by Ruth Rendell
It was very late when they came in. We were all in the drawing room. Those of us not compulsively enraptured by another’s body—myself, Mervyn, Mimi, and Rimmon—were gathered around Cosette’s table drinking wine. The air must have been thick with cigarette smoke in those days, only no one seemed to notice it, or no one seemed to mind. Wrapped in each other, locked together like pieces of a human jigsaw, Diana and Patrick possessed the sofa with a heavy, silent, very early unmoving occupancy. Birgitte and Mogens lay side by side, lips sometimes touching, whispers passing, each with a hand on the back of the other’s neck. From time to time Mervyn had been playing to us on Gary’s ocarina, sometimes accompanying music from the record player. I had never heard him play before and he surprised me. He was good. After a little while he got up and put on an LP of Carmen, and when it reached the appropriate passage Perdita, who was there without her husband, who had been sitting in her quiet poised way in the red velvet chair that had been Auntie’s, rose and without a word began to dance the seguidilla.
It was seldom she would dance for us and when she did I think we all felt privileged that we had had the chance to see in private this once-great dancer who had spoiled herself, who had backed down from the last unscaled height of success, for the sake of love, for, if you like, the folly of love. It was flamenco, I suppose, the dance she did. I only know that all of it—the music, the dance, the single lamp and the candlelight, the wine and the warmth and the lovers—was enormously romantic.
She was a tiny woman, but as straight as a flame, black-haired as Carmen should be, the dress she wore having a flounced skirt of many red frills. She wanted us to clap to the music while she danced but we couldn’t, it seemed to interfere with the air of it, the distance of it from us, the otherness. The ancient ceremonial steps, the stylized movements, the slow twirls, followed their prescribed order, and the music its pattern, and Mervyn’s instrument made a strange haunting overtone, and the candle flames fluttered with the stirred air. And into it, the door opening very gently, came Mark and Cosette, pausing just inside when they saw what they had interrupted. It was scarcely an interruption, for the dancer didn’t pause. And they stood side by side, watching, moving almost imperceptibly closer and closer together until their bodies touched and Mark slid his arm round Cosette’s waist.
We all clapped when it was over. I poured a glass of wine for Mark and one for Cosette, who, rarely for her, didn’t refuse it. There was no conversation. This wasn’t unusual for the House of Stairs, where everybody knew everybody else and knew their views and didn’t feel the need to make small talk. It was a place where people sat reading books in company. But that evening, it seemed to me that there was a peculiar wordlessness, as if communication were being made by other means, by touch and sight and music. The lovers were together, absorbed in each other, and we three who were each alone had our own interior worlds in which to lose ourselves. Rimmon was already slipping into that narcosis with its horrible fantasies from which he was never truly to recover, the dancer perhaps had her memories and her sacrifice and I thought of Bell and remembered Felicity saying that, like Carmen, Silas had had nothing left to do and nowhere to go but to die.
The music was changed, replaced by something of Massenet. The doorbell rang and it was the dancer’s taxi driver, come to take her home. I thought Mark would go at the same time, but he only went downstairs to see her into her cab, and although he had no proprietorial air about him, it was the first time, I was sure, that he had behaved in this manner of a host. He returned, but not to his chair. He sat on the arm of Cosette’s, drew his hand very softly across her golden head and let his arm rest across her shoulders. She looked up at him, but not smiling; whatever it was they had come to was too serious for that. The music had become gentle and warm and seductive. Instead of returning this long rapt gaze of hers, his eyes ranged the big, warm, candlelit room, passing from the locked jigsaw couple on the sofa to the finger-patting, butterfly-kissing couple on the rug, to Mervyn and Mimi at the table, she with her head on his shoulder and his arm holding her. The light gleamed on the silver streak that banded his brown hair. Mark turned his head and let his eyes meet Cosette’s. I could swear that at that moment they might have been the same age. I could have sworn it was a mutual passion.
He bent and kissed her lips, not drawing away but holding the kiss for a little while. You won’t believe me if I say I was shocked, but remember it was the first time I had ever seen them kiss. I found myself first staring, then looking away, glad of the wine I had drunk that fuddled me a little, that blurred the hard edges of painful things. Cosette was flushed a rosy red when the kiss was done, proud in that company, the leader of it. She smiled, spoke his name only, “Mark …”
He gave her his hand. “Time to go,” he said, and pulled her lightly to her feet.
I thought he meant he was going home. She would go to the front door with him if he let her, he didn’t always. Sometimes he would shake his head at her and with a movement of his hand indicate to her to stay sitting where she was. She invariably obeyed him. But that night she put her arm into his, for all the world as if they were going out for a sedate walk. And it seemed to me, though this may be hindsight, that the faintest shyness came into her face and made her manner a shade diffident.
But when she said to me, “See that all the lights are put out, darling,” her voice was steady, and she added in that abstracted way of hers, “the candles, I mean. You know how I worry about the candles.”
She looked as if she worried about nothing on this earth. She turned her face into Mark’s neck and he bent his head, his lips on her forehead, looking like some picture I have seen of Paolo and Francesca.
“Goodnight,” she said. And Mark said, “Goodnight.”
They didn’t quite close the doors behind them. Doors weren’t closed much in the House of Stairs except those to bedrooms. I really thought, I still thought, I would hear their footsteps descend the stairs and only one set return. But they mounted. We were all silent in there, listening, even love forgotten, even desire, in the silent press of listening to know. Her door shut and no one came down. Mimi released her breath in a long, shuddering sigh.
We were mad, weren’t we? This was just a couple breaking the ice of the first time, getting through or over the awkwardness and rapture of a first time that was the more fraught with awe and tension for having been so long postponed. We were insane to make so much of it. But I am telling you how it was and that is how it was, as important somehow as a monarch’s wedding night. I trembled at the thought of Bell, I began immediately to fear for Cosette.
But the fearing and the trembling, the sighs and the awkwardness, were all broken into by the arrival home of Gary and Fay, who banged the front door no more than five minutes after Mark and Cosette departed. They came up the first flight quarreling bitterly, shouting insults and imprecations at one another, only to be hushed by us, fingers to lips, as they burst into the drawing room, as if upstairs were babies we had at last managed to rock and sing to sleep.
17
TO CATCH BELL AND warn her before she saw for herself seemed to me important. I wasn’t sure when she was coming and knew better than to expect her to let us know. She would walk in when she was ready, climb the stairs, all 106 of them, wearily perhaps or energetically and without pausing at the landings, and shut herself into her room. I might only know she had returned by the sound of her movements above my head.
As it happened, I intercepted her quite by chance. It was early and the household was asleep. I went down to pick up the post, expecting a letter from my publisher. Time doesn’t mean much to Bell, she knows no regularity in her hours, perhaps because she has never worked for her living, perhaps for other reasons. She is as likely to get up at five as to go to bed at that time. On that particular morning she must have left Thornham at seven in order to be here by nine. It was cold, early January, and she brought a gust of raw, bitter air with her as she unlocked the front door and came in. She had a
carpetbag with her, they were a hippie fashion then, but hers was worn and discolored, and over her black and brown layers she was wearing a coat of synthetic fox fur, which I recognized as an old one of Felicity’s. It was plain what had happened. Bell had turned up at Thornham with her usual ragbag of cotton skirts and jumble-sale jumpers and nothing to keep her warm but the shawl that had done duty as a shroud for Silas.
I was standing by the table, reading my letter. We looked at each other and Bell said, falling back perhaps on that perennial staple at moments of awkwardness, the weather. “Christ, it’s bloody freezing.”
Unprepared now that the time had come, I hunted for suitable words. She dropped the carpetbag, unwound the long gray scarf that wrapped her head and pushed her fingers through the flaxen, tangled, curly hair. It is a noble face Bell has, Lucrezia Panciatichi’s, aristocratic, serene, the proportions of small straight nose in relation to full folded lips, wide eyes, high forehead, almost perfect. How can someone like her have a noble face?
She held up her arms. “What do you reckon?”
“Of the coat? Did Felicity give it to you?”
“I had to have something. She’s got so many she won’t miss it. That was what she said, she actually said those words. It’s hideous, isn’t it? But beggars can’t be chosers. It’s not half as warm as the real thing.”
“Felicity wouldn’t wear the real thing, I suppose,” I said, and then, because I still hoped for something, for love or friendship, “I’ll buy you a coat, Bell.”
“No,” she said. “No, thanks.” She made things clear. “If I can’t have something wonderful and wicked, if I can’t have snow leopard, something you couldn’t afford, I mean, I’d rather have Mrs. Thinnesse’s castoffs.”
“That’s frank.”
“Well, I am. No point in being otherwise, is there? I’m very poor—did you know? I don’t suppose you ever thought about it. That money I got from Silas’s dad’s house, it’s not worth what it was five years ago. What it brings in isn’t worth what it was. I’ve been talking to Esmond about it. He says going decimal has done it and it hasn’t half begun what it’ll do in the next few years.”
It was a muddled way of putting it, but I dimly saw what she meant. “Talking is pointless,” she said. “I often think talking about anything is pointless.” She picked up the bag and walked past me to the stairs, beginning the climb that with that bag and in that coat would be a slow, long haul.
I followed her, saying, “Bell …”
“What?”
“I thought you might want to know, I mean I don’t want it to be too much of a … a surprise to you.” I nearly said “a shock.” “Mark is up there. In Cosette’s room.”
I don’t know what I expected, but not what I got: a pleased smile, the first smile since she had come in, a look of genuine delight someone might wear when you told her of a friend’s good luck or forthcoming marriage. “How long has that been going on, then?”
“A week.”
“About time too.”
We began going upstairs together. She took off the mock fur and I carried it. “Tell me about it.”
“Tell you what?”
“Well, how it came about, what they did, how you knew, all that. You know.”
It was like the old days, when we used to talk and share with each other views and opinions no one else might know. But we were outside Cosette’s door and I put one finger to my lips, as we had hushed Gary and Fay that first night. Bell mouthed at me to come on up to her room. The house was as still and silent as other houses would be by night. Even Gary, who nearly always got up early, was sleeping in. We climbed on up to the top. Outside her door I told her how Cosette wouldn’t allow anyone else to sleep there while she was away, though we had a house full to overflowing, and Bell only said that was nice of her but she wouldn’t have minded. Why should she mind? And when we went in I wondered why should she mind, it was such a barren place, with no imprint of its occupant on it, unless Silas’s paintings with their backs turned were an imprint. No pictures on the walls, no books, no magazines, no ornaments, no garments scattered, only the bed, a chair, an ashtray as big as a soup bowl, that had once been a soup bowl, empty but still smeared with ash, on the bedside cabinet. The air smelled stale and musty, but it was too cold outside to open the window. It presented, from where I stood, a view only of sky, white but veined with gray and shedding a thin, fine drizzle that might have been rain or snow.
I told her about the night of the seguidilla and she listened with approval but laughing sometimes, giving whoops of laughter, at places in the account I hadn’t found funny. She was unpacking the carpetbag, throwing aside those unidentifiable lengths of dark cloth, crumpled and faded, in which she dressed herself. Then she locked the door. She came and sat on the bed beside me. She lay on the bed beside me.
“It’s all very good, isn’t it?”
“For them?”
“For everyone!”
She took me in her arms. It was the first time for months and the last time forever.
Mark was living in the House of Stairs, though I believe he still kept his flat. In February, which is about the worst time of the year to do such a thing, though I suppose it doesn’t much matter when you’re on your honeymoon, he and Cosette went to Paris for a couple of weeks. Cosette must have paid, of course, and they stayed at the Georges V. I couldn’t stop thinking about that aspect of things, I was always thinking of it, how Mark, like the others, had become her kept man, though, without being explicit about it, he had made it plain he never intended to be.
On the subject of the “others,” who should turn up soon after they got back but Ivor Sitwell. He just arrived early one evening without warning. Cosette was too happy for recriminations. He had betrayed her and treated her shamefully, but who cared now that she had Mark? It was Fay he betrayed her with and she had long been good friends with Fay. She seemed delighted to see him and was soon arranging for us all to go out to dinner together. No one could have been in their presence for more than five minutes, not even anyone as insensitive as Ivor, without realizing Mark was Cosette’s lover. An outsider might have been with her and Ivor for hours without being aware of the situation, but things were different now. It wasn’t just the way she looked at Mark but the way he looked at her. Even I, fearing him bought, corrupt, prostituted, had to admit he looked at her as if money didn’t come into it, as if he were passionately in love.
Advance copies of my new book had come and Cosette was looking at the one I had given her when Ivor arrived. She, of course, was being extravagant in her praise and Ivor, taking the copy from her, remarked that I was “still churning them out.” He was as objectionable as he had ever been, though making no references this time to the Sitwell family. No doubt he had been rumbled, and by others apart from Bell and her informant. He tried to get a flirtation going with her while we were in the restaurant, but you can imagine how far that got him. All the time he was living with Cosette he was never so nice to her as then, when he saw her with another lover.
We were a big party, eleven of us around the table, and by some mischance I had been seated next to Ivor. Bell was on the other side of him, Mark next to her, and Cosette next to him. When Bell had put an end to his compliments and tentative advances with her own brand of devastation (“‘Why don’t you fuck off?”), he turned to me and said how nice it was for Cosette to have such a charming “sweetheart.”
“It’s nice for him too,” I said.
“Sure it is. I don’t doubt he knows it. What does he do?”
I told him. Ivor said he was sure he must have heard his voice, but it wasn’t like being on television, was it? “Resting at present, I imagine?”
We talked for a while. I didn’t have much choice. Bell would have had a choice, she simply wouldn’t have replied. She sat isolated, eating, drinking rather a lot of wine, not talking because she had no one to talk to, having rejected Ivor and been rejected by Mark—at least, temporarily deserted by him
. He had eyes and conversation for no one but Cosette, had finished his meal and, having twisted around in his chair, was talking to her in a low, loving, intensely intimate voice not much above a whisper. I remember thinking then how alike she and Bell were, like enough at any rate to seem related, Cosette looking far older of course and far less beautiful—that wasn’t a mere matter of age—but of the same physical type, with the same fair, northern beauty, a kind of Valhalla goddess cast of face, a Freya or a Brunhild. Her right hand lay on the tablecloth, a plump, white hand not at all like Bell’s and Mark laid his tenderly over it. She made some reply to him and his own response to it the entire table might have heard, a gratified, delighted, ardent, “Darling!”
Ivor said dryly to me, “Of course, he’s an actor.”
It was cruel, but it was only what I was thinking. And yet, and yet … When I was at school and I read Thackeray’s Esmond I used to wonder how Lady Castlewood, who is old and made ugly by smallpox, could quite suddenly grow beautiful. Well, Cosette had grown beautiful and no doubt for the same reason. She paid the bill and Mark let her. He didn’t have much choice. Cosette told me a little while afterward that he had recently done some auditioning for television but he didn’t photograph well. Perhaps I should say he didn’t film well, which was astonishing with those cheekbones and that mouth.
“He’s too beautiful,” she said. “You see, he couldn’t get a big part, I mean he’s not a star, and he’s too good-looking for supporting parts, he’d steal all the scenes from the stars.”
Perhaps this was true, but it sounded a bit like a Hollywood thirties verdict. Mark might just not have been a very good actor and after that, as far as I know, he never worked again. But he was a man of many interests: he read, he walked, he worked out in a gymnasium before this was a fashionable thing to do, he was passionately fond of the stage and he took Cosette to lunchtime theater and fringe theater, he cooked, so that those meals of expensive delicatessen became a thing of the past. Strangely enough, he seemed to have no friends of his own, or if he did have friends, none of them came to the House of Stairs. But he became, in a way neither Ivor nor Rimmon had approached becoming, the master of the house.
