The House of Stairs (37 page)

He went around to the passenger door and opened it. I should have remembered his unfailing simple courtesy. Cosette got out without assistance from him, without taking his hand. But they were together, they had returned together. He closed the car door and they stood looking at each other and then, there in the street where anyone could observe them, indifferent perhaps as to whether they were observed or not, they went into each other’s arms and pressed their faces together with their cheeks touching.

He put his arm round her waist and led her out of our sight up to the front door and into the house.

Elsa is as courteous and friendly toward her as if Bell had done no more than travel on the tube without a ticket. Does she remember that dinner and Bell’s flight and my misery? We have all grown decorously into the preliminaries of middle age. After lunch, over coffee, I watched Bell, who sat stately and dignified, cool and—harmless. It was absurd what she had said to Elsa about being an ugly sight. Perhaps that was why she had said it, for she has lost years and years since that day I followed her on the tube, since that day I went to see her in her room in Kilburn. She is growing young again, is being rejuvenated, revitalized. I could see Elsa glancing from her face to mine. It may be only conjecture, it may be my imagination, but I fancied Elsa was making comparisons, was thinking, how can Bell look the way she looks after suffering so much and Elizabeth the way she does after so little?

Of course she said nothing and it may be she never thought it. We had talked about everything that was innocuous, we had talked for about two hours, and still I hadn’t asked the question I always make a point of asking Elsa when we meet, for I have no other means of finding out the answer. She had told us about her new job and her new man, who may be the one she has been waiting for, though she won’t marry him, she will never marry again. We spoke of our morning’s task and our future plans, our intention perhaps of taking a holiday together. I mentioned my father and his visit. And then Bell got up and asked Elsa where the bathroom was.

“Do you have a bathroom?” was what she asked, as if the chances were that the occupant of this charming and prettily furnished flat had to use a communal lavatory and the public baths.

Elsa smiled at me after she had left the room and I knew the same thought was passing through her mind. Whatever else Bell was, had become, she remained tactless, insensitive and, about such small social niceties, quite uncaring. Quickly, I asked my question.

Elsa seemed to understand. Her eyes went to the closed door. “Very well, I think. We spoke on the phone a couple of weeks ago.”

“I’m glad.” I said. “I’m always glad. I don’t suppose”—how often I ask this and always so awkwardly!—“anything is ever said about me?”

That English passive is enormously useful, isn’t it? You can thus do without names, should anyone be listening at the door.

“Nothing, Lizzie, I’m sorry.” I nodded a little. “I get the impression even mentioning you would—cause great pain.”

“Bell hasn’t asked,” I said. “I don’t want to say anything until she asks.”

I could hear her coming back, heard her pause outside before bringing her hand to the door handle. She is quite capable of listening. Elsa and I fell silent, looking at each other, waiting for her to come in, awed by her, knowing she stood on the other side of the door in the hope of hearing secrets she was not meant to know.

20

THE PHONE WAS RINGING
when we came into my house. That was three days ago, but it seems a lifetime. The widow my father likes but wouldn’t marry for fear of depriving me of my inheritance had rung me to tell me he was ill, he had had a stroke. Bell was behaving strangely. She had been quiet, bemused, ever since we left Elsa’s. When she heard my father was ill, that I was going immediately down to Worthing where he was in the hospital, she said, “Is he going to die?”

“I suppose so.”

“I shall be all alone here,” she said. “I shall be alone in the house. I don’t know if I’m equal to it.”

“You’ll have the cats,” I said.

At present I am staying in my father’s house, which is on an estate where the average age of the inhabitants is said to be seventy. I am used to it, I have come down here to stay every year for a week, but in the past I have tried to pick a time when the Arundel Festival is on or there is good theater at Chichester, so that I have something to do. And once, fourteen years ago, shortly after he had bought it, I lived here with him for a whole month, I and my typewriter, trying to write, trying to seem normal. Poor man, he must have wondered if he was to be saddled with me for years, for a lifetime. I could hardly explain I had lost my home, my friendships, my life, but I made a convincing enough case for myself with my excuse of not wishing to stay in a place where murder had been done. Most of each day I spend at the hospital, where my father lies half-paralyzed and with his face grotesquely twisted. No doubt it is natural to feel as I do when one’s father is dying. Just the same, I have never before experienced a depression so deep as to cause physical malaise. A great weariness has taken hold of me and, as was the case with Bell when she first came out of prison, I sleep a lot. I fall asleep in the chair at my father’s bedside and, returning to his house in the evening, fall asleep in my armchair in front of the television. But I don’t sleep well at night. At night, with my head aching, I lie awake and think about things. And I see figures and shapes form in the darkness whether my eyes are open or closed, I see men and women then that I have never seen before, strange faces like the faces of unknown people we see sometimes in dreams. One of the oddest things, it has always seemed to me, is that our minds can invent people for our dreams. Or are they not invented? Have we seen them all somewhere before and has some camera of the mind photographed them? Between the unknown faces, emerging from a great crowd of them, I sometimes see Cosette’s and sometimes Mark’s, but they are never together, they are always separated by a multitude of strangers.

That night fourteen years ago I fell asleep quickly, the sleep of relief. But I awoke to understand that though things might come right for Cosette, they couldn’t for me. She still had Mark, but I had lost Bell. He had been Bell’s lover. When, I asked myself, when was the last time? When was the last time Mark had made love to Bell? And suddenly I knew when it was. It was the night Auntie died, when Cosette begged Mark to stay and I, in my innocence, directed him up to the top of the house, to the room next to Bell’s.

That other night, after the scene in the restaurant, while he and Cosette were out in the car, driving and parking and driving again, getting out to walk, sitting on park benches, he told her everything. He had to, he couldn’t do less, there was nothing else for it. He laid it all before her, as Bell had conceived it and he, with increasing reluctance, had tried to carry it out. And Cosette forgave him. Why wouldn’t she? It isn’t hard to forgive someone who tells you he was kept from the ultimate baseness by love of you. But in these instances someone has to be blamed. Not the abject, ardent lover, but the lover’s scapegoats. Mark, in those long hours of explanations and excuses, had been obliged (in his methodology) to lay the blame elsewhere, to confess that if some of the action had been his the strategy was not, the original conception was not.

It wasn’t in Cosette’s nature to send for someone, to seek an interview designed to extract an explanation. She suffered, but in silence. She suffered, but she had Mark, who would mitigate any suffering for her, soften any blow. I was innocent then, unaware that I might be involved in Cosette’s immediate trouble. I even felt excluded, an unnecessary presence in the house. That she might have any feelings toward me then beyond an affectionate but abstracted warmth, a mother’s feelings for one of her children when, for once, her own concerns have become paramount, never crossed my mind. I had an idea only that when I next encountered her I would hug her and hold her close to me.

The next day, in the early afternoon, I met her on the stairs. There were so many stairs and the staircase was so big in relation to the size of the house that, when the place was full, meetings took place on the stairs every time you went up or down. There were only five of us now, and Bell had been up in her room ever since she returned in the middle of the night. Elsa was at work and the house was still and silent. I was coming down from my workroom, having finished my morning’s stint rather late, and Cosette was coming from the drawing room back to her bedroom. She had a dressing gown on, it was a Japanese kimono, green with white flowers, and her fair shiny hair hung loose to her shoulders. Her face was pale and drawn and you could see she had been crying, but a long time since, before she slept.

She would have gone past me without a word, without even that look of reproach that itself implies future forgiveness is possible. I put out my hand to touch her arm. You must understand I had no idea then that I could be thought guilty of any offense. If I saw myself as in any way culpable, it was only in having been, among others, a witness of that scene on the previous night. She would have passed me without a glance, but she was tired, drained of feeling, and when you are as close as she and I, living side by side, mother and child, must there always be greetings, inquiries, signs? Love, as against being “in love,” is about taking for granted. But I spoke to her.

“Are you all right, Cosette?”

She stood there and she looked at me. Behind her head hung that branched and bead-hung chandelier of Murano glass that had been so bright that night when Esmond switched the lights on. She pulled my hand off her arm, plucked it off, the way someone might pluck off a leech. Her eyes looked into mine, but dully, without feeling, without care. If it were possible to use such an expression in connection with Cosette, I would say with indifference.

I rephrased my inquiry. “What is it, Cosette? What’s the matter?”

“It’s strange, isn’t it, that when those you love speak your name, your given name, you know all is well? You know things will be all right. Cosette didn’t speak mine, she never spoke it again. She said, “You brought that woman here.”

“Bell?” I was already cold with fear. “But I didn’t know,” I said. Even then I didn’t want to speak of the deception she had practiced. “I didn’t know; I was as much taken in as you.”

Cosette moved her shoulders. She was holding on quite tightly to the banister, and she looked up the staircase, up the winding shaft of it, to the top. Her voice remained gentle, she couldn’t change that.

“It was your idea Mark should pose as her brother.” I shook my head, but she went on, “You gave her some book to read.”

“Bell? She’s never read a book in her life.”

Cosette said with quiet bitterness, “She didn’t need to read it. You told her the story. You gave her the whole marvelous idea. I suppose you told her what a close parallel there was to the situation here. Only I’m not young and beautiful and I wasn’t dying.”

It was a lot to take in, and it took me some seconds to receive it, to begin the process of understanding. While I stood looking at her and she brought her gaze down from that spiraled height, right down, to fix it on her own white hands that side by side clutched the banister, Mark’s voice came from the bedroom above, calling from behind the door that was narrowly open: “Cosette, where are you?”

She ran to him and let the door slam behind her. I stood where I was for a moment and then I went on slowly down. I had had a shock and knew myself the victim of a great injustice. Perhaps, just because of this, I was even then—so quickly do we rally our forces—sure I could explain, I could make things right. She had had a shock too. Wait a little, as Elsa might have said, wait a little.

Down in the kitchen, where I had been on my way to make myself a late lunch, I sat at the table and thought about what Cosette had said. My appetite had gone, but I poured myself some icy-cold white wine that had been opened the day before, a glass drunk from it and the rest left in the fridge overnight. I drank my wine down, poured another glass and thought, you can understand why people take to drink. Mark, of course, had betrayed me—no, not that, for in order to be betrayed in this context I would have had to have done something wrong. Better to say he had borne false witness against me, or sold me down the river. Plainly, he had told Cosette I had recommended to Bell that she and he do what the conspirators in
The Wings of the Dove
do; I had advised it as a practical plan. Sitting there with my wine, I remembered Bell picking up the book in my workroom and asking what it was about, and I remembered my answer.

“This man and girl are engaged, but they can’t marry because they haven’t any money. There’s a young girl called Milly Theale who’s terminally ill and enormously rich. James doesn’t say what’s the matter with her, but he does say it’s not what you might think, meaning tuberculosis. I’ve always thought it must have been leukemia. The engaged girl proposes to her fiancé that he marry Milly. Then when Milly dies she’ll leave him all her money and he and she can marry and enjoy it.”

Bell had thought Cosette had cancer. Mark would marry her, Cosette would die and he inherit her money. Then he and Bell would live on it. It came into my head how Bell said if she couldn’t have nice things, she’d rather have nothing. She would have nothing now. It was no wonder, I thought, that she had positively wanted Mark to sleep with Cosette, had been irritated by his delays, had expected him speedily to marry her. But what had her discovery, late in the day, that Cosette didn’t have cancer, wouldn’t die from natural causes, done to the plan? Not much. Doubtless, she saw herself still Mark’s lover after the marriage (or the relationship at any rate resumed) and in that role able to enjoy Cosette’s bounty as much as he did. Perhaps that too was part of the plan. Or had she intended to deal with Cosette?

I didn’t think of that then. These ideas came to me much later, when I knew what Bell was, when the facts about her sister, Susan, were known and Silas’s suicide came in question. On that summer’s day in the House of Stairs I thought only that Bell and Mark had tried to relive the plot of a novel and it had failed—as indeed the conspiracy in
The Wings of the Dove
fails.