The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  She said, incredibly, “What about all my things?”

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had laughed, but there was utter silence except for Mick Jagger upstairs. Bell’s and mine were the only names of those present that Esmond knew and he said, without looking at us, without taking his eyes from Felicity, “Elizabeth or Bell will send them on.”

  She took his hand and went with him. They passed me and went down the stairs. On her face was a look of total defeat. Her freedom had lasted nine months, and I should think it was a matter of doubt whether she had enjoyed it. Esmond spoke not a word to anyone and neither did she. The front door closed quietly behind them and I heard a car start.

  I received a note from her two or three weeks later, thanking me for sending the two packages of her clothes, and after about a year, or a year and a bit, she phoned to invite Cosette and me to Thornham for Christmas. For various reasons, though rather touched at being invited, we refused. Later on Elsa told me Esmond had bought the flat at the World’s End, very much the “in” place to live at that date, to afford Felicity a kind of bolt-hole. I heard about her, but I never heard from her or spoke to her again until two weeks ago.

  The party began to break up after they left. That kind of thing casts a blight on merrymaking, in much the same way as a ghost might, coming to the table and sitting down in an empty chair. We never saw Harvey again. Though he had been living in the House of Stairs, sleeping with Felicity in her room on the top floor, he must have had somewhere else to go, for he disappeared along with the crowd that went when the dancers went.

  Only Gary and Fay and their phobic friend remained, still out in the garden, still on the stone seat, and looking now in the moonlight like a group of statuary on a fountain after the water has been turned off. Arms around each other, heads lolling, they sprawled in attitudes of abandonment, even the acid freak in a peaceful, stupefied doze. Bell and I looked down at them from the dangerous window of the top room, the room which had been Felicity’s. I had conducted her there, offering her the bed, when she said it was too late for her to go home. We opened the lower sash and leaned out, lying on our stomachs for safety’s sake.

  The sky was clear but no stars were visible. Cosette’s garden had become a collection of empty bottles and broken glasses and cigarette ends and heels of loaves.

  “I don’t understand why people get married,” said I, who was to do so myself three or four years afterward.

  “Women get married to have someone to keep them,” Bell said quite seriously. “They get married to be safe.”

  “Felicity’s got a degree, she could get a job. Why does she need someone to keep her?”

  Bell laughed a little at that, a small, dry laugh. “You know my feelings about that. Not everyone’s into working the way you are, as you could see by the gang here tonight.”

  Emboldened by the night and her niceness, I asked her why she had got married. Why had she married Silas?

  She was at art school, she told me, Leicester College of Art, and she met Silas there. He was her supervisor, she a first-year student. They got married because she was pregnant, but afterward he made her have an abortion. Then Silas got the sack, or got warned he would get the sack, or something like that, on account of his propensity for doing dangerous things with firearms, so he left and tried to live by his painting alone.

  “So you didn’t marry to have someone keep you,” I said.

  “Yes, I did. Partly. I knew he’d got an old dad who was ill and who’d leave him something. As a matter of fact, I thought it was more than it was. But I wasn’t far wrong, was I? I did get it and it does keep me— just.”

  We said good night soon after that and I went down to my own room, congratulating myself on having at last found out something of Bell’s history. I had no idea then—naturally I didn’t, believing her, as everyone did, as Esmond Thinnesse had once said he did, because of her honest and direct manner, to be totally truthful—that most of what she told me at the window that night was false. The important bits—none of those were true. When people tell lies about the past, they nearly always distort it to flatter themselves. That is why they lie. The truth isn’t glamorous enough, it doesn’t make them into the exciting, experienced, successful people they wish to appear. Bell was unique. She invented a past that showed her in an unsympathetic light.

  I think she rejected the truth out of mere caprice.

  11

  IN VENEZUELA THERE IS a village where half the population has Huntington’s chorea. Such a high incidence is brought about by the inbreeding in this remote place where the poor people until recently have been quite ignorant about the hereditary nature of their sickness and have intermarried regardless of a parent’s disease and the disease of a partner’s parent. In their lakeside village they also thought Huntington’s—though not knowing it by this name—exclusive to their locality and were amazed when told it was worldwide.

  I have been reading all this in today’s paper and can’t help wondering if Felicity has read it too. Unless she has changed greatly, it is right up her street, just the thing to regale her family with the way she used to regale us with Selevin’s mouse and stiletto fatalis and the Defenestration of Prague. But she may have embarked on it long before today, for the newspapers and television and magazines have been full of Huntington’s lately. Huntington’s has become a fashionable disease, displacing multiple sclerosis and even schizophrenia in the public’s curiosity. I glanced at the piece again before I got ready to go and meet Bell, at the photographs of the poor bewildered people, and reread the paragraph at the end of the article, about the test that can now be done and the counseling for potential victims that can be sought.

  If the sixties was the age of the sexual revolution and the seventies of the destruction of our environment, the eighties are the decade of the support group and the counselor. I doubt if there is any problem, physical or mental, confronting modern man and woman, for which counseling can’t be obtained. If I had been able to talk to a counselor in the sixties, would the course of my life have been different? Who knows? As it was, I did so much of what I did in the expectation of grotesque paralysis and encroaching death: writing for financial gain my bad, sensational, insensitive books, so as to live and enjoy the present; making love with whom I chose, often promiscuously, on the dubious ground of not missing anything; marrying, criminally, dishonestly, in the hope of pretending none of it was true, and giving a false reason for my refusal to have a child. And then, of course, there was Bell… .

  It sounds insane, but can you believe me when I say, half-truthfully, more than half, that if Huntington’s had come, at least it would all have been justified, at least I could say I acted in the fearful expectation of this and I was justified? I was right not to have a child, I was right not to give birth to another being with a fifty-fifty chance of Huntington’s. I was right to produce twenty-five sexy, romantic, sensational adventure books in seventeen years, so that I could live those years in comfort. I was right not to struggle half-starved and alone in a rented room creating the literature I know I could have created and on the dream of its being published one day in the sweet or paralyzed by-and-by. (Though in fact the gain was never as great as at first I anticipated, I never made a fortune, or achieved great success or fame, as perhaps writers don’t, even the purveyors of adventure and passion and crime, unless they write from the heart.)

  I shall be forty next week and as Bell said I am very likely out of the woods. To speak, as I am sometimes inclined to do, with the truest, deepest pessimism, I have made a mess of my life for nothing. But it is useless to brood on it, pitifully absurd to maunder like this. I have been to meet Bell, as I hinted just now, I have been to meet her after her first day at the shop in Westbourne Grove.

  It wasn’t that I much wanted to. Nor did she ask me, though she rang up the morning after I left her sleeping to remind me rather dolefully of when she was starting and where the shop was. I went because I thought I ought to. A
poor woman who has passed years in prison—the least an old friend can do is keep an eye on her, give her some kind of support until she adjusts to her new world. Anyone who has loved passionately and now feels an obligation to the object of her love, that where desire once impelled, duty now dictates, will know how I felt. For that renewal of excitement, of passionate need, which I experienced when I pursued Bell on the tube train and through the streets, that was ephemeral after all, was a false fire, and now what I feel is more a wariness and a dread of something I can’t define.

  She was surprised to see me but very pleased. How ecstatically grateful I would once have been for those signs of pleasure, the lighting up of her whole face, her hands stretched out to me! Once, of course, I wouldn’t have been late but waiting for her to come out ten minutes before the shop was due to close. As it was, the phone rang as I was leaving and then I found one of the cats on the front doorstep, a place neither of them is supposed to know exists, and had to stop to put him inside, so when I met Bell it was on the corner of Ledbury Road, I having raced down from Westbourne Park station.

  I spotted her before she saw me and it seemed to me that she was walking aimlessly, and if she was making for Notting Hill Gate, in the wrong direction. But before I spoke to her I understood, or thought I understood. She was avoiding Archangel Place. The extent of depth of this I didn’t realize until she said simply, “I can’t exactly remember where it is.”

  You would think that anyone who had done such things and known such things would have the place where they happened indelibly printed on the memory, so no matter what was forgotten that could never be forgotten. There would be a map in the mind, a street plan with fearful corners and ominous landmarks and signposts that warned what to shy away from. But, “I think something has gone wrong with my memory,” said Bell. “I expect I could find it in the London guide. Anyway, it’s all changed round here.”

  It hadn’t—much. Apart from some smartening up, nothing had changed in this immediate vicinity. Together we walked westward, toward Ladbroke Grove.

  “How was it?” I said.

  “The shop? I don’t know if I shall be equal to it.” Bell laughed the laugh that was always dry and faint but has now become ghostly, a whispered giggle at the far end of a passage in the dark. “She doesn’t like me handling money, you can tell that. I nearly told her it wasn’t for helping myself from the till that I got sent to prison.”

  “Perhaps you had better not say that.”

  “Oh, I won’t. I am not so open as I used to be, I can tell you.”

  I had no clear idea of where we were making for. It seemed that, considering our separate destinations, we were both going in the wrong direction. And then it came to me both that Ladbroke Grove station would do for me as well as Westbourne Park and that Bell intended to come home with me. What else had I in mind? A cup of tea in a café and then dispatching her back to Kilburn? She was a ghost, I thought, and not only in her laugh. We always think of ghosts as pale, as white and glimmering, and Bell has faded, has bleached to pallor, her skin and her hair and even her eyes, vague now, leeched of their colors. Only her clothes remain deepest black. I wonder what has become of the shawl she wore the first time she came to Cosette’s and which once covered Silas’s body?

  She smoked as she walked, going into a tobacconist’s by the station to buy more cigarettes. In the train she fell briefly asleep but revived once we were home and walked about my house, admiring it. The cats homed on her, loving her for some reason, clambering over her and the ash-scattered folds of her bundled black cotton. I fear the reason may be that they love anyone who smells strongly, no matter what of, and Bell reeks of stale cigarette smoke, she smells like something raked out of the ashes of a fire. She is sleeping again now, her long pale hands hanging over the arms of the chair like empty sleeves.

  I am sitting opposite her with a glass of gin and dry vermouth in my hand. Bell has only sipped hers and her cigarette has burned itself out in the ashtray. It seems strange to me that though we have been talking for the best part of two hours she has never once mentioned Cosette, or for that matter, Mark. But perhaps that isn’t so strange.

  Cosette and I had refused Felicity’s invitation but Bell accepted, spent Christmas at Thornham and reported back to me that everything was just the same as before Felicity ran away. Even the children seemed unaffected by her long absence, and Miranda was still quoting, with proud sententiousness, her mother’s opinions.

  “My mummy says it’s revolting to eat quail’s eggs,” or “My mummy says only old ladies wear stockings.”

  The party was run on the same lines as those of the one the year Silas died. Only there was no quiz on the day after Boxing Day. There was no quiz at all. But the same people were there, more or less. At any rate, old Julia Dunne was there and the ancient brigadier and his wife and Rosalind and Rupert, Felicity’s sister and brother-in-law. And Lady Thinnesse, of course, was there, behaving toward Felicity exactly as she had always done. On Bell’s last evening Felicity organized a debate, the subject being the possible reintroduction of capital punishment, in which Bell said Esmond stood up stoutly for the noes and Mrs. Dunne became quite rejuvenated and vociferous for the yeses.

  One of the things I liked so very much about Bell, I mean one of the definable things, was that she was quite as interested in people as I was. She was the only person I have ever known who really wanted to get inside people’s heads and know how they worked and the only person who could talk about other people for hours on end without getting bored or tired. Without any tutelage or training, she had a fine grasp of human psychology. I learned a lot about people from Bell, though I never had the wisdom to put any of it in my books, preferring to use stereotypes for my characters. And she had, has, will always have, a wonderful imagination.

  By this time I had found out why she hadn’t wanted me to know where she was living or to go there. It was her mother’s flat in Harlesden. Bell often said how she didn’t really think of anywhere west of Ladbroke Grove of east of the City as being London at all, so I could understand her detestation of West Ten and all its subdivisions. Besides, it was her mother herself. She said she wanted to be totally open about it now she was on the subject and the truth was she would have been ashamed for me to meet her mother.

  “If you saw her in the street, you’d think she was an old bag lady. She doesn’t even keep herself clean. She’s an old cockney”—and here Bell laughed her dry laugh—“who carts her false teeth about with her in a tobacco tin.”

  “She can’t be that old,” I said.

  “She’s old to be my mother. She was a lot over forty when I was born. The thing was, when I left Admetus’s place I hadn’t anywhere to go but to her. She’s not well anyway. She needs someone with her and there’s no one but me.”

  I hesitated. Still, why not say it? “But you’ve a brother, haven’t you? I’ve seen your brother; I saw him at the Global Experience thing.”

  She laughed. It must have been at the memory of those dotty happenings. “Oh, Marcus, yes.”

  “Is that what he’s called?” I was enchanted by his name. A person couldn’t be that bad, I suggested, who would call her children Marcus and Christabel.

  “She probably wasn’t as bad then, but she’s very bad now.”

  I told her she couldn’t live with her mother for the rest of her life, meaning her mother’s life.

  “Don’t you worry, I won’t,” Bell said.

  Soon after that conversation I remembered Elsa the Lioness telling me just after the death of Silas that Bell had nowhere to go and no relatives to take her in. Her parents were dead. But since she was so ashamed of her mother, wishing to keep her existence a secret from most people, no doubt she would have said she was dead. It seemed reasonable enough. How strange and sad that she should so detest her mother and I so love mine—well, my adoptive mother. For that was the year, or the spring, Cosette was ill. In fact, she wasn’t really ill at all, she had a scare and gave me a
scare, but because I loved her so much I magnified it out of all proportion. I was sure that because she was having uterine hemorrhages she must be dying of cancer and I confided my worries to Bell.

  “When will you know what she’s got?”

  “In about a week,” I said.

  I imagined losing her, I imagined her own fear of death. I talked to Bell about it, about Cosette’s long, half-asleep life, and the chance that had come at last, too late perhaps, for her to live. How terrible if freedom, so short-lived, not even surely enjoyed, should so quickly end in death! Bell listened, calmly attentive. Sometimes she looked as if love was something she didn’t quite understand and, lips parted, head held slightly on one side, was considering it as a subject for possible research. But I am not sure if I thought like that then, if I was as wise as that then.

  Cosette went into the hospital, it was the Harley Street Clinic, and they scraped something from the inside of her womb and found she had a benign polyp, which they removed. I think—no, I know—Cosette was proud of all this. You see, it made her seem young. It made her seem as if she still had active reproductive organs, and when I went in to see her along with the crowds of other people who gathered round her bed, I was embarrassed by her talk. I was embarrassed when she said to Dawn Castle and Perpetua that they hadn’t “taken anything away,” that her insides were still in “working order,” they hadn’t made her sterile. Because of this I said not a word to other people, not even to Bell, telling myself that because the worry was past so must be any interest in Cosette’s condition.

  We welcomed her home with flowers and a feast. We put flowers in the drawing room and flowers in her bedroom and in the big jardiniere that stood at the top of the first flight of stairs. Bell helped me fetch the flowers and arrange them and she helped me lay the table in the dining room and shop for food. It was Cosette’s money, of course, for she had an account at the delicatessen and an account at the florist’s, and because she was always more or less on a diet, she ate less than anyone, but as she would have said, it was the thought that counted. She looked tired when she came home and rather bemused. It occurred to me—too late—that someone ought to have gone to fetch her in her own car, not left her to be brought back by an unknown minicab driver. But I wasn’t able to drive then and as for Gary and Fay and the acid-freak Rimmon (his real name was Peter), who had come to live in the house without invitation, none of them offered or were even at home when Cosette left the clinic.