The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  “Some other time, then,” she said, and then added, incredibly, so that I had to suppress my laughter, “As a matter of fact it’s our wedding anniversary, so perhaps Esmond wouldn’t have liked it.”

  “I should think not.”

  “I’ll ring you again, I shan’t let you go as easily as that. Did you ever hear from Bell Sanger?” Poor Bell has acquired a permanent surname in Felicity’s speech.

  This sets her apart, puts her outside the friends category in which she may no longer be allowed a place.

  Why did I lie again? For the usual reason for all our lying. It makes things easier. “No,” I said. “Oh, no.”

  “What did she want?” Bell asked me when I told her about the call. Through her half sleeping, half waking, she heard the phone ringing or dreamed she heard it.

  “Me to go out with them.”

  She jumped up and the poor cat shot off her lap. “She isn’t coming here!”

  “She isn’t. Don’t worry. But would that be so bad? You’ve spoken to her.”

  Touchingly, she said, “Only to find out about you.”

  But Felicity’s name brought her into an area of her past that isn’t the part I want to know about. These revelations, the ones she made this morning, are not those I longed to hear. At least she has begun, though. She has begun to reveal.

  “Has she said anything to you about Silas?”

  I asked her carefully, “What sort of thing?”

  “Anything. Has she mentioned him? I can see in your face she has. Did she ask you if you ever thought I might have been responsible for Silas’s death?”

  What was the use of denying it? I nodded, pursing my lips, as if perhaps it was too bad, too awe inspiring, for speech.

  “No one mentioned it at my trial, did they? Did you notice? The prosecution didn’t even say I’d had a husband who killed himself. But all that stuff about me as a child came out, all that. And I’d forgotten it, did you realize that? I’d forgotten everything about it. I had to think for a moment who Susan was. It might have been some other person, some other twelve-year-old they were talking about. But that’s why I got such a long sentence. Isn’t it terrible to go to prison for all those years for something you’ve forgotten? They found it out, all the dirt, but they never found out about Silas, or if they did, they never questioned that he shot himself, even though by then they knew what I was.”

  She took another cigarette and lit it, shaking the match too slowly to extinguish the flame, having to drop it burning into the ashtray. “I did kill him,” she said. “Well, isn’t it obvious, knowing what we all know?”

  “You’re making it up, Bell,” I said.

  “Why would I? Haven’t I got crimes enough and notoriety enough? Why would I make it up?”

  “Why did you ever make anything up?” I said, and I know I said it bitterly.

  “To make things work better, of course. To make them go the way I wanted them to. Do you know anything about Russian roulette?”

  “Only that you use a revolver, put a bullet in only one of the chambers, and then spin it around. Felicity told us that much.” I was reluctant to talk about it. It is an unpleasant feeling to think you may be encouraging someone in her lying. It marks you as a dupe. “I never thought about it again.” I said. “I wasn’t interested.”

  “Not even when you met me again? Didn’t you wonder?”

  “I thought I was living in a society where people might commit suicide but not where they killed each other.”

  She laughed her distant dry laugh. “In Russian roulette,” she said, “what do you think the odds are? Come on, don’t look so … pained. You know most of the things I did, you ought to be tougher. You know now you were living in a society where one person anyway was capable of killing. So what do you think the odds are, using a revolver with a six-chamber cylinder?”

  “They must be five to one.”

  “Oh, no. That’s the mistake most people make. Because, you see, in a well-balanced gun, if you are loading only one cartridge, when you spin the cylinder the chamber with the cartridge in it will be heavier and will naturally tend to fall to the bottom. So the odds are much, much higher than five to one, perhaps, if you know just how to spin, as much as a hundred to one.”

  This seemed to echo something I’d heard before. “What has all this to do with Silas?” I said.

  “Silas taught it to me.”

  “Among other things he taught you, I suppose. At art school. Before he got you pregnant and married you and you had your miscarriage.”

  “Is that what I told you?”

  “Oh, Bell, don’t you even remember?” I realized I was carping pointlessly. It was hardly cruel, since she showed no sign of suffering, seemed almost to enjoy my sarcastic reminder of one of her prime lies. But it was useless and it was too late, she would never see. “What exactly did Silas teach you?”

  “About spinning the cylinder and the heaviest chamber falling to the bottom. And then he said if you got a lead bullet, a blank but not a cartridge, a solid lead bullet, and loaded it into one of the other chambers, that would be quite an interesting situation. Because now when you spun the cylinder that one would fall to the bottom, not the one with the cartridge in. If you calculated which chamber would be brought into line with the barrel when the chamber with the lead bullet fell to the bottom, say the one next but one to it on the left, you could load a cartridge into that chamber. Or if the cartridge was already in the revolver, you could calculate which chamber to put the lead in to bring the cartridge into line with the barrel.

  “Would you say that again slowly,” I said.

  She said it again. She offered to draw it.

  “No, don’t bother. I can see it without that. But barring mistakes or unless, say, the revolver wasn’t well-balanced, it wouldn’t be a matter of odds then, it would be a certainty.”

  She nodded, “Yes.”

  I looked up at her. Her face had the impassivity of Lucrezia Panciatichi’s, bland and composed, Lucrezia aged but still Lucrezia. “I don’t understand what you did,” I said.

  “Silas put a cartridge into one of the chambers and he left the revolver and went to get a drink—you know that filth he used to drink, wine with meths in it, one part purple meths to two parts red wine. While he wasn’t there I put the lead bullet into the next chamber but one.”

  There was silence. Bell took another cigarette and held it between her lips unlit for a moment. She reached for the Wedgwood lighter Cosette gave me, watching me speculatively.

  “The police would have found it,” I said.

  “I took it out after Silas was dead and before I went over to the Hall.”

  I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. All that stuff about well-balanced revolvers and the heaviest chamber falling to the bottom—how would I know if it is true or false? I know nothing of guns. I know no one I could ask. Would a man load a gun and then just lay it down somewhere while he went to get a drink? He might, if he were Silas Sanger. For one thing, he might have had a lot to drink already. I couldn’t believe it, but I could see Bell doing it just the same. Oh, I could see her.

  “Accepting that you did, which I don’t accept, why did you?”

  “I was so pissed off with him, I was so bored; he was driving me insane. He married me to get a slave and that’s what I was, a slave and a drudge, a thing to use, a servant to serve. When he married me I was grateful, I thought that was the life, ten times better than anything I could expect with what was behind me. I didn’t know anyone else, my mother and father wouldn’t have me near them, I hadn’t seen them for seven years, I hadn’t any friends. I only knew social workers and one or two kids from the home. You know all that, it all came out in court. I thought I was lucky to get a life with Silas, but I learned, I did a lot of growing up and learning in my six years of married life.”

  “There’s such a thing as divorce,” I said.

  The look she gave me brought it back, that sidelong calculating look bro
ught back to me my old delusion that money meant nothing to Bell, that she was uninterested in material things. But I am no longer deluded, that went long ago, I just remember with wonder and self-disgust the faith I had in the purity of her aims. “His old father was dying, wasn’t he? And he was rich. Well, he wasn’t as rich as Silas boasted, but his house was worth a bit. I knew what Silas would do with it, he’d told me often enough. Go and live in bloody Java and paint. He’d been there, he liked the climate. That’s why we were hanging on at Thornham, even though Esmond wanted us out. We were waiting for his old dad to die so that Silas could flog the house and go to bloody Java like some old French painter he was always wanking on about.”

  “Gauguin,” I said, “and it was Tahiti.”

  She took no notice. She always hated those interjections of mine, what she called “boring bits of culture.” “He didn’t care whether I came or not. But if I didn’t, he said he wasn’t going to keep me. I could go out to work. He’d kept me for six years, what did I expect? So when the telegram came saying his father was dead I didn’t show it to him. I kept it to myself and put the lead bullet in the revolver.”

  “You can’t send telegrams anymore,” I said stupidly. “Well, you can but they won’t get there any faster than letters.” Had there been a telegram sent up to Thornham? It was possible, but who would remember now? “I don’t believe any of it, Bell,” I said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “I can believe you wanted him dead.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “There is a difference.”

  “I wasn’t there when he did it,” she said. “I was upstairs like I said. He wouldn’t have known anything about it, or if he did for a split second, he’d have thought his time had come, the way you must be sort of expecting your time to come when you play Russian roulette.” She picked up the little cat and began stroking him, long hands pushing hard down the length of his body the way he loves. “His liver had gone rotten anyway. He wouldn’t have lived long. One glass of that red muck of his and he’d be staggering. His liver couldn’t handle it anymore, he was going yellow all over. God, I hated him.” Another cigarette, and the little cat flinching from the lighter flame. “Felicity saw the telegram come, you see.”

  “What do you mean, Bell?”

  She didn’t answer at once. “If Silas had died before his father, I wouldn’t have got the house, I was only his daughter-in-law. At any rate I’d have had to fight for it. But once he was dead it was sort of automatically Silas’s. Only as soon as Silas could get his hands on it he was going to be off to Java. And he mightn’t even have bothered to take me. Why would he? He was as sick of me as I was of him.” She drew on that cigarette then and puffed the smoke out through her nostrils as if there were a fire inside her face. “You’d finished lunch,” she said, “and Felicity was upstairs fetching the quiz papers that were in her bedroom. She looked out of the window and saw the boy come up on his bike. I don’t think she made the connection for quite a long time, not till just before I was going to leave in April. She got me talking about the old man and his death—I was moving into his house, you know. She just said, ‘But didn’t you get a wire an hour or so before it happened?’ I didn’t know what she meant at first. Have you ever heard a telegram called a wire?”

  “Only in books,” I said.

  “Sorting that one out gave me a chance to think. I told her the boy had come to the wrong house but I could tell she didn’t believe me. Funny, at my trial I thought she might be a witness. And then I thought that if I got off, they’d get me back again on another charge, on killing Silas, and Felicity would be there ballsing on about that telegram.” She sighed, looking at her fingers that were beginning to turn yellow with nicotine. “Have you still got that picture?”

  “What picture, Bell?” Though I knew, of course I knew.

  “The one of the girl in the red dress that whoever it was wrote a book about?”

  Not the same words, but the same kind of words, the same lack of comprehension, the same wonder. The wonder to me is that she can speak of it after the part it played, the role it had.

  “It’s in the study,” I said.

  “I haven’t been in there yet,” she said, and then, “Can we go out? I should like to go down to the river and go in a pub. Could we find a pub and eat there? Isn’t there a pub where some guy wrote the words to ‘Rule Britannia’?”

  “James Thomson and it’s The Dove. How did you know?”

  “You once told me,” she said.

  We didn’t talk about it but we each made assumptions. Or so I suppose. I made assumptions and all Bell’s behavior showed that she must have done so too and that they were of the same kind. But there was no talk of why.

  I would have told anyone who asked me that I was heterosexual. I had only, till then, had affairs with men. A few men. Several. I would like to say I didn’t count their number, that it wasn’t in that sort of light that I looked on them and back at them, but it wouldn’t be true, for that is a number we all know. After Dominic, there was a man at my publisher’s, an editor, though not my editor, and for one night there was Gary, just once. We weren’t drunk or high on anything, we just happened to be alone together in the house, talking, experiencing a sudden mutual warmth, fellow-feeling, shared knowledge, all those things and being young. But it was something like that, something of the same kind only magnified a hundred times, that brought me and Bell together that silent night.

  I have never wanted any other woman before or since. On the other hand, I never felt it was a shocking thing we did or wrong or perverse. It seemed natural. Homosexual men who have occasionally slept with women have told me it was enjoyable, they like it, but they felt it wasn’t the real thing. Doesn’t Proust say somewhere that the homosexual man only sins when he sleeps with a woman? So afterward I half expected my lovemaking with Bell, though delightful, though immensely pleasurable, not to be like the real thing. But my reaction was very different, for delightful and pleasurable were not words to be used, other hitherto undiscovered words had to be found, and as to the real thing, this was more real than whatever the real thing is. And so I come up against an inability to express my feelings, my desires, and my fulfillments, a blankness like a sheet of dark water, a pool on which float dazzling mysterious memories and whispered words, a drowning place where the thin branch I clutch at is the recollection that I was in love. I was in love with Bell with the kind of fierce, jealous passion experienced by girls ten years younger than I was for someone they are at school with.

  Psychologists would say—oh, I know what they would say—that I had been arrested in my sexual development by a shock, a trauma-making revelation. This there had certainly been, and perhaps the knowledge of my possible legacy of Huntington’s did freeze me in some inverted phase. But it didn’t feel like that, it felt like passion, it felt like being in love, it was being in love, it was the kind of thing you delude yourself that, if all goes well, will last a lifetime.

  Things, of course, didn’t all go well. When do they?

  On a high and glorious plane it lasted a little while.

  Eva Faulkner’s cousin Audrey had vanished, so Bell moved in and became the Girl-in-Residence. I have never known if Cosette knew, but I tend to think she didn’t. Cosette had an attitude toward lesbians characteristic of her generation: “Don’t leave me alone with her, darling. Whatever would I do if she made a pass at me?”

  Did she then suppose that all heterosexual men she was alone with would make passes at her? Hoped it perhaps, poor Cosette. I never felt the hint of a recoil when I kissed her or saw her flinch when Bell came near her. No doubt she saw us only as best friends and the jealousy in her that I observed was due to this, that Bell took me away from her and—incongruously perhaps, but who really understands people?—I took Bell away from her.

  She was very alone that summer which was Bell’s summer and mine. She must have been, though I was aware of it only afterward. Being in love and hav
ing, at least supposedly, one’s love returned, there is nothing like it for making one oblivious to the loneliness of others. I was a little dismayed, I am sorry to say a little fastidiously disapproving, when I understood Cosette was sometimes sleeping with Rimmon. She was fifty-five and he was twenty-seven; he had no money and she had a lot. If I didn’t understand about loneliness, I understood even less that in middle age the heyday in the blood does not always grow tame. Going to Glyndebourne with the Castles and taking Auntie for drives in Richmond Park were not enough for her.

  Bell has never read any of my books. She has scarcely read any books by anyone. If I am to be very honest, I will say that in a secret corner of myself I was glad she never read mine, for my books are not the way I talk, they don’t reveal real emotion, real sensitivity, they are not about people in the way Bell and I talked about people. Anyone who knew me the way she knew me would, after reading them in the spirit in which Bell would necessarily have read them, be disillusioned about me and see me as a hypocrite. Useless to talk to someone so unacquainted with books as Bell is, of the dichotomy between the writer’s art and the writer’s life or, as she would have put it, other balls like that.

  She was in my room just as I finished my stint of writing for that day. It was late summer, early autumn, and she was in white cheesecloth, a kind of robe with huge sleeves, the waist caught in to its tiny span by a belt of plaited leather. Above my head, while I typed the last of my requisite two thousand words, I had listened to the movements she made prior to coming down to me, the closing of that window, the window which had never been protected by the promised cage, her footfalls muffled by the carpet, then touching the wood surround which did not at all muffle the clack-clack of Indian sandals, the door shutting, the creak of the 104th stair as she began to descend. These are the stuff of love’s obsessiveness, in which I was up to my neck.