The House of Stairs (39 page)

“Take it,” says Bell, when told about it. “Unless you feel like giving some of it to me.” She laughs, so that I shall know she is joking. But, “You could buy a bigger house for us now.”

It is an idea. I could buy a house big enough for her to live in one half of it and I in the other. Or I could buy her a flat and put her in it and be rid of her forever. But this I don’t think I shall do. A sense of fatality colors the depression I live in now, colors it gray. I am stuck with Bell for better or for worse. She has abandoned black at last and is dressed in gray herself today, garments in shades of lanata and senecio and eucalypt made of fine knitted cotton, but they don’t suit her, they make her look like a witch, one of those beautiful witch-queens or malevolent fairy godmothers.

I am being silly, I am imagining things, for she is very gentle with me today, kinder than perhaps she has ever been. She tells me she has been to see her probation officer, agreed with this woman that she must look for a job, find herself a gainful occupation.

“I said I would. It’s easier than giving an outright no.”

The cats have both draped themselves on Bell, the little one reclining in her lap, the big one half on the back of her chair, half on her shoulder. They have taken to her completely and now they prefer her to me. She strokes the big one’s head, pushing his face into the curve of her neck.

“Of course I shall never work again. They made us work in the town when I was in the prerelease place—did I ever tell you?”

I shake my head, unbelieving.

“In a hospital, cleaning wards. I got paid. I spent all the money I got on cigarettes.”

I know she is stalling. She is filling up emptiness with talk that will provoke me to question her, so that she may postpone what it is she has to ask. I don’t react, I am not to be tempted.

“Don’t you want to know what else I did while you were away?”

“I know you want to tell me.”

“Elsa phoned and asked me round and I went. I went for walks, I walked all the way to Archangel Place and I looked at the house—there!” She looks at me sideways, lays a hand on each cat as if prepared to spring away, carrying them with her. “I watched telly. I saw Mark.”

My voice comes all ragged and rough. “What do you mean, Bell? What do you mean, you saw Mark?”

“I saw Mark on telly.”

“He was hardly on it, only radio, you know that.”

“He made just that one film—don’t you remember? Before you knew him. They were doing this Michael Caine season and he had this small part in a Michael Caine film. It was funny seeing him, it was really strange. Do you remember we all once talked about the category of disappointing things? It wasn’t much of a film, it was a disappointing film.”

We looked at each other, into each other’s eyes. I had this feeling of my thoughts being read or that the force in them was so great as to transmit them into her mind. For I could see another watching that old film— with unchanged love? With indifference? Or in tranquility?

And for once the thought-reading or the will to have thoughts read has worked.

“Lizzie,” she says, “Lizzie, what became of Cosette?”

“I wondered when you’d ask.”

“Is she dead?”

“No, she’s not dead. She married Maurice Bailey and went back to live in Golders Green.”

21

I HAVE SHOCKED HER
and she has gone quite pale. “I thought she was dead, I thought she must be.”

“Why? She’s not yet seventy.”

“And she married that funny old man?”

“He was only eight years older than she. I believe people thought it very suitable. People like the Castles and Cosette’s family must have thought it the best thing that could possibly happen to her. They must have thought she had come to her senses at last. He was a widower and very comfortably off and he had a house that was even bigger than Garth Manor.”

“Why do you say ‘must have’? Don’t you know?”

“No, I don’t know, Bell. I can guess. I can gather things from what Elsa tells me. Elsa keeps in touch with Cosette, but I don’t. I can’t.”

“Why don’t you? What do you mean?”

I may as well tell her. I have never told anyone but Elsa. No one has been interested. Why should they be? We fall out with our friends, everyone does, friendship comes to an end through disuse and neglect mostly, but sometimes through the violence of a quarrel.

“Cosette hasn’t spoken to me since, Bell. She never spoke to me again, she has never forgiven me. She thinks I betrayed her, you see, and that was the one thing she couldn’t bear.”

“You could have explained.”

“I didn’t get the chance. After it happened, you see, that same evening, she didn’t stay in the House of Stairs. Her brother Leonard came and took her away to Sevenoaks. I phoned her there and Leonard’s wife answered and said Cosette was too ill to speak to anyone. I meant to write, but I didn’t know what to say. Elsa and I were still in the House of Stairs, alone there. A solicitor wrote to me on Cosette’s behalf …”

Suddenly I find it desperately hard to speak of this. I am near tears and my voice is failing. But Bell presses me and Bell has got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

“You mean Cosette got a solicitor to write to you and tell you not to get in touch with her? Did she? I wouldn’t have believed it of her!”

“No, Bell, he wrote to tell me Cosette wanted to give me the House of Stairs, she wanted to make it over to me by a sort of deed of gift.”

Her face has changed, it has become greedy, rapacious, the eyes glittering with need. “She gave it to you? It must have been worth a fortune even then.”

“Don’t be silly. Do you imagine I’d have taken it? I wouldn’t have dreamed of taking it. She meant it as compensation for herself, for my losing her. I understood that. I wrote to the solicitor and told him I didn’t want the house or what it would fetch or anything, I didn’t want compensation for losing Cosette.”

“And you never got in touch with her again?”

“After your … trial, after that, she went away somewhere and when she came back I couldn’t find her, I couldn’t find where she was. Perhaps I didn’t try very hard. I knew her, you see, I knew how she felt about betrayals. Being betrayed was the only thing she couldn’t forgive. Then Elsa told me she’d got married and I got married too and it was all too late.”

When Mark and Cosette came home from the registrar they went straight up to the drawing room, where Luis found them. They told him their news, they had no need to keep it a secret. They were getting married.

They had given notice of their marriage to take place three weeks from that day. I don’t know what was said, of course, I only know what Luis, coming back into the garden to say goodbye, told me was said, and he had no gift for reportage. But Cosette had referred to the difference in their ages, he told me, and I can imagine her saying, “We had to put our ages on the form, Luis, and it was a bit humiliating, but not so bad as having to say them out loud.”

Luis, with unusual sensitivity, must have understood his company wasn’t exactly the fulfillment of their desires at that moment. Not that Cosette would ever have said so or have failed to press him to stay, to go home and fetch Perdita, all go out together and dine. Probably it was Mark who put up no dissuasion when Luis said, halfheartedly, that he must go.

Left alone, the two of them brought to crystallization the flow of doubt, hesitancy, half decision which had filled their talk, running between islands of love and lovemaking and future plans, ever since the night before. Mark must tell Bell. Or they must both tell Bell. Bell must be told.

The thing, the awful thing, was that Cosette never really knew what Mark had to tell Bell. Cosette never knew the magnitude of it, what being told that her lover was truly “in love” with Cosette would do to Bell. Because, you see, she thought the worst of it was that Bell must be informed of their intention to marry and of the loss of her home, a blow that she had persuaded herself would be much softened by compensating Bell with a substitute. What a one for compensating people with houses Cosette was, incurably generous, undaunted!

But this she saw as the worst of it. Mark, of course, knew better. Mark had some idea of what he faced in confronting Bell. No doubt he was afraid she in her turn would confront Cosette and pour out to her all the early plans she and Mark had made, an intrigue not qualified by loving apologies and excuses (and laying the blame elsewhere) as had been Mark’s own policy when confessing to Cosette, but raw and ugly with every greedy word quoted, every yelp of laughter recalled, every callous aspiration exposed.

You understand that I am guessing, don’t you? You understand that I was not there, that Luis was not there, that Elsa wasn’t yet home, that he and Cosette were alone? But if I had been there, could I have seen into Mark’s heart? No one knows precisely what he thought or what he feared, though what he said when he was in Bell’s room, that is known. He was very afraid to go up there. He would have liked to postpone it forever, to have sat forever in that close, warm, still drawing room, side by side with Cosette on the sofa, his arm around her and her head on his shoulder, from time to time turning her face to kiss her lips. But for the most part silent, at rest, the awful events, the alarms and excursions of the past twenty-four hours, by a miracle of love—and, yes, of exertion too and passionate hard labor—smoothed into serenity, forgiveness asked and granted, leveled into a kind of rich peace.

But for Bell. But for the task that remained. He probably told Cosette that he was afraid, he wouldn’t have minded telling her that, though not precisely what he was afraid of. Wasn’t she his mother as well as his lover, the gentle all-embracing maternal image to whom he could confess anything, admit any terror?

I suppose she told him she would do it and he demurred. He knew Bell wouldn’t have believed Cosette. Then she told him it was best to get it over. Procrastination makes things worse. Tell her and get it over. Probably she suggested taking Bell out to dinner. I am exaggerating only slightly when I say there were few things Cosette thought couldn’t be ameliorated if not cured by a good dinner in an expensive restaurant.

He went upstairs, up all 106 stairs, or however many there were from the drawing room to the top. He knocked on the door, he called out to her. I don’t know if she answered or if he just walked in without being invited. She was there in her room, lying on the floor with her head on the windowsill, the two windowpanes raised up to their fullest extent. A stark, nearly unfurnished room, with boxes of clothes lying about, and clothes on the bed, and Silas’s paintings stacked against the walls. He went in and closed the door behind him, but he couldn’t lock it. Perhaps he didn’t want to lock it. He told Bell he had something to tell her.

After she had done it, some time after but before the police came, she told Elsa and me what had happened. Isn’t it strange that, for all her knowledge of people, Bell had never guessed what Mark’s true feelings were?

“He said he was in love with her. The fool was standing by the window, the open window, looking out. I knew he was going to marry her, that was part of the plan, that was great, fine. What did I care about the bloody house? I didn’t want to live in this house. But he was in love with her? He was going away to live with her, just her, and drop me in the shit? It was him saying he was in love with her, and I knew the fool meant it, that was what did it. He said, ‘I know what was planned, Bell, I can’t forget it. I wish I could, it makes me feel sick now to remember. I’m in love with Cosette, I love her like I never loved anyone, I have to tell you I just want her and only her for the rest of our lives.’ And he turned his stupid face and looked at the sky like it was full of angels singing.

“She came in then. She tapped on the door and came in saying she thought she too ought to explain. So I did it. I wanted to do it in front of her. You know what I did. I jumped up and ran at him and pushed him out. I wanted to do it, it was great—until I’d done it and then I wanted to pull him back out of the air, undo it. Did you hear him scream, Lizzie, did you hear him scream?”

It is something I should like to forget. If someone fell from a height, I supposed they fell in silence, that the shock stunned them, the empty air. But Mark screamed as he fell, a cry, a roar of terror that split open the still and heavy summer evening. That sound, though, that expulsion of the ultimate expression of fear, was as nothing to the sounds his body made as it struck the stone paving of the gray garden, a sound I am unable even now to describe, to convey anything approaching the dreadfulness of both its solidity and its liquidness, the noise of a human being bursting bonds that are its own flesh and bones.

We were inside the house by then, Luis and I, inside the French doors, walking across the dining room. You don’t speak or reflect or even pause in these circumstances. You run. Away from or toward. We both ran back into the garden and saw the exploded thing spread like a stain on the gray flagstones, and we whimpered and held each other. We held each other like lovers, and rocked and moaned.

Crying, making these sounds, clutched together, as one we turned away from what lay out there, as we staggered, locked together, toward those open doors, first Elsa came walking across the dining room and then, pushing her aside, uncaring of anyone or anything that might be in her path, Cosette ran through the room and into the garden and cast herself upon Mark’s body. She lay on his body until at last they took her away and I saw she was covered with blood as if she too had been mortally injured.

I have lost track of the times of things. It might have been ten minutes or an hour afterward that Bell came down and spoke to us. To Elsa and me, that is. Where was Luis? I find I have no idea what became of Luis. Someone phoned the police, but I don’t think it was one of us. A neighbor perhaps, a passerby. Did Mark’s terrible cry ring across Notting Hill to summon the little crowd that gathered outside our gate? I heard sirens long before the police came and found out later this wailing came from fire engines rushing to a fire in Westbourne Grove.