The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  He turned his head and spoke to me. “It seems so strange that all this time Cosette and I were both living in London and we never knew each other. It seems such a waste.”

  “You can make up for it now,” I said, reflecting that it wasn’t so long since Cosette had had a husband who I was sure wouldn’t have welcomed Mark among the visitors to Garth Manor.

  “We are making up for it.” He looked over his shoulder quickly. To try to find her in the crowd or to make sure she wasn’t coming? Mark’s eyes, the deep dark blue of lapis, had the clarity of water, but water that flows over a multitude of living things. “I’ve never known anyone like her,” he said. “She is the most wonderful person; she has everything.”

  Except youth, I thought, and I thought he was going to say it. I thought he was going to say, with rue, that if only, if only, she had been a bit younger. He didn’t. He pursued his theme.

  “Every gift, every grace. It’s rare to find a woman who’s never bitchy. Cosette envies no one.” I would have taken issue with him there. She envied all the girls she met, only without vindictiveness. He made nonsense of my thoughts. “Of course, there’s nothing she could be envious about.”

  Cosette came back. I thought she looked tired and worn, the makeup she wore runneled and smeared, her hair lank, and that red dress—the one she had been wearing when first she met him! But her face lit at the sight of Mark, lit as if there truly were a lamp of great brilliance inside her head and his smile had switched it on. He said, rather crossly for him, “It’s time you went home, you’re tired. Come, let’s go.”

  “But, Mark, they’re still dancing, and look, you can see they’re enjoying themselves so much …”

  She never called him darling. “Darling” was for all the rest of us. But her face betrayed everything, the love in it at that moment was naked, stretching out its yearning arms. He said, “They can either come now or get home by their own transport.”

  She loved it, you could see that, she loved a man who would be masterful and put her wants first. Had anyone, even Douglas, done that before? But when we reached Archangel Place, Mervyn and Mimi naturally with us, willing to sacrifice any pleasure rather than pay a bus or tube fare, Mark came only as far as the hall, where, in a curiously formal way, he placed Cosette in my charge, asking me with his usual simple courtesy please to see she went to bed now, that she had a good night’s sleep. He would phone in the morning and see how she was.

  He always did exactly what he said. If he said he would phone, he phoned. I happened to take the call, it was made a bit early for Cosette and she was still asleep. How, anyway, would he be cognizant of Cosette’s retiring and rising habits? He seemed amused and strangely delighted—“tickled to death” is the expression my father would have used—to hear she was still in bed. On no account must I wake her. Just tell her he had phoned to ask how she was.

  “And give her your love?”

  There was a pause. “Whatever you think she’d like,” he said.

  Cosette always listened to the radio serial Mark was in. He had quite a significant part in it and certainly could be heard at least three out of the five nights of the week it was on. She hadn’t possessed a radio but she bought one after she had known Mark for about a week. Alone, she would sit listening to his voice while Bell and Auntie stayed downstairs, preferring the television. I came into the room to hear him utter the last sentence of the episode. He had been in private conversation with the heroine and the words he had to speak struck me as immensely strange in the circumstances. They had a thrilling effect, and an embarrassing one too. It was disquieting, it was shiver-provoking, to hear Mark’s voice say, “You must know I love you. I’ve been in love with you for ten years, ever since we first met… .”

  This was the signal for music to swell, to break like a wave on a beach. There would be no more till tomorrow when that music would begin afresh. Cosette switched off her transistor and there was a deep silence, until into that silence, dully fragmenting it, came the thud-thud and mutter of Auntie’s television from below.

  You have to understand that Cosette didn’t talk about herself, she wasn’t always airing her feelings. The concerns of others seemed more important to her, formed more of the substance of her converse. I have told you of that vague mysterious smile she put on when asked questions she wasn’t happy to answer. She was adept at shifting interest from herself onto others. I believe she genuinely thought that in her sphere and at her age she was no longer an object to provoke interest or excite curiosity. But that evening, at that moment, when we had heard Mark’s voice and she had abruptly cut the music off, I had a premonition confiding was to begin and revelations to be made.

  Suddenly she said, her voice fierce—it was as if she clutched at me, though she hadn’t moved and we were yard apart—“I’m so much in love with him I think it will kill me.”

  “Mark?” I asked stupidly. Yet, was it so stupid? I had convinced myself by then that they were friends, the best of friends but only friends, that the desire for no more than friendship was hers as well as his.

  “I didn’t know what it was,” she said. “I never had it for anyone before. No, not for Douglas, never, never, I didn’t dream of it. Don’t look like that, Lizzie. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I think of him day and night. When he’s not with me I’m thinking of him and talking to him. I have these long imaginary conversations with him in my head. You needn’t look like that, darling, so pitiful. You don’t have to be sympathetic. It doesn’t make me unhappy, it makes me happy. I’ve never been so happy in my life. Is there anything so blissful as being in love? I couldn’t stand not being now, I should die.”

  I didn’t remind her that five minutes before she had said that being in love would kill her. Instead, prudently, I advised caution.

  “You’d better go a bit easy.”

  “Why? Why should I?”

  I hesitated. I was remembering what Stendhal says somewhere about wishing he was in love, his longing for the bliss of that condition. Though she might be the ugliest kitchen maid in Paris, that would be of no account provided he was in love with her and she returned his passion. I said, with care, “Perhaps being in love isn’t all that great if it isn’t returned—I mean if the other person doesn’t feel the same.”

  Her reply shook me; I seemed to feel the floor beneath my feet quiver. Cosette was soft-voiced, but she almost shouted, “Who says he doesn’t feel the same?”

  Her beseeching face, turned up to me, her hands curiously stretched out to supplicate, induced in me a chill and a nausea that were quite physical. “Cosette—?”

  “Cosette what?” she said. “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t be loved? Aren’t I lovable?” Her face wasn’t haggard then, it was young. It was as if, briefly, a young Cosette had crept out of the skin of age.

  “I don’t want you to be unhappy,” I said, the words wrenched out of me.

  Her voice trembled. “If I was a man and Mark a woman, no one would think anything of my being fifteen years older.” Poor Cosette had entered her phase of reducing the span of years between them when she talked about it. After the same fashion she had taken to pointing out the silver streak in Mark’s hair. “Why does it matter so much the other way around? We live longer than men. Why do we have to be old for so much longer?”

  In the years since then things have happened to redress that balance. Elsa married a man eleven years her junior and everyone said how lucky he was. I said to Cosette, lamely I’m afraid, “Everyone can see how fond he is of you.”

  “How I hate that word!”

  I could think of nothing more to say, so I went over to her and hugged her. We held each other in a strong, warm embrace that I can easily think myself back into now and feel again, that I can remember more readily than any of those love passages with Bell.

  15

  WE HAVE HAD TWO visitors, Bell and I. It is two weeks since she came to stay a
nd in all that time, until yesterday, no one has come to the house. We have been alone together and every morning I have gone into my room and tried to write—that is, I have tried to write the novel I am supposed to be working on, a tale of international intrigue and sexual adventure in Vienna and Mauritius. I haven’t written a word of it. All I write is this account or record or whatever you care to call it. What Bell does while I am here I don’t really know, but I hear her go out, so I suppose she walks, ranging the west London streets. Never since she has been here have I heard a word scorning suburbs or about my house being too far west for her.

  But yesterday my father came. Twice a year he comes to London for a medical checkup. He has a pacemaker to regulate his heart, and although he could easily and far more conveniently go for his examinations to a heart specialist in some hospital on the south coast, he has an idea in his head that everything in London must be better. Especially in Hammersmith, where the hospital enjoys a glamorous reputation in matters of the heart. He is spry and energetic for his seventy-three years, but London and its crowds confuse him and I always go to meet him at Waterloo and take him to the hospital. After his checkup he comes back here to stay the night.

  It may seem strange, when Bell and I were so close, that he should know nothing of her, not even know until yesterday that she exists. But I wasn’t called upon to give evidence at her trial, there were other witnesses to do that. And although he must have heard of her, for, briefly, every newspaper reader and television viewer heard of her, there is no reason for him to connect the somber and austere woman in her mourning clothes, whom I introduce to him simply as Bell, with Christine Sanger. Did I tell you Christabel was another of her inventions, that instead of Christabel she was really Christine, that Ivor Sitwell in giving her that name was unwittingly correct? I am telling you now.

  My father has changed. His tragedy he has put far behind him. If he knows that there is still time for his daughter to go the way his wife went, he never gives a sign of it. Sometimes he even talks of the distant future, my distant future, and with satisfaction of the good fortune that awaits me. For although he has, and has had for years, a woman friend of a few years younger than himself, a widow living on the same senior citizens’ estate, in the same street three bungalows away, he declines to marry again because thereby he would deprive me of my rightful inheritance. His bungalow and the few thousand pounds he has in unit trusts are destined for me, and it is in vain that I have told him over and over that I don’t need them, that they are his to dispose of as he pleases, to leave to a wife if he likes.

  He reverted to this subject, as he always does whenever we meet, while we were all watching television, during a commercial break. A banking advertisement set him off.

  “It’s all in my will, it’s all set down in black and white,” he said. “I’ve done that so that you don’t have the fuss and bother of applying for Letters of Administration.”

  “That’s a long time off,” I said.

  “Easy to say at your age and when you don’t know what illness is. There’s a chap I’ve seen at that hospital every time I’ve been there for the past three years, he always had his appointments the same day as me, a curious coincidence, really. Well, he was missing today and why do you think? He’d dropped down dead a month ago on his way on holiday to Ibiza, fell over and died in the duty-free shop.”

  We turned our eyes back to the screen, Bell rather more slowly than my father and I. She had been watching him in wonder. I supposed it was his refusal to recognize my continued danger that she found astonishing, but perhaps it wasn’t that, perhaps what he said recalled to her the evening she asked me about Cosette’s will. I didn’t inquire. When he went off to bed and for half an hour or so we were alone, I didn’t ask her. I am not yet prepared to force a discussion of Cosette or of Mark. They must wait a little longer.

  This morning I took him to catch his train. As I walked back along the street where I live I saw ahead of me a taxi stopped outside my house and a woman getting out of it. I didn’t recognize her. She was a big, dark woman, tall and heavily built, with one of those figures in which the stomach has become very prominent, jutting out nearly as protuberantly as the bosom. Her hair had been dyed raven black and dressed in such a bouffant way that it would have given the impression from the distance that she was wearing a wide-brimmed black silk hat. She paid the taxi driver and turned to face my house, looking up at the roof and down to the little front garden in an appraising way as someone might who was surveying the place with a view to buying it. She opened the gate and began to walk up the path. My footstep behind her made her turn. I may have changed as much as she has, but she had the advantage over me, she knew that living in this house I was more likely to be Elizabeth Vetch than not. The voice I recognized, when she had spoken my name.

  “Felicity,” I said.

  I was at the typewriter in my working room in the House of Stairs, listening to Bell’s movements above me, listening with pain to the closing of the door and the creak of the 104th stair, for I knew that what would happen was what always happened now. She would pass my door without slowing her pace. It was late summer, a weary dusty time, the London air stale and still. Below, in the gray garden, when I went as I now did to the window, I could see the top of Auntie’s white chrysanthemum head in one of the deck chairs and, resting lightly back against the canvas of the other, Cosette’s freshly blonded chignon onto which a silver eucalypt leaf had fallen, seemingly pinned there like a hair ornament.

  But this time, instead of passing my door, Bell’s footsteps slowed. She must have stood there for a long moment—doing, thinking, what? Wondering perhaps about the enormity of what she planned to ask? I held my breath. Bell knocked on the door, causing me pain, more pain than I want to write about. She had never before knocked at the door of any room I was in. My whispered “Come in” was so low I had to repeat it.

  She entered the room without any awkwardness, unless to pause just inside the door and light a cigarette is to be awkward. If she felt she owed me some explanation for repudiating me, she never showed it. The paperback books on the desk and on the table were not those that had been there last time she was in my room. It was a long time since she had last been there. She picked up What Maisie Knew, turned it over, looking at it in the way one might look for an assay mark on a piece of silver. At the window she glanced downward, no doubt to check that Cosette was still far away, still well out of earshot.

  “I suppose,” she said brusquely, “Cosette will leave everything she’s got to you.”

  “What?”

  “In her will, I mean. You must know what I mean. When she dies this house and all her money will go to you.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t suppose she has made a will. Why should she? She’s not going to die.”

  Bell went once more to the window. The casement was open a little way. She closed it, stood there with her back to the window. “She’s got cancer, hasn’t she?”

  “What gave you that idea?”

  She didn’t say anything and her silence spoke terrible things to me. I jumped up out of my chair.

  “Who told you? Are you keeping something from me?”

  “I don’t know anything you don’t. I thought they found cancer when they scraped her out or whatever they did.”

  “They didn’t find anything, she was perfectly clear. She’s been for a checkup since and she was fine. She’ll probably live for thirty years, she’ll live longer than I will.”

  Bell said slowly, as if she were thinking deeply and enormously, laying out options and rejecting them, biding her time, “I see,” and again, “I see.”

  From that moment I date my anger with her, my distaste for her, my near-hatred of her. All those things are quite compatible with love, aren’t they? I was angry with her because what she had said seemed to confirm my fears that she disliked Cosette, that Cosette’s generosity inspired no gratitude in her, that living on Cosette’s bounty, rent free, with heat and fo
od freely provided, had provoked no affection, aroused no warmth. I said, speaking to her as I never had before, “I was working and I’d like to get on, so would you mind going?”

  After she had gone I couldn’t work. I repeated to myself, carefully, word for word, all the things she had said, and though I read into them a suggestion that she expected and indeed wanted me to inherit Cosette’s property, my anger wasn’t cooled or my hurt less painful. I only saw her as inquiring in order to make sure of the future good fortune of her “friend,” under whose protective umbrella she meant to shelter. With luck, by playing her cards right, even when Cosette was dead, a home here would be secured to her, an even freer and more spacious home in fact, with me as owner. I felt I was being used, perhaps had always been used to this end. Was it possible that Bell had gotten to know me, had then engineered our relationship into what it had been for those few months, solely because she saw me as a rich woman’s adopted child and necessary heir?

  Of course, I was quite wrong. I was even flattering myself; I was attributing to myself an importance I didn’t have. Bell’s motive for asking those questions was outside the bounds of my imaginings. I heard her go down the stairs, down all the stairs to the bottom, and then I heard the front door close after her rather harder than usual. She had nearly slammed it. I used to wonder where she went, perhaps only to walk, or to visit those corners of London where the beautiful things are displayed, to range Kensington Church Street and the King’s Road and Camden Passage. She was back again by six, watching television with Auntie, while Cosette, on the floor above, listened to Mark in his serial, the character he played newly married and just returned from his honeymoon.