The House of Stairs (35 page)

She said to Cosette, “Can I take the telly up to my room?”

Down there, in the room where Auntie had died, no one ever watched it. Cosette seemed grateful for the request. I think she was grateful Bell had spoken to her. These cold, laconic people, you can be almost elated by a sign of warmth from them, an ordinary remark even.

“Of course you can, darling, if it will work up there. Will it, Mark?”

“I’ve no idea,” he said.

“And you mustn’t attempt to carry it on your own,” Cosette said. “Mark will give you a hand with it.”

He didn’t refuse but he didn’t say he would. His voice sounded strained. “If you want television, Bell, why don’t you buy a set of your own?”

“I’d like to speak to you,” she said to him. “In private.”

I thought he would say there was nothing she could say to him she couldn’t say in front of Cosette, but he didn’t. Elsa and I were there, of course. He hesitated and then got up and left the room with her.

“It’s about having a key to her room,” Cosette said. I was very sure it wasn’t. “She mentioned losing it the other day.”

Elsa helped her carry the television set up those 106 stairs. Later that evening I came upon Bell in the kitchen going through drawers, supposedly looking for the lost key to her room.

“Why bother?” I said. “I won’t come in.”

It was the only time I ever saw her blush. She left the drawer open, walked past me out of the kitchen, and slammed the door. Above me, as I worked, I would hear the television. She had it on at all hours, whenever there were programs, though luckily for me there weren’t nearly so many then as now. Elsa said to me, sitting in my workroom, while some cartoon for children chattered and squeaked overhead, “Mark is a weak sort of character, isn’t he?”

It was unlike her to comment on people’s natures. “Why do you say that?”

“For one thing, he’s afraid of Bell. He’s got someone coming to look at this house tomorrow, to value it, and he doesn’t want her to know. He wants me to take her out somewhere so that she’s not in when this man comes. He says only I can do it because I’m the only one here that’s on good terms with her.”

“He’ll have to tell her sooner or later.”

“There’s something more than that he’ll have to tell her,” said Elsa. “I don’t know what it is, but I sense it. She asked me yesterday if I’d heard anything about their marriage plans, but I could only say I didn’t know they were getting married.”

“I wish I knew,” I said, “just what was going on.

She shrugged. “Wait a little, said the thorn tree.”

Bell half guessed. She knew at any rate that something had gone wrong. Aware of people’s ways as she was, she must have known his weakness, the sponginess at the core of him, which made him amenable to her suggestions in the first place. She must have known it was this that now held him back from making to her some great revelation. That was what she wanted to talk about to him in private, and at that private conversation I am sure he lost his nerve again and told her only that things were going well, she must be patient. I can’t ask her all these things now. I can’t. I think she half guessed and the half she guessed was only that Mark wasn’t going to get married. But what she believed was that he was unable to persuade Cosette to marry him. He may even have told her this at their private talk, that she must wait a little, thorn tree-like, while he tried his powers of persuasion.

Imagine, though, what it must have been like for him, poor weak Mark, having to do this and talk like this while loving Cosette with all his heart.

19

WHAT BECAME OF SILAS’S
pictures?” I said. It was this morning and we were in Bell’s room in Kilburn under the railway bridge.

“When I went to prison my solicitor asked what would I want done about my things and I said burn them, so he did. He said he would, and I expect he did. They would never have been worth, anything.”

“I’d have looked after them for you.”

She smiled at me. Sometimes she has this way of looking at me as if I am an eccentric child, given to making artless statements of a charmingly innocent kind. When she was first in prison I got a monthly Visitors’ Order and used to go in and see her, but after a while she asked me not to come anymore. She didn’t want visitors, there was no one she wanted. Well, things have changed and she isn’t like that now. She wants me. Irony of ironies, she now wants me. We are here in her room, clearing it out, packing her very small and some would say pathetic quantity of possessions into one of my suitcases. For Bell is moving in. She has told her probation officer and she is coming to live with me, not for a week or two or for months, but forever. Because she wants to and I don’t know how to say no. The past won’t let me say no; it would seem like an act of violence to the past, to my old feelings and vows and desires, to refuse her.

It isn’t something I look forward to with relish. If I could afford it, I would sell my house and buy a bigger one so that we wouldn’t have to live in, as they say, each other’s pockets. But I can’t afford it. Bell and I will have to live side by side in four rooms. She is destitute and depends solely on me. I haven’t yet actually handed cash over to her, I haven’t given her pocket money for her cigarettes, but no doubt that will come. Is she drawing social security benefits? I haven’t asked, any more than I asked what happened to the money derived from the sale of Silas’s father’s house. She told me.

“I spent it on my defense. They wouldn’t give me legal aid when they found out I had a private income.”

We began packing her things into my suitcase. Among them I recognized a necklace Cosette once gave her, a long chain of amber beads. I don’t suppose they are really amber, they are only amber-colored, and I have never known Bell to wear them. They were in a box, a long shiny black box that I think is called japanned and which probably once was used for keeping long gloves in. No doubt the chain of beads was in this box when Cosette gave it to her. Also in there, wrapped in one of the remnants of cloth that constitute Bell’s garments, was the bloodstone.

The dark green is chalcedony and the red spots are jasper. This gemstone was much in demand by painters in the Middle Ages for flagellation scenes and to symbolize the blood of martyrs. I sound like Felicity, I probably got that from Felicity. I laid the ring in the palm of my hand, looking closely at it for the first time. The setting is composed of many strands of gold, laid parallel to form the band itself, twisted and plaited where these surround the stone. Examining it, I wondered where it had come from, if it had passed down in our family, perhaps from one afflicted member to another, until it finally came to Douglas’s mother, who was my mother’s aunt. And I remembered Cosette giving it to Bell for her thirtieth birthday, at the party when Mark came to the House of Stairs for the second time, and how Bell took it indifferently with a muttered word of thanks.

“Have you ever worn it?” I said.

She didn’t answer my question, but said to me, “You can have it. Why don’t you have it?”

“All right,” I said. I expect I spoke ungraciously, for I thought of it as Cosette’s to give, not hers.

Her action, her words, surprised me. She put the bloodstone on my finger. “With this ring I thee wed,” she said, and laughed her dry-as-dust laugh. I don’t understand her, I often don’t, I don’t know what she wants. She can still astonish me. For instance, it always surprises me how little of the paraphernalia of living she needs in order to live. We filled that one suitcase and a single plastic carrier and the room was emptied.

“And think what someone like Felicity has,” I said. “That great house filled with her things and the flat they have that must be filled with them too.”

“If I can’t have the things I want,” Bell said, “and I can’t because I can’t afford them, I’d rather have nothing.”

It wasn’t the first time I had heard her say that. But the first time I heard it I didn’t know what I know now. Someone walked over my grave; I felt a small, cold thrill, but she wasn’t looking at me, she had forgotten ever saying it before. She looked round the room with indifference, the indifference I believe she has felt to everywhere she has ever lived. So much for Mark, who tried to make me believe she loved the House of Stairs and would mind leaving it. We went downstairs and out into the street, looking for a taxi. At certain times of the day taxis come down from Cricklewood, making for the West End. This wasn’t one of them and we walked southward along Kilburn High Road, I carrying the suitcase and she the carrier bag, but they weren’t heavy and it has been a warm humid day of thick air and hazy sunshine. Even if no taxi came we would have gotten into the tube at Kilburn Park. It was Bell who, looking down the long slope toward Maida Vale, mentioned the friend we had who lived there.

“Now that we’re here we could go and see Elsa.”

I was more likely than she to have made this suggestion. Up till today she hasn’t spoken of wanting to see anyone from the past, and when Felicity came she was almost violent to her. She has asked about no one, reacts with perhaps natural terror when I speak the names of Cosette and Mark—that I can understand. But Admetus? Eva? Has she no curiosity about the fates of Ivor Sitwell and Gary and the dancers? I had made no reply to her and she said with suppressed violence, “I should never have come out of there, out of prison. I was best in there. I could cope in there, maybe I ought to go back.”

There is no answer to make. Platitudes and placebos, which I was once quite good at offering, are alien to my present mood. Instead I said, pointing down Carlton Vale, “Elsa lives down there. Do you want to ring her first?”

“Why, when we’re on the doorstep? If she doesn’t want us, she can tell lies to our faces just as well as on the phone.”

“She won’t tell lies to me,” I said. I was aggrieved and glad to be, glad to feel something more than dull indifference. The suitcase suddenly felt heavy and I wondered what I was doing, carrying it. “Your turn,” I said, and I swung it at her, the red sparks in the bloodstone flashing. “Give me the bag.”

Elsa keeps me informed of things—and people. Certain people who I never see anymore she tells me about, and that is the only way I know. She is my best friend, yet months pass by without our seeing each other. I hadn’t even spoken to her on the phone since Bell reappeared in my life. I don’t believe there is anyone left but me who still calls her by that school name, Lioness. One of my books is dedicated to her, the one about the safari park: “To the Lioness, with love.”

She looks like one, strong and lithe and muscular, with amber cat’s eyes and a mouth that tilts up at the corners. Of course she must have known Bell was with me. Felicity would have told her, for Felicity is her cousin. Or, rather, Esmond is, and as he once gravely told us, “A cousin’s wife is a cousin. Husband and wife are one flesh.” She answered the entry phone and said nothing to my announcement of who it was but “Come up.” At the top of the first flight of stairs where her flat is she was waiting for us, a towel in her hands and her sandy-orange lion’s hair wet from washing.

Bell didn’t even wait for her to speak a word but said, “I can see you don’t recognize me, I’m so changed. An ugly sight, aren’t I?”

For some reason I wanted to hit her. I wanted to scream out. It is a new mood for me and devastating. Of course I did nothing—that is, I said nothing, only made eye contact with Elsa and cast up mine, while a kind of panic hatred of Bell made my whole inner self tremble, though outwardly I was iciclelike, still and stiff and cold. Elsa spoke graciously, reminding me that she was indeed Esmond’s cousin, “It’s good to see you, Bell. I hope you and Elizabeth will stay and have lunch with me.”

In this gracious way she spoke to a woman who has done murder and put herself outside the pale of any civilized society. And with aplomb she preceded us into her flat.

It isn’t the same as the one she was waiting to move into while staying at the House of Stairs. That was a very long way down in Chelsea, practically Fulham, even farther west than where the Thinnesses have their pied-à-terre. Since then she has married again and is waiting to be divorced again. She was not particularly interested in people’s motivations, but she was interested in sexual relationships. And she loved Cosette, she was pleased to see Cosette happy.

“He doesn’t seem to have any friends of his own,” she said to me.

“If he has, they don’t come here.”

Of course you might have said that Bell had no friends either, but that wouldn’t quite be true. The Thinnesses were her friends and the Admetuses, at least she knew them and associated with them; I was her friend and Elsa. But Mark appeared to have no one, nor could I remember his speaking the names of friends in conversation, but only of his referring vaguely to people he knew. He never talked about his past either. He might, for all that was known of his origins, have been born two years ago, aged thirty-six, or been created by Pygmalion-Bell and had life breathed into him especially for me to see him across the room at Global Experience. It was quite a shock for me, though a pleasant one, when researching one day in the British Newspaper Library and looking (for something quite different) through old copies of the
Radio Times,
to find his name among those in the cast list of a play heard five years before. Ibsen, it was,
Rosmersholm,
and Mark Henryson had been cast as Peter Mortensgaard.

He had told me nothing of his past, but why should he? Cosette he had probably told. Cosette very likely knew his whole history from childhood to the present day. How would I know? I was hardly ever alone with her; Mark was always there.

Elsa refused to fall in with Mark’s plan to get Bell out of the house while his valuer came, for Elsa is truly honest, truly open. She might—as Bell suggested today—tell a social lie or two, but she wouldn’t consent to deceive a friend for an unworthy purpose. She no more believed than I did that Bell was too deeply attached to the House of Stairs to bear the idea of leaving it. By this time I think she had gathered how little Mark had wanted her to come there even for two or three weeks, though she was one of the few of Cosette’s visitors who bought food for the house, contributed to the wine stocks, and saw to her own laundry. Clearer sighted than I, fresh to the situation, she suspected Mark, and said in a sweet tone that took the sting out of it, “You’ll have to do your own dirty work.”