The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  I don’t mean he was domineering or even masterful. He didn’t suddenly start dictating to everyone or telling Cosette what she should do. It was nothing like that, rather that when it was a case of making a decision, he made it. And in a way that I know sounds sinister, though it wasn’t because Mark himself was about as far from sinister as anyone could be, he began to make it clear that not all the occupants of the House of Stairs were welcome guests.

  Gary, for instance, and Fay. “He asked if I ever in fact cleaned Cosette’s car,” Gary told me. “That was the arrangement when I first came here, he said.”

  “It’s not that Gary minds having that sort of thing said to him,” said Fay. “He’s not paranoid. But it’s a question actually of who says it. He wouldn’t mind if Cosette said it.”

  “Except that you can’t imagine Cosette saying it. I might have cleaned the bugger sometimes if Cosette hadn’t always told me to leave it.”

  Birgitte and Mogens he got rid of more easily. How I don’t know, but I suppose he simply told them to go. They were very young and Mogens was one of those rare Danes who don’t speak much English. They had nowhere to go and very little money and Birgitte was actually crying when they left, escorted out of the house by Mark. It reminded me of an “Expulsion from Paradise,” Adam downcast, Eve in tears, and the avenging angel driving them ahead of him. Cosette knew none of this, he kept it from her, and when she found out she was upset. He told her they wouldn’t come to any harm, they could throw themselves on the mercy of the Danish consul.

  “All good things come to an end,” he said.

  Cosette looked anxiously at him. “Oh, don’t say that!”

  “I meant them, not us.”

  Since they had only come for a protracted Christmas holiday, Mervyn and Mimi had already gone. Rimmon was rather ill. It wasn’t that he was addicted to any particular drug, but rather that he had poisoned himself in some way with all the things he had swallowed and injected over the past two or three years. He was extremely thin and he ate very little, he had no appetite, and he wandered about the house, pale and hollow-eyed, doing absolutely nothing. Mark refused to call him Rimmon but insisted on addressing him by his real name, Peter. Almost anything that was said to him, even mildly critical, upset Rimmon, and when Mark told him he couldn’t go on like this, he obviously needed psychiatric treatment, he started crying. Of course Mark was never loud or aggressive, far from it; he was always gentle and with an air of thinking carefully about what he said, but Rimmon cried just the same and couldn’t seem to stop, the tears falling in a permanent slow trickle. At last Mark got a doctor to him—naturally, Cosette had her own tame private doctor—and poor Rimmon went into a psychiatric ward, disappearing forever from our knowledge, at least from mine.

  I began wondering who would go next. Gary and Fay were still there, but by then they understood they were there on sufferance, indefinite marching orders had been given to them, and the sooner they found a flat or room elsewhere the better. Toward Cosette’s friends from outside he reacted very differently. Admetus and Eva Faulkner, who were married a few months afterward, he made very welcome, as he did Perdita and Luis and the Castles and Cosette’s brothers. They were all respectable people, more or less, they had jobs or at any rate they had callings, they didn’t use drugs or keep peculiar hours or buy their clothes at jumble sales or make love in public. Sometimes I saw Mark’s eyes rest speculatively on Bell as she lay on Cosette’s sofa, chain-smoking, or repaired to the room where the television was, or he encountered her coming upstairs, wrapped in Felicity’s synthetic-fur coat. And then I wondered if it wasn’t too farfetched to think her days in the House of Stairs might be numbered.

  “They’ll get married,” she said to me one evening when we found ourselves alone in the drawing room, Mark and Cosette having gone off to see a play in some suburban theater. “You’ll see.”

  “It’s what she wants, I suppose.”

  “It’s what they both want. You know my views. Marriage is an economic arrangement. You’d realize that if you weren’t so sentimental.”

  “You mean,” I said, “that she wants him and he wants her money.”

  “That’s my kind of blunt speaking,” she said, “but yes, okay, that’s about it. I told you, he’ll be nice to her, he’ll treat her right.”

  “She’s nineteen years older than he is. When she’s seventy he’ll only be a bit over fifty.”

  Bell gave me an odd sort of look when I said that. It was as if I had said something incredible, as if I were talking about some contingency not just remote but beyond the bounds of possibility. I didn’t understand it then. I thought she was implying something quite different.

  “Are you saying that won’t matter because he’ll have other women?”

  “It’s not likely he’ll stay faithful to her for the rest of their lives, is it?”

  “It would kill her.”

  “People aren’t so easily killed,” said Bell, as if she regretted this. “It’d solve a lot of problems, wouldn’t it, if people died of jealousy or being rejected? Imagine if it was a fatal disease—‘She’s got terminal jealousy,’ or ‘He won’t last long now that he’s been rejected.’”

  I didn’t ask her what she meant. I thought she was thinking about Silas or even Esmond Thinnesse. But when Mark and Cosette came in a couple of hours later I half expected them to announce to us their impending marriage. It wouldn’t have surprised me if one or the other of them said they had something to tell us and then invited us to Kensington Registry Office on the following Saturday; or, because Cosette was romantic and there was that formal, ceremonious side to Mark’s nature, to a marriage service according to the rites of the Church of England at St. Michael the Archangel.

  Nothing like that happened. The room was full of smoke from our cigarettes and Mark opened the windows onto the balcony. It was April and cold and the wind lifted the red velvet curtains and made them belly and shudder. For someone to do that today wouldn’t be exceptional, what would be is such excessive smoking, but it wasn’t then, it was normal, everyone in the house smoked, except Mark himself. His gesture, followed by a fanning of himself with his hand, seemed a reproach—more than that, for he looked at Bell with distaste, as if he knew very well that the majority of the cigarettes had been smoked by her. He looked at her as if he wished she wasn’t there.

  Bell returned this look with a classic one of her own, impudent and defiant. It seemed to say, I brought you here, I put you in the way of all this good fortune, and just you remember it. You won’t turn me out the way you got rid of Birgitte. Of course, all this was in my imagination and in fact I was quite wrong. Bell’s look meant a great deal, but not that.

  She left the room soon after they came in. I had noticed she didn’t like being with them and I had even asked her why she now disliked Cosette. Her reply had a chilling effect.

  “I don’t dislike her. I’m indifferent to her.”

  I ought to have asked her how, this being so, she had the nerve to go on living on Cosette’s bounty, but I didn’t. I didn’t because I loved her, I needed her, to be with, to talk to sometimes, to maintain for myself the illusion she was still my closest friend. And I had begun to be afraid she would leave, either of her own volition or because something would drive her away. Mark would drive her away; I was very afraid of that.

  It was soon after this that he asked me to have dinner with him.

  The evening he named was one on which Cosette would be at a niece’s wedding. This was the niece who had stayed in the House of Stairs and been told by Rimmon she was sleeping on the sofa where Auntie had died. It was to be a big wedding down in Kent with a disco in the evening and Cosette had promised to stay for part of this. Mark hadn’t been invited. Leonard and his wife knew him, had met him at the House of Stairs, and Mark had treated them with great courtesy, but I think they found the whole setup rather awkward. They hadn’t liked to ask if he was a friend or a kind of servant-companion or Cosette’s fiancé or w
hat. Probably they didn’t realize he was living with her. Anyway, he wasn’t asked to the wedding. I was very surprised that the first evening he found himself without her he was asking me out. Briefly, I remembered what Bell had said about the unlikelihood of his being faithful to Cosette for the rest of their lives. But I couldn’t see myself as a possible candidate, he being, I was sure, as unlikely to fancy me as I was to be attracted to him.

  Then it occurred to me that this was a party he must be arranging. “Have you asked Bell?” I said.

  Was it my imagination or did the mere mention of her name these days make him, if not quite wince, somehow withdraw himself, brace himself, force a response?

  “It will be just you and me,” he said. “There is something I want to say to you.”

  The chances were that this was to be an ultimatum. I was the next member of the household he wanted out. Over an elegant dinner paid for with Cosette’s money, I was to be asked, with charm and tact because of my special position and place in her affections, if I didn’t think it was time I quitted my two pleasant rooms and looked about for somewhere of my own to live.

  You will see that I had come very near to disliking Mark. He was a threat to me, a thief of love, who came between me and Cosette. As they wished me to do, I was seeing everything inside out.

  18

  WE LIVED IN THE same house but we didn’t go together. We met in the restaurant. It was a bistro not far from Paddington Station, not at all grand, but not shabby either. For some reason I didn’t say anything to Bell about dining with Mark—the reason probably was that I didn’t get the chance, I didn’t see her—and later on I was glad I hadn’t. I took it for granted Cosette didn’t know this meeting was going to take place and I was surprised when Mark said to me, it was almost the first thing he said, “It was Cosette’s idea we meet away from the house. You know how it is, you can never be sure if you’re overheard.”

  His smile and raised eyebrows had a rueful air. All those crowds of people, he seemed to infer, lurking behind doors, listening, sponging. And there was something in what he implied, for Gary and Fay still hadn’t moved and, to his dismay, Diana Castle and her boyfriend had suddenly arrived, begging Cosette to put them up for just a week, it wouldn’t be more than a week, and Cosette of course had consented. But this declaration of “Cosette’s idea” made me immediately anxious. I could hardly believe she would depute Mark to turn me out, yet his influence with her was great, was growing greater with every day that passed. She was in thrall to him, and that would not be putting it too strongly.

  “What did you want to say to me, Mark?”

  “Several things, really.”

  He waited. Usually very articulate, he seemed at a loss for how to express himself, and my apprehensiveness grew. It seemed to me that his look had become almost ominous, like that of a messenger come to break bad news. In those moments my expectations changed and, in spite of what he had said about our meeting there being Cosette’s suggestion, I had a sense that he was going to tell me of a coming breach with her, of his involvement perhaps with someone else, even of his coming marriage to that other woman. His silence was heavy and, unable to bear it any longer, I leaned forward and said in the voice one uses to jerk someone from a trance state, “Mark, what is it?”

  He smiled, shook his head. “Oh, nothing, nothing to look like that about. I find some things hard to say, that’s all.”

  And then he did say it. It gave me a greater shock than if he had told me he was leaving the House of Stairs, never coming back, going to the other side of the earth. The words came rapidly, almost in a rush.

  “I suppose you must realize how much in love with Cosette I am.”

  I just looked at him. I didn’t say anything.

  “It wasn’t like that at first,” he said. “Of course I liked her, I liked her enormously. And then—well, I fell in love.” He laughed a little. “I couldn’t quite believe it at first. It seemed so—improbable.” Why? Because she was so much older? Because he wasn’t the falling-in-love kind? He didn’t explain, but he forgot his reticence and what might have been embarrassment. “I tried to stop it, I told myself it was ridiculous. I couldn’t stop it. Of course I wouldn’t want to stop now—the idea of stopping is impossible, it’s laughable. You look surprised. Couldn’t you see? I thought it showed in every word I spoke and every way I looked.”

  He meant what he said utterly. He was as moved with passion as Cosette herself had been when she told me she loved him so much she would die of it. He leaned across the table and gazed at me with an ardor the waiter who came up to us must have thought was meant for me. I was so astonished I just sat there shaking my head. When someone says “I am in love,” we know at once what is meant even though we may find it very hard to define. It isn’t the same as “I love,” not just in degree but in kind, it isn’t weaker but far stronger than the extravagant expressions “I adore,” “I am mad about.” It implies obsessive commitment. It includes thralldom, blindness, total acceptance, absolute fidelity, involuntary exclusiveness. In it lies security. Outside it is the world that cannot get in. When I had gotten over utter disbelief and into absolute belief, I felt enormously relieved. My relief was for Cosette, that she was safe.

  “I don’t,” he said, “actually want it to show.” This was a confession of some significance that I was to appreciate later.

  “Is that why you said it was ridiculous?”

  Because she’s old, I thought, because she was such an obvious pushover. That wasn’t what he had meant, as I later found out, but he seemed to have forgotten saying it.

  “Did I say that? Ridiculous at my age, I suppose.”

  Then what about hers? “Why are you telling me?”

  “Because you’re more than just a friend of hers. You’re almost an adopted daughter.”

  We began eating. I was astonished by what he said and growing more and more pleased by it, yet somehow it had taken away my appetite. I picked at my food. I drank my wine.

  “There are things I mean to do,” he said, “and not to do. I thought it would be right to tell you. What others may think is irrelevant. For one thing, I’m not going to get married.”

  So much for Bell, I thought.

  “It would seem the absolutely right thing to do when you feel like I do, make a public statement of one’s commitment. The reason I’m not going to do it is because Cosette”—he paused for word selection—“is very wealthy. I don’t think it would be quite—well, honorable for me to marry her. Do you understand what I mean?”

  I nearly burst out laughing. I knew a lot of people, older people, my father and Cosette’s brothers, for instance, who thought practically the only honorable thing a man could do by a woman was marry her. Once a woman lived with a man he would never marry her, was what they would say, he wouldn’t make an “honest woman” of her. And here was Mark telling me that in his philosophy it wouldn’t be honorable to marry a rich woman. But I saw what he meant. I even thought it quite admirable and saw him in those moments as a strong-minded, disciplined man.

  “Some would think you married her for her money,” I said.

  “To put it brutally, yes.” He obviously hadn’t liked the way I put it. “Of course, in the nature of things, if I live with her—and I intend to live with her for as long as she’ll have me, forever, I hope—some of her wealth must rub off on me. I must benefit. But at least I won’t … have a right to it.” He talked as if the Married Women’s Property Acts had never been passed, but again I knew what he meant. The waiter came over and he asked for another bottle of wine. We were drinking ferociously, to combat emotion I suppose, Mark looked at me and with a quick shiver shed his pomposity, like someone slipping off a cloak. He said simply, “I’m so happy. I’ve never been so happy.”

  “I can see,” I said.

  “The next thing I want to say is that we shan’t go on living in Cosette’s present house.” He had never called it the House of Stairs. I was suddenly, for the first time, a
ware of this. “I’ve never liked Number Fifteen Archangel Place.” He gave the address a stagey emphasis. The enthusiasm he showed on his first visit was apparently forgotten. “It’s very inconvenient. It costs Cosette a fortune to run—mainly for the benefit of other people. I don’t mean you, Elizabeth, and what is it, after all, but a damned great staircase with rooms sprouting out of it? It’s a folly, really.”

  “Cosette used to love it.”

  “It’s interesting why Cosette bought it. It was as an antidote to loneliness, the principle being that if you have empty rooms they’ll be filled. And they were, they were. Now she wants to be with me just as much, thank God, as I want to be with her.”

  “Alone with you?” I was thinking of Bell, but he, of course, thought I meant myself.

  He said quickly, in a cliché to which it would have been hard to find an alternative. “There will always be a home for you with us, Elizabeth.”

  It seemed to put me rather in Auntie’s role. I didn’t care for the idea of living with these lovebirds. “Where will I go?” I said.

  “A little house in a mews, we thought.”

  There would be no room for Bell. And I should lose her once and for all. This would be the rupture and it would be a parting without a promise of reunion, I sensed that. “Bell will be happy for you,” I said. “She thought you’d get married, so she wasn’t entirely right, but she was right in principle.”

  A shadow touched his face. It was as if all the happiness, the glow of it, was cut off by a shutter closing. His gaze had been a room filled with light and happy people celebrating and then the door was shut. “I wonder if you’d mind not saying anything to Bell just for the moment.”