by Ruth Rendell
“Why do you say ‘must have’? Don’t you know?”
“No, I don’t know, Bell. I can guess. I can gather things from what Elsa tells me. Elsa keeps in touch with Cosette, but I don’t. I can’t.”
“Why don’t you? What do you mean?”
I may as well tell her. I have never told anyone but Elsa. No one has been interested. Why should they be? We fall out with our friends, everyone does, friendship comes to an end through disuse and neglect mostly, but sometimes through the violence of a quarrel.
“Cosette hasn’t spoken to me since, Bell. She never spoke to me again, she has never forgiven me. She thinks I betrayed her, you see, and that was the one thing she couldn’t bear.”
“You could have explained.”
“I didn’t get the chance. After it happened, you see, that same evening, she didn’t stay in the House of Stairs. Her brother Leonard came and took her away to Sevenoaks. I phoned her there and Leonard’s wife answered and said Cosette was too ill to speak to anyone. I meant to write, but I didn’t know what to say. Elsa and I were still in the House of Stairs, alone there. A solicitor wrote to me on Cosette’s behalf …”
Suddenly I find it desperately hard to speak of this. I am near tears and my voice is failing. But Bell presses me and Bell has got hold of the wrong end of the stick.
“You mean Cosette got a solicitor to write to you and tell you not to get in touch with her? Did she? I wouldn’t have believed it of her!”
“No, Bell, he wrote to tell me Cosette wanted to give me the House of Stairs, she wanted to make it over to me by a sort of deed of gift.”
Her face has changed, it has become greedy, rapacious, the eyes glittering with need. “She gave it to you? It must have been worth a fortune even then.”
“Don’t be silly. Do you imagine I’d have taken it? I wouldn’t have dreamed of taking it. She meant it as compensation for herself, for my losing her. I understood that. I wrote to the solicitor and told him I didn’t want the house or what it would fetch or anything, I didn’t want compensation for losing Cosette.”
“And you never got in touch with her again?”
“After your … trial, after that, she went away somewhere and when she came back I couldn’t find her, I couldn’t find where she was. Perhaps I didn’t try very hard. I knew her, you see, I knew how she felt about betrayals. Being betrayed was the only thing she couldn’t forgive. Then Elsa told me she’d got married and I got married too and it was all too late.”
When Mark and Cosette came home from the registrar they went straight up to the drawing room, where Luis found them. They told him their news, they had no need to keep it a secret. They were getting married.
They had given notice of their marriage to take place three weeks from that day. I don’t know what was said, of course, I only know what Luis, coming back into the garden to say goodbye, told me was said, and he had no gift for reportage. But Cosette had referred to the difference in their ages, he told me, and I can imagine her saying, “We had to put our ages on the form, Luis, and it was a bit humiliating, but not so bad as having to say them out loud.”
Luis, with unusual sensitivity, must have understood his company wasn’t exactly the fulfillment of their desires at that moment. Not that Cosette would ever have said so or have failed to press him to stay, to go home and fetch Perdita, all go out together and dine. Probably it was Mark who put up no dissuasion when Luis said, halfheartedly, that he must go.
Left alone, the two of them brought to crystallization the flow of doubt, hesitancy, half decision which had filled their talk, running between islands of love and lovemaking and future plans, ever since the night before. Mark must tell Bell. Or they must both tell Bell. Bell must be told.
The thing, the awful thing, was that Cosette never really knew what Mark had to tell Bell. Cosette never knew the magnitude of it, what being told that her lover was truly “in love” with Cosette would do to Bell. Because, you see, she thought the worst of it was that Bell must be informed of their intention to marry and of the loss of her home, a blow that she had persuaded herself would be much softened by compensating Bell with a substitute. What a one for compensating people with houses Cosette was, incurably generous, undaunted!
But this she saw as the worst of it. Mark, of course, knew better. Mark had some idea of what he faced in confronting Bell. No doubt he was afraid she in her turn would confront Cosette and pour out to her all the early plans she and Mark had made, an intrigue not qualified by loving apologies and excuses (and laying the blame elsewhere) as had been Mark’s own policy when confessing to Cosette, but raw and ugly with every greedy word quoted, every yelp of laughter recalled, every callous aspiration exposed.
You understand that I am guessing, don’t you? You understand that I was not there, that Luis was not there, that Elsa wasn’t yet home, that he and Cosette were alone? But if I had been there, could I have seen into Mark’s heart? No one knows precisely what he thought or what he feared, though what he said when he was in Bell’s room, that is known. He was very afraid to go up there. He would have liked to postpone it forever, to have sat forever in that close, warm, still drawing room, side by side with Cosette on the sofa, his arm around her and her head on his shoulder, from time to time turning her face to kiss her lips. But for the most part silent, at rest, the awful events, the alarms and excursions of the past twenty-four hours, by a miracle of love—and, yes, of exertion too and passionate hard labor—smoothed into serenity, forgiveness asked and granted, leveled into a kind of rich peace.
But for Bell. But for the task that remained. He probably told Cosette that he was afraid, he wouldn’t have minded telling her that, though not precisely what he was afraid of. Wasn’t she his mother as well as his lover, the gentle all-embracing maternal image to whom he could confess anything, admit any terror?
I suppose she told him she would do it and he demurred. He knew Bell wouldn’t have believed Cosette. Then she told him it was best to get it over. Procrastination makes things worse. Tell her and get it over. Probably she suggested taking Bell out to dinner. I am exaggerating only slightly when I say there were few things Cosette thought couldn’t be ameliorated if not cured by a good dinner in an expensive restaurant.
He went upstairs, up all 106 stairs, or however many there were from the drawing room to the top. He knocked on the door, he called out to her. I don’t know if she answered or if he just walked in without being invited. She was there in her room, lying on the floor with her head on the windowsill, the two windowpanes raised up to their fullest extent. A stark, nearly unfurnished room, with boxes of clothes lying about, and clothes on the bed, and Silas’s paintings stacked against the walls. He went in and closed the door behind him, but he couldn’t lock it. Perhaps he didn’t want to lock it. He told Bell he had something to tell her.
After she had done it, some time after but before the police came, she told Elsa and me what had happened. Isn’t it strange that, for all her knowledge of people, Bell had never guessed what Mark’s true feelings were?
“He said he was in love with her. The fool was standing by the window, the open window, looking out. I knew he was going to marry her, that was part of the plan, that was great, fine. What did I care about the bloody house? I didn’t want to live in this house. But he was in love with her? He was going away to live with her, just her, and drop me in the shit? It was him saying he was in love with her, and I knew the fool meant it, that was what did it. He said, ‘I know what was planned, Bell, I can’t forget it. I wish I could, it makes me feel sick now to remember. I’m in love with Cosette, I love her like I never loved anyone, I have to tell you I just want her and only her for the rest of our lives.’ And he turned his stupid face and looked at the sky like it was full of angels singing.
“She came in then. She tapped on the door and came in saying she thought she too ought to explain. So I did it. I wanted to do it in front of her. You know what I did. I jumped up and ran at him and pushed him out.
I wanted to do it, it was great—until I’d done it and then I wanted to pull him back out of the air, undo it. Did you hear him scream, Lizzie, did you hear him scream?”
It is something I should like to forget. If someone fell from a height, I supposed they fell in silence, that the shock stunned them, the empty air. But Mark screamed as he fell, a cry, a roar of terror that split open the still and heavy summer evening. That sound, though, that expulsion of the ultimate expression of fear, was as nothing to the sounds his body made as it struck the stone paving of the gray garden, a sound I am unable even now to describe, to convey anything approaching the dreadfulness of both its solidity and its liquidness, the noise of a human being bursting bonds that are its own flesh and bones.
We were inside the house by then, Luis and I, inside the French doors, walking across the dining room. You don’t speak or reflect or even pause in these circumstances. You run. Away from or toward. We both ran back into the garden and saw the exploded thing spread like a stain on the gray flagstones, and we whimpered and held each other. We held each other like lovers, and rocked and moaned.
Crying, making these sounds, clutched together, as one we turned away from what lay out there, as we staggered, locked together, toward those open doors, first Elsa came walking across the dining room and then, pushing her aside, uncaring of anyone or anything that might be in her path, Cosette ran through the room and into the garden and cast herself upon Mark’s body. She lay on his body until at last they took her away and I saw she was covered with blood as if she too had been mortally injured.
I have lost track of the times of things. It might have been ten minutes or an hour afterward that Bell came down and spoke to us. To Elsa and me, that is. Where was Luis? I find I have no idea what became of Luis. Someone phoned the police, but I don’t think it was one of us. A neighbor perhaps, a passerby. Did Mark’s terrible cry ring across Notting Hill to summon the little crowd that gathered outside our gate? I heard sirens long before the police came and found out later this wailing came from fire engines rushing to a fire in Westbourne Grove.
It was a police doctor who gently lifted Cosette from off Mark’s body. Her face was terrible, smeared with blood, distorted into a ferocious ugliness by naked pain. They laid her on the settee downstairs in the television room where Auntie’s body had lain the night after she died. The doctor gave her a sedative injection but if she slept, it wasn’t a deep enough sleep to prevent her going with Leonard when he came for her late in the evening.
I never saw her again.
I heard that she gave evidence at Bell’s trial. I didn’t and neither did Elsa. Bell told everyone what she had done, the police, the doctor, she seemed proud of it, and I am sure she would have told the Central Criminal Court if her counsel hadn’t advised her not to give evidence. There is only one penalty for murder in English law and that is life imprisonment. “Lifers” usually come out after about ten years unless there is a recommendation from judge or jury that the convicted person serve much longer than that. This happened in Bell’s case, for after sentence had been pronounced and it was possible to reveal previous offenses to the court, a policeman made public the fact that, when she was twelve years old, the middle child of three, the eldest being a boy of fifteen, Bell had killed her infant sister.
Those years of mystery, sometimes hinted at, usually glossed over, had been passed by her in a section of a women’s open prison set aside to receive her and only her. She had had lessons, seldom if ever been entirely alone, and yet her loneliness while there had been intense. When she was sixteen—it was obvious they didn’t know what to do with her—she was removed to a children’s home and placed in the care of the local authority. Many people, over the years, have told me they tried to kill a younger sibling, the baby brother or sister who, in their eyes, had stolen all the tender exclusive love previously lavished on the potential killer by a parent. Cosette once told me how she tried to kill Oliver by stuffing his mouth and nose with zinc and castor oil cream, but her mother came in in time. Most of these children fail, but through ineptitude or timely discovery, not loss of nerve. Cosette failed because her mother came in. Bell succeeded. If her mother had come into the room two minutes sooner, Bell’s strangling of the two-year-old Susan would have been no more than a failed act of violence on the part of a child maddened by jealousy.
But it taught her something none of us should ever learn: that killing, once done, may be done again— c’est le premier pas qui coute.
Bell said to me reflectively, “Cosette must be fantastically rich now. I mean from what you say the old man’s got a lot too and he’s bound to go first.”
She doesn’t mind what she says, so why should I? “Would you have killed Cosette?”
One of her sidelong glances. A pursing of the mouth. She looks well and strong, vigorous, her eye on the future. “I thought she was going to die, didn’t I? I wouldn’t have to if she’d had a fatal disease, which I thought she had.” It was a strange look she gave me, speculative, considering, utterly calm. And then, on a different note, “Seriously, why don’t you try to see her?”
“I suppose because I feel it would never be the same. The quarrel, her accusation and my inability to refute it, the silent years—all that would always hang between us.” I knew quite suddenly I wouldn’t be able to make Bell understand. The nuances of human intercourse, the subtleties of affection, these are unknown to her. She knows nothing of treading softly, nothing of the kind of innocence Cosette and I had in our long mother-child friendship, which seemed strong but was fragile enough to be destroyed by a single external blow. “Don’t think I fail to appreciate your selfless attempt to secure me a legacy,” I said, “but don’t you think your own presence in my life might be a stumbling block?”
“Not when we’ve got a big house divided into two,” she said. “She wouldn’t have to see me. Besides”— Oh, Bell, unchanging, unchangeable, direct, relentless, and incorrigibly selfish—“I’ve got so much against her as she has against me. She stole my lover, you forget that.”
As if the years had never been. As if Mark had never died, or Bell herself had never passed fourteen years in prison. Cosette had said she would like to steal other women’s men, speaking of it as an impossible dream, but she had done it, she had stolen another woman’s man, she had succeeded.
“You never told me how you met him,” I said, to deflect Bell from Cosette. “You never said how long you knew him before you brought him to the House of Stairs.”
She gave me a sidelong, speculative look, as if wondering how I should take what she had to say— wondering but not caring too much. “I met him at that Global Experience.”
“No, that was where I first saw him. Don’t you remember? He’d been sitting at a table with you and I said, ‘Is that your brother?’”
“You put the idea into my head.” Her smile was so wry, such a sophisticated smile. “You’ve been a genius at putting ideas into my head, Lizzie.” Another cigarette, her eyes screwing up as the plume of smoke rises. “I’ve got a real brother, you know that, I haven’t seen him for a thousand years. When you asked that about Mark it gave me a shock, just a bit of a shock. I thought, It’s Alan, but how can it be? I looked and I saw it wasn’t. But I said yes when you asked. Alan, my real brother, he’s so ugly and stupid, or he was, I expect he still is, but Mark was beautiful, wasn’t he? I thought, I’ll say he’s my brother and then maybe I’ll get to know him. Funny, wasn’t it? I’d never seen him before, never set eyes on him before.”
I knew she told lies for pure pleasure. My voice sounded in my own ears stonelike, profoundly heavy. “I don’t believe it. It can’t be. He’d been at your table.”
“It wasn’t my table. I was just there. There weren’t enough tables to go round. Those others sitting there, God knows who they were. When he came back—he was on his own too—I said to him there’d been someone talking to me who asked if he was my brother because we looked alike. Did he think we looked alike? I asked him
that. And that was it, Lizzie, that was the beginning of it. That was how it started. We had a drink and then we went back to my place together. He said he was glad he wasn’t my brother.
“But it was useful later on. It wouldn’t have worked out, him trying to marry Cosette and her knowing he’d been my lover. It was much better that way. Using both your ideas was really good—and they’d have worked if he hadn’t been such a fool!”
So I have been responsible for it all, it all happened because of what I did and what I said, and Cosette has been right to blame me. Perhaps it is the pain in my head that makes it all unreal and any action, any positive step, seem impossible. I have written nothing for weeks, and if the headache is intermittent, the depression is constant. There is something else too, something I have never heard of anyone else having. I go to bed at night and fall asleep but within moments I am awake again and in such a panic of horror, such an indescribable fear of life itself, of reality, of my black-dark surroundings, that my body jerks and twists with it and my eyes, stretched wide open, stare in terror into the empty darkness. It passes, in ten minutes or so it passes, and I return to my customary placid and resigned depression, and eventually to sleep. But what is it? And why does it come?
I told Bell. Telling Bell things like that is useless, but I told her just the same. Put the light on, she said, drink something. Keep a glass of wine there and drink that. I tried it. But the bulb had gone in the bedside lamp, so nothing happened when I pressed the switch, and though I thought I had grasped the wineglass, I succeeded only in knocking it onto the floor. I knocked it to the floor and the other things with it, my watch and the aspirins and the bloodstone ring. So I wear the ring all the time now, I never take it off.
Before we went to see the solicitor, I asked Bell a question. I asked her what she understood love to be. She thought for a while but not for long.
