The House of Stairs (26 page)

“Is that true, Bell?”

“Is what true?”

“All of it.”

“Of course it is. You said yourself even liars tell more truth than lies.”

The muscles were jumping in my neck and shoulders. I tried to control them, breathing deeply. “Where was Mark then?” I said. “What was Mark doing?”

She jumped up and ran out of the room, hanging the door.

Mark came to the party Cosette gave for Bell’s birthday. For some reason, it was a far more decorous affair than the one Esmond Thinnesse interrupted to take Felicity away. People got drunk, of course they did, and Rimmon went on one of his acid trips, but these had become habitual to him, were a weekly indulgence. As far as I remember no couple disappeared into a bedroom as Felicity and Harvey had on that previous occasion. I have sometimes thought that this party was less of a saturnalia than previous ones simply because Mark was there. Of course, I am not implying that he had prudish views or that there was anything repressive or disapproving in the way he behaved. There was nothing like that. It was more that his presence seemed to make people feel that it was possible to have a good time socially without getting drunk or high or pawing others about, that conversation and being nice to fellow guests was a reasonable, if outdated, alternative. Of course, I realize I’m making a pretty high-flown claim for Mark and maybe I’m quite wrong. Maybe the party was the way it was because Admetus wasn’t there and neither was Felicity nor Fay nor Gary.

Cosette urged Bell to invite her own friends. She was very eager that Bell and Mark’s mother should be invited and in fact wanted more than that. Because it was for Bell’s birthday, she wanted Bell’s mother asked around in advance, she wanted her actually to take some part in organizing the party. Bell invited no one. I can quite see why not now, but at the time it seemed strange to me. Apart from Mark, the guests were all Cosette’s old gang, the usual Wellgarthians, Oliver and Adela and the ballet dancers, and Perpetua with a lot of her family, including Dominic, and Mervyn and Mimi, and some neighbors from Archangel Mews.

At that party, for a birthday present, Cosette gave Bell the bloodstone ring. She said it suited Bell’s hand much better than her own and she was right. Bell said thank you and looked at the ring on her finger and then up at Cosette, but without smiling or showing any special signs of pleasure. Almost anyone else would have kissed Cosette for that, thrown her arms round her and kissed her. I wasn’t surprised when Bell didn’t do this, but I was sorry. I was sorry too that she never wore the ring afterward, or if she did, it wasn’t when she was with me. The next time I saw her and I think every time since then, her hands were bare.

Mark didn’t stay till the small hours. He went home a little after midnight. Cosette pressed him to come back the following evening to dinner when they would talk about the party.

“I don’t think I should come tomorrow,” he said.

There was something in the way he put it that made it far from a direct refusal. Cosette seized on this.

“If you mean you ought not to come because you’ve been here twice, that’s nonsense, you know. Everyone else comes just as often as they want. We don’t stand on ceremony here. Please come.”

He smiled at her. “Just the same, I won’t come tomorrow.”

I was angry with him. It seemed to me he was playing hard to get. Why follow these rules with a rich woman old enough, nearly old enough, to be his mother? It was unkind. Or it was deliberately making himself elusive, unattainable and therefore the more longed for. He said no more. Cosette watched him go down the street, watched his long thin shadow cast by the lamplight. She closed the door. We were alone in the hall, the party and the music still going on upstairs.

“I’d give everything I’ve got to have my youth back,” Cosette said. She said it in a fierce, intense whisper. “I’d give all the future and take death at the end of it if I could have one year of being thirty.”

It was nearly a week before she heard from him again. In that week, what was she like? Sad, I suppose, just sad. She didn’t talk about him, she didn’t say anything, but you could imagine her thoughts. If only, they must have run, I could have been just a handful of years younger and he just a fraction older, if only we could have met with no more than five or six years between us—ah, then! As it is I can do nothing, I can’t even phone him as I would Walter, say, or Maurice Bailey, or some other man, I can’t do it because of the way I feel, I can’t face the humiliation of a refusal. So she must have thought. Sometimes I caught her looking at Bell as if there lay her only hope. Bell was the key to Mark. What questions could she answer, what histories give, what analyses of his past behavior? But Cosette never asked, and I didn’t ask either. It seemed to me—quite wrongly, of course, as I now know—that perfect confidence had existed between Bell and me and the coming of Mark spoiled it. I was afraid to ask and she was not willing to explain.

It erected a barrier between us, or so I thought. In fact it did erect a barrier, it was through Mark that we began to be drawn apart, but not at all in the way I supposed.

14

THERE IS A LIMIT
, said Henry James, to the impunity with which one can juggle with truth.

I could question that. He never knew Bell, he never knew the archjuggler in the circus of the world. It is a strange thing the conclusions we draw not from the impressions we are given but from the impressions we take. I took it for granted Bell was experienced, sophisticated, richly traveled in all kinds of sexual regions, as streetwise as could be, as tough. Yet she never told me so. Did she act these things, or did I choose to see her as acting? Certainly she told me she had been at art school, had lovers long before she went there, grew up fatherless and with a strange mother who had been a concert singer. Her maiden name, of course, had been Mark’s name, Henryson.

I reached a conclusion: life with Silas had compounded her distaste for men. Even while with him, married to him, she had turned to women as lovers, probably a series of women. And after he was dead and she was free she was able to indulge her love for her own sex. I thought it likely that this accounted, more than a need to be with her mother, for those absences of hers and that disappearance that took place soon after our meeting in Admetus’s house. She had had a lover, a woman, to whom she was deeply committed but with whom she had finally broken in order to come to me. For, looking back over our life together and the multitude of things we had talked about, I could recall no mention of any man she was involved with except Silas, no mention indeed of any man at all except her brother, Mark, and on the subject of him she was not communicative.

I thought we would never see him again, and I was surprised when I answered the phone to hear his voice. He recognized mine at once. Mark wasn’t one of those people who, though they have met you, when they phone treat you with their “Can I speak to so-and-so” like the secretary or the housekeeper. Mark called me by my name and asked me how I was and then sounded taken aback when I said Bell wasn’t in.

“It isn’t Bell I want. I hoped I could speak to Cosette.”

He had rung to ask her out to dinner. Just the two of them, not a party, just he and she because he thought it would be nice to entertain her for a change after he had twice been her guest. Her reaction wasn’t at all what I expected. It wasn’t what Bell expected either. I won’t say I knew Bell by that time. In view of how tremendously I was deceived, that would be stupid, but I knew sides of her, I knew what it meant when she watched someone in that cold interested way of hers. She was making mental notes of their follies, how far they would go. Having seen Cosette—well, let me make no bones about it—having seen her simper at Mark and bridle and gaze with adoration, hang on his words, and defer to his opinions, she was waiting for some fresh ridiculous display. Isn’t it strange that I was beginning to understand that Bell disliked Cosette? Hardly anyone ever disliked Cosette, you see, it was nearly impossible, so I had discounted the signs I had seen before, only keeping in mind the kindnesses and politenesses Bell had rendered Cosette when first they met. Now I saw in Bell’s eyes a mild scorn, and I saw disappointment that when Mark asked her out to dinner Cosette didn’t get into a panic about what to wear, when to have her hair done, what to do about her face, and cry, oh, if she could only be a little bit younger!

You see, I think Cosette had given up the battle. Probably she had taken a good, hard, long look at herself in the glass and decided it was no use.
This man was too important for it to be any use.
Ivor Sitwell was one thing, the kind of man you had your face lifted for and dieted for and bought new clothes for, but only to get back into the running. Rimmon—well, what was he but what Bell called a snack-fuck, something to have between proper meals? There had been another man, I think, some pal of Admetus’s, no more than a one-night stand. But Mark was the real thing and because he was the real thing it was no use. Better to have him as a friend, to have his respect, his delightful company, than make a guy of oneself, an overscented, overpainted show, and thus earn his contempt.

“I am trying to teach myself not to mind when the people in the restaurant take me for his mother,” she said to me. “No, I’m doing better than that, I’m teaching myself to expect it and like it. I mean, I’d have loved to have a son like Mark. Imagine how different things would be for me now if I had a son like him.”

“You never liked it when I was taken for your daughter and he’s ten or eleven years older than I am.”

“I would like it now. I’m changing, I’ve got to. I’m going to grow old gracefully.”

The interesting thing was that she looked a lot nicer and a lot younger for not going in for all that makeup and rigid hairdressing. She wore her hair in a simple loose knot on the back of her head (the way Bell wears hers now), touched her face with a little soft color, put on a plain, dark green dress with the pearls that had been Douglas’s last present to her. Handsome and dignified she looked and only a very unobservant person would have thought her old enough to be Mark’s mother, unless that person had mysteriously been reared in a society where girls get married at twelve.

Overcourteous in Admetus’s way, obsequious and deferential, Mark never was. He had arranged to meet her at the restaurant, not call for her. And it was a little bistro in Queensway to which he was taking her, none of your
grande cuisine.
I didn’t see her go or return. Bell and I were invited to Elsa’s divorce “thrash,” the party she was giving to celebrate extricating herself from her French Catholic husband. The next morning, late because we had gotten home in the small hours, Mark was there in the drawing room with Cosette and Auntie, and he and Cosette, facing each other across the table, were engaged in animated conversation, their eyes fixed on each other’s faces. I caught a sentence or two of it.

Cosette was saying, “But I don’t know anything about Schönberg.”

And Mark rejoined, “Neither do I—yet. We can learn. We can learn together.”

They—at any rate, Cosette—didn’t seem too pleased to see Bell and me. Of course, she put up a show of being pleased because she was like that, but I could tell. They went out soon after that; they were taking Auntie somewhere. It was Cosette’s day for taking Auntie for a drive and Mark had said he would come too. Auntie went along obediently, in the rather zombielike way she did most things, just doing what she was told, but I fancied she looked less bewildered. Mark was a person she could understand, not curiously dressed or using words she had been taught it was a crime to utter or smoking strange things or making discordant music. And he talked to her, he didn’t pretend she wasn’t there.

I went out onto the balcony to watch them go, wondering if Mark would drive the car, but he didn’t, not that time at any rate. He sat in the back.

“He must have stayed the night,” Bell said in the curious, uninflected tone she sometimes used.

“I’m certain he didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just have a feeling he didn’t. They would have been different. Cosette would have been different.”

And it turned out the way I supposed. Bell asked Gary directly. I thought it a strange thing to do, to ask him outright like that. Gary never slept much, going to bed very late always and seldom staying in bed much after seven. Mark had come in with Cosette at eleven the previous evening, he said, stayed ten minutes, came back at ten that morning. Gary had let him in himself.

“You sound like you’re his wife’s spies,” said Gary.

“He hasn’t got a wife,” Bell said.

“Do you want to know if he kissed her goodnight?”

“For Christ’s sake!” I said, trying to put a stop to it. “This is Cosette we’re talking about,
Cosette.”

“So what?” he said, rather unexpectedly. “The wine she drinks is made of grapes.”

“Maybe, but he’s not likely to drink the same wine, is he?”

Bell said slowly, “I don’t see why not, I really don’t see why not.”

“Cosette’s well into her fifties. She doesn’t expect it, she doesn’t dream of it.”

“I bet she
dreams
of it,” said Gary.

Mark was just a friend. How could it be otherwise? At least he wasn’t on the gravy train to Cadgeville. He took Cosette out to meals or else he came to the House of Stairs when dinner was over. Very occasionally, when all of us were taken out by Cosette, he would join us, but he behaved rather austerely at these dinner parties, drinking sparingly, eating cheaply. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink spirits. When he was present you could feel the lavish days were past, the days of green Chartreuse and burnt bank notes.

I had got it into my head, on the strength of once having seen them together, that he and Bell were close. This seemed not to be true. It was plain, at any rate, that he didn’t come to the house to see his sister. They took no more notice of each other than each did of Gary or the ballet dancers, less in fact, for Mark was always polite and pleasant to Cosette’s friends. Bell was the only person I ever saw him apparently indifferent to. And he was more than indifferent to her, he was capable of ignoring her when she walked into the room. Sometimes I saw him look up, realize who it was that had come in, and look away again without a nod or a word. I don’t know why, but somehow I thought this must be Bell’s fault, this must be something Bell had done.