The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  “Have you ever worn it?” I said.

  She didn’t answer my question, but said to me, “You can have it. Why don’t you have it?”

  “All right,” I said. I expect I spoke ungraciously, for I thought of it as Cosette’s to give, not hers.

  Her action, her words, surprised me. She put the bloodstone on my finger. “With this ring I thee wed,” she said, and laughed her dry-as-dust laugh. I don’t understand her, I often don’t, I don’t know what she wants. She can still astonish me. For instance, it always surprises me how little of the paraphernalia of living she needs in order to live. We filled that one suitcase and a single plastic carrier and the room was emptied.

  “And think what someone like Felicity has,” I said. “That great house filled with her things and the flat they have that must be filled with them too.”

  “If I can’t have the things I want,” Bell said, “and I can’t because I can’t afford them, I’d rather have nothing.”

  It wasn’t the first time I had heard her say that. But the first time I heard it I didn’t know what I know now. Someone walked over my grave; I felt a small, cold thrill, but she wasn’t looking at me, she had forgotten ever saying it before. She looked round the room with indifference, the indifference I believe she has felt to everywhere she has ever lived. So much for Mark, who tried to make me believe she loved the House of Stairs and would mind leaving it. We went downstairs and out into the street, looking for a taxi. At certain times of the day taxis come down from Cricklewood, making for the West End. This wasn’t one of them and we walked southward along Kilburn High Road, I carrying the suitcase and she the carrier bag, but they weren’t heavy and it has been a warm humid day of thick air and hazy sunshine. Even if no taxi came we would have gotten into the tube at Kilburn Park. It was Bell who, looking down the long slope toward Maida Vale, mentioned the friend we had who lived there.

  “Now that we’re here we could go and see Elsa.”

  I was more likely than she to have made this suggestion. Up till today she hasn’t spoken of wanting to see anyone from the past, and when Felicity came she was almost violent to her. She has asked about no one, reacts with perhaps natural terror when I speak the names of Cosette and Mark—that I can understand. But Admetus? Eva? Has she no curiosity about the fates of Ivor Sitwell and Gary and the dancers? I had made no reply to her and she said with suppressed violence, “I should never have come out of there, out of prison. I was best in there. I could cope in there, maybe I ought to go back.”

  There is no answer to make. Platitudes and placebos, which I was once quite good at offering, are alien to my present mood. Instead I said, pointing down Carlton Vale, “Elsa lives down there. Do you want to ring her first?”

  “Why, when we’re on the doorstep? If she doesn’t want us, she can tell lies to our faces just as well as on the phone.”

  “She won’t tell lies to me,” I said. I was aggrieved and glad to be, glad to feel something more than dull indifference. The suitcase suddenly felt heavy and I wondered what I was doing, carrying it. “Your turn,” I said, and I swung it at her, the red sparks in the bloodstone flashing. “Give me the bag.”

  Elsa keeps me informed of things—and people. Certain people who I never see anymore she tells me about, and that is the only way I know. She is my best friend, yet months pass by without our seeing each other. I hadn’t even spoken to her on the phone since Bell reappeared in my life. I don’t believe there is anyone left but me who still calls her by that school name, Lioness. One of my books is dedicated to her, the one about the safari park: “To the Lioness, with love.”

  She looks like one, strong and lithe and muscular, with amber cat’s eyes and a mouth that tilts up at the corners. Of course she must have known Bell was with me. Felicity would have told her, for Felicity is her cousin. Or, rather, Esmond is, and as he once gravely told us, “A cousin’s wife is a cousin. Husband and wife are one flesh.” She answered the entry phone and said nothing to my announcement of who it was but “Come up.” At the top of the first flight of stairs where her flat is she was waiting for us, a towel in her hands and her sandy-orange lion’s hair wet from washing.

  Bell didn’t even wait for her to speak a word but said, “I can see you don’t recognize me, I’m so changed. An ugly sight, aren’t I?”

  For some reason I wanted to hit her. I wanted to scream out. It is a new mood for me and devastating. Of course I did nothing—that is, I said nothing, only made eye contact with Elsa and cast up mine, while a kind of panic hatred of Bell made my whole inner self tremble, though outwardly I was iciclelike, still and stiff and cold. Elsa spoke graciously, reminding me that she was indeed Esmond’s cousin, “It’s good to see you, Bell. I hope you and Elizabeth will stay and have lunch with me.”

  In this gracious way she spoke to a woman who has done murder and put herself outside the pale of any civilized society. And with aplomb she preceded us into her flat.

  It isn’t the same as the one she was waiting to move into while staying at the House of Stairs. That was a very long way down in Chelsea, practically Fulham, even farther west than where the Thinnesses have their pied-à-terre. Since then she has married again and is waiting to be divorced again. She was not particularly interested in people’s motivations, but she was interested in sexual relationships. And she loved Cosette, she was pleased to see Cosette happy.

  “He doesn’t seem to have any friends of his own,” she said to me.

  “If he has, they don’t come here.”

  Of course you might have said that Bell had no friends either, but that wouldn’t quite be true. The Thinnesses were her friends and the Admetuses, at least she knew them and associated with them; I was her friend and Elsa. But Mark appeared to have no one, nor could I remember his speaking the names of friends in conversation, but only of his referring vaguely to people he knew. He never talked about his past either. He might, for all that was known of his origins, have been born two years ago, aged thirty-six, or been created by Pygmalion-Bell and had life breathed into him especially for me to see him across the room at Global Experience. It was quite a shock for me, though a pleasant one, when researching one day in the British Newspaper Library and looking (for something quite different) through old copies of the Radio Times, to find his name among those in the cast list of a play heard five years before. Ibsen, it was, Rosmersholm, and Mark Henryson had been cast as Peter Mortensgaard.

  He had told me nothing of his past, but why should he? Cosette he had probably told. Cosette very likely knew his whole history from childhood to the present day. How would I know? I was hardly ever alone with her; Mark was always there.

  Elsa refused to fall in with Mark’s plan to get Bell out of the house while his valuer came, for Elsa is truly honest, truly open. She might—as Bell suggested today—tell a social lie or two, but she wouldn’t consent to deceive a friend for an unworthy purpose. She no more believed than I did that Bell was too deeply attached to the House of Stairs to bear the idea of leaving it. By this time I think she had gathered how little Mark had wanted her to come there even for two or three weeks, though she was one of the few of Cosette’s visitors who bought food for the house, contributed to the wine stocks, and saw to her own laundry. Clearer sighted than I, fresh to the situation, she suspected Mark, and said in a sweet tone that took the sting out of it, “You’ll have to do your own dirty work.”

  In the event he did nothing, the valuer when he came didn’t want to go into every room and Bell was shut up in hers with the television on. Three days later a man representing a property company—shades of things to come!—came to look at the house with a view to buying it. It was a happy coincidence for Mark that Bell happened to have gone out for one of her long walks, the first she had taken for weeks. Before she came back Mark and Cosette had gone out house hunting, or I believe they had gone out for this purpose. They made a big secret of this because Bell wasn’t supposed to know.

  “Short of killing her,” I said
to Elsa, “I don’t see how they’re going to get out of it.” I was writing a novel in which someone had to be disposed of by murder. It was the only possible way for the life of the book to continue. I suppose I had it on my mind.

  “I doubt if they’ll do that,” she said.

  That night we were all to be taken out to dinner by the dancers. Entertaining Cosette was something they did about once a year, to make up for all the entertainment they received from her. Since they dined with her at least once a week and were taken about by her to plays and concerts and cinemas, it didn’t even begin to make up for it, but I expect it eased their consciences. They were resigned to the company of whoever else might be in the house, for Cosette would have contrived, very gently and tactfully, to decline their invitation unless she could take what Ivor had rudely called her entourage with her.

  I remember so much, but I don’t remember the restaurant we went to. In Soho it may have been, or Charlotte Street. And Luis and Perdita were lucky, for they had only five guests, whereas in the past there might easily have been ten. Bell had consented to come, much to my surprise. It was curious how she had gotten herself into the position of the odd person out, the third in the two’s-company-three’s-none situation, almost the specter at the feast. We paired naturally into Cosette and Mark, Luis and Perdita, Elsa and me, and then there was Bell. She must have been the worst-dressed woman in that restaurant. She was by far the worst-dressed of our party, a tied-up parcel of layers the color of brown paper, but heads turned to look at her. They always did. It was the way she walked, so straight and her head so perfectly carried, and that crown of disordered gleaming pale hair and that indestructible face, the profile carved for a cameo.

  It is worth telling you how we were seated. They put three tables together for us and Luis sat at the head of them with Cosette on his left and Bell on his right. Mark was next to Cosette—they always sat like that, they would never be parted—and Elsa next to him. Opposite them, Perdita sat between Bell and me, so that Elsa and I faced each other.

  We ate nothing that evening, we none of us reached the point of having dinner. I think Luis actually ate a few pieces of a bread roll and we all had drinks of the aperitif kind. Bell had brandy. It’s strange how clearly I remember that. Everyone else had wine or sherry, and Cosette of course had her orange juice, but Bell had brandy, a double brandy that she asked for in a desperate voice as if she were dying for lack of it. Cosette was wearing a new dress of pale yellow lawn with a pattern on it of sprinkled white daisies, and she was looking very nice, her face serene and happy. The dim lights in the restaurant flattered her. Her hair had been done that day and looked as fine and as silky as Bell’s. For once she wasn’t talking with Mark, behaving, as they so often did, as if no one else existed, but had gotten into a mild argument with Luis about, of all things, whether Gibraltar should or should not be Spanish.

  A waiter came and took our orders. Luis had just finished telling a joke that was going the rounds about Franco having said Britain could keep Gibraltar if she would give him back Torremolinos, when a woman came up behind Mark and touched him on the shoulder. She was about forty, dark, attractive, more conventionally and conservatively dressed than any of us. He looked around, then immediately pushed back his chair and got up. She kissed him on the cheek.

  It would somehow be satisfying to say that he turned pale. In the fiction I write all the color would have drained from his face or he would have flushed “darkly.” Mark simply looked blank. He said, “Hello, Sheila,” and then spoke our names rather slowly and monotonously. It was as if he were struggling to recover from a shock. “Cosette, Elsa, Elizabeth, Perdita—”

  She interrupted him with, “Of course I know Bell!”

  She was looking at Bell and smiling. Bell was holding her brandy glass in both hands, just staring ahead of her. By this time it was clear something was very wrong, or something was about to go wrong. At least it was clear to everyone at our table but not to the woman called Sheila, who, swiveling her head to the left and to the right, having uttered shrill hellos and how-do-you-dos, said, “I’m Sheila Henryson, I’m Mark’s sister-in-law.”

  She turned round and beckoned to a man who was sitting with a party almost as big as ours. He got up and made an excuse to the woman next to him. He wasn’t in the least like Mark in feature, and he was much heavier, but as soon as you knew you could see he was Mark’s brother.

  Which meant, didn’t it, that he must be Bell’s brother too?

  Sheila Henryson must be a very insensitive woman. The silence at our table was almost palpable now, but she seemed unaffected by it. Her husband came up, muttered something to Mark and gave him a pat on the back. Isn’t it strange that I never learned what Mark’s brother’s name is and I don’t know now? She began making explanations. They lived abroad, Riyadh or Bahrain or somewhere like that, were home for a few weeks’ holiday, had tried to write to and then phone Mark but had, as she put it, “got no joy of that,” which wasn’t surprising since Mark never went home to Brook Green anymore. She began making plans for the two parties to unite, we must all contrive somehow to sit together, the management would fix it, they were with people Mark knew, she said, and who would love to see him again… .

  Cosette was the first of us to speak. She had been looking simply confused. Not unhappy, not that, but bewildered. She interrupted Sheila Henryson’s flow in a way quite uncharacteristic of her, and said to Mark’s brother, “Then Bell is your sister?”

  “No,” he said. “What makes you think that?”

  I heard Bell make a sound. It wasn’t distress but more like exasperation. Cosette didn’t turn pale or flush either, but age got hold of her face, she aged before our eyes. She put out a hand as if to touch Mark. He was still standing up, standing quite rigid, with his eyes fixed on a point on the other side of the restaurant. The way he was standing, with his brother on one side of him and his sister-in-law on the other, made him look like someone about to be arrested. Cosette put out her hand and withdrew it without touching him. Mark’s brother gave a nervous laugh.

  “I can tell I’ve said something I shouldn’t,” he said.

  It was at this point that the waiter appeared with a plate in each hand, the first of the hors d’oeuvres we had ordered. Cosette looked at the artichoke hearts he placed in front of her, put her hand over her mouth, got up, and walked out of the restaurant. She walked fast and clumsily and as if she were blind, bumping into people and pushing chairs out of her path and fumbling with the door and letting it bang behind her.

  Everybody began talking at once, Luis and Perdita inquiring what had gone wrong, Elsa casting up her eyes and saying she wished to God she hadn’t come, Bell drumming her fists frenetically on the table and saying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—oh, fuck!”

  The brother said to Mark, “But what on earth did I do?”

  Mark didn’t answer. He went after Cosette. I sometimes wondered if poor Luis and Perdita had to pay for that uneaten meal, for I don’t think even they ate any of it. I heard Luis say something to the waiter about bad news, about its being impossible to stay. I never saw Perdita again, though Luis I did—but that is another, later story. Murmuring that we were sorry, sorry that we too must go, I left them there with the brother and his wife now imploring them to explain what had gone wrong, and followed Elsa and Bell. Cosette had disappeared and so had Mark.

  Elsa said what I hadn’t been able to find the words for, “Why did you say he was your brother?”

  Bell heaved up her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. She cocked a thumb at me. “It was her idea. She said, ‘Is he your brother?’ and I thought, why not? I thought it’d work better and so it did till that stupid bitch put her spoke in.”

  “What do you mean, ‘work better’?” I said.

  She didn’t answer that one. “He’s my lover,” she said.

  I think I gasped. “Since when?” I too had a vested interest—nearly as much as Cosette did.

  “Years.”
<
br />   Cosette and I, then, were in the same boat. When was it I had first seen them together at Global Experience? Three years ago… .

  I said fiercely, “He’s not still your lover.”

  “There’s had to be”—she paused, in search of a phrase, found one that was wildly unsuitable—“a temporary suspension of that.”

  We were walking along the street, wherever it was. A street of restaurants and clubs and little shops. The weather was warm and sultry and it wasn’t anywhere near dark, but high summer and as light as at midafternoon. That sort of shock gives you a pain, the kind they call a stitch, that you can get from hard running. I felt as if I had been running. I wanted to sit down and I did. I sat on a doorstep. Elsa stood and looked at me, her face kind and concerned but very puzzled, and Bell stood a little apart. If I had to describe the way she looked, I’d say she looked awkward, which was very unusual for her.

  “I don’t feel equal to this,” she said.

  Elsa looked as if she would have liked to hit her. “Shut up,” she said. “Why don’t you piss off somewhere?”

  Which Bell did. She just walked away from us, her head held high. She came to a street that turned off to the right and walked down it, disappearing from view. Elsa and I stayed there for a while, sitting on the step, while I thought about what it meant to me, Mark being Bell’s lover, and what it would mean to Cosette, and then we got a taxi and went home in it. The house appeared to be empty. I went outside again to look for Cosette’s car. It was still a Volvo, though not the one she had had when she moved there, the successor to the successor of that one. Parking in Archangel Place was getting more and more difficult, but it was always possible to park somewhere down there or in the mews. I looked up and down the street and down into the mews, but the car wasn’t there, and that obscurely made me feel better, it made me think Cosette and Mark must have gone out somewhere in it together. At any rate it made me feel better for Cosette.