because she didn’t get enough to eat at home, but perhaps for some neurotic or compulsive reason. If meals were irregular in the House of Stairs and mostly you had to get what you wanted for yourself, the two fridges and the larder were overflowing with food, splendid food of the luxury kind, out-of-season vegetables, salmon and pheasant and caviar and pâté and profiteroles and cream and strawberries. Cosette was in the habit of taking Auntie out for drives, and while they were out they always went shopping. Birgitte had gone into the food hall carrying two empty Harrods carriers. With incredible naiveté she must have believed they would therefore think she had paid for what she had in them. She had helped herself to tins of biscuits and boxes of chocolates and a jar of some sort of candied fruit before she was caught. It made me wonder if she had gotten the idea from Gary’s habit of filling bags with leftover food in the restaurants Cosette took us to dine in. He too was gone by July, off like so many others at that time on the golden road to India. And Mervyn had departed for his caravan, no longer able to endure, he told us, any company but that of Mimi and hers only in isolation. We were missing two bottles of brandy and six of claret after he left, but I said nothing about it to Cosette, though I think she knew.

  Felicity’s lover was called Harvey something. He was one of those tallish, thinnish, thirtyish men with dark shaggy hair and moustache and beard, in much-worn crew-neck sweater and patched jeans, who thronged the streets of west London then and still throng them today. He hardly spoke and was shy, being more Auntie’s type, one would have thought, than Felicity’s. I never heard how she met him or witnessed his introduction to the house. He just appeared in her company. One day she was alone and the next Harvey was with her, sitting beside her holding hands. To be fair to her, she had probably asked Cosette if he could stay, could move in with her, that is. It just happens that I didn’t hear her ask.

  You could see she was very proud to have secured a man of her own. She was like Cosette had been when she first landed Ivor Sitwell. I remarked on this to Bell as we sat side by side on one of the flights of stairs at Cosette’s party. Bell was very dressed up, wearing a feather boa and artificial pink roses over a black crepe de chine and lace dress, bought for seven and sixpence at a jumble sale at St. Mary the Boltons. It was then that she told me about Ivor not being a real Sitwell, though she seemed to have no actual idea what a real Sitwell was.

  “Brothers and a sister who were writers, Eva said.” For it was Eva Faulkner, Admetus’s standoffish ex-girlfriend, who had spilled the beans. “She’s well rid of him,” she said of Cosette. “Do you think she’d like someone else?”

  “She’d like someone she could love and who would love her. Wouldn’t we all?”

  Bell gave me a strange, sidelong look. She didn’t reply. Perhaps she thought I didn’t expect a reply, or more likely because she herself did not come into the category I spoke of. There had been no repetition of that kiss. We were cool, friendly, chain-smoking, with a bottle of wine between us on the stairs, half a French stick, and a piece of Brie. We sat there commenting on the guests who came up and down, who sat five stairs below us, who congregated on the landing beneath.

  Dawn Castle and her husband had come, out of place but determined to enjoy themselves. Even Maurice Bailey had come. He spent the evening in the dining room talking to Auntie. Walter Admetus was there with a new woman—so much for my ideas of seducing him—and Fay, long forgiven by Cosette, there with a new man. A pair of ballet dancers, Cosette’s latest acquisition, had arrived early. They were husband and wife. Perdita Reed was as beautiful as Bell but in a different way, tiny, white skinned, with classic ballerina looks, the raven hair drawn back and center parted. She had been approaching international fame when she fell in love with a dancer from Madrid. Apparently she wanted him to appear in everything she was in, which, it might be thought, was to the detriment of her career. I overheard Fay’s new man say something slighting about Cosette, and if Luis Llanos gave no reply beyond a smile, he didn’t spring to her defense either. Though inhabiting a borrowed flat in Hampstead, though grandly and gorgeously dressed, they were poor and needy.

  A lot of people at that party, as Bell pointed out, were there for the purpose of freeloading.

  “Everyone comes here,” she said, “on the gravy train to Cadgeville.”

  It reminded me of The
Great Gatsby, the bit about all the world and its mistress going to Gatsby’s house and where the young ladies are saying nasty things about him while picking his roses and drinking his champagne. Of course it didn’t remind Bell of any such thing, she never heard of Fitzgerald or almost any other novelist, come to that. Sometimes I think it would have been better for everyone if I never had, if it had been history or political economy I had read at university.

  Caterers had done the food but everyone was left to help themselves. They were left to help themselves to drink too because this was Cosette’s way—she who seldom drank more than half a glass of wine—but it was a mistake. A lot of them were well away by ten-thirty. It was at about that time too that the sweet reek of marijuana crept up the stairs from somewhere down below. Auntie followed it up, carrying with her all the things old ladies take to bed with them, a book and glasses and a handbag and a knitting bag. To my surprise Bell jumped up and gave her an arm. Auntie had been rather dragging at the banister, her face gray with a kind of tired bewilderment, and Cosette, watching her from the landing below, seemed about to follow and help her. I had never seen Bell do anything like that before; I had never seen her take a scrap of notice of Auntie before. She seemed to know which room was hers though, for she opened the door and escorted Auntie in, saying, “Good night, Mrs. Miller,” and telling her to sleep well.

  We went downstairs in pursuit of what Bell succinctly called dope. The landing on the drawing room floor was more spacious than the others and there stood on it at one side a scroll-ended sofa and at the other a kind of daybed with no back but vertical sides. I once possessed a postcard photograph of Proust seated on just such a daybed which so enraptured Cosette that, at enormous expense, she got an antique dealer in Kensington Church Street to find this one for her. Seated on it now were Felicity and Harvey, who, perhaps following Mervyn and Mimi’s example, were kissing and nuzzling and fondling each other. Admetus was sitting on the sofa opposite, drinking brandy, his girlfriend stretched out with her head in his lap.

  People were sitting on stairs all the way down, most of them drunk and a lot of them engaged in what I once heard Ivor call “the preliminaries to sexual congress.” Maurice Bailey had had enough of it and was going home. Having donned his summer hat of white straw, he was shaking hands with Cosette just inside the front door and telling her in a very repressive way not to overtire herself.

  For a little while Bell and I joined the circle of smokers in the dining room, passing round the joint speared on a hat pin with a marcasite rose on it, which must have belonged to Cosette, if not to Auntie. The doors to the garden were open. It was a warm soft night and a big orange moon was slowly rising behind the roofs and spires of Notting Dale. But the light it shed was mysteriously pale. As it rose, revealing itself like a large, glowing, not quite spherical, fruit, a light breeze came with it, ruffling all the gray foliage and making the leaves of the eucalypt shake with a soft rattle. A group stood watching it and commenting on this moonrise with extravagant admiration. There were a lot of people around at that time who raved about nature, about almost any natural phenomenon, about a common flowering weed even, and they were always those who were entirely ignorant of natural history. Over in the corner, on the stone seat, behind which the macleaya grew tall with its bluish vinelike leaves and feathery orange blossom, Gary and Fay were supervising a friend of theirs who had embarked on an acid trip. They had given him the LSD in a spoonful of jam, and now that it was too late, though nothing had so far happened, he had remembered a good reason for not experimenting with hallucinogens.

  “I’m a phobic,” I heard him say nervously. “I have arachnophobia. Suppose I start seeing spiders. I might see spiders on me. I’ll go mad if I get spiders on me.”

  Dominic, somehow isolated in this crowd, stood watching them with the unhappy near-disbelief of a crypto-Christian at a Roman orgy. When he saw me his expression changed from incredulous dismay to reproach. I knew he would soon be leaving, that his sister had found a room for him in Kilburn in the next street to where she lived, and, coward that I was, I hoped to avoid a showdown, an explanation, telling myself it was an ugly rather than a dignified parting that I feared. So I looked quickly away, I turned away, and taking Bell by the arm, was leading her back into the house when two things happened simultaneously. The clock on the tower of St. Michael the Archangel at the end of the street struck midnight and the doorbell rang.

  It didn’t just ring, it rang insistently, as if whoever it was had put finger to bell and kept it there, pressing hard. I thought it was more guests arriving, or rather gate-crashers, for as many of the people there were uninvited as invited. How could you tell, when Cosette had said to Gary and Fay and Dominic, to Felicity and Harvey and even the ballet dancers, to ask anyone they liked?

  “Most likely the neighbors complaining,” said Bell.

  But it wasn’t the neighbors or gate-crashers. It was Esmond Thinnesse.

  Neither Bell nor I let him in, but we were the first people he saw that he knew, indeed, apart from his wife, the only people there that he knew, for by then Elsa the Lioness had married and gone to live in France. He had been thin before, but now he was much thinner. He had an ascetic, even priestly, look. In fact, that was essentially the way he did look, like some monk long subjected to a severe discipline or fast. I remembered he was supposed to be particularly religious, and now his face had the rapt, trancelike look of a holy martyr in a Renaissance painting. Or so it appeared in the mixed moonlight and candlelight which was the hallway’s only illumination.

  He said to me, “I’ve come for my wife. Where is she?”

  Someone behind me gave a nervous giggle. I was momentarily stunned. It was the oddness of it that astounded me, that a man as conventional and in many ways old-fashioned as Esmond should for any purpose whatever come like this to a stranger’s house without warning in the middle of the night. He seemed to sense what was passing through my mind, for he said, “I have been in London all day on business. I have the motor with me. Finding myself at Marble Arch, I had an impulse to come here. It seemed the best way.” He spoke rather remotely, like one who has suffered such terrible unhappiness that it has drained him of all emotion. Or perhaps like someone who has done as his faith adjured him to do and cast his burdens upon God. “We can’t,” he added in the same tone, “go on like this.”

  I was beginning to say, “She’s upstairs somewhere …” but Bell was quicker and, recalling no doubt what Felicity had been doing upstairs, was halfway up the first flight before I had finished my sentence. Esmond followed her and I him, a crocodile of people following me, all of them somehow sensing melodrama, growing bored with the party, wanting a new stage for it, a climax, or at least a diversion. But a curious silence fell, at any rate on the stairs and that first landing, where faces appeared over the curve in the banisters. Above, of course, the hubbub continued, augmented at that moment by music from the record player in Gary’s room on the second floor, where someone had put on, at full volume, a Rolling Stones record.

  Bell, in any case, was too late. Not knowing what all this signified or who had arrived, Felicity and Harvey, having long before this gravitated from the daybed to a real bed, came out of Cosette’s bedroom carrying empty wineglasses and in a state of extreme dishevelment. Felicity persisted in wearing her miniskirts, though the fashion for them was past, and the one she had on, of black leather, had its zip undone. Her long dark hair hung loose over her shoulders and her face—she always made up heavily—was like a painter’s palette at the end of a hard day’s work. Harvey had his arm around her shoulders, his hand scooping up and squeezing her left breast as if he were trying to express milk from it.

  Cosette whispered to me, “Who is he?”

  “Her husband.”

  “Oh, dear. It’s all like the worst excesses of the Roman Empire, isn’t it?”

  Felicity screamed when she saw Esmond.

  I said afterward to someone, Cosette I think it was, that it mus
t have been dreadful for him, her screaming like that. He must surely then have remembered moments of passion and tenderness between them, perhaps those first moments of love beginning or the time when the sight of him, far from causing her to scream and hide her head in another man’s arms, brought her running to him with joy. But his face showed nothing of this. He said, “Felicity, I want you to come home with me. Come with me now and we can be home in an hour.”

  You could see Harvey didn’t want any part in this. Felicity was clinging to him, but he wasn’t holding her. He whispered something to her and then actually began backing away. She lifted her head from his chest and turned slowly around, cringing, with her shoulders hunched. People were coming down the upper flight now. I don’t think Esmond was aware of them, I don’t think he was really aware of anyone but himself and Felicity and perhaps a few vague, scarcely human, presences, a faceless chorus in a tragedy.

  “Come with me now, please,” he said. “This has gone on long enough.”

  I thought he would say something about the children, but he didn’t. He simply repeated his request to her. The landing was still lit only by candles and moonlight, but now Esmond, who had never been in the house before, put out one hand and pressed the light switch as if he had been doing so in this particular place every night for years. A kind of chandelier of metal branches bearing spheres of etched glass hung there and the light it gave was so bright that Cosette avoided having it on. When the brilliance flooded us all, making people blink and showing up their untidy hair and crumpled clothes, Felicity gave another cry, but this time it was a piteous, yielding sound. Esmond approached her, putting out his hand. She hesitated.