The House of Stairs (30 page)

That autumn Cosette suddenly became far richer than before.

I haven’t said much about Cosette’s income, her fortune, rather giving the impression perhaps that she just possessed a lot of money. But it wasn’t quite like that. Douglas had left all kinds of assets, including defunct companies that still however had stock exchange quotations, and a certain amount of apparently undesirable real estate. By that I mean it was in the form of land in outer suburbs with derelict industrial buildings on it, that sort of thing. One of these companies had already been bought out, the purchaser being in need of the stock exchange quotation, and paying something in the region of a half-penny a share. That was just before decimal coinage came in at the beginning of 1971. Of course that didn’t bring Cosette in much money, but the piece of land she owned did. She had forgotten she owned it, these few acres somewhere on the edge of south London. A firm of accountants administered everything for her and they were pleased to tell her that an enormous offer had been made for this land by a garage and petrol-station chain. A new road was going through and Cosette’s old industrial site would abut onto it.

The precise figure I never knew. Perhaps Cosette didn’t know it herself. It wasn’t in her nature to be discreet and she broadcast the news of this windfall as she called it to all the visitors to the house.

“Hundreds of thousands of pounds,” was the nearest she got to exactitude. “It will make me a real millionairess.”

Bell was there to hear it and so was Mark—inevitably. I looked at Bell, expecting to meet eyes turned to meet mine as she calculated the benefits of staying friends with me, but she wasn’t looking in my direction. She was looking at Cosette. It struck me then that, for one who prided herself on her powers of observation, she had made a curious mistake in supposing anyone who looked like Cosette to be suffering from cancer. For unhappy on one level as Cosette might be, guilty that is and really sorrowing for Auntie, missing her as one might miss a mother, on another level she was quite obviously rapturously happy and her happiness made her beautiful. People tend to eat less when they are in love and Cosette had become slimmer without effort. Her skin glowed, her hair shone. I don’t suppose it’s really possible for happiness to tighten up the muscles of the face, but that was the way it looked. I am sure Mark never went shopping for clothes with her, but since knowing him her dress sense had improved. It was a surprise to me what good legs she had, but I had never before seen her wear very fine denier stockings and plain high-heeled shoes. She had bought some simple dresses in silk or fine wool with which she had taken to wearing that jewelry that had been the envy of Elsa and me. She had become elegant—a word no one would have thought in the past of applying to Cosette. But of those who were assembled in the House of Stairs I alone remembered the stout, sturdy woman whose iron-gray hair matched her tailored suits.

Bell, who had been watching Cosette in silence while Mervyn made some hopeful remark about going out to celebrate, now got up, pushed her fingers through her tangled, tendriled, bird’s-nest hair, and announced that she would be going to Felicity’s for the holiday, she would be going the next day. And Cosette, as if to neutralize this cold tone with an extra warmth in her own voice, said, “Oh, darling, we
shall
miss you. It has become quite a regular thing for you, going there for Christmas, hasn’t it?”

Bell looked at her, lifting first her eyebrows, then her shoulders, her expression remote. As if someone walked over her grave? Or as if she had a strange prevision this would be the last time?

It wasn’t, anyway, to invite either or both of us for Christmas, that Felicity came to visit me this morning. Even for her, July would have been a little early. And Bell she will never want again, whatever her feelings about me may be. She was astonished to see Bell, so surprised that she actually jumped at the sight of her, recognizing her at once, with no difficulty. Before going into my living room, where I supposed rightly that Bell was, I tried to whisper a warning, to utter simply the three words that would be enough, “Bell is there!” but Felicity, who has become far more overbearing and dictatorial, gave me no chance, walking rapidly ahead of me and remarking loudly about how sweet these little houses could be made, how delectable mine was, what wonders could be done with these former artisans’ cottages. For Bell there was no escape, the artisan’s means not having stretched to two exits from the living room.

Being on what Henry James calls almost irreconcilable terms with the printed page, Bell was watching television, some abysmal late-morning offering. The little cat lay in her lap, watching the big one, who was sprawled on top of the set, possibly watching the lion on the screen that slowly stalked a wildebeest. Bell still has that enviable poise. No jumping for her, no attempt at rising even. She looked at Felicity in a way that made me doubt for a moment if she knew who this was.

“My God,” said Felicity. “Surprise, surprise.” How did I know, even then, that whatever it cost her, she wasn’t going to utter Bell’s name?

“Why?” Bell said. “I talked to you on the phone. You knew I wanted to find Elizabeth.”

“Oh, true, true.” Felicity gave an unpleasant little laugh, a laugh I couldn’t remember from the old days. “When I said ‘surprise’ I meant I was surprised on Elizabeth’s behalf, not yours.” It was the kind of silky rudeness Cosette used to hate so much and it is from her I have derived my hatred of it. Felicity sat down, her skirt riding up, showing a lot of plump leg and black stocking top. It is horrible, for she isn’t in the least like Cosette, never has been, but the way she dresses, showily and unsuitably,
coyly,
reminds me of Cosette’s early efforts, between the departure from Wellgarth Avenue and the coming of Mark. “I’m having lunch with a friend in Barnes,” she said to me. “The taxi almost had to pass your door, so I thought, why not? I’ll never get to see her if I wait for her to phone.”

A strange route for a taxi going from Glebe Place to Barnes to take. I didn’t say so though. I was relieved she wouldn’t expect to lunch here. “I knew I’d catch you because you’d be doing your writing at this hour.” It was said with a fine, artless regard for the writer’s self-imposed disciplines.

“You were wrong, weren’t you?” said Bell, her first contribution, and a hard, cold one. “About her writing, I mean, not about you catching her.”

I explained about my father. It was something to say. I didn’t know what to say with the two of them there, Bell seemingly so despairing of her life that she didn’t care what she said, consequences being of no account to her, Felicity revengeful and disapproving of Bell’s very existence. I was afraid Felicity would say something about Cosette, it seemed so obvious that she must, though I doubted if she would go so far as to refer to Mark. And now I noticed for the first time that she was carrying, along with her large black patent leather handbag and a pair of absurd white gloves, the early edition of the evening paper, the
Standard,
which had been on the streets a couple of hours. I had already glanced at it while at the station, at the lead story which is that of the murder by a child of a child. With a dreadful feeling of heart-sinking I saw Felicity lay her handbag on the table, place her gloves beside it, so that this newspaper, though still folded, lay alone on her unattractively bulbous lap, the large bold print of two words only of the headline exposed, but the two words of greatest significance:
child
and
killed.

Bell perhaps also saw it. I don’t know if she did.

Felicity said, “Do you think we could possibly have the television off?”

Carrying the little cat, pendulous from her forearm as a muff might be, Bell got up and made the most offensive response to this request there is, not excluding refusing it. She turned the sound down to a low murmur. Felicity was unfolding her paper, I don’t really know why, I can hardly imagine what she intended to say or do. To read that story? To ask Bell in her didactic way (teaching always, reverting always to the vocation she had missed) what comments she had on it? Listing, for I am sure she still lives in a world of quizzes, a catalog of minimonsters, adolescent and subteen assassins?

But Bell forestalled her. Still standing, still with the cat draped over her arm as if boneless, a stretchy rubber sling sheathed in sable fur, Bell said, “It looks to me as if you’ve come a long way since you were sponging on Cosette and that ponce with the beard was screwing your brains out.”

I was more shocked to hear her speak Cosette’s name than by the actual content of what she said. She had got back into the dangerous country, she had taken some terrible plunge, was swimming the river.

You could see it in her face, too, in the width of her eyes, the recoil, as if someone else had spoken those words. Felicity, of course, looked terribly offended. But she didn’t jump up and leave the house in dudgeon. I think people very seldom behave quite like that. They like to have options left to them. In fact, she managed a breathy deprecating laugh.

“Sponging!” she said. “Oh, dear, what a word! As if people, some of them not too far from here, didn’t sponge on me year after year. Inevitably, that’s your lot if you happen to be rather better off than the run of the mill.”

She got up then, taking care to display the entire front page of the paper and the headline: TYNESIDE VICTIM KILLED BY CHILD, 10. Then she dropped the paper on the seat of her chair. “Oh, no, you keep it,” she said sweetly when I reminded her. I used rather to like Felicity, her enthusiasms, her rebellions, her intensity, her passions. All that seems to be gone now. No doubt it was necessary, if she was going to live with Esmond at Thornham and have a modicum of contentment, to ditch all that. Perhaps it was a case of ditching it or going mad. Who knows? I saw her out and we made cool, careful farewells, with no added riders of meeting again.

I was afraid to go back in there, I was really afraid. But you can hardly avoid going into your own living room for the rest of your life. I braced myself, opened the door. The newspaper was on the floor by Bell’s chair. The little cat sat on one edge of it washing his face. Bell had her head in her hands, the fingers plunged into her gray, wiry, coarse hair. I didn’t know what to do. So I sat down and waited and said nothing and thought of the peacefully quiet, reasonably industrious life I had been leading before she came out of prison and I found her.

Presently she took her hands down and looked at me and said in quite a normal, ordinary voice, “Am I a psychopath? I suppose I must be, they all said I was. But I don’t feel like that, I just feel like anyone else.” What she had said must have struck her as absurd or shallow, for she corrected herself. “Or I think I do.”

16

SINCE BELL HAS BEEN
here I have gotten into the habit of looking at people and wondering which of them, if any, are like her. I mean, like her in that they have killed someone and been sent to prison for it, served their sentences and come out again. It is a new phenomenon. Murderers used to be hanged.

Now they are set free and come back to live among us. Or to exist. I look at people and I wonder. Think of the number of murders we read are committed each year. Give it ten years—Bell was exceptionally long incarcerated and that for a particular reason—and their perpetrators (as the police say) are out again, ordinary people looking like everyone else, having ordinary jobs, perhaps living next door. That woman I find myself sitting opposite in the tube may have shot her lover. That man with his dark scowl, arms folded across a thickly muscled chest, leaning against a wall on a street corner, may have knifed someone in a street brawl. How many have smothered the baby in its cradle or helped the elderly encumbrance on its way? People like me and Felicity and Elsa know them and go on knowing them and learn to adjust. Yet you would think murder the one act no one could adjust to, no one could make allowances for.

She had asked me if I thought she was a psychopath—well, she had asked the question, of the air perhaps, or of God. I could only shake my head and say I didn’t know. I have always understood psychopaths to enjoy tormenting animals. Having uttered her question and made her half-despairing remarks, Bell turned away from me and coaxed the little cat back to her. It jumped onto her lap and she began stroking it in the way it likes, long hard movements of the hands, strong enough to push it to a crouching position. Then, as it folded itself and curled into the thick black bunches of her skirt, she let her hands rest with the softest and most caring of movements on its sleek back. I would never have associated tenderness with Bell. Sensuousness, passion, a kind of tragic grandeur, all those, but not tenderness. Yet she is tender with my cats, as wondering and appreciative and absorbed as some women are with babies.

“I was never with animals before,” she said, as if reading what I was thinking. “I didn’t know I liked them.”

“Admetus had a cat,” I said, “with cat fleas.” And I remembered Mark, and Cosette’s anxious witticism about the
entrechat.
“There were dogs at Thornham.”

“Big and loud and domineering like their bitch of an owner. She would have invited you down there if I hadn’t been here.”

“I wouldn’t have gone.” I said. “What was it like that—that last Christmas?”

We used to talk of people, she and I, why someone said that at just that moment, why someone else did that particular thing, what their motive was, and wasn’t it all strange? I see little sign that this still interests her. People have been too much for her and now she likes animals better.

“Just the same, only without the quiz,” she said. “The same as the year before. It always was the same. I don’t know why I went.”

“Don’t you?”

She looked at me with a sort of cold stubbornness. Why should I talk if I don’t want to, she may have been thinking, why should I explain? “You went so that you shouldn’t see those two together,” I said, “so that you wouldn’t be there when
it
happened.”

“You’re as bad as me,” she jeered at me. “You’ll no more say their names than I will. Only I will, I will. Mark and Cosette—there!”