The House of Stairs (24 page)

She never read a book, as I have said. But she would walk about picking books up and examining them. I have said that too. It is such a strong image in memory. I was still intending to write my paper on Henry James, between books I would write it, and eventually I did. It was
The Awkward Age
that Bell picked up off my desk, a copy from the library in Porchester Road, and, looking at it with interest, feeling the texture of it, assessing the number of its pages, reading its spine, rather than even glancing at its text, said, “Is this the one that’s about the girl that looks like me?”

“No, that’s
The Wings of the Dove.”
I found my copy and gave it to her, taking the other book out of her hand and kissing her hand, holding it against my face. She was so touchable, Bell, her skin sweet smelling, like a child’s. We stood close together for a moment, the sides of our bodies pressing. “It’s the painting that looks like the girl and you look like the painting.”

She turned her face into mine, smiling close to my cheek, said in that light way she had, teasing, incredulous, “When did he write it, this guy you’re so keen on?”

I had a shot at it, but was a year out. “In 1901.”

“I don’t see how she can be in a painting you say was painted in fifteen hundred and something if he didn’t write it till 1901.” She was looking at
The Wings of the Dove
now, and if there was ever a novel to daunt the non-novel reader, the dipper into magazines, the desultory scanner of newsprint, this is it. The pages of text scarcely broken into paragraphs, uninterrupted by dialogue, as she viewed them with increasing dismay, brought such a look of horror to her face that, stepping back to get a clearer look at her, I burst out laughing.

“What’s it about?” she said. “It doesn’t even make sense, it might be in a foreign language.”

So, sitting there cross-legged on the floor, Bell dropping to sit beside me and be close to me but still with the book in her hand, still disbelievingly turning its pages, I told her the plot of
The Wings of the Dove.
That was all I ever did, all. It wasn’t even the only or the first novel plot I had told her, for I remember some weeks before she had wanted me to go with her to the Electric Cinema where they were showing
The Wanderer,
which is the film version of
Le Grand Meaulnes,
and I had given her a kind of précis of that too. But Milly Theale remained in her memory, Milly Theale and Merton Densher and Kate Croy, though I don’t believe I ever told her their names. That wasn’t necessary, the plot was enough, the melodramatic central spring of the novel that James somehow makes not sensational but subtle, tenuous, like life. I suppose it was the painting that anchored her to it, the Bronzino that looked like her and which poor doomed Milly Theale looked like.

She said slowly, wonderingly, “What a clever idea!”

“James was clever. There’s never been a cleverer novelist.”

“He could have fooled me,” she said, typically Bell, “the way he goes wanking on.”

13

THE FIRST TIME MARK
came to Archangel Place there were living in the House of Stairs Cosette and myself and Auntie, Gary and Fay, Rimmon and a Filipino friend of his, and, of course, Bell. In the autumn of 1972 she had gone back to Harlesden for a while because of some crisis in her mother’s household. I know now, and have known for years, that Bell had no widowed mother in Harlesden, that her own mother and father were living together in Southsea, attempting to put their unhappy foray into parenthood as far behind them as they could. But I didn’t know it then. I believed Bell when she said she had to go “home” to “sort things out.”

Though adept at self-delusion of many kinds, I have never deluded myself about the moods and climatic changes in love affairs. I know at once when something is going off the boil. That first tiny break in the lover’s absorption, not rejection, nothing as plain as that, more an air of distraction, a vagueness, then the unavoidable painful observance that it is always the other now who is first to end an embrace, withdraw the tongue, harden and retract the lips, the other whose laughter ceases to be slow and conspiratorial and whose fingers no longer have all the time in the world at their tips. I am aware of these things, I don’t delude myself that they are not there. Where the self-deception comes in is in my ability, notwithstanding all this, to persuade myself of its being a phase, a stage in a progress, or a mere lapse.

Bell’s passion for me, which I am sure, am still sure, in spite of everything, was once as real as mine for her, had begun to slacken its intensity. She became abstracted, withdrew herself a little. My second book was published, and there was some press attention this time and talk of it as a candidate for an adventure novelists’ prize; American publication was assured, and I was busy with all this, but not so busy as to be unaware of Bell’s absences, of some business she had that was private from me. What could she have to do that took her away from the House of Stairs so much? Where was she when occasionally she phoned me or Cosette to say she would be late, she was “held up”? She did nothing—ever. In this way she rather resembled Cosette, as in so many others—and what does that say about Mark and about me?

Bell had no occupation, hobbies, interest. Her interest in people and their behavior absorbed her. She liked to look at beautiful things, in shops and in exhibitions, not at clothes, though walking through fabric departments, stroking the more extravagant stuffs, gave her intense sensuous pleasure. Mark told me later she sometimes went to look at the crown jewels in the Tower. Was that what she was doing, in all those absences, looking at the people and the lavish artifacts in Bond Street? Stroking damask in Liberty’s?

Then she went back to her mother’s. There was an awful evening when we sat together in the gray garden, Cosette and Auntie and I, each feeling our peculiar individual loneliness, not even a warm evening, but humid and cool and smelling of soot and the leaves of the eucalypt. Anyone who looked over the high walls of brick and flint might have taken us for the representatives of three generations in one family, daughter, mother, grandmother, but no one looked over the walls. The sky was like white marble, the night long in arriving. Once, I remember, Cosette said, “Why does no one come anymore?”

That shy, half-tearful smile trembled on Auntie’s lips. She seemed to understand less and less as time went on. Her bewilderment was of the kind that is afraid no sincerity remains, everything is becoming a joke, but a joke that to her is meaningless. In another way she was like one of those poor zoo animals that, accustomed to living in a group of their peers and in a particular habitat, are imprisoned in an alien one and alone. I went indoors, ostensibly to fetch a sweater, and, mounting the stairs, hearing with the first of many twinges of pain my own foot set the 104th step creaking, entered Bell’s room to hold one of her dark wraps to my face and smell her sweet child’s smell.
The Wings of the Dove,
unread, never to be read, of course, lay on a chair. I took it away downstairs.

Another time, when Auntie had gone off to bed, Cosette said to her reflection in the drawing room mirror:

“Is this the form, she made her moan,

That won his praises night and morn?

And, Ah, she said, but I wake alone,

I sleep forgotten, I wake forlorn.”

I put my arms around her and hugged her. How that would have flustered her had she known about Bell and me! But she laughed at Tennyson and herself.

“Isn’t it dreadful? Ivor wrote better poetry than that. Well, marginally better. ‘My life is dreary, he cometh not.’”

He cometh not. ... The inexpressible, absolute
he,
the nonpareil of
hes
she waited for. She had been reading
Washington Square,
lent to her of course by me, and she identified with poor Catherine Sloper. Women are usually shy about admitting their need of a man. They deny this need, dismiss it; they could easily, they say, get themselves a lover, a husband, if they wanted one. But why go to so much trouble? Why bother? They are content as they are. Not Cosette. Frankly, she would declare it, not just to me but to almost any listener, to Perpetua, to Auntie, that she was sick for a man’s love, a man’s companionship. Her life was dreary, he cometh not, she said… .

But two days later he did come. He arrived like the answer to a prayer, or like the answer one dreams of but doesn’t expect to get. He arrived like the prince that some fairy messenger brings, and he wasn’t even in disguise. Or not apparently so. It was Bell who brought him. There was no fanfare of trumpets. Very casually, she gave notice to Cosette of what was about to happen, announcing this event that was to prove so momentous in her usual offhand way. She had reappeared in the House of Stairs after an absence of two or three weeks—why do I say two or three weeks when I know the length of time precisely, when I know it was exactly eighteen days?—and sauntered into the drawing room as if she had never been away. She was wearing her white cheesecloth, carrying her cigarette packet and matches in her hand. I never saw Bell with a handbag. Us three—Cosette, Auntie, and me—she glanced at as if we were equally casual acquaintances, people she tolerated in an indifferent good-humored fashion.

“My brother’s coming this evening. Is that all right?”

But Cosette spoke to her as if she were her daughter. “Darling, how can you ask? Of course it is. We all long to meet him.”

Mark—how can I describe him? He was simply the best-looking man I have ever known and one of the nicest. Or so I thought for a long time, marginally, at last, changing this view of him. He was one of those people you at once feel at ease with, who are “always the same,” without vanity or apparently the knowledge they have anything to be vain about, clever and amusing without cruelty, unfailingly kind, seductively charming without any of the slyness or conscious affectation this implies. Yet when I look back on this I see I have given an impression of someone quite unlike Mark, for the point with him, I might even say the point
of
him, was his naturalness, that all these most delightful possible attributes of a young handsome man had come into being and coalesced by a happy chance and he was not even aware that they were there. Even the things he said seemed never the result of calculation but the expression of a warm and gentle nature. Have I made him sound like a fool? I don’t think he was a fool, for a long time I thought him intelligent, but that view too I revised. Let me say only that Mark was exceptional to look at but intellectually nothing out of the common way.

Older than Bell by about eight years, he was thirty-six that winter. By then I had put him and Bell down as probably being of Scandinavian origin, but Mark’s looks were really more of the Slavonic kind, the wide, high cheekbones, the nose that was perfectly straight but rather short for a man’s nose, the short upper lip, the full but firm mouth. His skin was brown and his hair nut-brown with a streak of silver running from one temple across the crown. How Cosette came to love that silver streak, how important it was to her!

She wasn’t looking particularly nice that evening. Her hair needed doing and the roots showed gray. Staying thin wasn’t just a losing battle with Cosette but a series of skirmishes in which about fifty percent of the time her side won. Necessarily, therefore, the other half of the time fat was the conqueror and he was in the ascendant now, positively crowing his victory on the scales that morning. She had a silk caftan on, in a shade of light red that didn’t suit her, and she had sprayed on too much Joy. Fay, on the other hand, with twenty-five years’ advantage over her, was looking gorgeous. She went through phases, did Fay, times of indifferent, rather shabby looks when she would be washed-out and stringy, and times of glory, each dependent on the attention she paid herself. She must have been attentive lately, for she glowed under makeup as heavy but more skillfully applied than Felicity’s had ever been, and instead of her usual jeans, she was in a skirt that showed off her legs and fine ankles. Perdita, the dancer, who had been left there by her husband while he went off to some charity performance, also presented an appearance with which Cosette couldn’t have competed. She was always exquisite, like an exhibit in a little girl’s glass case of dolls, waxen faced, raspberry-fuchsia mouth, hair that might have been painted on with lamp black and a fine brush, every gesture learned and every pose rehearsed.

I mention competing because that was the impression they gave, those three women, when Mark walked in. Bell had gone out onto the balcony to check that it was he when the doorbell rang and then she went down to let him in. He was the only man and there were we five women. You could see at once what an impact he made. His grace as much as his looks did that. He was very thin and he walked like a dancer—imagine Nureyev entering a London drawing room incognito—or perhaps he walked like an actor, which is what he was. It would have been amusing, the reaction of those three, if it hadn’t been sad, for in the few seconds before Mark went over to her and shook hands, you could see Cosette, bowed and humbled, retire from the contest. It was as if she took in for the first time without self-delusion the appearance of the other two, as if the shock of it struck and pained her, her fifty-five years and her weariness smote her, and she put out her hand to him with a half smile in which was self-mockery and defeat.

It was not she whom he approached first. Mark was Mark and he knew what was due to the obviously eldest lady there. Auntie was the first of us he shook hands with, Auntie, who was so accustomed to being ignored by pretty well everyone except Cosette—you see how, even here, I said that we were five women, not six—that she was too stunned to reply when he said how do you do to her.

Bell made no introductions, I should have been astounded if she had. She simply waved a hand at him and said, “This is Marcus.”

He said quickly, almost apologetically, “No—Mark, please.”

And of course I found out long afterward that it was Bell, with her fondness for pretentious fancy names, who had Latinized him. Cosette told him who we all were. Something like this had happened the first time Walter Admetus came around, the first time Luis Llanos did. The dancer had merely bestowed on all his charm-laden smile and a “Hi!” while Admetus went from person to person, carefully enunciating names—“How do you do, Gary?” “How do you do, Mimi?” Mark said how do you do only to Auntie, an individual hello to all the rest of us. I saw no special glance of admiration rest on Perdita or on Fay. Bell, too, was watching, with the same passion for the finer points of human behavior.