The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  That evening, an hour or two later, Auntie died.

  I wasn’t there, I wasn’t in the house, my bitter anger against Bell having sent me to the telephone to ring up a man I had met a week before at a party, a man who had phoned since and left a message for me with Mervyn. His name was Robin Cairns and three years later I was to marry him, but I foresaw nothing like that then. He was just a useful person to keep thoughts of Bell away.

  Auntie sat in the armchair next to Bell’s and they watched an episode in a serial about policemen in San Francisco. At some point during the car chase up and down those switchback hills, while guns were firing and tires bursting, rictus-faced men doubling up to clutch gunshot wounds, Auntie lay back against the cushion and died. It was a death not dissimilar to Douglas’s. If we might all die so gently, so quietly! Bell saw her glasses fall off her nose, but since they were attached to a chain around her neck, they didn’t fall far. She never took any particular notice of Auntie, and though I suppose she answered if Auntie spoke to her, it seemed she was herself the instigator of an exchange, it was never she who was the first to remark on a program or an actor.

  Mark came at nine, but he didn’t look into the room where Bell was, though the door was always left ajar. Mimi let him into the house and he went straight through the dining room into the garden to find Cosette. It was darker than dusk, for by then it was September, but it had been very hot that day, hot as July, and the heat still hung in the air. There must have been a strong pungent smell of eucalypt out there, as always on warm nights. I know there was a moon; for Robin and I saw it and watched it rise, a smoky red harvest moon, unusually large and glowing, as we walked along Kensington Gore.

  It was Mimi who told me what happened. She preceded Mark into the garden and went back to the corner where she had been lying beside Mervyn on a blanket spread out on the paving stones. They had been smoking, of all things, locust beans. Mervyn had heard that kids in Philadelphia hallucinate on them and had got someone to bring a bagful back from a trip to the United States. Like Rimmon, those two would smoke or chew anything they thought capable of changing their consciousness. They had even tried the eucalypt leaves, though to no effect. Mimi saw Mark go up to Cosette and kiss her cheek, sit down in the chair facing hers across the white-painted iron table, and heard him say something to her about the stars which were peculiarly visible that evening, bright punctures of light in the dark blue sky, which often, in London, seems to cover and conceal them. Some constellation hung brilliantly above them and they were both looking up at it, their chairs pushed close together, their shoulders touching, Mark pointing with one lightly extended forefinger, when Bell came out into the garden.

  She came across the paved area quickly, though not running, and went up to Cosette. I am sure there was no deliberate cruelty in the way she behaved. It was only thoughtlessness, only insensitivity. She had no feeling for Auntie and, on account of her eighty years and her reserve, scarcely considered her a human being. And I, perhaps wrongly, had once passed on to her my theory about Cosette’s only having her there to seem young in contrast to Auntie’s age. So she stood in front of Cosette and said, “Auntie just died. She’s dead.”

  Bell, of course, was familiar with death. She had seen death of more frightening sorts, the death of Silas and that other death I haven’t yet told you of, though I shall, I shall. Auntie’s was a quiet affair compared to those, all in the day’s work, something to be communicated much as one might retell a somewhat unexpected item from the television news.

  Cosette gave a cry and put up her hand to cover her mouth. Mark turned on Bell and said roughly, “What do you mean?”

  “I just told you, Auntie’s dead. She lay back and died while we were watching TV.”

  “Are you absolutely unfeeling, coming out here and telling her like that?”

  Mimi said Bell didn’t care for this. It made her wince. She stepped back, frowning, holding her hands up to her head. I could imagine her doing that, I could see that gesture of hers, as if her mass of fair hair were a wig and she was holding it on in a high wind. Cosette, silent, turned her face to Mark. They had both stood up. Mimi didn’t expect him to do what he did.

  She too had accepted he and Cosette were friends only, a son for a mother who had never had one, a mother for a son whose own was inadequate. Mark took her in his arms and held her and she put her arms around his neck and held him. They stood there very close, embracing for comfort, for solace, and Bell watched them.

  When I came in about two hours later the doctor had been and gone, had certified Auntie truly dead. A massive stroke had killed her. He and Mark moved her and laid her body on the sofa lest rigor should set in before the undertaker came in the morning. The sofa was rather less than five feet long, but it was more than big enough to accommodate Auntie’s small, shrunken body. I found Cosette desolate, not crying, not giving way to any transports of grief, but shattered with sadness, already shadowed by the guilt that was soon to oppress her. She had nothing to be guilty about. If Auntie had been a mother to her these past few years, she had been a good daughter. It was all of us who had neglected Auntie, treating her like a bit of furniture, who should have felt guilt, and of course none of us did. And for some reason, with very misplaced pity, Cosette was worried about Bell.

  “Poor girl,” she said to me. “I wouldn’t have had that happen for the world. Imagine what it must have been for her, finding Auntie dead. I should have been there, I shouldn’t have left her on her own.”

  Useless to tell Cosette that for one thing she wasn’t on her own and for another that Auntie adored television, that only exhaustion could drag her from it. I did tell her that the year during which Auntie had had television had probably been the happiest of her latter life, only to have Cosette retort that this made things worse, that she should have given Auntie television five years before.

  Mark came in and told Cosette she ought to go to bed, there was nothing more to be done till the morning. She should go to bed and try to sleep and he would come back first thing in the morning. Cosette turned to him and said with a kind of artlessness, as innocent as a small girl, “You’re not going, are you? I somehow counted on your staying.”

  It was then that I noticed, in spite of the shock and sorrow that had left tearmarks on her cheeks, how much younger she had begun to look. I mean, how much younger than, say, a year before. And I remembered what she had told me about loving Mark, about being in love, being killed with love, and I thought, killing or no, it’s done this for her, it has taken the lines away and the shadows, it has made her eyes shine and her face glow, it’s put a spark of youth back, I don’t know how.

  “Of course I’ll stay if you want me to,” he said.

  It stabbed me, the shock of it. I thought he meant with her, in her room, in her bed, and I didn’t want that, I was afraid of it. It was important to me to go with them up the stairs to Cosette’s door, to observe them. Bell, someone had told me, Mimi probably, had long ago gone to her room. Even she, Mervyn remarked, wouldn’t keep on watching television over Auntie’s dead body. I was hurt by that, struck by the unfairness of it, for he in that household had been no shining example of altruism.

  Cosette took Mark’s arm up the stairs. Not like an old woman might, though, more like a young girl who has received some injury. It astonished me that he wasn’t even sure which of the doors was the one to her bedroom. She opened the door and stood there, said suddenly, “I’ve this stupid feeling we shouldn’t be leaving her alone down there.”

  “It is stupid,” Mark said, but very gently.

  “I’m sorry to be such a fool. Don’t look so concerned for me, I shall sleep. I’m only sorry to say I shall sleep soundly.”

  She drew herself away from him, took a step into the room, still holding his hand. Their hands clasped more tightly for a brief moment, then each let the other go free. I knew it was going to be all right.

  Mark said to me, “There’s a room I can sleep in at the top, isn’t
there?”

  I nodded. “Next to Bell. The right-hand door, Bell’s is on the left.”

  He didn’t kiss Cosette. They looked at each other with a strange grave regard and he said, “Goodnight, Cosette.”

  Her voice was very quiet. “Goodnight, dear Mark.”

  It was a great relief to me, all of it. I watched him mount the next flight and pass out of sight on his way to the top. I knew it was all right then. Cosette slept in her own room and Bell in hers and Mark next door to her in the room that had been Felicity’s and everything was as it should be. Or so I thought then.

  I lay in bed having fantasies about their future, Mark and Cosette’s. She would always have a special place in his life, a unique role. One day, of course, he would marry and she would suffer bitter pangs, but she would adjust, she would acclimatize, ultimately coming to love his wife too. I imagined her godmother to his children, an honored matriarch in his home. Not to make myself out too great a fool, in fairness to myself, I must say here that I also imagined telling this to Bell and Bell saying, in typical utterance, that it was all a load of shit.

  Next day the undertaker did come and Perpetua came, commiserating with Cosette as perhaps no one else could, and something else bad happened. Mark lost his job. Or, rather, they decided to write out the character he played in the radio serial, to kill him off by the end of the following week. According to Bell—Mark never went into details himself—the actress who had the role of his wife had landed a Hollywood contract and the producer had decided the best way to handle this was to have them both die in an air crash.

  Cosette listened to the last installment he would ever be in. We listened to it together. With not much verisimilitude the script had had the character Mark played offered a wonderful job (too wonderful for him to dream of refusing) in the Far East. In this final episode for Mark, his brother-in-law and parents-in-law were seeing him and his bride of two months off at Heathrow. The next day’s program would have the news of the air disaster brought to these relatives. We decided not to listen to it.

  “Mark won’t have any trouble in finding work,” Cosette said to me after she had switched the set off. “He’s such a marvelous actor.”

  It might have been true, but from her it was no reliable testimonial. Everyone close to Cosette, whatever it might be that they did for a living, in her eyes did it to perfection. And, in some ways, no one had ever been as close as Mark, in the way of passionate love, that is. I agreed with her, I said I hoped so, but I wasn’t really confident.

  “He’ll move on to television,” said Cosette. “He’s ready for that now, it’s a step he ought to take.” She spoke as if Mark had never made his unsuccessful foray into this medium and as if a move now was entirely a matter for his own decision.

  I expected her to have an enormous showy funeral for Auntie, partly as a remedy for guilt. But one of the interesting things about Cosette was her way of behaving unexpectedly. She would act in character for a long while, until you thought you knew her thoroughly, could predict any move she might make, then perform the startling. It was Bell who once pointed this out to me, during the conversations we used to have about people and their ways. So, instead of announcing to the household that the funeral service would be at such and such a church and the cremation wherever it might be and the postfunerary food and drink at this or that particular hotel, Cosette only gave the necessary information quietly to me, and no doubt also to Mark.

  There was no fussing about what to wear, no lavish ordering of flowers.

  Cosette surprised me further when she said, “Would you very much mind not saying anything to Bell?”

  “You mean that the funeral is today?”

  “I don’t suppose she would want to come, but I’d—well, I’d prefer her not to be there.”

  I might have said there was no fear of that, but I didn’t. It was the nearest Cosette ever got to intimating not so much that she didn’t like Bell or found her uncongenial but rather that things about Bell deeply upset her. I promised not to mention it, but I think that by that time, a week or so after she had found Auntie dead, Bell had forgotten she had ever existed. Cosette and Mark and I went to the crematorium together. Her small cross of white chrysanthemums—a coincidence it must have been, their resemblance to Auntie’s pretty white curly hair—lay alone on the coffin. There were no other flowers and no one else there—who else could there have been?

  “The whole Archangel Place circus,” Mark whispered to me when I put this question to him. “Very sensibly, Cosette didn’t tell them.”

  A bit of nerve, I thought he had. Who was he to talk in that patronizing fashion about her friends when he was no more than one of them? Mark out of work had subtly shifted his position in my estimation. One of the reasons I had looked on him in a different light from the “circus” was the fact that he worked, he supported himself. As the weeks passed and he found no work, refusing, as I understood from Cosette, who was hotly indignant at the suggestion he should, any jobs outside acting, I found myself watching him with suspicion. I was waiting for him to borrow money from her (though I might not have known if he did), instigate once more the big dining-out parties that would include himself and for which as a matter of course Cosette paid, move in, and of course, of course, at last, do the inevitable at this stage and sleep with her.

  That autumn Cosette suddenly became far richer than before.

  I haven’t said much about Cosette’s income, her fortune, rather giving the impression perhaps that she just possessed a lot of money. But it wasn’t quite like that. Douglas had left all kinds of assets, including defunct companies that still however had stock exchange quotations, and a certain amount of apparently undesirable real estate. By that I mean it was in the form of land in outer suburbs with derelict industrial buildings on it, that sort of thing. One of these companies had already been bought out, the purchaser being in need of the stock exchange quotation, and paying something in the region of a half-penny a share. That was just before decimal coinage came in at the beginning of 1971. Of course that didn’t bring Cosette in much money, but the piece of land she owned did. She had forgotten she owned it, these few acres somewhere on the edge of south London. A firm of accountants administered everything for her and they were pleased to tell her that an enormous offer had been made for this land by a garage and petrol-station chain. A new road was going through and Cosette’s old industrial site would abut onto it.

  The precise figure I never knew. Perhaps Cosette didn’t know it herself. It wasn’t in her nature to be discreet and she broadcast the news of this windfall as she called it to all the visitors to the house.

  “Hundreds of thousands of pounds,” was the nearest she got to exactitude. “It will make me a real millionairess.”

  Bell was there to hear it and so was Mark—inevitably. I looked at Bell, expecting to meet eyes turned to meet mine as she calculated the benefits of staying friends with me, but she wasn’t looking in my direction. She was looking at Cosette. It struck me then that, for one who prided herself on her powers of observation, she had made a curious mistake in supposing anyone who looked like Cosette to be suffering from cancer. For unhappy on one level as Cosette might be, guilty that is and really sorrowing for Auntie, missing her as one might miss a mother, on another level she was quite obviously rapturously happy and her happiness made her beautiful. People tend to eat less when they are in love and Cosette had become slimmer without effort. Her skin glowed, her hair shone. I don’t suppose it’s really possible for happiness to tighten up the muscles of the face, but that was the way it looked. I am sure Mark never went shopping for clothes with her, but since knowing him her dress sense had improved. It was a surprise to me what good legs she had, but I had never before seen her wear very fine denier stockings and plain high-heeled shoes. She had bought some simple dresses in silk or fine wool with which she had taken to wearing that jewelry that had been the envy of Elsa and me. She had become elegant—a word no one would have tho
ught in the past of applying to Cosette. But of those who were assembled in the House of Stairs I alone remembered the stout, sturdy woman whose iron-gray hair matched her tailored suits.

  Bell, who had been watching Cosette in silence while Mervyn made some hopeful remark about going out to celebrate, now got up, pushed her fingers through her tangled, tendriled, bird’s-nest hair, and announced that she would be going to Felicity’s for the holiday, she would be going the next day. And Cosette, as if to neutralize this cold tone with an extra warmth in her own voice, said, “Oh, darling, we shall miss you. It has become quite a regular thing for you, going there for Christmas, hasn’t it?”

  Bell looked at her, lifting first her eyebrows, then her shoulders, her expression remote. As if someone walked over her grave? Or as if she had a strange prevision this would be the last time?

  It wasn’t, anyway, to invite either or both of us for Christmas, that Felicity came to visit me this morning. Even for her, July would have been a little early. And Bell she will never want again, whatever her feelings about me may be. She was astonished to see Bell, so surprised that she actually jumped at the sight of her, recognizing her at once, with no difficulty. Before going into my living room, where I supposed rightly that Bell was, I tried to whisper a warning, to utter simply the three words that would be enough, “Bell is there!” but Felicity, who has become far more overbearing and dictatorial, gave me no chance, walking rapidly ahead of me and remarking loudly about how sweet these little houses could be made, how delectable mine was, what wonders could be done with these former artisans’ cottages. For Bell there was no escape, the artisan’s means not having stretched to two exits from the living room.

  Being on what Henry James calls almost irreconcilable terms with the printed page, Bell was watching television, some abysmal late-morning offering. The little cat lay in her lap, watching the big one, who was sprawled on top of the set, possibly watching the lion on the screen that slowly stalked a wildebeest. Bell still has that enviable poise. No jumping for her, no attempt at rising even. She looked at Felicity in a way that made me doubt for a moment if she knew who this was.