The House of Stairs (2 page)

I told myself, as I always do, your legs ache because you’re not fit (the muscle in your chin jumps because you are tired, carelessness made you drop that glass) and I thought what a fool I was to go out in high heels, in pointed shoes that pinched my toes. It scarcely helped, nothing helps except the ache, the tic, the weakness, going away. I thought I would hail the next taxi that came round one of those narrow leafy corners, out of a crescent or a terrace, for this region of West Eleven is a tight-knit confusion, a labyrinth of alleys and mews, blown fields and flowerful closes, green pleasure and gray grief.

No taxi came and I was fooling myself when I said I would have taken it if it had. I had come to the narrow lane that leads into the mews and thence into Archangel Place, a lane that, for all its overhanging tree branches and dense jostling hedges, could never be in the country. Slates, polished by the passage of town shoes and their friction, pave it, and there is privet in the hedge and catalpa among the trees. It smells of a city, of staleness and use, and underfoot is dust rather than earth. Between the mews and the street stands the church called St. Michael the Archangel, Victorian Byzantine, unchanged, not closed and boarded up, not transformed by one of those vaguely blasphemous conversions into a block of flats, but just the same and with its doors flung wide to show the archangel in the sanctuary with his outspread wings.

I paused on the corner, bending down to rub the muscles in my calves, then looked up and stood up, stood there looking down the narrow, straight, and rather short street. From there the House of Stairs also appeared unaltered. But it was dusk now, the long London summer dusk, gloomy and cool, and changes might be hidden. Slowly and deliberately, as if out for a stroll, I walked down on the opposite side. On summer evenings when Cosette lived there, people used to sit on doorsteps and when it was hot sunbathe stretched out on the flat roofs of porches. But Archangel Place has come up in the world and I suspect that behind the varied facades—Dutch, Victorian Baroque, neo-Gothic, Bayswater Palladian—are rank upon rank of neat flats that are called “luxury conversions,” with close carpeting and false ceilings and double glazing. It was soon clear to me that number fifteen was such a one, for where Cosette had had a twisted wrought-iron bellpull was a row of entry-phone buzzers with printed cards above each one.

How could I have had the bizarre idea that Bell’s name might be on one of them? It was this at any rate that made me cross the road and look. The House of Stairs had become six flats, from basement to attic every floor economically used by occupants with Greek names and Arab names, a Frenchman by the sound of him, an Indian, a woman who might be German-Jewish or just an American, but no Bell. Of course not. The color of the house had changed. From the corner of the street this had not been discernible, but now it was, this new, doubtful shade that might be quite different in broad day from what the lamplight showed me, a darkish buff. When Cosette had bought it, the house was painted the dull green of a cabbage leaf but the stonework remained its natural cream color, as it still is now. The windows, five sets of them above ground level and one below, you can see for yourself in Ruskin’s
The Stones of Venice,
the plate that shows the arch masonry in the Broletto of Como. Whether the architect went there to see for himself or simply copied these windows from Ruskin’s drawing I don’t know, but they are very faithful renderings, each consisting of three arches with a knot like a clove hitch halfway up the two double shafts which are surmounted by Corinthian capitals. You can get a better idea from the picture.

There were lights on in these windows and not all the curtains were drawn. I retreated across the road and stood under one of the plane trees that line the street. It was shedding from its dying flowers the pale fluffy stuff that Perpetua used to say gave her hay fever. The new owners or the builders had changed the front door, which when Cosette lived there would also have been to Ruskin’s taste, having a pointed arch and its woodwork ornamented with ears of corn and oak leaves enclosed by fillets. The new one was a neo-Georgian monstrosity and the arched top of the architrave had been filled in with a pane of ruby-colored stained glass. But no one had changed the garden—the front garden, that is, for the back was invisible from where I stood.

It is a very small area of garden, between the pavement and the deep recess that separates it from the basement window. What always made back and front gardens remarkable was that they were gray gardens of gray flowers and gray foliage, cinerarias and sea holly, rabbit’s ears, lavandula lanata, the silver dwarf lavender, lychnis coronaria with leaves like felt, cardoons that are sisters of the globe artichoke, artemisia with its filagree foliage, ballotas, and senecios. I who knew nothing of gardening learned the names of all the plants in Cosette’s garden. Jimmy the gardener taught me, was delighted to find someone who cared enough to learn, and those names have stuck with me. Did Jimmy still come? He used to say that lanata was frail and would scarcely survive without his care. The plants looked thriving to me and the pale silver irises were in full bloom, their papery petals gleaming in the greenish lamplight.

Without being able to see it, aware that I couldn’t have borne to see it, I knew that the back garden would be different, would have undergone some tremendous change. Whoever had the house after Cosette, and after I refused it, must have known, must have been discreetly told and must have decided to accept the facts and live with them. But along with this decision would have come a need to alter the garden, change the positions of things, perhaps plant trim box bushes and sharp-pointed conifers, bright-colored flowers. All this would be designed to exorcise the ghosts that some say derive from the energy left behind after an event of violent terror.

I tried to see between the houses, to make my eyes penetrate brick wall and high hedge, black, nearly solid, masses of evergreen foliage. But if the eucalypt had still been there, its thready branches with fine-pointed gray leaves would by now far exceed in height the hollies and the laurel, for gum trees, as Jimmy once told me, grow tall quickly. If it was still there, it might even by now have reached close to that high window. It wasn’t there, it couldn’t be, and before I turned my eyes away I imagined its felling and its fall, the powerful medicinal scent that must have come from its dying leaves and severed trunk.

These are two balconies only on the facade of the House of Stairs, on the windows of the drawing room and principal bedroom floors, and they are copies of the balconies on the Ca’ Lanier, bulbous at the base, somewhat basketlike. This disciple of Ruskin was not averse to a hotchpotch of styles. As I stood there the central window on the drawing room floor opened and a man came out onto the balcony to take in a plant in a pot. He didn’t look in my direction but down at his plant and, reentering, swept aside the curtain to afford me a glimpse of a gold-lighted interior, mainly a tiny twinkling chandelier and a dark red wall no more than ten feet inside the window, hung with mirrors and pictures in white frames. It was a shock of a physical kind, clutching at the center of my body. And yet I knew the drawing room must have been subdivided; must, for it had been thirty feet deep, now compose the whole flat. The curtain fell and the window was closed once more. I had a sudden vivid memory of returning from some time away, some visit to Thornham perhaps, and of climbing the first flight of stairs to open the drawing room door and seeing Cosette seated there at the table, her head at once turning toward me, that radiant smile transforming her wistful face, her arms out as she rose to receive me into her unfailing welcoming embrace.

“Darling, did you have a good time? You don’t know how we’ve all missed you!”

There would be a gift for me from that clutter on the table, a homecoming present carefully chosen, the strawberry pincushion perhaps or one of the gemstone eggs. And she would have wrapped it in paper as beautiful as William Morris fabric, tied it with satin ribbon, perfuming it as she did so by chance contact with her own skin, her own dress …

My eyes were tightly shut. Involuntarily I had closed them when the tenant or owner of the first-floor flat allowed me a sight of his living room, and I conjured up Cosette where the red wall now was. I opened my eyes, took a last look at the changed, reordered, spoiled house and turned away. It was dark by then and as I began walking toward Pembridge Villas, refusing for some melodramatic reason to look back, a taxi came out of one of the mews and I got into it. Leaning back against the slippery upholstery, I felt curiously tired and worn. You will think I had forgotten all about Bell, but she had only temporarily been pushed out of my mind by remembering Cosette and by all the other emotions the House of Stairs had awakened. What I had truly forgotten was the pain in my legs and this had gone. I was reprieved. The bore and the terror would be gone for a week or two.

Of Bell I now thought in a new mood of tranquillity. Perhaps it was all for the best that I had lost her, that there had been no confrontation. Again I wondered if she had seen me over the heads of those people in the lift and again I couldn’t make up my mind. Had she fled from me or, innocent of my presence behind her, left the station and gone directly into one of the Queensway shops? It might even be, and this was disturbing, that, emerging, she had followed me, unaware of who I was. Or indifferent? That too had to be faced. Perhaps she would want to know no one from those old days but start afresh with new friends and new interests, and that (as I now decided must be the case) was borne out by her living in Bayswater or Paddington, areas of London I believed she had never lived in before.

But all this made no difference to my decision to find her. I would find where she was and how she lived and what she now called herself, and obtain a sight of her, even if I took it no further than that. My heart sank a little when I contemplated the prison years, insofar as I could imagine them, the waste of life, the loss of youth. And then, just as I had had a kind of vision of Cosette at that drawing room table, loaded as it always was with books and flowers, sheets of paper and sewing things, the telephone, glasses for seeing through and glasses for drinking from, photographs and postcards and letters in their envelopes, so I seemed to see Bell as she was almost the first time I ever saw her, walking into the hall at Thornham to tell us that her husband had shot himself.

2

I WAS FOURTEEN WHEN
they told me. They were right, they had to tell me, but perhaps they could have waited a few more years. What harm would it have done to wait four years? I wasn’t likely to have married in those four years, I wasn’t likely to have had a baby.

Those were the words I used to Bell when I told her this story. She is the only one I have ever told, for Elsa doesn’t know, even my ex-husband, Robin, doesn’t know. I confided it all to Bell on one dark winter’s day in the House of Stairs, not up in the room with the long window, but sitting on the stairs drinking wine.

It wasn’t that my mother’s illness was apparent. They weren’t even sure she was ill, not physically, that is. Mental changes, which is how the books describe her condition, could be attributed to many causes or to none in particular. But they had set fourteen as the age, and they stuck to it and told me, not on the birthday itself, which is what happens to the heroes and heroines of romances who are initiated into family rituals and family secrets on some preset coming-of-age, but two months later on a wet Sunday afternoon. They must have known it would frighten me and make me unhappy. But did they understand what a shock it was? Did they realize they would make me feel as much set apart from the rest of humanity as if I had a hump on my back or were destined to grow seven feet tall?

I understood then why I was an only child, though not why I had been born at all. For a while I reproached them for giving me birth, for being irresponsible when even then they knew the facts. And for a while, a long while, I no longer wanted them as parents, I no longer wanted to know them. The rapid progress of my mother’s illness made no difference. There is no time in our lives when we are so conspicuously without mercy as in adolescence. I turned from them and their secret, her distorted genes, his watchful eyes and suspenseful waiting for the appearance of signs, to someone who was kind and didn’t cause me pain. I turned to Cosette.

Of course I had known Cosette all my life. She was married to my mother’s cousin Douglas Kingsley, and because we are a small family—naturally, we are—the few of us in London gravitated toward each other. Besides, they lived near us or near enough, a walk away if you didn’t mind long walks and I couldn’t have cared in those days. Their house was in Wellgarth Avenue, which is Hampstead but almost Golders Green. It faced the ponds and Wildwood Road, a thirties Tudor place, huge for two people, which was meant to resemble, but didn’t quite, a timbered country farmhouse. When people told Douglas that Garth Manor was very large for just two people he used to reply simply and not in the least offensively, “The size of a man’s home doesn’t depend on the size of his family. It’s a matter of his status and position in the world. It reflects his achievement.”

Douglas was an achiever. He was a rich man. Every morning he was driven down to the city in his dark green Rolls-Royce to join the queue of cars, even then, in the fifties and sixties, rolling ponderously down Rosslyn Hill. He sat in the back going through the papers in his briefcase, studying them through the thick lenses of glasses in dark solid frames, while his driver contended with the traffic. Douglas had iron-gray hair and an iron-gray jowl and the shade of his suits always matched hair and jowl, though sometimes with a thin dark red or thin dark green stripe running vertically through the cloth. He and Cosette led a life of deep yet open and frank upper-middle-classness. When I was older and more interested in observing these things I used to think it was as if Douglas had at some earlier stage of his life compiled a long list or even a book of upper-middle-class manners and pursuits and chosen from them as a life’s guide those of the more stolid sort, those in most frequent popular usage and those most likely to win reactionary or conventional commendation.