The House of Stairs (3 page)

All this was reflected in the magazines that lay on Cosette’s coffee table, the
Tatler,
the
Lady, Country Life,
in the food they ate—I have never anywhere else known such an enormous consumption of smoked salmon—the clothes from Burberry, Aquascutum, and the Scotch House, his Rolls-Royce, her Volvo, their holidays in Antibes and Lucerne and later, as the sixties began, in the West Indies. But at fourteen I didn’t see it like this, though I couldn’t help being aware of their wealth. If I thought about it at all, I saw this life-style as the choice of both of them, willingly and happily entered into. It was only later that I began to understand that their way of living was Douglas’s choice, not Cosette’s.

I began going to see her in those summer holidays just after my parents told me of my inheritance. Cosette had invited me while on one of her visits to our house. I was a child still, but she talked to me as to a contemporary, she always did this to everyone, in her smiling, vague, abstracted way.

“Come over next week, darling, and tell me what to do about my garden.”

“I don’t know anything about gardens.” I must have said it sullenly, for I was always sullen then.

“My lilies are coming out, but they’re not happy and it seems a shame, because they have such lovely names. Gleaming Daylight and Golden Dawn and Precious Bane. It says in the catalog, ‘Thriving in all garden soils, tolerant of both moisture and drought, they can be grown in full sun or partial shade …’ but I must say I haven’t found it so.”

I just looked at her, bored, not responsive. I had always liked Cosette because she took notice of me and never fussed or inquired, but on that day I hated all the world. The world had been injuring me without my knowing it for fourteen years and I had a lot of revenge to take on it.

“We won’t have to do anything,” said Cosette, evidently seeing the offer of idleness as a great inducement. “I mean we won’t have to dig or plant or get our hands dirty. We’ll just sit and drink things and make plans.”

They had told her I had been told and she was being tender with me. After a while she wanted my company for myself and kindness didn’t come into it. But at that time I was just a young relative who had been given a terrible burden to bear and whom she felt she could uniquely help. Cosette was like that. She welcomed me to Garth Manor and we sat outside the first time on the kind of garden furniture the other people I knew didn’t have, chintz-upholstered sofas that swung gently under canopies, cane chairs with high backs that Cosette called peacocks.

“Because they are supposed to look like the Peacock Throne but without all the jewels and everything. I wanted to have a pair of peacocks to strut up and down here—imagine the cock bird’s lovely tail! But Douglas didn’t think it would be a good idea.”

“Why didn’t he?” I said, already resentful of him on her behalf, already seeing him as an oppressive, even dictatorial, husband.

“They screech. I didn’t know that or of course I wouldn’t have suggested it. They screech regularly at dawn, you could set your clock by them.”

There was a glass-topped table of white rattan, sheltered by a big white sunshade. Perpetua brought us strawberries dipped in chocolate and lemonade made out of real lemons in glasses that by some magical means had been coated with actual frost. Cosette smoked cigarettes in a long tortoiseshell holder. She told me how much she liked my name. She would have called a daughter of her own by it if she had ever had a daughter. It was she who told me how it was that Elizabeth became a perennially popular name in England. Since then, though not at the time of course, I have often thought of the trouble she must have been to, gathering this information and a great deal more, just to please me and put me at my ease.

“Because if you say it over and over to yourself, darling, it really is quite a strange-sounding name, isn’t it? It’s just as strange as any other from the Old Testament, Mehetabel or Hephsibah or Shulamith, and any of them might have got to be as fashionable as Elizabeth if a queen had been called by them. Elizabeth became popular because of Elizabeth I and she was called Elizabeth because of her great-grandmother Elizabeth Woodville, that Edward IV married—so you see? Before that it was as rare as those others.”

“Cosette must be very rare,” I said.

“It means ‘little thing.’ It’s what my mother always called me and it stuck. Unfortunately, I’m not a little thing anymore. I’ll tell you my real name, it’s Cora—isn’t that awful? You must promise never to tell anyone. I had to say it for everyone to hear when I got married, but never, never since.”

I wondered why Douglas hadn’t given her an engagement ring and a wedding ring made of something superior to silver, not knowing then that the element was platinum, the latest fashion when Cosette was married. The big diamonds looked somber in their dark gray setting. At that time Cosette’s only excursion into cosmetics was to paint her nails, and these were the bright reddish pink of one of the clumps of lilies. The gesture she made when she pointed was peculiarly graceful, and somehow swanlike—only that is absurd.

Swans don’t point. But we think of them as moving with a slow fluidity, a delicate poise, and this too was Cosette.

The flower bed she indicated was shaped like a crescent moon and the lilies in it looked perfect to me with their red flowers and yellow flowers and flowers snow-white printed with a coffee smudge. The gardener had planted them and ever since tended them. Cosette might direct operations here and in the house, but I never saw her perform with her own hands any domestic task. I never heard anyone, not even my father, who was rather carping, call her lazy, and yet lazy she was with an unruffled, easy idleness. She had a tremendous capacity for doing absolutely nothing, though her sewing was exquisite and she could draw and paint, but she preferred to sit for hours in quietude, not reading, without a pen or needle in her hand, her face gentle and serene in repose. For in those days, and she must have been rather older than I am now, something over forty, the sadness I have spoken of had not come into her expression. Simone de Beauvoir, in some memoir, laments age which causes the face to droop and therefore take on a sad look. It was this sagging of the facial muscles that later gave Cosette an almost tragical appearance, except when she smiled.

To me, then, she was old, so old as almost to seem of a different species. Unimaginable that I might live to be as old as that—and unlikely too, as I sometimes thought with bitterness. She was then a large fair woman, overweight, fat even, though in those days she never showed signs of minding about her weight. Her eyes were a pale greyish blue that seemed to look at you uncertainly, with a wistful and perhaps timid regard. For there was shyness in Cosette as well as confident generosity.

“You think my hemerocallis is quite happy there then, darling?” she said. The names of plants presented her with no difficulty. She might never plant them or pull out the weeds that threatened them but she knew exactly what each one was called. I said nothing, but that did not deter her. “I suppose I’m being unduly impatient, expecting great things when the poor dears have only been there six months.”

Even I, young as I was, miserable as I was, couldn’t help smiling at the notion of Cosette as an impatient person. Her tranquillity was the essence of her. In her company, because of this almost Oriental placidity, I—and others—inevitably felt eased of burdens, curiously enfolded by a sweet meditative calm. It made you think in a strange way of its opposite, of the restless briskness so many women of one’s mother’s generation had and which made people of my age feel nervous and inadequate. She was always the same and always there, always interested, always with nothing better to do.

I soon began visiting her three times a week at least, then staying overnight. I was at school in Hampstead Garden Suburb and it was easy to explain that it was far more convenient for me to live at Cosette’s during the week than to go home to Cricklewood. Or that was how I did explain it, an explanation that would sound absurd to anyone aware of the distance between the Henrietta Barnett and Cricklewood Lane. Only the existence and frequent presence of Douglas stopped me attempting to live at Garth Manor. Everyone knows couples of whom one is congenial, the other unsympathetic. For me the return home of Douglas each evening, heralded by the sound of the Rolls’s wheels on the gravel drive, cast a blight over the companionship I enjoyed with his wife. He was so male, so stiffly elderly, so stockbrokerish, much of his talk incomprehensible, and he seemed, without actually asking for it, to require a measure of grave silence in his house while he was in it. And at the weekends he was there all the time.

Cosette changed not at all in her husband’s company. She was the same sweet, smiling, calm yet effusive creature, the same woman whose great gift was as a listener. To his accounts of deals and negotiations she would listen with the same rapt attention that she gave to my own outpourings, the retelling of my dreams, visions, frustrations, and resentments. And she really listened. It was not that she closed off her mind and wandered in thought to other regions. I marveled at the intelligent replies she made to his mysterious diatribes and looked with suspicion and lack of comprehension when, getting up from her chair to move swanlike across the room, she allowed one plump white hand to rest softly against the side of his face. When she did this he would always turn his face into it and kiss the palm. This caused me a furious embarrassment. I know now that I didn’t want Cosette to have any life of her own, any private life, that was not directly concerned with making mine easier and happier.

She didn’t mention the terror and the bore but waited for me to do so. Cosette seldom raised subjects or showed curiosity. I spoke of it—it burst out of me in a passion rather—after a neighbor of hers, a woman called Dawn Castle, had been in the garden with us on a warm October day when the lily flowers were dead and gone and it was the late dahlias that Cosette and I were admiring. Dawn Castle was always talking about her children, what a worry they were, the youngest had just been expelled from school, something like that, and another one had failed an exam. She finished, as she always did, with the old cliché. “Still, I suppose I wouldn’t be without them.”

It never occurred to me that this often-repeated remark might be hurtful to Cosette. I saw it only as profoundly silly and said rudely, “Why not, if they worry you so much?”

She looked shocked, as well she might. “One day you’ll have a baby of your own and then you’ll feel differently.”

“I shall never have a baby, never.”

I had spoken very abruptly, and I felt Cosette’s eyes on me.

“I’d like a pound for every girl that has told me that,” said Mrs. Castle with her hard little laugh, and after that she went home, being one of those people who are only at ease in an atmosphere of small talk and are quickly frightened away by what they call unpleasantness.

Cosette said, “That was fierce.”

“It’s cruel,” I said. “People ought to think before they speak. If she doesn’t know about me, surely she knows about you. She knows Douglas is my mother’s cousin.”

“In my experience no one ever remembers about other people’s family relationships.”

“Cosette,” I said, “Cosette, is that why you never had any children? Didn’t you want children?”

She had a way of smiling in reply to a question she intended not to answer in words. It was a slow, mysterious smile that overspread her face, vague and gentle, but it somehow always put an end to further probing. I got it into my head then, for no reason, that Douglas had married Cosette without telling her of his inheritance. There was no foundation for this belief, you understand; I read it or thought I read it in her rueful eyes, in a kind of resignation. Adolescents do that, weave impossible romances around the lives of their older friends. I taught myself to believe Douglas had deceived Cosette, denied her children when it was too late for her to retreat, had attempted to compensate by showering her with opulence. That winter they went to Trinidad and I went home, where I found myself watching my mother in an almost clinical way. One day she dropped a wineglass and I screamed. My father came up to me and smacked my face.

It was a light slap, not painful, but I received it as an assault.

“Never do that again,” he said.

“And you never do that again to me.”

“You had better learn to control yourself. I have had to. In our position you have to.”

“Our position? What position? You’ve got one position and I’ve got another. I’m the one people are going to scream about, not you.”

Strong stuff for a fifteen-year-old. In the spring I went back to Cosette and Garth Manor from where I could walk to school across the Heath Extension and where I had in my large bedroom with its view of the woodlands of North End such luxuries as my own television and electric blanket and bedside phone. Though I must say, in my own defense, that it was not these things which attracted me. Why do young girls, at this particular stage of their development, enjoy the company of an older woman? I should like to think it wasn’t stark narcissism on my part, it wasn’t that Cosette, very nearly thirty years my senior, presented no competition, or that my own good looks showed up more delightfully by contrast to her aging face and body. For as aging I certainly saw her, aged in fact, past hope as a woman and sexual being. The truth was that I had made Cosette into another mother for myself, the mother I had chosen, not had thrust upon me, the mother who listened and who had infinite time to spare, was prodigal with a flattery I believed and still believe sincere.

In those days she never seemed to mind being taken for my mother. That came later, in Archangel Place, when though she might not express it aloud, the pain she felt and a kind of humiliation at the frequent assumption made that I (or Bell or Birgitte or Fay) was her daughter showed in her eyes and the wry twist of her mouth. But Mrs. Cosette Kingsley of the Townswomen’s Guild, the Wellgarth Residents’ Association, school governor, purveyor of Meals on Wheels, and occasional volunteer social worker, had no such vanities. Sometimes, in the holidays or on Saturdays, we would go shopping together and in Simpson’s or Swan and Edgar, then still dominating the corner between Piccadilly and Regent Street at the Circus, an assistant would sometimes refer to me as her daughter. The same thing happened in the restaurants we dropped into for the cups of coffee Cosette seemed to need every half hour in order to survive.