The House of Stairs (31 page)

“All right,” I said. “You needn’t shout.”

“When
it
happened—you’re like some mealy-mouthed old woman, like
her
auntie. Why don’t you say what you mean, that I didn’t want to be there the first time he fucked her? As if I cared. I only wanted him to get on with it. Christ, he was so slow, like some fellow in those old-time books you read. The truth is I thought he’d get on faster if I wasn’t there.”

“It made no difference whether you were there or not.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she said. “None of it does, nothing does.”

“I want to know something. If nothing hurts you, I can ask it.”

She looked at me, smiling now. “Ask what you want. I don’t have to answer.”

“Did you,” I said, choosing words with care, “mean to kill Cosette? I mean, were you planning it even at that early stage?”

“I got it into my head she’d die naturally.”

“But when you knew she wouldn’t, were you planning it then?”

It was so open, her response, a frank scoffing. “Planning it? Making a sort of plot? You know I don’t do that.”

“Oh, Bell,” I said. “What was all your time at the House of Stairs but a plot?”

“I mean plan to kill someone. I do that”—she spoke quite proudly as if talking of some arduously acquired special skill—“on the spur of the moment. Even Silas, I thought about it often, but I was only planning for about five minutes. It’s only when things get intolerable or I … I want something very, very much.”

She got up, carrying the little cat. The big one, who was still on top of the television set, she scooped up and hung over her other arm. It is something she has taken to doing when she goes up to her room, at bedtime or to rest. “I don’t want any lunch,” she said. “I’m going to lie down.” She is such a curious figure in her black and with that crown of ashen hair, saved from appearing absurd by her tragic slenderness, the cats entwined round her arms like a boa of living fur.

Here, in my house in Macduff Street, she once again has the room above my workroom. That is where my spare room happens to be. The difference, one of the differences, is that it happens to be 16 stairs up, not 106. As I sit here at my desk I hear nothing but a single murmur of the bedsprings when she lays herself down on the mattress, a sound like a heavy sigh. The cats will stay with her for a little while, then climb out of the window while she is asleep, get onto the slate roof of the kitchen and try to catch starlings. They are never there when she wakes up.

That last Christmas I missed the sound of her above me, the creak of the 104th stair as she came down, even the murmur of the television she had taken to watching alone now Auntie was gone. The house was full. Diana Castle had come with a new boyfriend, and Birgitte, though having left under a cloud, reappeared with a boy she said was her cousin. The dancers and Walter Admetus went home only to sleep. Cosette refused to allow any visitor to occupy Bell’s room, she thought that wouldn’t be right, so with Gary and Fay, Mervyn and Mimi and Rimmon as permanent residents, when her niece, Leonard’s daughter, turned up, she had to sleep on the sofa in the television room. Rimmon, trying to get the niece to sleep with him by telling her that the sofa was where Auntie had been laid out, only succeeded in driving her from the house.

But the days of the big parties were over, the evenings of the great restaurant gatherings. When Cosette and Mark went out they went alone together. Without the least element of saturnalia, with no resemblance to those orgiastic parties, there was an atmosphere in the house of high romance. Winter, whatever may be the accepted view, is a more sexual season than summer, a bedroomy season of curtained windows and soft upholstery and artificial heat, of cold shut out and warmth enclosed, of faded, dwindling days and long, long nights. You notice these things more when you have no one of your own, for Robin wasn’t my own or much to me then. Had there ever been so many lovers all together in the House of Stairs?

Picture how it was. Gary and Fay, for a start, who, having for a long time been no more than fellow lodgers, had embarked on a stormy, intense relationship. They were always parting forever and then being marvelously reunited. Diana and Patrick, newly in love, at the touching stage, the ardent eye-contact stage, were apparently unable to bear the rupture that occurred each time flesh was sundered from flesh; Birgitte and her “cousin,” a giggly pair, babes in the wood who had sex as well as cuddles under their leaves; Mervyn and Mimi, a couple with that rare quality, an air of being no one else in the world who mattered half as much as the other. Of all the lovers I knew them, only they are still together. I saw them a few months back, walking down North End Road hand in hand, she holding the hand of a boy about eight and he of a girl about six. I waved, but they didn’t see me.

And, of course, there were Mark and Cosette. If you saw them together, you would have taken them to be in love, he with her as much as she with him. They were more decorous than the other couples. They were not to be come upon in corners, rammed almost painfully together, bones bruising flesh, open mouths devouring mouths which themselves ate lips and tongue, fingers prising as if to unearth where and what that essence was which created appetite and produced love. I never saw more than hands touching or a finger laid against a cheek. Their age made dignity harder and they seemed to strive for dignity.
Their
age? Mark was only a year older than Diana’s Patrick. But just as Cosette seemed to have grown younger to meet him, so he had aged to meet her; not so much in looks, he retained altogether his handsome, somehow Slavonic appearance, his lean straight figure, but in his bearing, so that without losing any of his grace he appeared more staid and more deliberate.

They weren’t lovers in the sense that we use the term. I don’t think they were. Of course Cosette went out with him and they were gone for hours and they may not have been in theaters or cinemas or restaurants. They may have been in Mark’s flat in Brook Green. But I have, and had, a very strong feeling that wasn’t so. At home, in the House of Stairs, Cosette was after a fashion chaperoned by day and night. Naturally, I don’t mean anyone would have interfered with what she did, tried to stop her, for instance, but they would have known, everyone would have known. It was a curious situation. Here was this house full of lovers, by night everyone a lover except me, love in the air of the place like an all-pervading perfume, languorous and sweet and strangely exhausting, but Cosette, who looked more in love than any of them, whose whole manner, restrained though it was, spoke of a dying for love, remained unfulfilled, remained a kind of reconstituted virgin.

I speculated about it; I couldn’t understand why. She had gone to bed readily enough with Ivor and, come to that, with Rimmon, men she had scarcely cared for, men who were stopgaps. Every gesture of hers; every word uttered in and out of his presence, testified to her passion for Mark. And she was no cold woman and no moralist, adhering still to the prejudices of her youth. Love to her, she had said often enough, was something to be consummated as soon as possible. Was it Mark, then, who hung back? And if he didn’t want her, what did he want? Because I was lonely, finding myself in that situation when I wasn’t first with anyone in the world, I consoled myself by watching them, how they behaved to each other; discreetly I did it, I hope. Of course I was jealous of Mark. In Cosette’s affections he had taken my place as no predecessor of his ever had. So much for those who believe I was myself in love with him… .

For a long time I have been telling myself he wasn’t pursuing Cosette for her money. She happened to have money, a lot of it, but he would have liked her and wanted to be with her whether she had it or not. So I believed. Yet who was paying for all these dinners they ate and all these plays they saw? He still had no work. He had no prospect of work. I remembered Ivor asking for money in the restaurant and, on one occasion, a check being palmed to Rimmon to spend on acid. Mark seemed beyond all that, having a curious, pure containment, walking tall and keeping himself distant from all these fleshpots.

The position changed and all was altered as openly as on any wedding night in the past when the bride is brought to bed, the bridegroom fetched to her and the guests, barely excluded, are witnesses of a necessary ceremonious rite. It was a few evenings after Christmas. The air was cold and thick with mist and it had been dark since soon after three. With the great feast only a few days past we had all been lazing indolently, no one had got up till late, and it was Walter Admetus who woke me, ringing the doorbell at noon. There was talk of going back to his place for an improvised party and to drink the case of Spanish champagne he had somehow come by. He had a place in Fulham by then, a converted coach house, and had taken up with Eva Faulkner once more. I didn’t want to go, I knew it would be the sort of party it didn’t do to be alone at, and I worked on my new book until late in the evening. Gary and Fay went, but Cosette and Mark, who were the prizes it seemed Walter was seeking, said they were going out for dinner, just the two of them.

It was very late when they came in. We were all in the drawing room. Those of us not compulsively enraptured by another’s body—myself, Mervyn, Mimi, and Rimmon—were gathered around Cosette’s table drinking wine. The air must have been thick with cigarette smoke in those days, only no one seemed to notice it, or no one seemed to mind. Wrapped in each other, locked together like pieces of a human jigsaw, Diana and Patrick possessed the sofa with a heavy, silent, very early unmoving occupancy. Birgitte and Mogens lay side by side, lips sometimes touching, whispers passing, each with a hand on the back of the other’s neck. From time to time Mervyn had been playing to us on Gary’s ocarina, sometimes accompanying music from the record player. I had never heard him play before and he surprised me. He was good. After a little while he got up and put on an LP of
Carmen,
and when it reached the appropriate passage Perdita, who was there without her husband, who had been sitting in her quiet poised way in the red velvet chair that had been Auntie’s, rose and without a word began to dance the
seguidilla.

It was seldom she would dance for us and when she did I think we all felt privileged that we had had the chance to see in private this once-great dancer who had spoiled herself, who had backed down from the last unscaled height of success, for the sake of love, for, if you like, the folly of love. It was flamenco, I suppose, the dance she did. I only know that all of it—the music, the dance, the single lamp and the candlelight, the wine and the warmth and the lovers—was enormously romantic.

She was a tiny woman, but as straight as a flame, black-haired as Carmen should be, the dress she wore having a flounced skirt of many red frills. She wanted us to clap to the music while she danced but we couldn’t, it seemed to interfere with the air of it, the distance of it from us, the otherness. The ancient ceremonial steps, the stylized movements, the slow twirls, followed their prescribed order, and the music its pattern, and Mervyn’s instrument made a strange haunting overtone, and the candle flames fluttered with the stirred air. And into it, the door opening very gently, came Mark and Cosette, pausing just inside when they saw what they had interrupted. It was scarcely an interruption, for the dancer didn’t pause. And they stood side by side, watching, moving almost imperceptibly closer and closer together until their bodies touched and Mark slid his arm round Cosette’s waist.

We all clapped when it was over. I poured a glass of wine for Mark and one for Cosette, who, rarely for her, didn’t refuse it. There was no conversation. This wasn’t unusual for the House of Stairs, where everybody knew everybody else and knew their views and didn’t feel the need to make small talk. It was a place where people sat reading books in company. But that evening, it seemed to me that there was a peculiar wordlessness, as if communication were being made by other means, by touch and sight and music. The lovers were together, absorbed in each other, and we three who were each alone had our own interior worlds in which to lose ourselves. Rimmon was already slipping into that narcosis with its horrible fantasies from which he was never truly to recover, the dancer perhaps had her memories and her sacrifice and I thought of Bell and remembered Felicity saying that, like Carmen, Silas had had nothing left to do and nowhere to go but to die.

The music was changed, replaced by something of Massenet. The doorbell rang and it was the dancer’s taxi driver, come to take her home. I thought Mark would go at the same time, but he only went downstairs to see her into her cab, and although he had no proprietorial air about him, it was the first time, I was sure, that he had behaved in this manner of a host. He returned, but not to his chair. He sat on the arm of Cosette’s, drew his hand very softly across her golden head and let his arm rest across her shoulders. She looked up at him, but not smiling; whatever it was they had come to was too serious for that. The music had become gentle and warm and seductive. Instead of returning this long rapt gaze of hers, his eyes ranged the big, warm, candlelit room, passing from the locked jigsaw couple on the sofa to the finger-patting, butterfly-kissing couple on the rug, to Mervyn and Mimi at the table, she with her head on his shoulder and his arm holding her. The light gleamed on the silver streak that banded his brown hair. Mark turned his head and let his eyes meet Cosette’s. I could swear that at that moment they might have been the same age. I could have sworn it was a mutual passion.

He bent and kissed her lips, not drawing away but holding the kiss for a little while. You won’t believe me if I say I was shocked, but remember it was the first time I had ever seen them kiss. I found myself first staring, then looking away, glad of the wine I had drunk that fuddled me a little, that blurred the hard edges of painful things. Cosette was flushed a rosy red when the kiss was done, proud in that company, the leader of it. She smiled, spoke his name only, “Mark …”

He gave her his hand. “Time to go,” he said, and pulled her lightly to her feet.