The House of Stairs

by Ruth Rendell

  Have I said that it was a very hot day? I don’t believe I have. That kitchen, down in the basement, was the coolest place in the house. I went about opening windows, but without making much change in the atmosphere. It seemed only that blocks of hot stuffiness moved in to displace the blocks of hot stuffiness inside. No breath of wind stirred the curtains as the French windows were pushed open to bare the balconies. On the opposite side of the street a man and two girls came out onto the flat roof above the porch, spread out a blanket and lay on it, drinking wine. I had my wine bottle with me in one hand and the glass in the other, and as I ascended the staircase, pausing at each open window, I poured myself wine and drank it, a very unusual thing for me to do, very out of character. If you live under the threat of Huntington’s chorea, you don’t do things that will bring about a loss of dexterity, a vagueness, a failure of coordination. The wine began to give me a headache and dry up my mouth, but I wanted more. I thought of starting on another bottle, drinking myself into a stupor.

  Cosette and Mark went out together at about three-thirty. I don’t think they saw me. I watched them from the drawing room balcony where I had finally stationed myself, by then with a glass of water. The sun had reached a stage of glare, close and dusty, as if it shone through a sheet of gray gauze. Cosette wore a loose flowing dress, sleeveless, in pastel-flowered voile. Mark was in jeans but with a jacket and a tie. They got into the car, Mark driving as usual. It must have been blazing hot inside the car, for I saw Cosette flap the passenger door back and forth, back and forth, before she closed it and they drove off. Later I found out that they had gone to see the registrar. They were fixing a date for their marriage. He was so weak, Mark, he was as weak as water, unable even to stick to that bold and honorable resolve of his not to marry where it might be thought he had married for money.

  After a while I went out into the back garden, hot and dusty and scented by the eucalypt, and looked up at Bell’s window. It was wide open, the two sashes pushed up to the top. I thought of calling out to her, but I didn’t. I went up instead. By then I had gotten the idea that my best hope with Cosette was to make Bell explain that none of it was my fault, that I wasn’t in on the conspiracy. I must have been drunk to have imagined Bell doing this. I called to her from outside the door. There was a movement from inside, as if she had been lying on the bed and had swung her feet to the ground, but she said nothing and she didn’t open the door. I went down again. How many times, I wonder, did I climb and descend the staircase in the House of Stairs that long afternoon? How many times did I retreat to the garden and return to the drawing room? In times of stress I find remaining still very difficult; I need to fidget, to sit down, stand up, pace, wander to windows and gaze out of them.

  On the drawing room balcony, that Ca’ Lanier basket, onto which this past year I saw the new occupant come from his red and white streamlined segment of drawing room, I paused, looking down through leaves of plane and laburnum, sycamore and sallow, leaves that flagged in the heat of the day, onto the dusty roadway, car roofs that reflected the sun’s dull glare, yellowed grass growing out of splits in the pavement. I felt the heat laid on my arms like a thick soft cloth.

  Do you remember in the Old Testament how the sun stood still for Joshua? The sun was stilled upon Gibeon and the moon in the valley. I could see no sun, it was lost in its own white pool of heat, a molten source of burning, but time stood still for me the way it stands still when you long for it to pass. I went back into the neither cooler nor hotter interior, again pointlessly essayed the stairs, again tried the garden that looked to me as gray as mildew. There I sat at the stone table where in days that seemed long past, long gone and lost, I had sat with Cosette and Auntie, and Cosette had been Mariana in the Moated Grange and had asked so plaintively why no one came to visit anymore.

  As I sat there I understood something. I understood that to lose Cosette would be the worst of all possible losses, to which separation from Bell would be a mild deprivation, to which my own poor mother’s death would be nothing, to which no loss of lover or friend could compare. I could even define it. It would be the heart of loneliness. For Cosette, whatever nonsense I told myself about Bell, it was Cosette I loved, Cosette was this house to me, she was my home, it was she I had chosen to be my mother.

  I couldn’t lose her. It must be possible to explain to her and make her see. But a kind of panic took hold of me, a primitive fear, closely linked with self-preservation. It was as if, without Cosette, I could not preserve myself, my self. If she had truly been my mother, I could never lose her, for no matter what abuses have been heaped on them, what betrayals, insults, neglects, mothers can always be gotten back, brought around, retrieved. Mothers will always forgive. My terror lay in the fact that Cosette, though chosen, though loved more than any mother, was not my mother and between us there existed no flesh-and-blood bond of parent and child. The bloodstone, passed down through Douglas’s family, had not passed from her to me.

  You will see that I was growing hysterical. I returned to the house, went back to the garden, climbed the stairs to the drawing room and the balcony, and still they didn’t come back or Bell come down or Elsa return from work. I hung over the balcony in the heat, and what caused this release I don’t know, but sweat began to stream off my skin like bathwater, as if I had stepped from a bath.

  A taxi came down the street. It stopped outside and Luis Llanos got out of it. He had tight white trousers on and a loose white shirt made of some very thin transparent embroidered material and he looked very cool. He also looked, and all he needed to complete the picture was a black hat, like a bullfighter. When he had paid off the taxi he looked up at me and waved, very casual, serene really. Of course I understood he knew nothing; he didn’t know the world was coming to an end.

  I went down to let him in.

  Two days ago, at nine in the morning, my father died. I have done all the necessary things, registered his death, notified the funeral directors, seen his solicitor. And I have done the unnecessary things too, comforted the widow who would like now to be his widow, phoned Bell.

  I can scarcely imagine what words of sympathy from Bell would be like. What would she say? I shall never know, for now I have no more to lose and the occasion for condolence will never arise. What she said, yesterday afternoon, when I told her my father was dead, was: “A good thing that didn’t drag on.” And then, “When are you coming back?”

  I would have been made very happy once by such an inquiry from her. Now I find it mildly repulsive. Curiously enough, I don’t much want to go home; it is quiet here and removed from anything I have ever known, a placid life among the old whose blood is tame and passion spent. We will have the funeral, and I and the widow will attend it and one or two of my father’s neighbors, I expect.

  It will be the first funeral to come within the scope of my care since that one fourteen years in the past and that I didn’t attend. I was told it would be an outrage for me to be there. Bell, of course, was also excluded, but for other reasons. Murderers only attend the funerals of their victims if their crime has yet to be detected, and there was no detection in Bell’s story. Surprisingly, that brother and sister-in-law of Mark’s who caused so much of the trouble, were there to show something for him—love or respect or, more likely, accepted behavior. And Perdita and Luis were there, both in unrelieved but glamorous black, like participants cast for a dance of death. I saw none of it; I wasn’t, as I have said, there. I think it was Elsa who told me, though surely she couldn’t have been among the mourners. Luis Llanos I saw for the last time on that unbearably hot, still, dust-laden afternoon, when he arrived in a taxi to ask after Cosette.

  Unfairly, perhaps, I took this inquiry when correctly translated to mean: “What was going on last night? Give me all the dirt.” Angry with the world, sore with resentment and beginning anyway to feel ill, I tried to force him to say what he really meant.

  “Why should there by anything wrong with her?”

  “Happy
people, people who are having a good time, they are running away out of restaurants in the middle of their dinners? No, Elizabeth, you know they are not.”

  Sickness saved me. I said, “Excuse me, please, Luis, excuse me a minute.”

  As I ran from the room I could see him nodding, nodding and smiling, saying with awful complacency, “Yes, you are throwing up, I think.”

  I was throwing up. I had gotten to the bathroom just in time. Dehydration followed with swift ferocity and, leaving him alone, not caring, I went down to the kitchen to drink glass after glass of water. He had followed me down and was standing in the doorway watching me.

  “Where is Cosette now?” he said.

  “I haven’t the least idea,” and then, because there was no point in being antagonistic, no point in providing the occasion for more explanations, “Let’s go out into the garden. It might be a bit cooler out there by now.”

  “Why are you drinking, Elizabeth?”

  He meant: “Why are you drunk?” Luis was always, no doubt still is, asking questions. It is something people tend to do when they have a less than perfect command of the language they are obliged to speak. I have done it myself when trying to communicate in French or Italian. Real conversation in English was beyond Luis. He asked questions instead and, I must say in his favor, listened intently to the answers. If one was prepared to give them. I wasn’t, not on that afternoon, and I shrugged my shoulders impatiently. I wasn’t prepared to make tea for him either or open wine that I was in no fit state to share. Orange juice from a jar was all he was getting. We took it outside on a tray with two glasses.

  Thus it was that Luis Llanos was also a kind of witness to the death that was shortly to take place.

  By that time the sun had moved enough to leave half the garden in shade, and the light in the other half wasn’t bright, but hazy and subdued. There was stillness and there was dryness, a scattering of leaves from some preautumnal drop lying on the surface of the stone table. Ribbons of silvery bark hung as if flayed from the trunk of the eucalypt. The grayness looked as if it were the result of drought, not a natural property of those leaves, those stems, those effete flowers.

  I never remember a single insect in that garden, not even a common cabbage white butterfly, not a bee, nor some bright-bodied blowfly. There must have been birds, if only sparrows, but if there were I have forgotten them. Once I lifted a large, marblelike whitish stone, a giant pebble, and from underneath scuttled away a family of wood lice. But these after all are not insects any more than spiders are. The walls, of brick, of stone, of flint in places, were tall enough to keep out all sight or sign of neighbors except for branches and leaves which showed over the tops of them, their foliage greenish or yellowing. All the gray was inside, gray of flowers and leaves and urns and faded furniture, gray shade and above us a sky of great brightness but a gray sky just the same.

  It was the last time I sat there, just as it was almost my last day in the House of Stairs, the last time I spoke to poor, tiresome, irritating Luis with his vanities and his poses, his interminable questioning that had moved on to a series of inquiries as to why Cosette had this garden, kept it like this, had ever bought this house. He gesticulated with his long beautiful hands, naming the House of Stairs as “an elephant, an absolute elephant,” terminology incomprehensible to me until I understood he had omitted the significant adjective.

  I hardly listened to him anyway. Looking upward, I had seen Bell’s head appear at her wide-open window, appear strangely at floor level, edged out over the sill almost as if not attached to her body, as if it were a decapitated head that had rolled there. It lay, cheek downward, on the window frame, nest of fair hair outside on the narrow shelf of stone. Of course she was simply lying on the floor, but that was not how it looked from down there. I was to see her again, but not for long and not to speak to—words that seem incongruous, more than absurd, grotesque.

  The car returned. I heard it. Luis might have noted a taxi, not the individual engine sound of Cosette’s car, a sound familiar to me but not to him. He had reached a point of saying, “Why aren’t you speaking, Elizabeth? Why don’t you talk with me?”

  I said, “I’m not feeling well,” and I lay back against the chair and closed my eyes. I was filled with an enormous yearning for Cosette, for her to come out and tell me it was all a mistake, stupid, she didn’t know what had come over her, all was well, would I … would I forgive her? A need for action screamed at me, to move, to leap up and rush indoors, to cast myself upon her. Something told me not to do this, it would be wrong to do it, it would be disastrous. I must make myself wait if I could, if I could.

  By now, I thought, they would be in the house. Surely, surely, they would come out here and speak to us? All the windows stood open, the garden doors. Then, of course, I knew nothing of the purpose of their outing, but I sensed it was something momentous, I sensed they had news to impart, perhaps the purchase of a house. And Luis knew nothing. I opened my eyes and saw him looking at me aggrievedly. I said, “I think Cosette is back. I think I heard the car.”

  He asked if she would know he was there. It exasperated me. I felt like asking him if he had left evidence behind, unraveled a ball of string as he passed across the hall and the dining room and out through the French windows. But all I said was, “Why don’t you go and tell her?”

  I waited there for Cosette to come back with him, I waited and the sun stood still. Hours passed, five minutes passed. The sickness I felt had nothing to do with wine. I remember throwing my arms out across that table and laying my head in them. And Luis, at last, came back alone.

  It seems unlikely that I shall ever return to my father’s house. I came home yesterday, having asked his solicitor to see about the sale of it. Incredible the sum I find may be asked for it and probably obtained! Astonishing too the small fortune my father has left, his amassed twenty thousand pounds, give or take a little.

  “Take it,” says Bell, when told about it. “Unless you feel like giving some of it to me.” She laughs, so that I shall know she is joking. But, “You could buy a bigger house for us now.”

  It is an idea. I could buy a house big enough for her to live in one half of it and I in the other. Or I could buy her a flat and put her in it and be rid of her forever. But this I don’t think I shall do. A sense of fatality colors the depression I live in now, colors it gray. I am stuck with Bell for better or for worse. She has abandoned black at last and is dressed in gray herself today, garments in shades of lanata and senecio and eucalypt made of fine knitted cotton, but they don’t suit her, they make her look like a witch, one of those beautiful witch-queens or malevolent fairy godmothers.

  I am being silly, I am imagining things, for she is very gentle with me today, kinder than perhaps she has ever been. She tells me she has been to see her probation officer, agreed with this woman that she must look for a job, find herself a gainful occupation.

  “I said I would. It’s easier than giving an outright no.”

  The cats have both draped themselves on Bell, the little one reclining in her lap, the big one half on the back of her chair, half on her shoulder. They have taken to her completely and now they prefer her to me. She strokes the big one’s head, pushing his face into the curve of her neck.

  “Of course I shall never work again. They made us work in the town when I was in the prerelease place—did I ever tell you?”

  I shake my head, unbelieving.

  “In a hospital, cleaning wards. I got paid. I spent all the money I got on cigarettes.”

  I know she is stalling. She is filling up emptiness with talk that will provoke me to question her, so that she may postpone what it is she has to ask. I don’t react, I am not to be tempted.

  “Don’t you want to know what else I did while you were away?”

  “I know you want to tell me.”

  “Elsa phoned and asked me round and I went. I went for walks, I walked all the way to Archangel Place and I looked at the house—there!” She
looks at me sideways, lays a hand on each cat as if prepared to spring away, carrying them with her. “I watched telly. I saw Mark.”

  My voice comes all ragged and rough. “What do you mean, Bell? What do you mean, you saw Mark?”

  “I saw Mark on telly.”

  “He was hardly on it, only radio, you know that.”

  “He made just that one film—don’t you remember? Before you knew him. They were doing this Michael Caine season and he had this small part in a Michael Caine film. It was funny seeing him, it was really strange. Do you remember we all once talked about the category of disappointing things? It wasn’t much of a film, it was a disappointing film.”

  We looked at each other, into each other’s eyes. I had this feeling of my thoughts being read or that the force in them was so great as to transmit them into her mind. For I could see another watching that old film— with unchanged love? With indifference? Or in tranquility?

  And for once the thought-reading or the will to have thoughts read has worked.

  “Lizzie,” she says, “Lizzie, what became of Cosette?”

  “I wondered when you’d ask.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “No, she’s not dead. She married Maurice Bailey and went back to live in Golders Green.”

  21

  I HAVE SHOCKED HER and she has gone quite pale. “I thought she was dead, I thought she must be.”

  “Why? She’s not yet seventy.”

  “And she married that funny old man?”

  “He was only eight years older than she. I believe people thought it very suitable. People like the Castles and Cosette’s family must have thought it the best thing that could possibly happen to her. They must have thought she had come to her senses at last. He was a widower and very comfortably off and he had a house that was even bigger than Garth Manor.”