The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  “I’ve been on a diet.”

  “I can see,” I said.

  “The doctor told me to lose weight because of my blood pressure.”

  It was a shy look she gave me, her eyes not meeting mine. I had a curious feeling that though she was telling the truth, it wasn’t the whole truth. This wasn’t her honest and entire motive for losing weight.

  “You’ve done something to your hair.”

  Cosette put up her hand to the reddish brown coiffure. “First of all they tint it to your natural color and then every time you have it done,” she said confidingly, “they tint it a slightly paler color until you end up nearly blond. That way all the gray gets sort of absorbed and doesn’t show.”

  “Yes, I see,” I said.

  Had that ever been her natural color? Come to that, had it ever been anyone’s natural color?

  “The hairdresser says it takes ten years off my age.”

  I wasn’t going to deny it, though I couldn’t see it myself. The strange coppery color made Cosette’s face appear tired as the gray never had, and worse than that, her hair looked like a wig. I told her heartily that she looked very nice, it was all an improvement, and this seemed to make her happy. She said I must come and see upstairs, I must see “my” room, and I half expected her to jump out of her chair with a new lightness of step. But she was the same languid Cosette, apparently with all the time in the world at her disposal.

  We climbed up, looking into the rooms as we went. Auntie was out in the garden, sitting in a deck chair, sleeping probably, so we looked into her room up on the next floor, a big room full of old lady’s things, a strange radio from the forties in a polished wooden case, silver-paper pictures and a collage of sepia postcards, antimacassars on the two armchairs. A flypaper hung from the central light. I looked out of the window that, being at the back, was one of those glass-doors-opening-onto-a-balcony arrangements. Among all that gray foliage the top of Auntie’s head looked rather like a white chrysanthemum. She was sitting with her hands folded and her legs up and stretched out. If she had been doing anything, sewing for instance or even reading, I think I should have been very surprised. But she was doing nothing, just existing, basking in the mild autumn sun, the gray leaves all around her. Later I came to learn that the smoke-colored tree which made dappled shadows was a eucalypt, but I didn’t know it then, I didn’t know the names of anything in that pale, ghostlike garden.

  Cosette had allotted me a room on the floor above, but at the front. It had one of the Venetian bays. I have harped rather on windows, I see, as if I noticed them more than I noticed the proportions of the room and their sizes. Of course I didn’t. It was what happened later that makes me think I must always have been more aware of the windows than of any other feature of the House of Stairs, even the staircase itself, aware not only of the windows’ size and shape but of the danger to which they exposed those inside them. The ones at the front were safe enough, with their deep sills or guarded by their graceful iron baskets, but at the back of the house—what careless architect had designed windows that were in fact glass doors out of which you stepped almost into the void, onto at any rate a narrow ridge of plaster with a low wall a child could have stepped over? And one at the top that, when open, was just a doorless doorway?

  The room that was to be mine had a bed in it and crates and crates of unpacked articles. I began to wish I hadn’t committed myself to that teacher training course. For some reason, and this sort of attitude isn’t typical of me, I wanted to start unpacking and arranging immediately. The sun was shining, the last sun before the winter came perhaps. On the balcony in a house opposite, an austere Parisian angular balcony very unlike the ones on this side, a woman was watering geraniums. There were more trees in the street than cars.

  “You can come every weekend,” said Cosette.

  Going downstairs, we met Diana Castle and a boy coming up. Their appearance had been heralded by the front door slamming and making the house shake, shivering on its spine of stairs. Diana kissed Cosette and to my surprise the boy did too. They went on up into the room that became known as the room of the “Girl-in-Residence.” Who coined the expression I don’t know, perhaps Cosette herself. The door up there slammed too. Cosette smiled in a way I knew meant she was glad Diana could make herself at home in her house.

  She said to me, “I like the idea of having a girl living here. I’d like it to be you, but until it can be I’ll have someone else. People do seem to like it here. I am pleased.”

  Diana was supposed to look after Cosette a bit, do some shopping, clear up after parties, count and pack up the laundry, things like that, but not cleaning. Perpetua did the cleaning. But if Diana started off doing these tasks, she soon gave it up, just as her successors did. With the best will in the world it is almost impossible to wash dishes, tidy up, go down to the shops, when someone (the someone you are doing it for and in lieu of rent) keeps telling you not to bother, to leave it, that it isn’t important, but to sit down and talk to her instead. Already an enormous untidiness, a jumble-sale clutter, had begun to accumulate in the house around Cosette, covering the surfaces and lying in heaps on the floors. But it was a somehow pleasing disorder, it was the kind of delightful mess that puts visitors at ease.

  A great deal of it was strewn across the large circular rosewood table at which Cosette had been sitting when I arrived, at which I was to learn she sat for a large part of every day. It was the reception point of her salon, the place from which she held court. I remembered this table from Wellgarth Avenue, where, with two leaves inserted in its center and twelve chairs around it, it had nearly filled the dining room. There it had been kept polished to an immaculate glassiness. This gloss was already dimmed, the surface already marked with white rings and dull rings, water spots, the indentations made by handwriting on thin paper without a pad beneath. And this somehow, of all the observable changes in Cosette’s style of living, more than anything expressed to me the break she had made with the past, the revolution in her life.

  And of course, because this is the way with human beings, I felt a twinge of fear and more than a twinge of resentment. When we are young we want ourselves to change, but everyone and everything else to remain the same. She didn’t mention Douglas. Perhaps that wasn’t unnatural, but by no oblique word or hint or adumbration did she refer to her loss or her widowed state. There was no photograph of him in the house that I could see or ever did see. Later that day we went into her bedroom, a lavish boudoir newly furnished with a big oval-shaped bed, a Hollywood-style dressing table, the circular mirror surrounded by light bulbs, Chinese screens in ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The rich-man’s-bride furniture of Wellgarth Avenue, such as the honeymoon bed with its frilly white canopy, was distributed about the house, a piece here, a piece there, a couple of chairs for Auntie, the bed itself, stripped of its flounces, donated to the Girl-in-Residence. The silver-framed photographs Cosette now had were of me, of her St. John’s Wood brother and sister-in-law, and a niece’s wedding.

  That evening people came, all of them young, students, hippies, I suppose. Someone must have set this influx in motion, started it off. Cosette can hardly have advertised or stood in the street crying the house’s amenities like a barker. Perhaps Diana was the moving spirit behind it originally and her friends told their friends. I think even then I knew they came because it was free, what they got there, drink, at any rate tea and sometimes wine, food if they wanted it, unlimited cigarettes, talk or silence, and an offer if not of a bed, of a floor to sleep on. But it was also because of Cosette herself, her capacity for loving. She should have had ten children.

  These people came like the flies came to Auntie’s flypaper, lured by the sweetness of the gum, but unlike those flies paying no penalty for their attraction. And Cosette sat at her table with the books on it and the phone books, the sheets of paper, the empty cups and glasses, the phone and the radio, the dying flowers in the vase, her bulging handbag, glasses, cigarettes, powder compa
ct, and her nail varnish, but no biscuits or chocolates because she had to retain her new figure. For Cosette was looking for a lover.

  I didn’t know it then, I couldn’t have guessed. To me she looked like these people’s mother, an impossibly indulgent one of course, for what mother in the late sixties would have permitted a daughter to take a boyfriend off to bed or a son to roll a joint and, as it was passed round, partake of it? These things Cosette not only allowed but seemed positively to promote with her all-permissive smile. Did she smile with greater warmth on those passive bearded boys, the silent one who sat with bent head over Kahlil Gibran or the frenetic one who for hours on end plucked tuneless vibrations from a guitar? If she did, I would have attributed her smile to some other cause; I would never have guessed at a loneliness and an almost agonized longing that made her consider boys thirty years her junior as potential lovers. It was only later, at Christmas, when by a miracle we actually found ourselves alone together one evening, that she explained to me. It was then she talked about being a “manizer,” about stealing husbands.

  “If I was thirty again, Lizzie. I’d been married for eleven years when I was thirty. I’d never worked, you know. Lots of girls didn’t in the thirties, it wasn’t just married women who didn’t. Girls stayed at home with their mothers till they got married and you were lucky if you got married young, the younger the better. You never heard any of that talk you hear now about waiting to get married till you’re older, about having to be mature and all that. I was envied, everyone thought I was fortunate to be engaged at eighteen and married at nineteen—really, I was the envy of all. It seems mad now, it’s all changed.”

  “Do you wish you hadn’t?” The conversation made me feel a little uncomfortable.

  “In the climate of the times what else could I have done?”

  “I suppose it was what sociologists call a culture-specific,” I said, being clever.

  She lifted her shoulders, said very quietly, looking down, “I ate my cake and now I want to have it.”

  Even I, at twenty-one, knew better than to tell her she wasn’t thirty anymore and never could be again. She leaned forward and looked hard at me, then placed her fingertips on her cheekbones, raising the facial tissues until the lines on either side of her mouth disappeared and the jawbone was defined. I had no clue as to what she was doing, although I knew she was waiting for some comment from me. I looked up and then down, feeling my eyes flicker, feeling the embarrassment the young do feel when the old exhibit desires discordant with their years. I didn’t know what Cosette meant, only that it seemed to involve a loss of dignity. She took her hands down, letting her face sag once more.

  “I’ve got a lot of money,” she said. “I’m rich. I think I should be able to do what I like with it within reason, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said on firmer ground. She led me back to the quicksands.

  “Lots of middle-aged women find men to love them.

  A woman in her late forties isn’t what a woman would have been when I got married. My father used to say that you were middle-aged at thirty-five and elderly at fifty. That sounds absurd to you, doesn’t it?”

  Not especially. It sounded about right. Knowing Cosette was already past fifty, I said I thought she looked very nice, lovely, I loved the way she looked, and I meant all that. I did love her tired, gentle face, made haggard by the dieting, her still plump, unused hands with their pink polished nails, her dry reddish hair which the hairdresser, true to his promise, was gradually bleaching to a rosy blond, her dress of midnight-blue lace. It didn’t occur to me to tell her what she wanted to hear, the only thing she wanted to hear; it didn’t occur to me that she would have been delighted if, for instance, I had said she looked awful or ugly but young, if I had said I hated her hair, her dress, the color of her lipstick, yet reluctantly admitted how young she looked for her age. I would gladly have lied if I had only thought of it.

  Soon after that Auntie came into the room. She invariably knocked before coming in, though Cosette tried very hard to stop her doing this. There was a chair she always sat in, far from the table, near the window, a rather stiff and upright wing chair upholstered in Cosette’s favorite red velvet. Cosette always fussed around her, making her comfortable, looking in vain for the Girl-in-Residence—still Diana Castle, who was of course out somewhere—to fetch a small sherry or a cup of tea. In this particular instance I fetched Auntie’s drink and when I came back with it a crowd had arrived, five people whose combined ages probably added up to a hundred, and whom Cosette was in the process of presenting in a measured and formal way to her old second cousin.

  “This is Gary, Auntie, this is Mervyn, Peter, Fay, this is Sarah, Auntie. I want you all to meet my Auntie.”

  It must have made her young in their eyes, you see.

  Elderly people, even middle-aged people, don’t have aunts. There was exploitation in it but no cruelty, no harm. It was scarcely comparable, say, to the conduct of those Spanish Hapsburgs who kept dwarfs at court the better to show off their own height and looks. Auntie suffered no loss of dignity, no humiliation. She looked well on it, this court-dwarf role; she, ironically enough, actually did look younger than when I had seen her last. Placid, complaisant, almost totally silent, she sat in her wing chair at the window, not looking out into the night, for the red velvet curtains were drawn, but staring as if mesmerized at the soft cherry-colored folds.

  When I saw Cosette again, a month later, she had had her face lifted, and, newly done, it was purple and yellow with bruises so that poor Cosette looked as if she had been in a fistfight. By Easter all these efforts had had their effect and the man who called himself Ivor Sitwell was her lover.

  7

  IT WAS HE WHO, indirectly, led me back to Bell, or who brought Bell back into my life, though that was a while ahead. At first there seemed no possible good that could proceed from that source. I remember the shock I felt at finding him in the House of Stairs, the self-control I had to exert to stop myself telling Cosette exactly what I thought of him.

  She hadn’t told me about him in advance. But this was at first unnoticeable, because after a fashion she had achieved her salon and there were always people coming and going, the red stair carpet was already showing signs of wear. Some had even moved in to occupy the empty bedrooms and on your way to Cosette in the drawing room it wasn’t unusual when passing the ground-floor rooms to see beyond an open doorway four or five unknown people sitting on the carpet in a circle with a candle in the middle and someone playing a sitar or ocarina.

  Cosette herself had submitted to, or enthusiastically taken up, the sixties candle craze. (It came in useful for those seasons of power cuts a few years later.) Though there was a light on the stairs, in the drawing room the gloom was pierced only by candle flames. Candles stood in the pair of iron and bronze candelabra she had bought in the King’s Road, and in saucers too and even the screw-top lids of jars. I could just make out the shape of Auntie, in her red wing chair but facing into the room, and the shadowy candlelit forms of several others sprawled on floor cushions or seated at the round table. The huge ornate chandelier hung unlit but faintly luminous in its thickening drapery of cobwebs, a ghostly object growing out of darkness.

  I knew better than to comment on Cosette’s new face in that company—in any company. I liked the old one better, but I wasn’t a lover and Ivor Sitwell had never seen the old one. Somewhat egglike and with less expression, tautly pulled and faintly polished, the new face broke into the old smile. I was reassured. I kissed the smoothed-out skin and it felt the same as the old crumpled skin, or perhaps I mean there was the same smell, the sophisticated flowers of Patou’s Joy. Cosette’s hair had nearly reached the desired shade. It was the color of dry sand. On the third finger of her right hand she was wearing the bloodstone ring. It had become very fashionable but it still didn’t suit her.

  People were introduced, but I forget their names. If Ivor alone was introduced by his Christian and last names that, per
haps, was only because his surname was a distinguished one, at any rate one that someone like me was bound to notice if not remark out loud on. For the sake of suspense I might keep this a secret, but I won’t. A long time afterward I found out that Ivor was not “a” Sitwell, was not connected with the family. Sitwell was not even his real name. He had picked it himself when he shook the dust off his feet of his parents’ semidetached house in Northampton. One of the Sitwells—Sacheverell, I think it was—had happened to live in the manor house of a village not far away.

  Ivor was a poet. Cosette told me so when she told me his name. She also told me his poetry was wonderful and she would show me some of it the next day. He was a thin, unhealthy-looking man with a bony sallow face and very long brown hair. Most young men were wearing their hair long then, but Ivor wasn’t very young, he was close to forty, and he had a bald spot on the top of his head. He said, “Hi,” which was what everybody said then, which, if you still say it, brands you a child of the sixties, but Ivor murmured it without looking up from the book with which he was preoccupied. I say “preoccupied” and not “reading” because he was standing up, looking down at the book that was open on the table. It was one of those books that are collections of the best work of some photographer, interesting enough if the photographs are of people but boring (to me) if they are merely of artifacts. These photographs were of objects in incongruous juxtaposition to each other, and Ivor Sitwell was staring with a look of rapture at the picture of two empty milk bottles, the milk scum still clinging to their insides, standing next to a dead fish in a bird cage.

  He was one of those people who have made up their minds which members of the company are worth bothering about and which are not. I was not and Auntie was not and, with the exception of the prettiest girl, the people on the floor cushions were not. It was Cosette he spoke to.