The House of Stairs (12 page)

“If I was thirty again, Lizzie. I’d been married for eleven years when I was thirty. I’d never worked, you know. Lots of girls didn’t in the thirties, it wasn’t just married women who didn’t. Girls stayed at home with their mothers till they got married and you were lucky if you got married young, the younger the better. You never heard any of that talk you hear now about waiting to get married till you’re older, about having to be mature and all that. I was envied, everyone thought I was fortunate to be engaged at eighteen and married at nineteen—really, I was the envy of all. It seems mad now, it’s all changed.”

“Do you wish you hadn’t?” The conversation made me feel a little uncomfortable.

“In the climate of the times what else could I have done?”

“I suppose it was what sociologists call a culture-specific,” I said, being clever.

She lifted her shoulders, said very quietly, looking down, “I ate my cake and now I want to have it.”

Even I, at twenty-one, knew better than to tell her she wasn’t thirty anymore and never could be again. She leaned forward and looked hard at me, then placed her fingertips on her cheekbones, raising the facial tissues until the lines on either side of her mouth disappeared and the jawbone was defined. I had no clue as to what she was doing, although I knew she was waiting for some comment from me. I looked up and then down, feeling my eyes flicker, feeling the embarrassment the young do feel when the old exhibit desires discordant with their years. I didn’t know what Cosette meant, only that it seemed to involve a loss of dignity. She took her hands down, letting her face sag once more.

“I’ve got a lot of money,” she said. “I’m rich. I think I should be able to do what I like with it within reason, don’t you?”

“Sure,” I said on firmer ground. She led me back to the quicksands.

“Lots of middle-aged women find men to love them.

A woman in her late forties isn’t what a woman would have been when I got married. My father used to say that you were middle-aged at thirty-five and elderly at fifty. That sounds absurd to you, doesn’t it?”

Not especially. It sounded about right. Knowing Cosette was already past fifty, I said I thought she looked very nice, lovely, I loved the way she looked, and I meant all that. I did love her tired, gentle face, made haggard by the dieting, her still plump, unused hands with their pink polished nails, her dry reddish hair which the hairdresser, true to his promise, was gradually bleaching to a rosy blond, her dress of midnight-blue lace. It didn’t occur to me to tell her what she wanted to hear, the only thing she wanted to hear; it didn’t occur to me that she would have been delighted if, for instance, I had said she looked awful or ugly but young, if I had said I hated her hair, her dress, the color of her lipstick, yet reluctantly admitted how young she looked for her age. I would gladly have lied if I had only thought of it.

Soon after that Auntie came into the room. She invariably knocked before coming in, though Cosette tried very hard to stop her doing this. There was a chair she always sat in, far from the table, near the window, a rather stiff and upright wing chair upholstered in Cosette’s favorite red velvet. Cosette always fussed around her, making her comfortable, looking in vain for the Girl-in-Residence—still Diana Castle, who was of course out somewhere—to fetch a small sherry or a cup of tea. In this particular instance I fetched Auntie’s drink and when I came back with it a crowd had arrived, five people whose combined ages probably added up to a hundred, and whom Cosette was in the process of presenting in a measured and formal way to her old second cousin.

“This is Gary, Auntie, this is Mervyn, Peter, Fay, this is Sarah, Auntie. I want you all to meet my Auntie.”

It must have made her young in their eyes, you see.

Elderly people, even middle-aged people, don’t have aunts. There was exploitation in it but no cruelty, no harm. It was scarcely comparable, say, to the conduct of those Spanish Hapsburgs who kept dwarfs at court the better to show off their own height and looks. Auntie suffered no loss of dignity, no humiliation. She looked well on it, this court-dwarf role; she, ironically enough, actually did look younger than when I had seen her last. Placid, complaisant, almost totally silent, she sat in her wing chair at the window, not looking out into the night, for the red velvet curtains were drawn, but staring as if mesmerized at the soft cherry-colored folds.

When I saw Cosette again, a month later, she had had her face lifted, and, newly done, it was purple and yellow with bruises so that poor Cosette looked as if she had been in a fistfight. By Easter all these efforts had had their effect and the man who called himself Ivor Sitwell was her lover.

7

IT WAS HE WHO
, indirectly, led me back to Bell, or who brought Bell back into my life, though that was a while ahead. At first there seemed no possible good that could proceed from that source. I remember the shock I felt at finding him in the House of Stairs, the self-control I had to exert to stop myself telling Cosette exactly what I thought of him.

She hadn’t told me about him in advance. But this was at first unnoticeable, because after a fashion she had achieved her salon and there were always people coming and going, the red stair carpet was already showing signs of wear. Some had even moved in to occupy the empty bedrooms and on your way to Cosette in the drawing room it wasn’t unusual when passing the ground-floor rooms to see beyond an open doorway four or five unknown people sitting on the carpet in a circle with a candle in the middle and someone playing a sitar or ocarina.

Cosette herself had submitted to, or enthusiastically taken up, the sixties candle craze. (It came in useful for those seasons of power cuts a few years later.) Though there was a light on the stairs, in the drawing room the gloom was pierced only by candle flames. Candles stood in the pair of iron and bronze candelabra she had bought in the King’s Road, and in saucers too and even the screw-top lids of jars. I could just make out the shape of Auntie, in her red wing chair but facing into the room, and the shadowy candlelit forms of several others sprawled on floor cushions or seated at the round table. The huge ornate chandelier hung unlit but faintly luminous in its thickening drapery of cobwebs, a ghostly object growing out of darkness.

I knew better than to comment on Cosette’s new face in that company—in any company. I liked the old one better, but I wasn’t a lover and Ivor Sitwell had never seen the old one. Somewhat egglike and with less expression, tautly pulled and faintly polished, the new face broke into the old smile. I was reassured. I kissed the smoothed-out skin and it felt the same as the old crumpled skin, or perhaps I mean there was the same smell, the sophisticated flowers of Patou’s Joy. Cosette’s hair had nearly reached the desired shade. It was the color of dry sand. On the third finger of her right hand she was wearing the bloodstone ring. It had become very fashionable but it still didn’t suit her.

People were introduced, but I forget their names. If Ivor alone was introduced by his Christian and last names that, perhaps, was only because his surname was a distinguished one, at any rate one that someone like me was bound to notice if not remark out loud on. For the sake of suspense I might keep this a secret, but I won’t. A long time afterward I found out that Ivor was not “a” Sitwell, was not connected with the family. Sitwell was not even his real name. He had picked it himself when he shook the dust off his feet of his parents’ semidetached house in Northampton. One of the Sitwells—Sacheverell, I think it was—had happened to live in the manor house of a village not far away.

Ivor was a poet. Cosette told me so when she told me his name. She also told me his poetry was wonderful and she would show me some of it the next day. He was a thin, unhealthy-looking man with a bony sallow face and very long brown hair. Most young men were wearing their hair long then, but Ivor wasn’t very young, he was close to forty, and he had a bald spot on the top of his head. He said, “Hi,” which was what everybody said then, which, if you still say it, brands you a child of the sixties, but Ivor murmured it without looking up from the book with which he was preoccupied. I say “preoccupied” and not “reading” because he was standing up, looking down at the book that was open on the table. It was one of those books that are collections of the best work of some photographer, interesting enough if the photographs are of people but boring (to me) if they are merely of artifacts. These photographs were of objects in incongruous juxtaposition to each other, and Ivor Sitwell was staring with a look of rapture at the picture of two empty milk bottles, the milk scum still clinging to their insides, standing next to a dead fish in a bird cage.

He was one of those people who have made up their minds which members of the company are worth bothering about and which are not. I was not and Auntie was not and, with the exception of the prettiest girl, the people on the floor cushions were not. It was Cosette he spoke to.

“That sensuous, tender curve,” he said, indicating the side of one of the milk bottles with a dirty finger, “don’t you find that almost unbearably exciting?”

Cosette smiled at him and agreed. “Yes, it’s lovely, darling.” I knew that smile. It indicated only a sympathy with the inquirer, a desire to please, to be kind.

“Lovely, yes, but doesn’t it make your juices flow?”

I thought I detected a movement from Auntie, a start of astonishment, but then I saw that she was fast asleep, she had jerked in her sleep. Ivor picked up the book and set it in Cosette’s lap. She was to look, she was to study it. He stood behind her instructing her, holding the candle. It was soon after this that the candle grease spilled. People used to think Cosette clumsy, probably because she did things slowly, but in fact she never was, she was manually dexterous, delicately so. She reached up the hand with the green and red ring on it and Ivor made to thrust the candle into it. Perhaps it was not for this reason she raised her hand, perhaps it was to take his, but whatever it was, between them they dropped the candle onto the open book, letting it fall before it went out with a long stream of grease.

“You clumsy cow,” Ivor shouted. “Look what you’ve done!”

That was when I knew he was her lover.

A mere visitor to the house wouldn’t have spoken like that. Of course it was indefensible in Ivor to do so and I wasn’t yet used to his ways. But Auntie must have been, up to a point. His voice woke her up and I saw her sleepy old eyes fix themselves on him in a kind of innocent bewilderment. Neither the people on the floor nor the two at the table who were setting out the tarot took any notice. Cosette said, “Oh, darling, I’m terribly sorry. I can’t think what made me do that.”

Ivor was holding the book up close to this face. “Do you know what I sometimes think? I sometimes think you’ve got one of those nervous diseases, Parkinson’s maybe, something like that.”

Inwardly, I trembled. How could I not? Cosette caught my eye, as she would, she must, when such things were said. I knew her look of anguish and the faint swift shake of her head were for me, but he took them as a reinforcement of her apology.

“A normal woman wouldn’t be so awkward, even a woman in the throes of the menopause.”

Auntie got up, gathered together her book, her bag, her glasses, and began making her way to the door. I had never before known her to signify disapproval of anything and perhaps she wasn’t disapproving, perhaps she was only tired. Cosette, of course, intercepted her with a strained fluttery, “Are you all right, Auntie? Can I get you anything?”

“No, thank you, dear. I’m off to bed.”

The door closed the way Auntie always closed it, extremely, exaggeratedly slowly, with the faintest whisper of a click, as if the house were full of sleeping invalids. I sat at the table, watching them, Cosette and Ivor. She was telling him in her most soothing tone that she would replace the book, she would buy him another copy tomorrow. I didn’t know then that the one damaged by candle grease had been her gift, as was almost everything portable Ivor possessed, including the clothes he stood up in. If this didn’t of course justify her spoiling it, it did make his abuse the more outrageous. But I sat there dwelling on my discovery, the revelation that had been made to me. I was shocked.

My reaction, I suppose, was close to that of a child who finds out that its mother is having a love affair. The foundations of life are shaken, security slips from under one’s feet, is pulled away. Did it make a difference that this lover of Cosette’s was such an odious person? Perhaps, but not entirely. Anyone in that position would have been shocking, for the position itself was shocking. Cosette might have told me she would like to be a “manizer,” to be thirty again and steal husbands, but I supposed there was a natural gulf fixed between wishes and reality. Naively, I believed the slimming and the hair dyeing and the face lifting undirected to any other end but her own self-esteem. A curtain was lifted and I looked out into a world for which I felt distaste, a world where those I thought of as old had desires and excitements to “make juices flow.”

She never told me he was her lover in so many words. And certainly he never said he was. His attitude was one I had never seen before but have seen since. She was thirteen years his senior and therefore had no rights, no claim upon him, and he no obligations of fidelity or the duty even of courtesy. In other words, she was lucky to get him and he had the right to use her as he chose and get out of her what he could.

A while later, when he had decided I was worth taking a little notice of, not so much due to my daughterly role in Cosette’s life as to the fact that I was young and good-looking, he remarked to me in one of his pensive moods, “You see, I have no sweetheart at present, no one to make music with.”

Cosette, supposedly, didn’t count. Yet they shared a bed, the big, new oval bed in Cosette’s bedroom. I even saw them together in it. One morning a man came to the front door delivering a piece of furniture I was sure had been mistakenly sent; it seemed very unlike Cosette’s taste, the old taste or the new. Cosette, of course, was still asleep. Like her young guests she so much wanted to resemble, in this new life she slept late and was seldom up before noon. I went upstairs, up the four flights to the second floor, and knocked diffidently upon her door. I was actually shrinking at what seemed to me the enormity of what I was doing, the intrusion.