The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  People of Cosette’s kind—generous, selfless, patient, disproportionately grateful for any little thing that may be done for them—these people are always used, taken advantage of, and neglected. Nineteenth-century fiction is full of them and this has led us to believe that they and their fate are the invention of novelists. But they exist, to endow others and be trodden on by those who owe them the most. All of which makes Cosette’s subsequent life and eventual fate the more bizarre. Her life to come and her fate were what no one could have expected; they seemed a contradiction and a defiance of the rules that say such a woman will never find passionate, disinterested love, tragedy, violent death, and final irony, but only exploitation and disillusionment.

  None of us young ones had given much thought to Auntie while Cosette was away. It is only now, looking back, that I understand she must have seen Cosette almost in the light of a protector. She was so mouselike, so quiet and creeping, that even to Bell and me with our never-satisfied hunger to know what went on in people’s heads, our constant examination of personality, she seemed a person without feelings, certainly a person not worth wasting conjecture on. That she might be afraid in Cosette’s absence, afraid of us all with our habits acquired in a revolution she had never understood, of our youth and our music, our comings and goings and our sexual freedom, never crossed our minds.

  Perpetua, of course, was sometimes there. Jimmy the gardener would always put his head round the door with a word for her. But Cosette’s old friends from Wellgarth days, though visiting the clinic, never thought of visiting Auntie. Bell had been kind to her on the night of the party, but if she paid her any particular attention while Cosette was away, I wasn’t aware of it. Did anyone actually speak to the old woman while Cosette wasn’t there to speak to her? As I try to imagine the drawing room as it was without Cosette, I also see it without Auntie and this makes me sure Auntie kept to her own room most of the time, hiding herself from us and the challenges and dangers and shocks we offered, longing surely for Cosette’s return. And when Cosette walked into the drawing room Auntie had taken care to be there. For once she showed emotion, getting up from the red velvet chair and coming to Cosette with her arms out.

  “Why didn’t you come to see me?” Cosette asked her when the embrace was done.

  Auntie had no answer, perhaps didn’t care to say the means were not at her disposal, that none of us had offered to take her or even call a taxi and direct the driver. She could only shake her head and frown mysteriously, in the way old people do when they want to keep their needs and shortcomings a secret from the young.

  We all assembled in the dining room for the meal, Cosette and Auntie, Bell and I, Gary, who had just come back from India, and Fay and Rimmon. It was a small party for the House of Stairs, no one having come to take the place of Mervyn or of Felicity and Harvey. There was no longer any Girl-in-Residence, a function as empty and free of duties as being a Gold Stick or Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, but still a role with a room that no one filled. Cosette had tried to persuade the ballet dancers to take over the top floor as their home but they, naturally, were reluctant to give up rent-free occupancy of the Hampstead flat, whose owner, with luck, might never come back from South Africa. A girl called Audrey, who was a cousin of Admetus’s new girlfriend, had said she might take up the vacant post and vacant room. I don’t think she quite believed she could have that large second floor room for nothing and live there without performing any services beyond talking and listening and preparing cups of coffee, and that was making her hesitate. Cosette talked wistfully about this during the meal.

  We finished eating and, as usual, got up without thought of clearing the table or washing up. Perpetua wouldn’t be there the next day, and it was Bell who said in a very uncharacteristic housewifely way that she and I should do the dishes.

  “Oh, leave it till the morning,” said Cosette, not at all uncharacteristically.

  “I shan’t be here in the morning.”

  “But, darling, I thought you were living here now!”

  She sounded not just polite. She sounded appalled that the number of her household was therefore even smaller than she had supposed.

  “Bell has to live with her mother,” I said. “For the present anyway.”

  “I’m sure we’ve room for your mother too. Look at all the room we’ve got!”

  Of course this was absurd. Cosette could be absurd, her liberality taken to ridiculous lengths, and to insensitive lengths too. Even supposing Bell’s mother was very different from the grotesque description I had been given, why should she want to give up her home and come to live in a strange woman’s house? Bell gave her dry chuckle.

  “I’ll bear your kind offer in mind, Cosette.”

  No kind offer had been made, of course, only an assumption. But now the idea was in her head, Cosette wanted Bell. Not in the Girl-in-Residence’s room, that was reserved for Audrey, but why not in the top room above the place where I worked if she wanted some privacy? We even had to go up there and look at it, the lot of us, though Auntie disappeared into her own domain on the way. Cosette, sitting on the bed that had been Felicity’s, breathless from all that climbing, apologized for the room, its location up 106 stairs, its slanted ceiling, its dangerous window.

  “I’ll have bars put on that window. I’ll have a kind of cage made to make it safe.”

  She never did. Because Gary said how awful it would be, you would feel you were in prison? Or because Bell said not to do that for her, she couldn’t leave her mother’s house in Harlesden at present? Apparently, though, she was well able to leave her mother for a night or two, for she stayed and slept up there, and the next day, when I came home from the play center, told me that she had met an old friend of her mother’s who might just be willing to come and share her house.

  It was not that evening but a week or so later that I dressed Bell up in Cosette’s gown of “wasted” red. I had forgotten those remarks of Cosette’s, when she first saw the Bronzino reproduction, about still possessing somewhere a dress that looked like Lucrezia Panciatichi’s. But Cosette had been invited to Glyndebourne by the Castles and it was still obligatory then to wear a long evening dress when you went to hear opera there. Very seldom did anyone take Cosette out. I was happy that the Castles had thought of this, even though I knew it was done to show Cosette a contrast to the House of Stairs. At a party Cosette gave for Admetus’s fortieth birthday, I had chanced to hear Dawn’s husband murmur to his wife, “I wonder if she knows the life she gave up for this circus is still going on?”

  The Glyndebourne evening was two months off but Cosette took it into her head she must root out a suitable dress to wear, or in default of this, buy a new one. It reminded me of the old days at Garth Manor where Elsa and I used to try on Cosette’s jewelry and she would say when either of us admired something particularly, “It’s yours!”

  “Have it, have it,” was what she kept saying to me if I lingered a little over some thirties frock or postwar floor-length creation. But I laughed at her and shook my head. What did I want with a shawl-neck dress in powder-blue rayon crepe or a black ballerina skirt with bead embroidery? Then we came upon the Bronzino gown and it was very much like the one in the painting. Lucrezia’s low-cut neckline is filled in with gold lace and the lower parts of her sleeves are of a rich, ruffled black satin, but otherwise the dress was the same: tight bodice, puffed sleeves, full skirt, and all made of silk the color of a ripe Victoria plum.

  “Have it,” said Cosette. “You’ll be doing me a favor, darling. I’m such a hoarder, can’t bring myself to throw things away.”

  Bell was in her rusty, dusty black. Looking at her now, as she sleeps in my armchair, I can see no difference between what she wears today and what she wore on that momentous, tremendous, wonderful day, when she arrived at the House of Stairs in the early evening, except that, because it was March and cold, she had a black cape on and the shawl wrapped around her. Cosette was taking us out to eat and Rimmon and Gary w
ere coming too. I don’t remember where we went, though it may have been that Russian place down in Brompton. Later events must have obscured my memory of such things as restaurants and food and drink.

  The house was nearly empty. Auntie, who would never eat out in the evening, had long gone to bed. Gary and Rimmon had gone off to see a friend in Battersea, and if it seems strange to me now to hear of people going out visiting at eleven-thirty at night, it didn’t then. I don’t know where Fay was, staying perhaps with her new lover, an Indian who kept a sordid hotel, a kind of house of call, near Paddington Station. Bell and Cosette and I were alone and Cosette, at only midnight, talked of going to bed. She easily got tired, debilitated still from her not very serious operation.

  “Though it isn’t a delightful prospect,” she said, embarrassing me, “getting into that great big bed on one’s own. Sometimes I pull down one of the pillows and hug that.”

  “I want you to put the dress on,” I said to Bell.

  At first she wouldn’t. She said it was silly, her hair was wrong and she hadn’t any jewelry. But as she stood there looking at the picture, the idea grew on her. It would take a little while, she said, for she would have to braid her hair and wind it round her head, and I mustn’t be there, I must come back when it was done. I gave her the cameo that was herself and fastened it to a string of pearls, for it is a necklace rather like this that Lucrezia wears.

  While she was changing I went down to Cosette’s room. Cosette, in a Hollywood thirties bed jacket with white feathers on it, was sitting up in bed reading my book, which had been published the week before. She had already read it in manuscript and proof, but she swore it would be quite different reading the finished copy. She was also enraptured because I had dedicated it to her. I now had to listen to a lot of extravagant praise of what I knew even then was worthless trash; it made me wince, and served me right.

  In her bed with its piled satin-covered cushions and its pink pillows, its pink silk and white lace counterpane all covered with magazines and tissues and pairs of glasses, white telephone, telephone directories, address book, writing paper, fountain pen, Cosette, rising from befeathered fluffiness, scented with Patou’s Joy, looked much younger in the flattering pink lamplight, looked almost girlish. Since the coming of Ivor Sitwell she had abandoned the plastering of her skin with greasy cream at night and the pinning up of her hair and these exercises had never been resumed after he left. Her hair, now a silvery gold, lay smoothly on her plump white shoulders. The lines on her face scarcely showed, and the sad look, which came now that the tissues had begun to droop once more, gave her an appearance of wistfulness, not age. And those words someone speaks of Cleopatra at the end of the play came into my mind, that “she would catch another Anthony in her strong toil of grace.” Or I think they did, they should have done, but could I really have had such foresight?

  We were talking about the book, I with reluctance, for I should like to have taken the money and forgotten it, Cosette with enthusiasm, when the door opened and Bell came in. Or Lucrezia Panciatichi came in—or Milly Theale. She was wearing the pearls and the cameo and had found a gold chain of mine as well and a string of beads to wind round her braided coronet of hair. The red dress was loose on her, but you couldn’t see that from the front, she having skillfully pinned it down the back and at the waist. Her skin had that very pale luminous brownness that gives Lucrezia her glowing look. Instead of smiling at our delight—Cosette actually clapped—she stood gravely between the Chinese screens, then sank softly into the high-backed chair and became entirely the portrait, her left hand closing over the carved arm, her right holding open the little leather-covered book she had brought with her.

  Cosette wanted to take a photograph of her. She even got up and started poking about the room in a fruitless hunt for flashbulbs. I think she did take some sort of picture in the end, a picture that we all knew would never come out. Though she couldn’t find the flashbulbs, she found the bloodstone. She tried the ring on Bell’s hand, but Bell’s fingers were very long and slender. It was too big for the third finger and had to go on the middle one. Bell sat there, curiously serene, not laughing at Cosette’s efforts, not even smiling. It was as if Lucrezia or Milly had entered into her, infecting her with an old-fashioned placidity. After a while, when Cosette was back in bed, Bell joined in the conversation, idle midnight talk it was, about fashions and how uncomfortable it must have been to dress like that all the time, but she didn’t smoke while she had the red dress on. My cigarettes were on the greenroom-style dressing table with its mirror ringed by light bulbs, but Bell didn’t take one.

  Cosette was tired and falling asleep. It wasn’t in her nature to say she wanted to sleep now, to shoo us away. She nodded off, smiled, shook herself, her head dropped again. We took pity on her and left, turning out all the lights at the door. Bell slipped the ring off her finger and left it on the dressing table.

  In was a black night, starless and with no moon. I was aware of the quietness of the house, for at this time there would usually still be music coming from somewhere, the murmur of voices, the sound of languid laughter. That night there was a deep silence, and even the perpetual hum of distant traffic seemed hushed. For a long time the light bulbs on the staircase had needed replacing, a job for Perpetua if only she had known it needed to be done, but she was never there after dark. As our ancestors had done, we took candles to light us to bed.

  But Bell in the red dress had come down from my room in the dark, guided by the light from the doorway above and the doorway below. On the stairs she took my hand in hers and led me. The long stiff skirt of the dress rustled as we made our way up. In my room the light was soft and dim, coming from the bed lamp. The painted Lucrezia looked down at the living Lucrezia. I thought—not then, but on the next day—how strange it was, how infinitely mysterious it would have been to that cinquecento girl if she could have imagined, while she sat for Bronzino in all her beauty and finery, the picture he made reproduced and the copy, no less brilliant and true, hanging in the room where two women, one of them surely herself, entered each other’s arms and made love.

  Bell pushed the door closed with her toe, a naked toe that had not previously made itself visible under the red silk. Oh, there was such a silence! No words, no sound of breath, after our mouths parted and our eyelids half closed, then, like a roar in the quiet, the rustle of cascading silk and the tinkle of gold and stones, as the dress fell and the jewels fell. A shivering and a rapture of silky skins touching, and we moved into the pool of light shed by that single lamp onto the bed.

  12

  TODAY IS SUNDAY. I never write on Sundays and Bell doesn’t have to go to work in the shop. It is time for us to talk. By whose decree? It was a decision we both seemed to reach simultaneously, as if each knew at the same point that the time had come and there was nothing else left to do.

  Working in the shop wears her out. She falls asleep as soon as she gets home, and by “home” I mean my house, for it is here that she has returned every day. On the second evening and the third, when she woke up at about ten, I had a taxi take her home to Kilburn and the house under the railway arch. But it seemed a cruelty, perhaps because she was so malleable and so meek, allowing her arms to be pushed into the sleeves of the old black coat she wears, letting herself be led out to the waiting cab, lifting her face to be kissed on a cold cheek. So on Friday I made up the bed in the spare room for her and there she has been sleeping, fourteen, fifteen hours at a stretch.

  And all this sleeping, the cumulative effect of it, has at last refreshed her so that when she came down this morning, smoking her first cigarette of the day, she seemed less ghostly, more present, younger and fresher-looking, even managing to smile. And when the bigger, friendlier cat climbed onto her lap, she began stroking him instead of pushing him listlessly away. Facing each other later on, we came to this joint decision. We must talk. The things that had been waiting so long for utterance must now be said. It was only on which things should
take precedence over which other things that we differed. I believe it was Felicity’s phone call as much as anything which directed the turn our talking took. Yesterday evening, quite early in the evening, while Bell lay upstairs sleeping and I was sitting in the study reading for the fourth or fifth time The Spoils of Poynton, she phoned from the World’s End flat.

  I had truly supposed I should never hear from her again. All that about our meeting in London, about our having unanswered questions to discuss, I had taken as so much flannel, the stuff of small talk. But no, she meant it. Here it was, Saturday night, and she and Esmond were up in town planning to eat at a little French restaurant round the corner when she suddenly thought—“Why not ask Elizabeth to join us? We did actually book a table for four, but of course the chances of Miranda and Jeremy actually wanting to eat with us were pretty well nil from the start.”

  There was something attractive about it. What is she like now? What is he like? What, above all, are they like together? As she spoke I could again hear her scream when she saw Esmond come up Cosette’s stairs, I could see her turn her face away into Harvey’s shoulder. But I had Bell to think of, Bell, who slept because I was there, a reassuring presence downstairs. I lied to Felicity, I told her I had already arranged to go out. My refusal seemed not to distress her.