The House of Stairs (36 page)

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.”

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.

Elsa and I got ourselves something to eat and we waited. She asked me no questions but took one of the new novels Cosette had on the table and started reading it. I believe she guessed I had an emotional involvement with Bell quite different from my friendship with herself. But I didn’t care then, I didn’t care about hiding it. I couldn’t read. I could only lie back in my chair and stare at the ornate, complicated ceiling and the cobweb-festooned chandelier and think and think and be wretched. When it got to midnight, I said, “I have the feeling we’ll never see Bell again.”

“Who cares?”

I didn’t answer her. She knew very well I cared. “She won’t come back here,” I said. “She won’t bother about her things, they don’t matter to her. She’ll go to someone, she’ll go to her mother.”

“Are you sure she’s got a mother?”

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not,” and then, “I thought she had a brother.”

Elsa said, “She told me a long time ago, when I first met her at Thornham, that she had no parents. She had had no parents since she was twelve. I thought it was a bit fishy when you mentioned her mother.”

“What she told you might equally well be a lie.”

“True, but they can’t both be.”

“What happened when she was twelve? I mean, did she say her parents were killed in an accident or something? What happened to her?”

“She told me only that she lost her parents. She went into some sort of institution.”

“A children’s home, you mean?”

Elsa gave me a strange look. “I don’t think it was a children’s home, not at that stage, that came later. I don’t know what it was.”

As she was speaking, reluctantly, doubtfully, as if the words were dragged out of her, we heard the front door close downstairs. We were sitting in the drawing room and I think we both thought it was Cosette or Mark or, best of all, Cosette
and
Mark. The footsteps, a single set, came up the first flight and passed the door. It must be Bell. We heard her go on up the stairs, walking heavily for her, and because of this we weren’t positively sure it was she, and we went out onto the landing to listen. Like personages in a ghost story who have heard some sound that shouldn’t be, some unnatural footfall, we stood there clutching each other by the arms and staring upward. It was absurd, it was hysterical behavior, but we seemed to be involved in some high drama, and we held our breaths. Even from down there you could hear that 104th stair creak. Her bedroom door closed.

Elsa smiled her crooked ironic smile and broke the tension with, “She hasn’t got a mother.”

In the drawing room again, having no thought of going to bed, though it was past one, we opened the French windows and went out onto the balcony. It was a warm night and very quiet. But after a while of listening you could hear distant music of two sorts, and other sounds, a faint throb of traffic, a light rhythmic hammering as if someone who, because he worked all day, had to build his shelves and cabinets by night. The foliage was as dense as in a country lane, the trees heavy hanging masses of unmoving leaves. On a house opposite a vine grew and grapes dangled from it, gleaming pale green in the lamplight.

It came as a shock to see that the Volvo was there. It filled the space that had been empty when Elsa and I came in. We could see only the roof of it and we had no idea how long it had been there. The notion came to me to go back into the room and put the lights out. Whether this worked or whether the extinguishing of the lights went unnoticed I can’t tell, but after a moment or two, the driver’s door opened and Mark got out. I nearly gasped, I felt an almost intolerable constriction of the throat. What had become of her? Where was she? It seemed possible he had never found her, that he had come back here earlier only to fetch the car and search for her.