The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  You see, I think Cosette had given up the battle. Probably she had taken a good, hard, long look at herself in the glass and decided it was no use. This man was too important for it to be any use. Ivor Sitwell was one thing, the kind of man you had your face lifted for and dieted for and bought new clothes for, but only to get back into the running. Rimmon—well, what was he but what Bell called a snack-fuck, something to have between proper meals? There had been another man, I think, some pal of Admetus’s, no more than a one-night stand. But Mark was the real thing and because he was the real thing it was no use. Better to have him as a friend, to have his respect, his delightful company, than make a guy of oneself, an overscented, overpainted show, and thus earn his contempt.

  “I am trying to teach myself not to mind when the people in the restaurant take me for his mother,” she said to me. “No, I’m doing better than that, I’m teaching myself to expect it and like it. I mean, I’d have loved to have a son like Mark. Imagine how different things would be for me now if I had a son like him.”

  “You never liked it when I was taken for your daughter and he’s ten or eleven years older than I am.”

  “I would like it now. I’m changing, I’ve got to. I’m going to grow old gracefully.”

  The interesting thing was that she looked a lot nicer and a lot younger for not going in for all that makeup and rigid hairdressing. She wore her hair in a simple loose knot on the back of her head (the way Bell wears hers now), touched her face with a little soft color, put on a plain, dark green dress with the pearls that had been Douglas’s last present to her. Handsome and dignified she looked and only a very unobservant person would have thought her old enough to be Mark’s mother, unless that person had mysteriously been reared in a society where girls get married at twelve.

  Overcourteous in Admetus’s way, obsequious and deferential, Mark never was. He had arranged to meet her at the restaurant, not call for her. And it was a little bistro in Queensway to which he was taking her, none of your grande cuisine. I didn’t see her go or return. Bell and I were invited to Elsa’s divorce “thrash,” the party she was giving to celebrate extricating herself from her French Catholic husband. The next morning, late because we had gotten home in the small hours, Mark was there in the drawing room with Cosette and Auntie, and he and Cosette, facing each other across the table, were engaged in animated conversation, their eyes fixed on each other’s faces. I caught a sentence or two of it.

  Cosette was saying, “But I don’t know anything about Schönberg.”

  And Mark rejoined, “Neither do I—yet. We can learn. We can learn together.”

  They—at any rate, Cosette—didn’t seem too pleased to see Bell and me. Of course, she put up a show of being pleased because she was like that, but I could tell. They went out soon after that; they were taking Auntie somewhere. It was Cosette’s day for taking Auntie for a drive and Mark had said he would come too. Auntie went along obediently, in the rather zombielike way she did most things, just doing what she was told, but I fancied she looked less bewildered. Mark was a person she could understand, not curiously dressed or using words she had been taught it was a crime to utter or smoking strange things or making discordant music. And he talked to her, he didn’t pretend she wasn’t there.

  I went out onto the balcony to watch them go, wondering if Mark would drive the car, but he didn’t, not that time at any rate. He sat in the back.

  “He must have stayed the night,” Bell said in the curious, uninflected tone she sometimes used.

  “I’m certain he didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just have a feeling he didn’t. They would have been different. Cosette would have been different.”

  And it turned out the way I supposed. Bell asked Gary directly. I thought it a strange thing to do, to ask him outright like that. Gary never slept much, going to bed very late always and seldom staying in bed much after seven. Mark had come in with Cosette at eleven the previous evening, he said, stayed ten minutes, came back at ten that morning. Gary had let him in himself.

  “You sound like you’re his wife’s spies,” said Gary.

  “He hasn’t got a wife,” Bell said.

  “Do you want to know if he kissed her goodnight?”

  “For Christ’s sake!” I said, trying to put a stop to it. “This is Cosette we’re talking about, Cosette.”

  “So what?” he said, rather unexpectedly. “The wine she drinks is made of grapes.”

  “Maybe, but he’s not likely to drink the same wine, is he?”

  Bell said slowly, “I don’t see why not, I really don’t see why not.”

  “Cosette’s well into her fifties. She doesn’t expect it, she doesn’t dream of it.”

  “I bet she dreams of it,” said Gary.

  Mark was just a friend. How could it be otherwise? At least he wasn’t on the gravy train to Cadgeville. He took Cosette out to meals or else he came to the House of Stairs when dinner was over. Very occasionally, when all of us were taken out by Cosette, he would join us, but he behaved rather austerely at these dinner parties, drinking sparingly, eating cheaply. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink spirits. When he was present you could feel the lavish days were past, the days of green Chartreuse and burnt bank notes.

  I had got it into my head, on the strength of once having seen them together, that he and Bell were close. This seemed not to be true. It was plain, at any rate, that he didn’t come to the house to see his sister. They took no more notice of each other than each did of Gary or the ballet dancers, less in fact, for Mark was always polite and pleasant to Cosette’s friends. Bell was the only person I ever saw him apparently indifferent to. And he was more than indifferent to her, he was capable of ignoring her when she walked into the room. Sometimes I saw him look up, realize who it was that had come in, and look away again without a nod or a word. I don’t know why, but somehow I thought this must be Bell’s fault, this must be something Bell had done.

  I asked him one day what she was like when she was a little girl.

  He smiled. “I haven’t the least idea.”

  “You must have. You’re her brother.”

  In Cosette’s presence, out of a compliment to Cosette supposedly, he often added unspecified years to his age. “I’m so much older than Bell.” He made it sound as if the age gap were twenty rather than six and a half years. “I was away at school.” It was plain he didn’t want to talk about it.

  That same day I looked up Henryson in the phone book. Mark was there at Brook Green, a Riverside number, but there was no Mrs. Henryson in Harlesden. Why would there have been? I had never known Bell to phone her mother; no doubt she didn’t have a phone. I was naive, I was gullible. I believed in Bell, confusing frankness with honesty.

  Her frankness has led her to talk to me about Silas and their life together. We have moved on. Not to Cosette or Mark, she reacts to their names like an animal when it hears a gun fired, but to herself and me.

  “No, there weren’t any women before you,” she said. “There haven’t been any since, come to that.”

  “Am I hearing what I think I’m hearing?”

  “I’m not a lesbian. Sometimes I’ve wished I was. There was a lot of that going on in prison.”

  “Then, why … ?”

  She said simply, “Because you were.”

  “Never, till you.”

  Her dry laugh rattled in her throat. It is the kind of laugh that used to be called dirty, scathing, self-mocking.

  “Something came over me,” she said, “that night when I put the dress on. I thought you’d like it, and you did, didn’t you?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Oh, sure. I loved it, but it was never quite the real thing. Did you feel that?”

  “No,” I said. “It was the real thing for me. But I’ve heard other dabblers say what you say.”

  “What do you mean, dabblers?”

  “Queers trying it straight and straight people trying it queer.”


  “Have I upset you, Lizzie?”

  “You’ve given me a shock,” I said.

  I couldn’t look at her. I was wrong, wasn’t I, about her having been as much in love with me as I with her? But this is the kind of thing that must often happen to certain people, finding out that a lover made love to them only to please them or to gain a particular end. It must happen to rich old women and rich old men, to ugly rich people. But I had been young and poor and some said good-looking… .

  “Were you ever in love with me?” It took me a good hour to work myself up to ask that question and when I asked it my voice sounded strange, hoarse, and horribly anxious. “I was in love with you. Were you with me?”

  Something has softened her, the dreadful prison years supposedly. She takes pains not to hurt me too much. “I don’t know. I was very fond of you. I liked the sex. I liked the feeling of doing something—outrageous .”

  Has she always been so grossly insensitive? Was she then, when we were together? She laid her hand on me. She touched my shoulder, my neck. I stopped myself jumping up, shrieking, the way Cosette said she would if any woman made an advance to her. I just picked up the hand and threw it off, though not as fiercely as you would throw off an insect that fell on you out of a tree. I cast it away as Cosette once cast my hand off her arm.

  “The last thing I want,” I said. “I’m not sure what you’re offering, but I don’t want any part of it. Not if you and I were the last people on earth and marooned somewhere.”

  “That’s all right, then. I’m sure I don’t. I don’t mean you specially, not anyone, man or woman; it makes me shudder, the mere thought.”

  As Mark’s visits grew more frequent, as he came more to the house and he and Cosette went out more together, spending a lot of time in each other’s company, so Bell and I grew apart. You must remember that I didn’t know then what I know now, that she didn’t love me, had never loved me, had looked upon me—well, it is true, isn’t it, it must be faced?—as a sort of perverse indulgence, a co-player in a naughty game. I thought she had loved me but that her love was passing, that she was getting tired of me. Perhaps, anyway, that isn’t much of an improvement on the truth. Never to have been loved—that is somehow more acceptable than being the kind of person a lover quickly tires of.

  We talked less, too. The confiding stopped, the discussion of people in the house, the way they behaved, the things they said. It was Bell who stopped it. I would begin with a question as to why Gary had done such and such, what Cosette’s brother Oliver had meant by some remark, and my answer would be a shrug or “Who cares?”

  Cosette, rather late in the day, had bought a television set. Ostensibly, it was for Auntie. It wasn’t in the drawing room, Cosette wouldn’t have that, but in the front room on the ground floor, a place that had never before had any particular function except sometimes as a center for musical or hallucinogenic rites. A sofa and chairs were set out in it and Cosette had bought a huge gilt-framed mirror to hang on one wall. Bell spent a lot of time in there watching television. It was as if the television were my victorious rival, drawing her away from me. She and Auntie, who had nothing else in common, who had scarcely spoken to each other, were now usually to be found down there in armchairs side by side, a sporadic, totally screen-focused conversation carried on between them.

  “Shall I switch over to the other channel?”

  “Yes, if you like. It’s our serial tonight.” Auntie was usually off to bed by ten. Bell stayed up watching until midnight or beyond, if there was any beyond. And I would lie in bed waiting for her, first hearing Cosette and Mark come in, Mark sometimes but by no means always coming up to the first floor for a drink or a last word with her, then the front door closing on him, then finally Bell’s footsteps mounting the first flight and the second, but passing my door and going on up, up, up, to her room on the top.

  My heart was sore. I had had my dreams and made absurd plans. Our affair, or whatever you liked to call it, couldn’t go on, I knew that, but I had a romantic idea that a special bond would always be there, each of us as the years passed would be first with the other. And some ritual would come into being; we would, for instance, meet and make love once a year, we would always have a unique friendship, our secret closeness would enrich our lives and there would arise between us a special empathy so that, as separated twins are said to do, we would sense from a distance whenever the other was enjoying good fortune or in danger.

  For this to happen there would have had to be something to alter things and wrench us apart. Cosette’s moving, for instance, or illness afflicting me, or Bell’s mother needing her. Now I saw that there were other ways of parting a pair like us, evanescent, subtle things that took away the substance and left—nothing. For, as if we were true gays, we had always behaved with the utmost decorum in public. Homosexual couples invariably do, I have noticed, except in the society of others like themselves. When with straight people they never touch each other, exchange glances, or even sit side by side. So there were no changes for Bell and me to make in our social behavior. We had never touched and caressed in the sight of Cosette and Auntie. Now we no longer did so by night, in private. I knew only that I had no human rival, for Bell hardly ever went out and never received or made phone calls. She watched television.

  She said so little to me that spring and summer, whole weeks seemed to go by without a word from her, that I remember only one remark of any significance. We passed on the stairs. I was on my way to see my agent—to be told no one was interested in publishing my monograph on Henry James—and she had come up only from the hall where she had been to pick up the household’s post from the front doormat. Bell had grown pale and sickly-looking from never going out. The weather was warm, sultry, windless, but she preferred to be indoors, lying on her bed for hours on end up there, the dangerous window open to its fullest extent. And the dusty black she wore reminded me of the clothes of Middle Eastern women.

  “I feel like escaping, but where would I go?”

  I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t, “We could go away somewhere together. We could go for a holiday.”

  She looked me hard in the eyes. “I don’t mean that at all.”

  Sisters can be jealous of brothers—anyone can be jealous of anyone—and I thought it might be that she minded Mark’s spending so much time with Cosette. Had Cosette separated them? Was that the event which had taken place since I first saw them together and had changed their relationship? I fancied Cosette might have taken a sister’s place in Mark’s life. His own sister had perhaps been cold, uninterested, no longer the comrade of earlier years, and Cosette had slipped into that role. Certainly there was no sign of her and Mark being anything to each other but friends. Mark, who after his first few visits seemed cast for Ivor Sitwell’s part, had never stepped into it, but had rather retreated. And Cosette, who gave him at that same period so many languishing glances, who seemed set to fall deep into adoration, looked at him and spoke to him in the same tone she might use to Gary or Luis. The promise she had made, to teach herself that sexual love between them was impossible, to grow old peacefully, it appeared she was keeping. Her reward was his affection.

  He liked her for herself. She was his dear, special friend. Or that was how it looked. Very likely, he was the son she had never had and she the sort of mother he would have liked to have. There are plenty who would see it in that light. Young men do have older women friends and go about with them in an apparently sexless relationship. Of course, it is impossible to generalize and insensitive to try. They liked each other.

  They went to concerts, presumably to learn about Schönberg, as I had overheard Mark say they would. They went to the cinema. They took Auntie out for drives. Eating out as a way of life was becoming fashionable and they usually ate out together. Only sometimes would Cosette be assailed by guilt feelings that she was doing unfairly by the rest of us and then we would be gathered together into rather a formal dining-out group and shepherded off to
the Marco Polo or even somewhere very grand like the Ecu de France, on which occasions Mark would conspicuously not be present. It was very different from Wellgarth days and as different again from that early wild, decadent, chaotic time in the House of Stairs.

  I remembered Cosette’s dying Buddha story: “It changes.”

  Mark never stayed the night, not even in the spare room on the top floor next to Bell’s. I was as sure as one can be of such a thing that he had never slept with Cosette, never even kissed her beyond putting his lips to her cheek. Had he even done that? Once he spoke of her to me. We were alone together, it was a rare event, and very short-lived. Bell had refused to go out, Gary was away somewhere, it was all too late for Auntie, but Mervyn was back, he and Mimi still together, though used to each other by now and as comfortable together as an old married couple. The two of them, Mark and Cosette and I were all dining at the Villa dei Cesari and Mervyn and Mimi were dancing. Cosette got up to go and pay the bill. It was a discreet way of doing this which she had learned, a way which made it seem as if there was no bill to be paid. Mark sat watching the dancers and I watched him. I have said he never cared what he wore, he was indifferent to clothes, but he was always decently dressed for the place he was in, and that night he was wearing gray flannel trousers and a jacket of some sort of loose-woven dark blue stuff, far from new but not shabby either. Men were wearing their hair long then, but his was short by the standard of the time. He was very thin and this gave him a look of particular elegance. There is something sexually moving about a man’s upper back when it is straight and the bones are barely covered with flesh. Mark had tremendously attractive shoulder blades. I was very aware of it at that moment as he leaned forward across the table, lifting his head. His hands were long and slender but not at all effeminate, the bones of the knuckles too prominent for that.