The House of Stairs (34 page)

“Some would think you married her for her money,” I said.

“To put it brutally, yes.” He obviously hadn’t liked the way I put it. “Of course, in the nature of things, if I live with her—and I intend to live with her for as long as she’ll have me, forever, I hope—some of her wealth must rub off on me. I must benefit. But at least I won’t … have a right to it.” He talked as if the Married Women’s Property Acts had never been passed, but again I knew what he meant. The waiter came over and he asked for another bottle of wine. We were drinking ferociously, to combat emotion I suppose, Mark looked at me and with a quick shiver shed his pomposity, like someone slipping off a cloak. He said simply, “I’m so happy. I’ve never been so happy.”

“I can see,” I said.

“The next thing I want to say is that we shan’t go on living in Cosette’s present house.” He had never called it the House of Stairs. I was suddenly, for the first time, aware of this. “I’ve never liked Number Fifteen Archangel Place.” He gave the address a stagey emphasis. The enthusiasm he showed on his first visit was apparently forgotten. “It’s very inconvenient. It costs Cosette a fortune to run—mainly for the benefit of other people. I don’t mean you, Elizabeth, and what is it, after all, but a damned great staircase with rooms sprouting out of it? It’s a folly, really.”

“Cosette used to love it.”

“It’s interesting why Cosette bought it. It was as an antidote to loneliness, the principle being that if you have empty rooms they’ll be filled. And they were, they were. Now she wants to be with me just as much, thank God, as I want to be with her.”

“Alone with you?” I was thinking of Bell, but he, of course, thought I meant myself.

He said quickly, in a cliché to which it would have been hard to find an alternative. “There will always be a home for you with us, Elizabeth.”

It seemed to put me rather in Auntie’s role. I didn’t care for the idea of living with these lovebirds. “Where will I go?” I said.

“A little house in a mews, we thought.”

There would be no room for Bell. And I should lose her once and for all. This would be the rupture and it would be a parting without a promise of reunion, I sensed that. “Bell will be happy for you,” I said. “She thought you’d get married, so she wasn’t entirely right, but she was right in principle.”

A shadow touched his face. It was as if all the happiness, the glow of it, was cut off by a shutter closing. His gaze had been a room filled with light and happy people celebrating and then the door was shut. “I wonder if you’d mind not saying anything to Bell just for the moment.”

“About moving, you mean?”

“About any of it. It doesn’t matter if she thinks we’re getting married. I’m not surprised to hear she thinks that.”

“You mean she’s one of those people who might think you were marrying for money?”

The lowering of inhibition through drink made me speak like that. It didn’t please him. “I said it was irrelevant what other people think.”

“You don’t want me to tell Bell you’re in love with Cosette and you’re going to live with her and you’re not going to get married and you’re going to leave the House of Stairs?”

He had to say yes, that was right, but he didn’t like it. I had thought of Mark as strong, the way he talked, his peculiar articulateness, his seeming always to know his own mind, his decision-making when Cosette vacillated, but now I understood this wasn’t so. He was weak. He was only strong where there was no effort to be made, no barriers to overcome. Cosette was far stronger than he. I had a strange idea. Could it be the vigor of Cosette’s love, a love of consuming strength into which she put her whole self, body and soul, could it be that this was so powerful that it had reached out and drawn an answering love from him, ignited a passion where previously there had been no more than a spark? He looked weak as he sat there, he looked young and afraid and curiously wistful, as if he had found what he had been seeking all his life and now feared dreadfully that it would be dashed away. Cosette was a mother to him, and he a son to her, that was part of it and important, but only a small part of the complex whole. That indecisive, apprehensive look passed from his face and it hardened perceptibly. He smiled.

“Of course we’ll tell Bell in time. It’s just that we’d rather you didn’t mention it at present. As a matter of fact, Cosette feels she’ll have to make it up to Bell in some way. She’s thinking of buying her a flat—well, a studio flat, you know the kind of thing.”

I didn’t say any more. I don’t think we talked much more about it. We never did have much to say to each other, Mark and I. For the sake of politeness, I suppose, he did his best to be a host while we ate our cheese and finished the third bottle of wine. He was no drinker and his voice had thickened as he talked to me about this actor he knew and that actress and some play he had been on tour in and how the author had to cut some scene out so as not to offend the sensibilities of Middlesborough. Along with the brie and biscuits I digested what he had said, that Cosette would compensate Bell for the loss of her room by buying her a flat. I found it, at first, nearly incredible.

Not incredible that Cosette would do it. That was typical, exactly the kind of thing she would do, if she thought the projected recipient was in need. Remember, after all, Auntie. But someone would have had to put the idea into her head first. Why should she even have supposed it was her duty to compensate a young, healthy woman who was nothing to her, who even disliked her, for the loss of a room for which she had never paid a penny in rent? Had Mark asked her to do it? I felt a momentary gratitude that at least there was no proposal to provide me with some pied-à-terre.

So Bell was not to be told, not to be told any of this, not even, it seemed clear, that the notion of marriage she had got into her head was wrong. She must be allowed to continue in delusion. But when the House of Stairs was sold she would be informed and then fobbed off with the deeds of a bed-sit with kitchen and bathroom in north Kensington. I decided to ask Cosette about it; I wasn’t going to be instructed by Mark. Going home alone in a cab—he had gone off in another one to Victoria or Waterloo or somewhere to meet Cosette’s train—I found myself making rather wild plans to buy myself a home and ask Bell to share it with me. She would say no, of course, she wouldn’t do it. I imagined her disappearing once more, walking out one day and not coming back, and in ten years’ time I would go to someone’s party and she would walk into the room, heralded perhaps by an Ivor Sitwell look-alike saying the most beautiful woman he had ever seen was about to arrive… .

I was in error there. I was in error about Cosette and Mark too when I created a picture of them in my mind, living in their shared future. I had even decided on the street they would live in, a little alley of houses like country cottages up north of Westbourne Grove; one of those houses would be right for them, perhaps the one with the great yellow flowering tree growing in its garden. Since then—a long while afterward, because for years I stopped myself thinking of any of it—I have sometimes wondered what their life together would have been like.

It would have been a life together, they would have stayed together, of that I am sure. And Mark would have married her, if for no other reason than that she would have come to want it so much. He could never bear to disappoint her. He would have dedicated his life to making her happy, as he had already begun to do. I think it would have been a rather cloistered partnership, one of those of which people say the couple is “very wrapped up in each other.” Certainly there would have been no more rent-free tenants, nonpaying guests, visitors who came for a night and stayed for a year. There would have been few guests of any sort, myself, Bell, of course, Luis Llanos and Perdita Reed, Walter and Eva Admetus, perhaps, Cosette’s brothers, those friends of Mark’s he sometimes mentioned but we never saw. Sometimes they would have been seen, Mark and Cosette, dining alone together at some exclusive restaurant, the Connaught, perhaps, or Le Gavroche, celebrating an anniversary, the day they first met, the night they first made love, their wedding day, oblivious of the presence of others, eyes fixed with ardor upon the other’s eyes, hands touching, fingers enlaced upon the tablecloth. And by that time it would of course be Mark who paid the bill, went through the motions, that is, the signing of the check or the presentation of the credit card. For by then she would have become so accustomed to deferring to him in all practical matters, to leaving it all to him, that they would have largely forgotten whose money it had been in the first place.

“Are you really going to buy Bell a flat?” I said to Cosette.

“I’d rather buy you one, darling.”

“I shall manage for myself,” I said. “Thank you, but I really will. It will be good for me to stand on my own feet, as they say. Time I did. But do you mean to do that for Bell?”

“Well,” she said, “Mark seems to think it would … soften the blow.”

“What blow?”

“He seems to think she won’t like us selling this house and moving. Or I suppose that’s what he means. It isn’t altogether clear what he means. I think he’s rather confused. He seems to think that if Bell were, well, compensated, she wouldn’t feel so bad.”

“Why should she feel bad?”

“She’ll lose her home, won’t she? He’s got hold of this idea that she loves this house. Well, I can understand that, I love it, but it was a phase in my life really, something I had to do, and now I’m moving on. It was a kind of dream I had to make come true and the dream I have now is of living alone with Mark in a little house where we have to be close together because there isn’t room for us to be apart. Do you think I’m quite mad? You see, he feels exactly the same, and we can’t both be mad, can we? And when I think how I said I loved him so much I’d die of it! I love him so much now I want to live for it. Oh, Elizabeth, I’m so lucky, I can’t believe it sometimes, I can’t believe anyone can be so happy and it can go on and on and he can feel just the same as me.” Cosette, who had seldom talked much about herself, who had always put others before herself, now, transformed by love, deflected every conversation to her own feelings and, of course, to Mark’s. She had forgotten Bell.

It wasn’t hard for me to do what Mark has asked, for I hardly ever saw Bell. I only heard her, the droning monotone of the television in the ground floor room, the creak of the 104th stair, her footsteps moving above my head. She avoided me, I think she avoided everyone. I began to make preparations for acquiring a home of my own. I could easily afford to buy somewhere, I was doing well enough out of my books, much better than if I had followed the career I was trained for and become a teacher, better than if I had been a head teacher or taught in a university. Spending a lot of time peering into estate agents’ windows, I graduated at last to getting them to send me details of flats.

The House of Stairs had become a quiet, even decorous place. Sometimes, in the past, when I had been in my room trying to write, I had been exasperated by noise, music, footsteps running up and down, voices calling and voices shouting, doors slamming. So perverse are human beings that now I missed it. Loneliness drove me to Robin (in one of my novels I would have said it drove me into his arms) and to grow closer to him than would naturally have happened, given our very incompatible temperaments. And then Elsa came to stay.

I think I prefer the company of women.

This was something you didn’t admit to in the early seventies. If you said you liked being with women it was taken to mean you made a virtue of necessity, you put up with women because you couldn’t get a man. Of course things are quite different today and it’s acceptable, recognized as perfectly reasonable and indeed intelligent to prefer women’s company. I was overjoyed when Elsa came. She had always been my best friend, is still. For the first time I took it upon myself, took advantage of my daughter-of-the-house status, to ask someone to stay without asking Cosette first. It was unimaginable, anyway, that Cosette would say no.

Elsa had been renting a flat while waiting to move into the place she was buying. Things were getting easier, but for a divorced woman on her own to buy a flat on a mortgage wasn’t the straightforward operation it usually is today. There were delays and her three-months’ lease came to an end without the option to renew.

“It might be a month or longer,” she said when I invited her.

“Cosette will hope it’s longer—you’ll see.”

Mark didn’t. He wasn’t very pleased. But you could see he was thinking that all this sort of thing would come to an end soon enough, would necessarily come to an end when they had a house without spare rooms. Well, I could see it, but Bell didn’t seem to. Bell seemed to be waiting for something to happen, she had an air of biding her time. She watched Mark, but he no longer ever looked at her.

We gave Elsa Auntie’s old room, on the floor below mine. All Auntie’s things were still there, the antimacassars on the chairs, the radio in its veneered wood case. Elsa said to leave them, she liked them, but Perpetua took down the flypaper. I was interested in what was happening in the House of Stairs, I would have liked to talk about it, but Elsa isn’t like Bell, people’s acts and motivations aren’t of much concern to her.

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she would say when asked why she thought someone had said or done what he had said or done. “I expect he had his reasons.”

Bell was making it plain she no longer wanted to know me. It was as if I had fulfilled some requirement of the moment, served my purpose, and now her needs had changed, I was superfluous, If she passed me on the stairs, she would say a casual “hi.” At the big table down in the dining room she would pass me a plate and ask me if I wanted something. If I addressed her, she answered. That was all. My consolation—if consolation it was—was that no one received more from her than I did. When we gathered together in the drawing room, as we still sometimes did, she would never be one of our number. One day she walked into the drawing room while I was there with Elsa and Mark and Cosette, drinking coffee Perpetua had made and brought up to us after lunch.