The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  “My God,” said Felicity. “Surprise, surprise.” How did I know, even then, that whatever it cost her, she wasn’t going to utter Bell’s name?

  “Why?” Bell said. “I talked to you on the phone. You knew I wanted to find Elizabeth.”

  “Oh, true, true.” Felicity gave an unpleasant little laugh, a laugh I couldn’t remember from the old days. “When I said ‘surprise’ I meant I was surprised on Elizabeth’s behalf, not yours.” It was the kind of silky rudeness Cosette used to hate so much and it is from her I have derived my hatred of it. Felicity sat down, her skirt riding up, showing a lot of plump leg and black stocking top. It is horrible, for she isn’t in the least like Cosette, never has been, but the way she dresses, showily and unsuitably, coyly, reminds me of Cosette’s early efforts, between the departure from Wellgarth Avenue and the coming of Mark. “I’m having lunch with a friend in Barnes,” she said to me. “The taxi almost had to pass your door, so I thought, why not? I’ll never get to see her if I wait for her to phone.”

  A strange route for a taxi going from Glebe Place to Barnes to take. I didn’t say so though. I was relieved she wouldn’t expect to lunch here. “I knew I’d catch you because you’d be doing your writing at this hour.” It was said with a fine, artless regard for the writer’s self-imposed disciplines.

  “You were wrong, weren’t you?” said Bell, her first contribution, and a hard, cold one. “About her writing, I mean, not about you catching her.”

  I explained about my father. It was something to say. I didn’t know what to say with the two of them there, Bell seemingly so despairing of her life that she didn’t care what she said, consequences being of no account to her, Felicity revengeful and disapproving of Bell’s very existence. I was afraid Felicity would say something about Cosette, it seemed so obvious that she must, though I doubted if she would go so far as to refer to Mark. And now I noticed for the first time that she was carrying, along with her large black patent leather handbag and a pair of absurd white gloves, the early edition of the evening paper, the Standard, which had been on the streets a couple of hours. I had already glanced at it while at the station, at the lead story which is that of the murder by a child of a child. With a dreadful feeling of heart-sinking I saw Felicity lay her handbag on the table, place her gloves beside it, so that this newspaper, though still folded, lay alone on her unattractively bulbous lap, the large bold print of two words only of the headline exposed, but the two words of greatest significance: child and killed.

  Bell perhaps also saw it. I don’t know if she did.

  Felicity said, “Do you think we could possibly have the television off?”

  Carrying the little cat, pendulous from her forearm as a muff might be, Bell got up and made the most offensive response to this request there is, not excluding refusing it. She turned the sound down to a low murmur. Felicity was unfolding her paper, I don’t really know why, I can hardly imagine what she intended to say or do. To read that story? To ask Bell in her didactic way (teaching always, reverting always to the vocation she had missed) what comments she had on it? Listing, for I am sure she still lives in a world of quizzes, a catalog of minimonsters, adolescent and subteen assassins?

  But Bell forestalled her. Still standing, still with the cat draped over her arm as if boneless, a stretchy rubber sling sheathed in sable fur, Bell said, “It looks to me as if you’ve come a long way since you were sponging on Cosette and that ponce with the beard was screwing your brains out.”

  I was more shocked to hear her speak Cosette’s name than by the actual content of what she said. She had got back into the dangerous country, she had taken some terrible plunge, was swimming the river.

  You could see it in her face, too, in the width of her eyes, the recoil, as if someone else had spoken those words. Felicity, of course, looked terribly offended. But she didn’t jump up and leave the house in dudgeon. I think people very seldom behave quite like that. They like to have options left to them. In fact, she managed a breathy deprecating laugh.

  “Sponging!” she said. “Oh, dear, what a word! As if people, some of them not too far from here, didn’t sponge on me year after year. Inevitably, that’s your lot if you happen to be rather better off than the run of the mill.”

  She got up then, taking care to display the entire front page of the paper and the headline: TYNESIDE VICTIM KILLED BY CHILD, 10. Then she dropped the paper on the seat of her chair. “Oh, no, you keep it,” she said sweetly when I reminded her. I used rather to like Felicity, her enthusiasms, her rebellions, her intensity, her passions. All that seems to be gone now. No doubt it was necessary, if she was going to live with Esmond at Thornham and have a modicum of contentment, to ditch all that. Perhaps it was a case of ditching it or going mad. Who knows? I saw her out and we made cool, careful farewells, with no added riders of meeting again.

  I was afraid to go back in there, I was really afraid. But you can hardly avoid going into your own living room for the rest of your life. I braced myself, opened the door. The newspaper was on the floor by Bell’s chair. The little cat sat on one edge of it washing his face. Bell had her head in her hands, the fingers plunged into her gray, wiry, coarse hair. I didn’t know what to do. So I sat down and waited and said nothing and thought of the peacefully quiet, reasonably industrious life I had been leading before she came out of prison and I found her.

  Presently she took her hands down and looked at me and said in quite a normal, ordinary voice, “Am I a psychopath? I suppose I must be, they all said I was. But I don’t feel like that, I just feel like anyone else.” What she had said must have struck her as absurd or shallow, for she corrected herself. “Or I think I do.”

  16

  SINCE BELL HAS BEEN here I have gotten into the habit of looking at people and wondering which of them, if any, are like her. I mean, like her in that they have killed someone and been sent to prison for it, served their sentences and come out again. It is a new phenomenon. Murderers used to be hanged.

  Now they are set free and come back to live among us. Or to exist. I look at people and I wonder. Think of the number of murders we read are committed each year. Give it ten years—Bell was exceptionally long incarcerated and that for a particular reason—and their perpetrators (as the police say) are out again, ordinary people looking like everyone else, having ordinary jobs, perhaps living next door. That woman I find myself sitting opposite in the tube may have shot her lover. That man with his dark scowl, arms folded across a thickly muscled chest, leaning against a wall on a street corner, may have knifed someone in a street brawl. How many have smothered the baby in its cradle or helped the elderly encumbrance on its way? People like me and Felicity and Elsa know them and go on knowing them and learn to adjust. Yet you would think murder the one act no one could adjust to, no one could make allowances for.

  She had asked me if I thought she was a psychopath—well, she had asked the question, of the air perhaps, or of God. I could only shake my head and say I didn’t know. I have always understood psychopaths to enjoy tormenting animals. Having uttered her question and made her half-despairing remarks, Bell turned away from me and coaxed the little cat back to her. It jumped onto her lap and she began stroking it in the way it likes, long hard movements of the hands, strong enough to push it to a crouching position. Then, as it folded itself and curled into the thick black bunches of her skirt, she let her hands rest with the softest and most caring of movements on its sleek back. I would never have associated tenderness with Bell. Sensuousness, passion, a kind of tragic grandeur, all those, but not tenderness. Yet she is tender with my cats, as wondering and appreciative and absorbed as some women are with babies.

  “I was never with animals before,” she said, as if reading what I was thinking. “I didn’t know I liked them.”

  “Admetus had a cat,” I said, “with cat fleas.” And I remembered Mark, and Cosette’s anxious witticism about the entrechat. “There were dogs at Thornham.”

  “Big and loud and
domineering like their bitch of an owner. She would have invited you down there if I hadn’t been here.”

  “I wouldn’t have gone.” I said. “What was it like that—that last Christmas?”

  We used to talk of people, she and I, why someone said that at just that moment, why someone else did that particular thing, what their motive was, and wasn’t it all strange? I see little sign that this still interests her. People have been too much for her and now she likes animals better.

  “Just the same, only without the quiz,” she said. “The same as the year before. It always was the same. I don’t know why I went.”

  “Don’t you?”

  She looked at me with a sort of cold stubbornness. Why should I talk if I don’t want to, she may have been thinking, why should I explain? “You went so that you shouldn’t see those two together,” I said, “so that you wouldn’t be there when it happened.”

  “You’re as bad as me,” she jeered at me. “You’ll no more say their names than I will. Only I will, I will. Mark and Cosette—there!”

  “All right,” I said. “You needn’t shout.”

  “When it happened—you’re like some mealy-mouthed old woman, like her auntie. Why don’t you say what you mean, that I didn’t want to be there the first time he fucked her? As if I cared. I only wanted him to get on with it. Christ, he was so slow, like some fellow in those old-time books you read. The truth is I thought he’d get on faster if I wasn’t there.”

  “It made no difference whether you were there or not.”

  She shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she said. “None of it does, nothing does.”

  “I want to know something. If nothing hurts you, I can ask it.”

  She looked at me, smiling now. “Ask what you want. I don’t have to answer.”

  “Did you,” I said, choosing words with care, “mean to kill Cosette? I mean, were you planning it even at that early stage?”

  “I got it into my head she’d die naturally.”

  “But when you knew she wouldn’t, were you planning it then?”

  It was so open, her response, a frank scoffing. “Planning it? Making a sort of plot? You know I don’t do that.”

  “Oh, Bell,” I said. “What was all your time at the House of Stairs but a plot?”

  “I mean plan to kill someone. I do that”—she spoke quite proudly as if talking of some arduously acquired special skill—“on the spur of the moment. Even Silas, I thought about it often, but I was only planning for about five minutes. It’s only when things get intolerable or I … I want something very, very much.”

  She got up, carrying the little cat. The big one, who was still on top of the television set, she scooped up and hung over her other arm. It is something she has taken to doing when she goes up to her room, at bedtime or to rest. “I don’t want any lunch,” she said. “I’m going to lie down.” She is such a curious figure in her black and with that crown of ashen hair, saved from appearing absurd by her tragic slenderness, the cats entwined round her arms like a boa of living fur.

  Here, in my house in Macduff Street, she once again has the room above my workroom. That is where my spare room happens to be. The difference, one of the differences, is that it happens to be 16 stairs up, not 106. As I sit here at my desk I hear nothing but a single murmur of the bedsprings when she lays herself down on the mattress, a sound like a heavy sigh. The cats will stay with her for a little while, then climb out of the window while she is asleep, get onto the slate roof of the kitchen and try to catch starlings. They are never there when she wakes up.

  That last Christmas I missed the sound of her above me, the creak of the 104th stair as she came down, even the murmur of the television she had taken to watching alone now Auntie was gone. The house was full. Diana Castle had come with a new boyfriend, and Birgitte, though having left under a cloud, reappeared with a boy she said was her cousin. The dancers and Walter Admetus went home only to sleep. Cosette refused to allow any visitor to occupy Bell’s room, she thought that wouldn’t be right, so with Gary and Fay, Mervyn and Mimi and Rimmon as permanent residents, when her niece, Leonard’s daughter, turned up, she had to sleep on the sofa in the television room. Rimmon, trying to get the niece to sleep with him by telling her that the sofa was where Auntie had been laid out, only succeeded in driving her from the house.

  But the days of the big parties were over, the evenings of the great restaurant gatherings. When Cosette and Mark went out they went alone together. Without the least element of saturnalia, with no resemblance to those orgiastic parties, there was an atmosphere in the house of high romance. Winter, whatever may be the accepted view, is a more sexual season than summer, a bedroomy season of curtained windows and soft upholstery and artificial heat, of cold shut out and warmth enclosed, of faded, dwindling days and long, long nights. You notice these things more when you have no one of your own, for Robin wasn’t my own or much to me then. Had there ever been so many lovers all together in the House of Stairs?

  Picture how it was. Gary and Fay, for a start, who, having for a long time been no more than fellow lodgers, had embarked on a stormy, intense relationship. They were always parting forever and then being marvelously reunited. Diana and Patrick, newly in love, at the touching stage, the ardent eye-contact stage, were apparently unable to bear the rupture that occurred each time flesh was sundered from flesh; Birgitte and her “cousin,” a giggly pair, babes in the wood who had sex as well as cuddles under their leaves; Mervyn and Mimi, a couple with that rare quality, an air of being no one else in the world who mattered half as much as the other. Of all the lovers I knew them, only they are still together. I saw them a few months back, walking down North End Road hand in hand, she holding the hand of a boy about eight and he of a girl about six. I waved, but they didn’t see me.

  And, of course, there were Mark and Cosette. If you saw them together, you would have taken them to be in love, he with her as much as she with him. They were more decorous than the other couples. They were not to be come upon in corners, rammed almost painfully together, bones bruising flesh, open mouths devouring mouths which themselves ate lips and tongue, fingers prising as if to unearth where and what that essence was which created appetite and produced love. I never saw more than hands touching or a finger laid against a cheek. Their age made dignity harder and they seemed to strive for dignity. Their age? Mark was only a year older than Diana’s Patrick. But just as Cosette seemed to have grown younger to meet him, so he had aged to meet her; not so much in looks, he retained altogether his handsome, somehow Slavonic appearance, his lean straight figure, but in his bearing, so that without losing any of his grace he appeared more staid and more deliberate.

  They weren’t lovers in the sense that we use the term. I don’t think they were. Of course Cosette went out with him and they were gone for hours and they may not have been in theaters or cinemas or restaurants. They may have been in Mark’s flat in Brook Green. But I have, and had, a very strong feeling that wasn’t so. At home, in the House of Stairs, Cosette was after a fashion chaperoned by day and night. Naturally, I don’t mean anyone would have interfered with what she did, tried to stop her, for instance, but they would have known, everyone would have known. It was a curious situation. Here was this house full of lovers, by night everyone a lover except me, love in the air of the place like an all-pervading perfume, languorous and sweet and strangely exhausting, but Cosette, who looked more in love than any of them, whose whole manner, restrained though it was, spoke of a dying for love, remained unfulfilled, remained a kind of reconstituted virgin.

  I speculated about it; I couldn’t understand why. She had gone to bed readily enough with Ivor and, come to that, with Rimmon, men she had scarcely cared for, men who were stopgaps. Every gesture of hers; every word uttered in and out of his presence, testified to her passion for Mark. And she was no cold woman and no moralist, adhering still to the prejudices of her youth. Love to her, she had said often enough, was something to be consummate
d as soon as possible. Was it Mark, then, who hung back? And if he didn’t want her, what did he want? Because I was lonely, finding myself in that situation when I wasn’t first with anyone in the world, I consoled myself by watching them, how they behaved to each other; discreetly I did it, I hope. Of course I was jealous of Mark. In Cosette’s affections he had taken my place as no predecessor of his ever had. So much for those who believe I was myself in love with him… .

  For a long time I have been telling myself he wasn’t pursuing Cosette for her money. She happened to have money, a lot of it, but he would have liked her and wanted to be with her whether she had it or not. So I believed. Yet who was paying for all these dinners they ate and all these plays they saw? He still had no work. He had no prospect of work. I remembered Ivor asking for money in the restaurant and, on one occasion, a check being palmed to Rimmon to spend on acid. Mark seemed beyond all that, having a curious, pure containment, walking tall and keeping himself distant from all these fleshpots.

  The position changed and all was altered as openly as on any wedding night in the past when the bride is brought to bed, the bridegroom fetched to her and the guests, barely excluded, are witnesses of a necessary ceremonious rite. It was a few evenings after Christmas. The air was cold and thick with mist and it had been dark since soon after three. With the great feast only a few days past we had all been lazing indolently, no one had got up till late, and it was Walter Admetus who woke me, ringing the doorbell at noon. There was talk of going back to his place for an improvised party and to drink the case of Spanish champagne he had somehow come by. He had a place in Fulham by then, a converted coach house, and had taken up with Eva Faulkner once more. I didn’t want to go, I knew it would be the sort of party it didn’t do to be alone at, and I worked on my new book until late in the evening. Gary and Fay went, but Cosette and Mark, who were the prizes it seemed Walter was seeking, said they were going out for dinner, just the two of them.