The House of Stairs (21 page)

I had no clear idea of where we were making for. It seemed that, considering our separate destinations, we were both going in the wrong direction. And then it came to me both that Ladbroke Grove station would do for me as well as Westbourne Park and that Bell intended to come home with me. What else had I in mind? A cup of tea in a café and then dispatching her back to Kilburn? She was a ghost, I thought, and not only in her laugh. We always think of ghosts as pale, as white and glimmering, and Bell has faded, has bleached to pallor, her skin and her hair and even her eyes, vague now, leeched of their colors. Only her clothes remain deepest black. I wonder what has become of the shawl she wore the first time she came to Cosette’s and which once covered Silas’s body?

She smoked as she walked, going into a tobacconist’s by the station to buy more cigarettes. In the train she fell briefly asleep but revived once we were home and walked about my house, admiring it. The cats homed on her, loving her for some reason, clambering over her and the ash-scattered folds of her bundled black cotton. I fear the reason may be that they love anyone who smells strongly, no matter what of, and Bell reeks of stale cigarette smoke, she smells like something raked out of the ashes of a fire. She is sleeping again now, her long pale hands hanging over the arms of the chair like empty sleeves.

I am sitting opposite her with a glass of gin and dry vermouth in my hand. Bell has only sipped hers and her cigarette has burned itself out in the ashtray. It seems strange to me that though we have been talking for the best part of two hours she has never once mentioned Cosette, or for that matter, Mark. But perhaps that isn’t so strange.

Cosette and I had refused Felicity’s invitation but Bell accepted, spent Christmas at Thornham and reported back to me that everything was just the same as before Felicity ran away. Even the children seemed unaffected by her long absence, and Miranda was still quoting, with proud sententiousness, her mother’s opinions.

“My mummy says it’s revolting to eat quail’s eggs,” or “My mummy says only old ladies wear stockings.”

The party was run on the same lines as those of the one the year Silas died. Only there was no quiz on the day after Boxing Day. There was no quiz at all. But the same people were there, more or less. At any rate, old Julia Dunne was there and the ancient brigadier and his wife and Rosalind and Rupert, Felicity’s sister and brother-in-law. And Lady Thinnesse, of course, was there, behaving toward Felicity exactly as she had always done. On Bell’s last evening Felicity organized a debate, the subject being the possible reintroduction of capital punishment, in which Bell said Esmond stood up stoutly for the noes and Mrs. Dunne became quite rejuvenated and vociferous for the yeses.

One of the things I liked so very much about Bell, I mean one of the definable things, was that she was quite as interested in people as I was. She was the only person I have ever known who really wanted to get inside people’s heads and know how they worked and the only person who could talk about other people for hours on end without getting bored or tired. Without any tutelage or training, she had a fine grasp of human psychology. I learned a lot about people from Bell, though I never had the wisdom to put any of it in my books, preferring to use stereotypes for my characters. And she had, has, will always have, a wonderful imagination.

By this time I had found out why she hadn’t wanted me to know where she was living or to go there. It was her mother’s flat in Harlesden. Bell often said how she didn’t really think of anywhere west of Ladbroke Grove of east of the City as being London at all, so I could understand her detestation of West Ten and all its subdivisions. Besides, it was her mother herself. She said she wanted to be totally open about it now she was on the subject and the truth was she would have been ashamed for me to meet her mother.

“If you saw her in the street, you’d think she was an old bag lady. She doesn’t even keep herself clean. She’s an old cockney”—and here Bell laughed her dry laugh—“who carts her false teeth about with her in a tobacco tin.”

“She can’t be that old,” I said.

“She’s old to be my mother. She was a lot over forty when I was born. The thing was, when I left Admetus’s place I hadn’t anywhere to go but to her. She’s not well anyway. She needs someone with her and there’s no one but me.”

I hesitated. Still, why not say it? “But you’ve a brother, haven’t you? I’ve seen your brother; I saw him at the Global Experience thing.”

She laughed. It must have been at the memory of those dotty happenings. “Oh, Marcus, yes.”

“Is that what he’s called?” I was enchanted by his name. A person couldn’t be that bad, I suggested, who would call her children Marcus and Christabel.

“She probably wasn’t as bad then, but she’s very bad now.”

I told her she couldn’t live with her mother for the rest of her life, meaning her mother’s life.

“Don’t you worry, I won’t,” Bell said.

Soon after that conversation I remembered Elsa the Lioness telling me just after the death of Silas that Bell had nowhere to go and no relatives to take her in. Her parents were dead. But since she was so ashamed of her mother, wishing to keep her existence a secret from most people, no doubt she would have said she was dead. It seemed reasonable enough. How strange and sad that she should so detest her mother and I so love mine—well, my adoptive mother. For that was the year, or the spring, Cosette was ill. In fact, she wasn’t really ill at all, she had a scare and gave me a scare, but because I loved her so much I magnified it out of all proportion. I was sure that because she was having uterine hemorrhages she must be dying of cancer and I confided my worries to Bell.

“When will you know what she’s got?”

“In about a week,” I said.

I imagined losing her, I imagined her own fear of death. I talked to Bell about it, about Cosette’s long, half-asleep life, and the chance that had come at last, too late perhaps, for her to live. How terrible if freedom, so short-lived, not even surely enjoyed, should so quickly end in death! Bell listened, calmly attentive. Sometimes she looked as if love was something she didn’t quite understand and, lips parted, head held slightly on one side, was considering it as a subject for possible research. But I am not sure if I thought like that then, if I was as wise as that then.

Cosette went into the hospital, it was the Harley Street Clinic, and they scraped something from the inside of her womb and found she had a benign polyp, which they removed. I think—no, I know—Cosette was proud of all this. You see, it made her seem young. It made her seem as if she still had active reproductive organs, and when I went in to see her along with the crowds of other people who gathered round her bed, I was embarrassed by her talk. I was embarrassed when she said to Dawn Castle and Perpetua that they hadn’t “taken anything away,” that her insides were still in “working order,” they hadn’t made her sterile. Because of this I said not a word to other people, not even to Bell, telling myself that because the worry was past so must be any interest in Cosette’s condition.

We welcomed her home with flowers and a feast. We put flowers in the drawing room and flowers in her bedroom and in the big jardiniere that stood at the top of the first flight of stairs. Bell helped me fetch the flowers and arrange them and she helped me lay the table in the dining room and shop for food. It was Cosette’s money, of course, for she had an account at the delicatessen and an account at the florist’s, and because she was always more or less on a diet, she ate less than anyone, but as she would have said, it was the thought that counted. She looked tired when she came home and rather bemused. It occurred to me—too late—that someone ought to have gone to fetch her in her own car, not left her to be brought back by an unknown minicab driver. But I wasn’t able to drive then and as for Gary and Fay and the acid-freak Rimmon (his real name was Peter), who had come to live in the house without invitation, none of them offered or were even at home when Cosette left the clinic.

People of Cosette’s kind—generous, selfless, patient, disproportionately grateful for any little thing that may be done for them—these people are always used, taken advantage of, and neglected. Nineteenth-century fiction is full of them and this has led us to believe that they and their fate are the invention of novelists. But they exist, to endow others and be trodden on by those who owe them the most. All of which makes Cosette’s subsequent life and eventual fate the more bizarre. Her life to come and her fate were what no one could have expected; they seemed a contradiction and a defiance of the rules that say such a woman will never find passionate, disinterested love, tragedy, violent death, and final irony, but only exploitation and disillusionment.

None of us young ones had given much thought to Auntie while Cosette was away. It is only now, looking back, that I understand she must have seen Cosette almost in the light of a protector. She was so mouselike, so quiet and creeping, that even to Bell and me with our never-satisfied hunger to know what went on in people’s heads, our constant examination of personality, she seemed a person without feelings, certainly a person not worth wasting conjecture on. That she might be afraid in Cosette’s absence, afraid of us all with our habits acquired in a revolution she had never understood, of our youth and our music, our comings and goings and our sexual freedom, never crossed our minds.

Perpetua, of course, was sometimes there. Jimmy the gardener would always put his head round the door with a word for her. But Cosette’s old friends from Wellgarth days, though visiting the clinic, never thought of visiting Auntie. Bell had been kind to her on the night of the party, but if she paid her any particular attention while Cosette was away, I wasn’t aware of it. Did anyone actually speak to the old woman while Cosette wasn’t there to speak to her? As I try to imagine the drawing room as it was without Cosette, I also see it without Auntie and this makes me sure Auntie kept to her own room most of the time, hiding herself from us and the challenges and dangers and shocks we offered, longing surely for Cosette’s return. And when Cosette walked into the drawing room Auntie had taken care to be there. For once she showed emotion, getting up from the red velvet chair and coming to Cosette with her arms out.

“Why didn’t you come to see me?” Cosette asked her when the embrace was done.

Auntie had no answer, perhaps didn’t care to say the means were not at her disposal, that none of us had offered to take her or even call a taxi and direct the driver. She could only shake her head and frown mysteriously, in the way old people do when they want to keep their needs and shortcomings a secret from the young.

We all assembled in the dining room for the meal, Cosette and Auntie, Bell and I, Gary, who had just come back from India, and Fay and Rimmon. It was a small party for the House of Stairs, no one having come to take the place of Mervyn or of Felicity and Harvey. There was no longer any Girl-in-Residence, a function as empty and free of duties as being a Gold Stick or Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, but still a role with a room that no one filled. Cosette had tried to persuade the ballet dancers to take over the top floor as their home but they, naturally, were reluctant to give up rent-free occupancy of the Hampstead flat, whose owner, with luck, might never come back from South Africa. A girl called Audrey, who was a cousin of Admetus’s new girlfriend, had said she might take up the vacant post and vacant room. I don’t think she quite believed she could have that large second floor room for nothing and live there without performing any services beyond talking and listening and preparing cups of coffee, and that was making her hesitate. Cosette talked wistfully about this during the meal.

We finished eating and, as usual, got up without thought of clearing the table or washing up. Perpetua wouldn’t be there the next day, and it was Bell who said in a very uncharacteristic housewifely way that she and I should do the dishes.

“Oh, leave it till the morning,” said Cosette, not at all uncharacteristically.

“I shan’t be here in the morning.”

“But, darling, I thought you were living here now!”

She sounded not just polite. She sounded appalled that the number of her household was therefore even smaller than she had supposed.

“Bell has to live with her mother,” I said. “For the present anyway.”

“I’m sure we’ve room for your mother too. Look at all the room we’ve got!”

Of course this was absurd. Cosette could be absurd, her liberality taken to ridiculous lengths, and to insensitive lengths too. Even supposing Bell’s mother was very different from the grotesque description I had been given, why should she want to give up her home and come to live in a strange woman’s house? Bell gave her dry chuckle.

“I’ll bear your kind offer in mind, Cosette.”

No kind offer had been made, of course, only an assumption. But now the idea was in her head, Cosette wanted Bell. Not in the Girl-in-Residence’s room, that was reserved for Audrey, but why not in the top room above the place where I worked if she wanted some privacy? We even had to go up there and look at it, the lot of us, though Auntie disappeared into her own domain on the way. Cosette, sitting on the bed that had been Felicity’s, breathless from all that climbing, apologized for the room, its location up 106 stairs, its slanted ceiling, its dangerous window.

“I’ll have bars put on that window. I’ll have a kind of cage made to make it safe.”

She never did. Because Gary said how awful it would be, you would feel you were in prison? Or because Bell said not to do that for her, she couldn’t leave her mother’s house in Harlesden at present? Apparently, though, she was well able to leave her mother for a night or two, for she stayed and slept up there, and the next day, when I came home from the play center, told me that she had met an old friend of her mother’s who might just be willing to come and share her house.

It was not that evening but a week or so later that I dressed Bell up in Cosette’s gown of “wasted” red. I had forgotten those remarks of Cosette’s, when she first saw the Bronzino reproduction, about still possessing somewhere a dress that looked like Lucrezia Panciatichi’s. But Cosette had been invited to Glyndebourne by the Castles and it was still obligatory then to wear a long evening dress when you went to hear opera there. Very seldom did anyone take Cosette out. I was happy that the Castles had thought of this, even though I knew it was done to show Cosette a contrast to the House of Stairs. At a party Cosette gave for Admetus’s fortieth birthday, I had chanced to hear Dawn’s husband murmur to his wife, “I wonder if she knows the life she gave up for this circus is still going on?”