The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  This was so accurate I began to laugh. “Did you actually pay good money?”

  “The best,” he said.

  Cosette fell in love with him that evening. It happened as quickly as that. I was dismayed to see it, I watched aghast as, when we returned to the drawing room to drink, for some forgotten reason, champagne, she turned on him a look I had once seen on another face in very different circumstances. This had been when Cosette and I were together in Italy and into this café in Bologna came an itinerant musician with a guitar. There was a child in the café with her parents and older sister, a girl of about eight. She fell in love at first sight with the guitarist, following him in worshipful silence around the restaurant from table to table, watched with unconcealed amusement by her mother and father and the older girl. When he became aware of her attention he turned to her and performed only for her, seating her on a chair at a table alone, playing for her a grotesque pluck-plucking version of “Santa Lucia,” and receiving with evident kindly delight her gaze of adoration. Cosette, of an age to be that girl’s grandmother, wore that look identically, and for a long moment when he brought her glass of champagne she met his eyes with undisguised wonder and glory in her own.

  It would pass, I thought, it must pass, it must be no more than a “crush,” an evening’s infatuation that with nothing to feed on would die, would become for poor Cosette no more than a piece of nostalgia on which to look back with a “Do you remember that beautiful man who came here once and was so nice to us? I was madly in love with him for a whole week !”

  But she wasn’t going to give that a chance to happen. She wasn’t going to let him get away. Bell she rightly knew as evanescent, unreliable, an occasional “disappearer,” one not to be trusted to bring her showpiece back again. And Cosette was aware of the invalidity of the vague invitation that postulates another visit “sometime soon” or “when you’re passing.” Mark had to be summoned back for a specific occasion and he was: a party. She would give a party— for what? For Bell’s birthday, her thirtieth it was going to be. This seemed tremendously young to Cosette, though I am less sure of how Bell felt about it. Not too happy to have this milestone advertised, I suspect.

  “If I could be thirty again, I’d be a ‘manizer,’ I’d go about stealing everyone’s husbands.”

  I remembered that then. I remembered that when she invited Mark to Bell’s birthday party, including Fay in the invitation, of course, and Perdita. Her face was radiant still. It was like the little Bologna girl’s face in that there was no disguising her joy, as if she had seen no men before, never been married and had her two or three lovers, but had slept her youth away in the depths of a wood or wasted it in a nunnery, and, like Miranda, cried, “O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!”

  That night, later, lying in bed beside Bell, I said to her, “Cosette is going to fall in love with Mark.”

  “She’s in love with him already.”

  “You saw that?” I said.

  “Didn’t you? Of course you did.”

  “I wish there was something we could do to stop it.”

  “Why? Why ever? Because you’re afraid for her? But he’ll be different, he won’t be like that bastard Ivor thing. Mark doesn’t fuck women over.”

  “I mean he won’t feel the same as she does, he won’t be able to return what she feels.”

  “He’ll be kind to her, though. That’ll be the difference, you’ll see what a difference that makes. He’ll be so kind.”

  “I’d rather he didn’t get the chance,” I said.

  “Would you? Cosette wouldn’t.” She turned over, pulling herself away from me. “I’m going to sleep now. Goodnight.”

  This morning we went shopping together, Bell and I, down to the supermarket where I buy food for my cats. As we waited in the queue at the checkout, I pointed out to her the pictures in bright gilt frames the supermarket offers for sale at £9.95 apiece. In one of them was represented a favorite subject of Silas Sanger’s, an animal walking across a clearing in woodland, though this animal was a retriever in a sunlit grove, whereas Silas’s would have been a bloody-jawed predator in a rain forest.

  She thought of him too. “Silas used to freak out when he saw things like that,” she said. “They’re obscene, they make me feel sick.”

  “That’s the Leicester Art College view, is it?” I said. I know I shouldn’t make these scathing remarks to her every time we come near places in the past where she lied to me, but I can’t help it. Still, I must, I must resist. She doesn’t seem to care though; she takes it as if I have a right to try to settle scores, and perhaps I have.

  “You know I was never there. It’s a wonder you ever believed all that crap in the first place.”

  “Curious as it may seem to you, people do tend to believe what they’re told.”

  Her laughter is as dry now as sticks crackling when they start to burn. We paid for the cat food and lugged it out and waited for a taxi. She hasn’t after all found herself equal to that job in the shop in Westbourne Grove and has moved in with me; she lives with me now. Not that this has actually been said, not in those words, and rent is still being paid for that room under the railway arch. How she expresses it is that she is staying with me, but I know she means to remain. The irony of it amuses me greatly, for I remember how ecstatic I would once have been to have Bell living with me, to know Bell wanted to live with me—wanted it more than I wanted it. But such a state of affairs was unthinkable, unimaginable.

  Now, frankly, I don’t want it at all. I don’t want Bell as some sort of temporary but long-term guest in my house. She is too much for me, her past is too much, the things she has done. I jib at that. Who wouldn’t? It has made me nervous, all of it. It is causing me the kind of stress that always results in—well, you can guess what, can’t you? In a tic, a twitching, a jumping of the muscles. The more I worry about it the worse it gets. This is not the way Huntington’s begins, but I don’t like it and I worry about it. I know I am still not too old.

  My fortieth birthday has passed. Bell and I went out to dinner and celebrated. We go out together a lot, several evenings a week, often to the cinema, for there have been so many good films lately, Mona Lisa and A Room with a View and Prick Up Your Ears. I haven’t been to the cinema so much for years. And last week we went to see Antony and Cleopatra at the Olivier, the finest performance this century, some say, and had our supper at the National Film Theatre restaurant by the river. Two rather good-looking women in early middle age, people must think us, not sisters, too dissimilar for that, and not suburban neighbors either. No one could think Bell in her black layers, her different black textures all bunches and bundled and tied, anyone’s suburban neighbor. She wears nothing but black now. Like Chekhov’s Marya perhaps, she is in mourning for her life.

  “What bollocks,” she said when I told her this. “Half your trouble is you’ve read too many books.”

  “You mean half your trouble is I’ve read too many books.”

  You see, I want to get her to talk about Cosette and Mark. Sooner or later, if she fails to respond to all these hints, I shall have to say their names to her, talk about them myself, but I don’t want to do that yet. No, that’s not true, I’m afraid to mention them. When we got home the phone rang and it was Timothy. Do you remember Timothy, the man I was having dinner with in Leith’s the day after I first saw Bell? He doesn’t mean much to me, I am not in love with him or he with me, but he is a friend and I can’t see him now, not at present. I can’t ask people to meet Bell, I can’t introduce her to them. They may not know who she is and what she has done, there is no need for them to know, but I know and it inhibits me.

  Bell smoked all the way back in the taxi in spite of the driver’s notice saying THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING. She couldn’t believe this wasn’t a joke when she first read it. The driver coughed ostentatiously and when we got to my house said, “I’d have put you out of my cab, only I’ve got old-fashioned ideas about what’s due to ladies. Pity o
thers aren’t so considerate.”

  I thought Bell might swear at him, but she didn’t, she didn’t say anything, hardly seemed to have heard. She walked up to the front door and waited for me to unlock it and when we were inside said, “Shall I tell you how I really met Silas?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Come on,” she said, “that’s me, that’s what I say. You’re pinching my lines.”

  I started laughing. “Tell me how you really met Silas.”

  “It was in the children’s home. The home was a big house that was a sort of experimental unit-experimental fuck-up, actually. I mean they mixed up big kids with much younger ones and really little ones. It was supposed to be like a family, Christ. Give me my cigarettes, will you?

  “They put me in there when I was sixteen. You know where I’d been and why. Well, they put me in there sort of secretly. It was all supposed to be very progressive, in tune with the changing times and all that, it was 1958, not a word to get into the newspapers. There wasn’t much else in the way of media then. But they weren’t progressive enough to think I ought to be at school. I went out to work and lived at the home and in the evenings I used to have to help put the little ones to bed. Yes, really, that was a laugh, wasn’t it? I was dying to get away but I didn’t know when I could, if I ever could, being me, whether it was eighteen or twenty-one then or what, or whether it was just another kind of prison. Well, it wasn’t.

  “Silas had a relation with a kid in care but they used to let the kid go home at the weekends. Sometimes it was Silas who brought her back. Felicity was his girlfriend then. She was at college and I reckon she thought it ever so wild and daring screwing around with a schizzy soak like Silas. Okay, so I got him away from her and I really did get pregnant and the superintendent that ran the home made him say he’d marry me. They told him who I was and made it look like he’d done something really awful even touching me, like I was a leper, and now we’d both have leprosy but we’d have to have it together. I had a miscarriage on my wedding day. I started bleeding in the Registry Office.”

  “Is that true, Bell?”

  “Is what true?”

  “All of it.”

  “Of course it is. You said yourself even liars tell more truth than lies.”

  The muscles were jumping in my neck and shoulders. I tried to control them, breathing deeply. “Where was Mark then?” I said. “What was Mark doing?”

  She jumped up and ran out of the room, hanging the door.

  Mark came to the party Cosette gave for Bell’s birthday. For some reason, it was a far more decorous affair than the one Esmond Thinnesse interrupted to take Felicity away. People got drunk, of course they did, and Rimmon went on one of his acid trips, but these had become habitual to him, were a weekly indulgence. As far as I remember no couple disappeared into a bedroom as Felicity and Harvey had on that previous occasion. I have sometimes thought that this party was less of a saturnalia than previous ones simply because Mark was there. Of course, I am not implying that he had prudish views or that there was anything repressive or disapproving in the way he behaved. There was nothing like that. It was more that his presence seemed to make people feel that it was possible to have a good time socially without getting drunk or high or pawing others about, that conversation and being nice to fellow guests was a reasonable, if outdated, alternative. Of course, I realize I’m making a pretty high-flown claim for Mark and maybe I’m quite wrong. Maybe the party was the way it was because Admetus wasn’t there and neither was Felicity nor Fay nor Gary.

  Cosette urged Bell to invite her own friends. She was very eager that Bell and Mark’s mother should be invited and in fact wanted more than that. Because it was for Bell’s birthday, she wanted Bell’s mother asked around in advance, she wanted her actually to take some part in organizing the party. Bell invited no one. I can quite see why not now, but at the time it seemed strange to me. Apart from Mark, the guests were all Cosette’s old gang, the usual Wellgarthians, Oliver and Adela and the ballet dancers, and Perpetua with a lot of her family, including Dominic, and Mervyn and Mimi, and some neighbors from Archangel Mews.

  At that party, for a birthday present, Cosette gave Bell the bloodstone ring. She said it suited Bell’s hand much better than her own and she was right. Bell said thank you and looked at the ring on her finger and then up at Cosette, but without smiling or showing any special signs of pleasure. Almost anyone else would have kissed Cosette for that, thrown her arms round her and kissed her. I wasn’t surprised when Bell didn’t do this, but I was sorry. I was sorry too that she never wore the ring afterward, or if she did, it wasn’t when she was with me. The next time I saw her and I think every time since then, her hands were bare.

  Mark didn’t stay till the small hours. He went home a little after midnight. Cosette pressed him to come back the following evening to dinner when they would talk about the party.

  “I don’t think I should come tomorrow,” he said.

  There was something in the way he put it that made it far from a direct refusal. Cosette seized on this.

  “If you mean you ought not to come because you’ve been here twice, that’s nonsense, you know. Everyone else comes just as often as they want. We don’t stand on ceremony here. Please come.”

  He smiled at her. “Just the same, I won’t come tomorrow.”

  I was angry with him. It seemed to me he was playing hard to get. Why follow these rules with a rich woman old enough, nearly old enough, to be his mother? It was unkind. Or it was deliberately making himself elusive, unattainable and therefore the more longed for. He said no more. Cosette watched him go down the street, watched his long thin shadow cast by the lamplight. She closed the door. We were alone in the hall, the party and the music still going on upstairs.

  “I’d give everything I’ve got to have my youth back,” Cosette said. She said it in a fierce, intense whisper. “I’d give all the future and take death at the end of it if I could have one year of being thirty.”

  It was nearly a week before she heard from him again. In that week, what was she like? Sad, I suppose, just sad. She didn’t talk about him, she didn’t say anything, but you could imagine her thoughts. If only, they must have run, I could have been just a handful of years younger and he just a fraction older, if only we could have met with no more than five or six years between us—ah, then! As it is I can do nothing, I can’t even phone him as I would Walter, say, or Maurice Bailey, or some other man, I can’t do it because of the way I feel, I can’t face the humiliation of a refusal. So she must have thought. Sometimes I caught her looking at Bell as if there lay her only hope. Bell was the key to Mark. What questions could she answer, what histories give, what analyses of his past behavior? But Cosette never asked, and I didn’t ask either. It seemed to me—quite wrongly, of course, as I now know—that perfect confidence had existed between Bell and me and the coming of Mark spoiled it. I was afraid to ask and she was not willing to explain.

  It erected a barrier between us, or so I thought. In fact it did erect a barrier, it was through Mark that we began to be drawn apart, but not at all in the way I supposed.

  14

  THERE IS A LIMIT, said Henry James, to the impunity with which one can juggle with truth.

  I could question that. He never knew Bell, he never knew the archjuggler in the circus of the world. It is a strange thing the conclusions we draw not from the impressions we are given but from the impressions we take. I took it for granted Bell was experienced, sophisticated, richly traveled in all kinds of sexual regions, as streetwise as could be, as tough. Yet she never told me so. Did she act these things, or did I choose to see her as acting? Certainly she told me she had been at art school, had lovers long before she went there, grew up fatherless and with a strange mother who had been a concert singer. Her maiden name, of course, had been Mark’s name, Henryson.

  I reached a conclusion: life with Silas had compounded her distaste for men. Even while with him, married to him, she had turn
ed to women as lovers, probably a series of women. And after he was dead and she was free she was able to indulge her love for her own sex. I thought it likely that this accounted, more than a need to be with her mother, for those absences of hers and that disappearance that took place soon after our meeting in Admetus’s house. She had had a lover, a woman, to whom she was deeply committed but with whom she had finally broken in order to come to me. For, looking back over our life together and the multitude of things we had talked about, I could recall no mention of any man she was involved with except Silas, no mention indeed of any man at all except her brother, Mark, and on the subject of him she was not communicative.

  I thought we would never see him again, and I was surprised when I answered the phone to hear his voice. He recognized mine at once. Mark wasn’t one of those people who, though they have met you, when they phone treat you with their “Can I speak to so-and-so” like the secretary or the housekeeper. Mark called me by my name and asked me how I was and then sounded taken aback when I said Bell wasn’t in.

  “It isn’t Bell I want. I hoped I could speak to Cosette.”

  He had rung to ask her out to dinner. Just the two of them, not a party, just he and she because he thought it would be nice to entertain her for a change after he had twice been her guest. Her reaction wasn’t at all what I expected. It wasn’t what Bell expected either. I won’t say I knew Bell by that time. In view of how tremendously I was deceived, that would be stupid, but I knew sides of her, I knew what it meant when she watched someone in that cold interested way of hers. She was making mental notes of their follies, how far they would go. Having seen Cosette—well, let me make no bones about it—having seen her simper at Mark and bridle and gaze with adoration, hang on his words, and defer to his opinions, she was waiting for some fresh ridiculous display. Isn’t it strange that I was beginning to understand that Bell disliked Cosette? Hardly anyone ever disliked Cosette, you see, it was nearly impossible, so I had discounted the signs I had seen before, only keeping in mind the kindnesses and politenesses Bell had rendered Cosette when first they met. Now I saw in Bell’s eyes a mild scorn, and I saw disappointment that when Mark asked her out to dinner Cosette didn’t get into a panic about what to wear, when to have her hair done, what to do about her face, and cry, oh, if she could only be a little bit younger!