The House of Stairs (20 page)

I was beginning to say, “She’s upstairs somewhere …” but Bell was quicker and, recalling no doubt what Felicity had been doing upstairs, was halfway up the first flight before I had finished my sentence. Esmond followed her and I him, a crocodile of people following me, all of them somehow sensing melodrama, growing bored with the party, wanting a new stage for it, a climax, or at least a diversion. But a curious silence fell, at any rate on the stairs and that first landing, where faces appeared over the curve in the banisters. Above, of course, the hubbub continued, augmented at that moment by music from the record player in Gary’s room on the second floor, where someone had put on, at full volume, a Rolling Stones record.

Bell, in any case, was too late. Not knowing what all this signified or who had arrived, Felicity and Harvey, having long before this gravitated from the daybed to a real bed, came out of Cosette’s bedroom carrying empty wineglasses and in a state of extreme dishevelment. Felicity persisted in wearing her miniskirts, though the fashion for them was past, and the one she had on, of black leather, had its zip undone. Her long dark hair hung loose over her shoulders and her face—she always made up heavily—was like a painter’s palette at the end of a hard day’s work. Harvey had his arm around her shoulders, his hand scooping up and squeezing her left breast as if he were trying to express milk from it.

Cosette whispered to me, “Who is he?”

“Her husband.”

“Oh, dear. It’s all like the worst excesses of the Roman Empire, isn’t it?”

Felicity screamed when she saw Esmond.

I said afterward to someone, Cosette I think it was, that it must have been dreadful for him, her screaming like that. He must surely then have remembered moments of passion and tenderness between them, perhaps those first moments of love beginning or the time when the sight of him, far from causing her to scream and hide her head in another man’s arms, brought her running to him with joy. But his face showed nothing of this. He said, “Felicity, I want you to come home with me. Come with me now and we can be home in an hour.”

You could see Harvey didn’t want any part in this. Felicity was clinging to him, but he wasn’t holding her. He whispered something to her and then actually began backing away. She lifted her head from his chest and turned slowly around, cringing, with her shoulders hunched. People were coming down the upper flight now. I don’t think Esmond was aware of them, I don’t think he was really aware of anyone but himself and Felicity and perhaps a few vague, scarcely human, presences, a faceless chorus in a tragedy.

“Come with me now, please,” he said. “This has gone on long enough.”

I thought he would say something about the children, but he didn’t. He simply repeated his request to her. The landing was still lit only by candles and moonlight, but now Esmond, who had never been in the house before, put out one hand and pressed the light switch as if he had been doing so in this particular place every night for years. A kind of chandelier of metal branches bearing spheres of etched glass hung there and the light it gave was so bright that Cosette avoided having it on. When the brilliance flooded us all, making people blink and showing up their untidy hair and crumpled clothes, Felicity gave another cry, but this time it was a piteous, yielding sound. Esmond approached her, putting out his hand. She hesitated.

She said, incredibly, “What about all my things?”

I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had laughed, but there was utter silence except for Mick Jagger upstairs. Bell’s and mine were the only names of those present that Esmond knew and he said, without looking at us, without taking his eyes from Felicity, “Elizabeth or Bell will send them on.”

She took his hand and went with him. They passed me and went down the stairs. On her face was a look of total defeat. Her freedom had lasted nine months, and I should think it was a matter of doubt whether she had enjoyed it. Esmond spoke not a word to anyone and neither did she. The front door closed quietly behind them and I heard a car start.

I received a note from her two or three weeks later, thanking me for sending the two packages of her clothes, and after about a year, or a year and a bit, she phoned to invite Cosette and me to Thornham for Christmas. For various reasons, though rather touched at being invited, we refused. Later on Elsa told me Esmond had bought the flat at the World’s End, very much the “in” place to live at that date, to afford Felicity a kind of bolt-hole. I heard about her, but I never heard from her or spoke to her again until two weeks ago.

The party began to break up after they left. That kind of thing casts a blight on merrymaking, in much the same way as a ghost might, coming to the table and sitting down in an empty chair. We never saw Harvey again. Though he had been living in the House of Stairs, sleeping with Felicity in her room on the top floor, he must have had somewhere else to go, for he disappeared along with the crowd that went when the dancers went.

Only Gary and Fay and their phobic friend remained, still out in the garden, still on the stone seat, and looking now in the moonlight like a group of statuary on a fountain after the water has been turned off. Arms around each other, heads lolling, they sprawled in attitudes of abandonment, even the acid freak in a peaceful, stupefied doze. Bell and I looked down at them from the dangerous window of the top room, the room which had been Felicity’s. I had conducted her there, offering her the bed, when she said it was too late for her to go home. We opened the lower sash and leaned out, lying on our stomachs for safety’s sake.

The sky was clear but no stars were visible. Cosette’s garden had become a collection of empty bottles and broken glasses and cigarette ends and heels of loaves.

“I don’t understand why people get married,” said I, who was to do so myself three or four years afterward.

“Women get married to have someone to keep them,” Bell said quite seriously. “They get married to be safe.”

“Felicity’s got a degree, she could get a job. Why does she need someone to keep her?”

Bell laughed a little at that, a small, dry laugh. “You know my feelings about that. Not everyone’s into working the way you are, as you could see by the gang here tonight.”

Emboldened by the night and her niceness, I asked her why she had got married. Why had she married Silas?

She was at art school, she told me, Leicester College of Art, and she met Silas there. He was her supervisor, she a first-year student. They got married because she was pregnant, but afterward he made her have an abortion. Then Silas got the sack, or got warned he would get the sack, or something like that, on account of his propensity for doing dangerous things with firearms, so he left and tried to live by his painting alone.

“So you didn’t marry to have someone keep you,” I said.

“Yes, I did. Partly. I knew he’d got an old dad who was ill and who’d leave him something. As a matter of fact, I thought it was more than it was. But I wasn’t far wrong, was I? I did get it and it does keep me— just.”

We said good night soon after that and I went down to my own room, congratulating myself on having at last found out something of Bell’s history. I had no idea then—naturally I didn’t, believing her, as everyone did, as Esmond Thinnesse had once said he did, because of her honest and direct manner, to be totally truthful—that most of what she told me at the window that night was false. The important bits—none of those were true. When people tell lies about the past, they nearly always distort it to flatter themselves. That is why they lie. The truth isn’t glamorous enough, it doesn’t make them into the exciting, experienced, successful people they wish to appear. Bell was unique. She invented a past that showed her in an unsympathetic light.

I think she rejected the truth out of mere caprice.

11

IN VENEZUELA THERE IS
a village where half the population has Huntington’s chorea. Such a high incidence is brought about by the inbreeding in this remote place where the poor people until recently have been quite ignorant about the hereditary nature of their sickness and have intermarried regardless of a parent’s disease and the disease of a partner’s parent. In their lakeside village they also thought Huntington’s—though not knowing it by this name—exclusive to their locality and were amazed when told it was worldwide.

I have been reading all this in today’s paper and can’t help wondering if Felicity has read it too. Unless she has changed greatly, it is right up her street, just the thing to regale her family with the way she used to regale us with Selevin’s mouse and
stiletto fatalis
and the Defenestration of Prague. But she may have embarked on it long before today, for the newspapers and television and magazines have been full of Huntington’s lately. Huntington’s has become a fashionable disease, displacing multiple sclerosis and even schizophrenia in the public’s curiosity. I glanced at the piece again before I got ready to go and meet Bell, at the photographs of the poor bewildered people, and reread the paragraph at the end of the article, about the test that can now be done and the counseling for potential victims that can be sought.

If the sixties was the age of the sexual revolution and the seventies of the destruction of our environment, the eighties are the decade of the support group and the counselor. I doubt if there is any problem, physical or mental, confronting modern man and woman, for which counseling can’t be obtained. If I had been able to talk to a counselor in the sixties, would the course of my life have been different? Who knows? As it was, I did so much of what I did in the expectation of grotesque paralysis and encroaching death: writing for financial gain my bad, sensational, insensitive books, so as to live and enjoy the present; making love with whom I chose, often promiscuously, on the dubious ground of not missing anything; marrying, criminally, dishonestly, in the hope of pretending none of it was true, and giving a false reason for my refusal to have a child. And then, of course, there was Bell… .

It sounds insane, but can you believe me when I say, half-truthfully, more than half, that if Huntington’s had come, at least it would all have been justified, at least I could say I acted in the fearful expectation of this and I was justified? I was right not to have a child, I was right not to give birth to another being with a fifty-fifty chance of Huntington’s. I was right to produce twenty-five sexy, romantic, sensational adventure books in seventeen years, so that I could live those years in comfort. I was right not to struggle half-starved and alone in a rented room creating the literature I know I could have created and on the dream of its being published one day in the sweet or paralyzed by-and-by. (Though in fact the gain was never as great as at first I anticipated, I never made a fortune, or achieved great success or fame, as perhaps writers don’t, even the purveyors of adventure and passion and crime, unless they write from the heart.)

I shall be forty next week and as Bell said I am very likely out of the woods. To speak, as I am sometimes inclined to do, with the truest, deepest pessimism, I have made a mess of my life for nothing. But it is useless to brood on it, pitifully absurd to maunder like this. I have been to meet Bell, as I hinted just now, I have been to meet her after her first day at the shop in Westbourne Grove.

It wasn’t that I much wanted to. Nor did she ask me, though she rang up the morning after I left her sleeping to remind me rather dolefully of when she was starting and where the shop was. I went because I thought I ought to. A poor woman who has passed years in prison—the least an old friend can do is keep an eye on her, give her some kind of support until she adjusts to her new world. Anyone who has loved passionately and now feels an obligation to the object of her love, that where desire once impelled, duty now dictates, will know how I felt. For that renewal of excitement, of passionate need, which I experienced when I pursued Bell on the tube train and through the streets, that was ephemeral after all, was a false fire, and now what I feel is more a wariness and a dread of something I can’t define.

She was surprised to see me but very pleased. How ecstatically grateful I would once have been for those signs of pleasure, the lighting up of her whole face, her hands stretched out to me! Once, of course, I wouldn’t have been late but waiting for her to come out ten minutes before the shop was due to close. As it was, the phone rang as I was leaving and then I found one of the cats on the front doorstep, a place neither of them is supposed to know exists, and had to stop to put him inside, so when I met Bell it was on the corner of Ledbury Road, I having raced down from Westbourne Park station.

I spotted her before she saw me and it seemed to me that she was walking aimlessly, and if she was making for Notting Hill Gate, in the wrong direction. But before I spoke to her I understood, or thought I understood. She was avoiding Archangel Place. The extent of depth of this I didn’t realize until she said simply, “I can’t exactly remember where it is.”

You would think that anyone who had done such things and known such things would have the place where they happened indelibly printed on the memory, so no matter what was forgotten that could never be forgotten. There would be a map in the mind, a street plan with fearful corners and ominous landmarks and signposts that warned what to shy away from. But, “I think something has gone wrong with my memory,” said Bell. “I expect I could find it in the London guide. Anyway, it’s all changed round here.”

It hadn’t—much. Apart from some smartening up, nothing had changed in this immediate vicinity. Together we walked westward, toward Ladbroke Grove.

“How was it?” I said.

“The shop? I don’t know if I shall be equal to it.” Bell laughed the laugh that was always dry and faint but has now become ghostly, a whispered giggle at the far end of a passage in the dark. “She doesn’t like me handling money, you can tell that. I nearly told her it wasn’t for helping myself from the till that I got sent to prison.”

“Perhaps you had better not say that.”

“Oh, I won’t. I am not so open as I used to be, I can tell you.”