The House of Stairs (10 page)

She said naively, “It’s in the best part. It’s bohemian.”

“Why do you want somewhere so big?”

“I don’t suppose I shall be on my own—much. People will come.” She was looking at me anxiously now, doubtfully, in need of reassurance. “Don’t you think people will come?”

What people? Dawn Castle and her husband? Elderly Maurice Bailey, president of the Wellgarth Society? Her brothers? “Well, I suppose. If you invite them. They all expect you to live in a flat or a bungalow.”

“There are a lot of young people in that part of London,” said Cosette.

It seemed irrelevant. “But what will you do?” I said.

“Live,” said Cosette, smiling, and then, perhaps because she thought that sounded pretentious. “I mean I will just live there and—and see.”

It is absurd the way I am waiting for Felicity to phone. I am waiting with the breathless anticipation of someone expecting a call from an unreliable lover. What will happen if she phones while I am out? Will she call back again? I dare not take the risk so I cannot go out. This should be a good opportunity to get on with the book I am currently writing, and I might with truth say that I have at least sat in front of my typewriter all day, or on and off all day. And the sheet in the typewriter is not blank. No doubt, though, what is on it is rubbish and will all have to be done again. It and its contents, its theme and plot and personages, fail to distract my thoughts from Bell. And when I abandon it, though still sitting there, looking from Cosette’s agate jar and the curious heatherroot paper knife to Douglas’s old Remington on which my first books were typed—with such enthusiasm, with such excitement—when I turn my attention from it and try to think instead of my first visit to Archangel Place when Cosette took me there on a bitter day in February, concentration is impossible and this too fails. Remembering the House of Stairs as it was that day, the yawning icy rooms that seemed to branch off that winding trunk of staircase like leaves from a twisted bough, goes no further than remembering this, evokes no consequent memories of acts and activities, of the changes that came, of the people that came, of Cosette’s “salon.” Bell alone occupies my thoughts. I remember her in those early days, or rather, I remember what I heard of her, what Elsa and Felicity told me of her, for she vanished from any scenes of mine for more than a year.

But then, after Silas had been covered up with that shawl (a shawl Bell later calmly went on wearing) I went back to the house and left them there, Bell and Esmond Thinnesse. And after a long while, several hours, after the police had been there and a doctor, and all sorts of adjuncts of the police, Esmond brought Bell back to the house and she walked into the drawing room where we all were. It was almost palpable in the air, the embarrassment everyone felt, everyone that is but me and Felicity, who doesn’t know what embarrassment is, and Elsa. I could tell the others were wondering what they were to talk about, how the rest of the evening was to be passed, now Bell was among them. But their difficulty was momentary. She stood there and said in a voice of cold disdain, a voice that made nonsense of what she said, “I am sorry to be the cause of so much trouble.”

An odd thing to say, wasn’t it? Surely poor dead Silas was the cause, he and what he had done? She said it and immediately turned and went upstairs. Felicity was later obliged to go after her and ask her if she wanted anything, a drink, for instance, or something to eat, a share in the supper of cold Christmas leftovers we were all picking at downstairs. Bell refused everything. Next day the police were back, talking to her, and after being closeted with one of them for a long time in Esmond’s study, she walked in among us.

She was all in black. But I later came to know she often was, it had nothing to do with mourning for Silas. I had never seen anyone like her, never before encountered that air of indifferent confidence and tragic poise. Sorry for her, pity for her, I never felt, though perhaps I ought to have felt it. After all, she was a widow, she had lost her husband only the day before in the most appalling circumstances of violence and horror. I felt only admiration, the kind of hero worship I had not had for anyone since I had a crush on the music mistress some seven years before. What I would have liked was for the two of us to go away somewhere and talk. I would have liked to be with her, alone with her, to talk and learn about her and tell her about me.

Of course this was impossible. Elsa and I were going back to London, were due to be driven to Debden tube station by Esmond in about half an hour’s time. Felicity’s sister and her husband and children had already gone by car, taking Paula and her daughter with them. Bell came close up to the chair where Felicity was sitting with the little boy Jeremy on her lap. She laid her hands lightly on the back of the chair, holding her head high, that mass of untidy fair hair, hair the color of tarnished brass, plaited and tied up on top of her head with a piece of string. Without looking at Felicity, looking at the plaster moldings on the ceiling, the cornice, the elaborately pelmeted tops of the windows, she asked if she could remain at Thornham a little longer.

“Not in the house. In the cottage. Just until I find somewhere.”

Felicity was beginning to say, “But, my dear, of course, of course you must, I wouldn’t dream—” when Bell interrupted.

“I know Esmond doesn’t like me. I know none of you like me.” Did I imagine her roving glance coming to rest for a moment on me and the slightest change, a softening, in her expression, as if she made an exception of me? “But I have,” she said, “nowhere else to go.”

She had a reputation for being honest. On the way to the station Esmond said to us, “It’s true I don’t much like her. Frankly, I didn’t like him. But one can say for Bell that she’s a totally honest person. She is incapable of deceit.”

It is interesting how such reputations are built. They come about through confusing the two kinds of truth telling: the declaration of opinion and principle and the recounting of history. Bell always expressed her feelings about things, her beliefs, with frank openness. It wasn’t in her, for the sake, say, of politeness or social ease, to say she was pleased about something when she wasn’t or that she liked something or someone when she didn’t, or that she didn’t mind when she did mind. And because of this, because of this well-known honesty of hers, it was assumed—no, taken for granted—that she also told the straightforward transparent truth about what she had done, what her past was, what had happened. I came to know, and it was a hard lesson, that Bell was in fact one of the world’s grand liars, who tell lies from choice and, I think, for pure pleasure.

On that occasion she told Felicity she had nowhere to go, and Felicity, first denying for all she was worth the plain truth that no one at Thornham much liked Bell, offered her the cottage rent-free for as long as she might want it. Bell nodded and said thanks in that laconic way of hers that she could make sound as if she had little to be grateful for.

“What shall I do about the blood?” she said.

Felicity nearly screamed. She put her hand over her mouth. Jeremy was staring, big eyed, mouth open.

“Someone will have to clean it up.”

“The police will see to that, Bell,” Esmond said. “You can leave that to the police.”

That was the last time I saw her, as I have said, for more than a year. Elsa told me that she had no relatives to take her in. Her parents were dead. She had no profession, was trained for nothing, her life since she was nineteen had been the wretched sharing of Silas Sanger’s poverty and the homes he had contrived for them, a cottage that was no more than a hut on an estate in the Highlands of Scotland, a room in south London, a coach house loft in Leytonstone, finally this cottage of the Thinnesses. The knowledge that she was to inherit Silas’s father’s house took her away from Thornham and translated her to that house, first to live in it, then to sell it and realize from the sale a skimpy income. She moved out of the orbit of Esmond and Felicity and such lesser moons as Elsa and Paula who circled about them, and for quite a long time was lost among the unnumbered galaxies that made up the youth of London in the late 1960s.

It occurs to me as I wait for the phone to ring that it is possible Bell herself will still phone me. When the phone does ring it may not be Felicity, whose voice I long for, but Bell, who would be much the greater prize. In moments of stress, when alone, I always talk aloud to myself. Does everyone?

“Are you mad?” I say aloud to myself. “Are you mad to care like this, to need like this? What do you want and what do you need after so long, after receiving so little, after knowing everything? Are you mad?”

But I don’t pursue that one. Madness is something we don’t speak of lightly, frivolously, in our family, for madness of a kind we are also heirs to, the schizoid delusions associated with our inheritance. I don’t pursue it and, strangely, when it gets late, too late for anyone reasonably to phone, much too late for Felicity, I feel a curious, unexpected lightening of the heart.

6

OF THE FIGURES WHO
come into our dreams, according to the Jungians, the only ones whose identity we can be certain of are ourselves. When I first read of this I wanted hotly to deny it, for hadn’t I often encountered Bell in my dreams? And Cosette and even, once or twice, Mark? But I came to see that they were not in fact themselves, but only figments that exhibited aspects of those people, that often metamorphosed, changing into unknown personages or half-forgotten acquaintances or even animals. Why this should be, taking into account how little we really know of those who are closest to us, is no mystery, but a warning not to be hasty with our assumptions about the nature of others or complacent about our knowledge of the human heart.

So it wasn’t Felicity I dreamed about last night but only someone who looked and sounded like Felicity, and that not for long; someone who, once she had led me into the gray garden in Archangel Place, turned her head and showed me a changed face, the face of someone I can’t name but connect with that time, a face I find it hard to say was a man’s or a woman’s. Before that happened we had been in the House of Stairs together, and from Cosette’s table Felicity had picked up the sheets of paper on which her quiz was typed. Some were untouched, some half-completed. She said, as I never remember her saying at the time, as I would remember if it had happened, “That woman is such a fool, she has identified Huntington’s chorea as a geography book. I suppose she thinks the islet of Langerhans is off its coast.”

Freud’s dream theory has been much ridiculed. But no one disputes the wisdom of his suggestion that in trying to understand our dreams we should write accounts of them as soon as we wake up, keeping pencil and paper beside the bed for this purpose. Felicity’s remark didn’t pain me in the dream as it would have done had I been conscious and she real. I was amused by it in the dream, and hastened to write it down when I awoke. Then I reflected on the rest of the dream, how she and I had gone outside where the plants in the gray garden were taller and more luxuriant than I remember them, where even the flowers were not yellow or white but a metallic, silvery gray. We stood looking up at the back of the house, a tall house of five stories and a basement, but not as tall as in the dream, in which it had become a tower whose pointed top was half-obscured by the lowering London sky.

But the windows were the same. These wide apertures, one on each of the four middle floors, pairs of glazed French doors really, opened onto narrow balconies with low plaster walls. But on the basement floor and on the top the windows were simply long narrow sashes. It wasn’t Mark who came out onto the fourth-floor balcony from the room that was once mine, it wasn’t Bell or Cosette. The figure who stood up there leaning perilously over the wall was a child’s, a child I didn’t recognize but that Felicity knew, that Felicity or the possessor of the changed face she turned to me recognized as one of her own. She began shouting at the child to be careful, to go back.

“Go back, go back, you’ll fall!”

And now I am reading my account of this dream along with Felicity’s remark, which no longer seems so brilliant to me, so witty, as it did at first. Written on the paper too is Bell’s phone number which she gave me when she phoned me this morning, accosting me with her cheerful, “Hallo, there!”

I asked her what I had not been able to bring myself to ask her yesterday. (How much joy do we miss through cowardice?) I asked her why Bell had phoned her.

“Oh, Elizabeth, I thought you knew. Didn’t I say? She wanted your number.”

Joy, indeed. Immediately I reproached myself for feeling such a surge of happiness. I should know better, I should have learned something in all those years, after so many friendships, a marriage, and other loves.

“Didn’t you give it to her?” I realized as soon as I said this that there was no reason why she would have known it. It is a long time since we have spoken, though something to Felicity’s credit perhaps that it doesn’t feel long, that she, maddening woman though she is, has that quality of taking up the reins of friendship and driving merrily along as if no lapse of years had ever been. “No, you couldn’t have. I’m in the phone book in my married name. My publishers wouldn’t give my number.”

“I didn’t try them. Frankly, I thought Bell would be the last person you’d want to be in touch with. After all that happened.”

I realize now, after some hours have passed, that she thinks I was in love with Mark. Maybe others thought so too. That, they suppose, is what accounted for my unhappiness and my withdrawal. I contemplate this number that begins with the three digits six-two-four, the Maida number, but I do nothing more with it, I only look. Strangely, the last thing I need to do at this moment is dial it, speak to Bell. I am so supremely content to know she wanted mine, that her sole purpose in phoning Felicity was to ask for my number, that I feel no need to proceed further—yet. I feel, sitting here in my workroom in front of the typewriter, rather as I felt on the very few occasions in the House of Stairs when I smoked the cigarettes Bell passed to me at the window’s edge: at peace, serene, there is no tomorrow, or if there is, it is of no significance, there is only the everlasting, delicious, tranquil now.