The House of Stairs (40 page)

It was a police doctor who gently lifted Cosette from off Mark’s body. Her face was terrible, smeared with blood, distorted into a ferocious ugliness by naked pain. They laid her on the settee downstairs in the television room where Auntie’s body had lain the night after she died. The doctor gave her a sedative injection but if she slept, it wasn’t a deep enough sleep to prevent her going with Leonard when he came for her late in the evening.

I never saw her again.

I heard that she gave evidence at Bell’s trial. I didn’t and neither did Elsa. Bell told everyone what she had done, the police, the doctor, she seemed proud of it, and I am sure she would have told the Central Criminal Court if her counsel hadn’t advised her not to give evidence. There is only one penalty for murder in English law and that is life imprisonment. “Lifers” usually come out after about ten years unless there is a recommendation from judge or jury that the convicted person serve much longer than that. This happened in Bell’s case, for after sentence had been pronounced and it was possible to reveal previous offenses to the court, a policeman made public the fact that, when she was twelve years old, the middle child of three, the eldest being a boy of fifteen, Bell had killed her infant sister.

Those years of mystery, sometimes hinted at, usually glossed over, had been passed by her in a section of a women’s open prison set aside to receive her and only her. She had had lessons, seldom if ever been entirely alone, and yet her loneliness while there had been intense. When she was sixteen—it was obvious they didn’t know what to do with her—she was removed to a children’s home and placed in the care of the local authority. Many people, over the years, have told me they tried to kill a younger sibling, the baby brother or sister who, in their eyes, had stolen all the tender exclusive love previously lavished on the potential killer by a parent. Cosette once told me how she tried to kill Oliver by stuffing his mouth and nose with zinc and castor oil cream, but her mother came in in time. Most of these children fail, but through ineptitude or timely discovery, not loss of nerve. Cosette failed because her mother came in. Bell succeeded. If her mother had come into the room two minutes sooner, Bell’s strangling of the two-year-old Susan would have been no more than a failed act of violence on the part of a child maddened by jealousy.

But it taught her something none of us should ever learn: that killing, once done, may be done again—
c’est le premier pas qui coute.

Bell said to me reflectively, “Cosette must be fantastically rich now. I mean from what you say the old man’s got a lot too and he’s bound to go first.”

She doesn’t mind what she says, so why should I? “Would you have killed Cosette?”

One of her sidelong glances. A pursing of the mouth. She looks well and strong, vigorous, her eye on the future. “I thought she was going to die, didn’t I? I wouldn’t have to if she’d had a fatal disease, which I thought she had.” It was a strange look she gave me, speculative, considering, utterly calm. And then, on a different note, “Seriously, why don’t you try to see her?”

“I suppose because I feel it would never be the same. The quarrel, her accusation and my inability to refute it, the silent years—all that would always hang between us.” I knew quite suddenly I wouldn’t be able to make Bell understand. The nuances of human intercourse, the subtleties of affection, these are unknown to her. She knows nothing of treading softly, nothing of the kind of innocence Cosette and I had in our long mother-child friendship, which seemed strong but was fragile enough to be destroyed by a single external blow. “Don’t think I fail to appreciate your selfless attempt to secure me a legacy,” I said, “but don’t you think your own presence in my life might be a stumbling block?”

“Not when we’ve got a big house divided into two,” she said. “She wouldn’t have to see me. Besides”— Oh, Bell, unchanging, unchangeable, direct, relentless, and incorrigibly selfish—“I’ve got so much against her as she has against me. She stole my lover, you forget that.”

As if the years had never been. As if Mark had never died, or Bell herself had never passed fourteen years in prison. Cosette had said she would like to steal other women’s men, speaking of it as an impossible dream, but she had done it, she had stolen another woman’s man, she had succeeded.

“You never told me how you met him,” I said, to deflect Bell from Cosette. “You never said how long you knew him before you brought him to the House of Stairs.”

She gave me a sidelong, speculative look, as if wondering how I should take what she had to say— wondering but not caring too much. “I met him at that Global Experience.”

“No, that was where I first saw him. Don’t you remember? He’d been sitting at a table with you and I said, ‘Is that your brother?’”

“You put the idea into my head.” Her smile was so wry, such a sophisticated smile. “You’ve been a genius at putting ideas into my head, Lizzie.” Another cigarette, her eyes screwing up as the plume of smoke rises. “I’ve got a real brother, you know that, I haven’t seen him for a thousand years. When you asked that about Mark it gave me a shock, just a bit of a shock. I thought, It’s Alan, but how can it be? I looked and I saw it wasn’t. But I said yes when you asked. Alan, my real brother, he’s so ugly and stupid, or he was, I expect he still is, but Mark was beautiful, wasn’t he? I thought, I’ll say he’s my brother and then maybe I’ll get to know him. Funny, wasn’t it? I’d never seen him before, never set eyes on him before.”

I knew she told lies for pure pleasure. My voice sounded in my own ears stonelike, profoundly heavy. “I don’t believe it. It can’t be. He’d been at your table.”

“It wasn’t my table. I was just there. There weren’t enough tables to go round. Those others sitting there, God knows who they were. When he came back—he was on his own too—I said to him there’d been someone talking to me who asked if he was my brother because we looked alike. Did he think we looked alike? I asked him that. And that was it, Lizzie, that was the beginning of it. That was how it started. We had a drink and then we went back to my place together. He said he was glad he wasn’t my brother.

“But it was useful later on. It wouldn’t have worked out, him trying to marry Cosette and her knowing he’d been my lover. It was much better that way. Using both your ideas was really good—and they’d have worked if he hadn’t been such a fool!”

So I have been responsible for it all, it all happened because of what I did and what I said, and Cosette has been right to blame me. Perhaps it is the pain in my head that makes it all unreal and any action, any positive step, seem impossible. I have written nothing for weeks, and if the headache is intermittent, the depression is constant. There is something else too, something I have never heard of anyone else having. I go to bed at night and fall asleep but within moments I am awake again and in such a panic of horror, such an indescribable fear of life itself, of reality, of my black-dark surroundings, that my body jerks and twists with it and my eyes, stretched wide open, stare in terror into the empty darkness. It passes, in ten minutes or so it passes, and I return to my customary placid and resigned depression, and eventually to sleep. But what is it? And why does it come?

I told Bell. Telling Bell things like that is useless, but I told her just the same. Put the light on, she said, drink something. Keep a glass of wine there and drink that. I tried it. But the bulb had gone in the bedside lamp, so nothing happened when I pressed the switch, and though I thought I had grasped the wineglass, I succeeded only in knocking it onto the floor. I knocked it to the floor and the other things with it, my watch and the aspirins and the bloodstone ring. So I wear the ring all the time now, I never take it off.

Before we went to see the solicitor, I asked Bell a question. I asked her what she understood love to be. She thought for a while but not for long.

“Being first with someone. It’s when you’re the most important person in someone’s life.”

“What about you?” I said. “What about when it’s you doing the loving?”

She had never thought of that. Love, to her, is something you receive—or don’t receive. “My mother and father. I was first with them till Susan came along. I thought I was first with Mark. No one was first with Silas except maybe Silas.” I could tell she didn’t mind talking about it, Bell never minded talking about people, including herself. “I’ll tell you what,” she said, “it’s got to be the person you want wanting you, the rest don’t count.”

It seemed safer not to pursue this. And yet do I care at all for her now? Does she care even a little for me? There is another passion in Bell’s life that we never talk about and that has never yet been gratified. Isn’t that the very heart and essence of frustration? To pursue always through unimaginable suffering yet never to attain? I say we never talk of it, yet in a way it was what our visit to the solicitor was all about.

Bell wouldn’t come in, though she came with me as far as the offices, which are in Knightsbridge. The next hour she said she would spend in Harrods, where she hadn’t been for fourteen years. Among the antiques, the jewelry, the dress materials. The bit of Harrods I like best is the zoo, but Bell looked uncomprehendingly at me when I suggested this.

I went to make my will. It was Bell’s suggestion, because I am really quite rich now and if I die intestate, who will it all go to, the two houses and my father’s savings? The state? There is literally no one. Cousin Lily is dead now, they are all dead, or for obvious reasons have never been born. I have left everything to Bell, everything except a thousand pounds to Elsa for being my executor.

“Mrs. Sanger is older than you,” the solicitor said.

“Yes, I know.” I didn’t say any more and he didn’t ask. It hurts my head if I start arguing.

When he has drawn the will he will send it to me for me to sign in the presence of two witnesses, each to sign in the presence of each other. He said he would get it in the post on Friday so it should be here by tomorrow. The people next door will be my witnesses. They used to feed the cats while I was away and before Bell came. Occasionally we go in there for a drink with them or they come in here. Their interest in us and the looks they exchange tell me they take us for a lesbian couple and this they find exciting.

I haven’t told Bell what else I have done, that I have written to Cosette. I was determined not to do this, but Bell’s telling me of her first meeting with Mark has changed my mind. Showing me my guilt, though my involvement was unconscious, has changed things for me. I know how much Cosette has to forgive and I know she will forgive me. Since I talked of her to Bell, I keep seeing her in her old habitat but translated to Maurice Bailey’s house, I imagine her planting lilies in the garden. How do I know she is once more a significant presence in the Wellgarth Society, an officer in the Townswomen’s Guild, a school governor, a voluntary hospital visitor? I just know. I know she has her gray worsted suits made for her by Maurice Bailey’s tailor. I know she has a Volvo and he a Jaguar. Perpetua comes to clean and Jimmy to do the garden and Dawn Castle comes around and tells Cosette what a trouble her grandchildren are but she wouldn’t be without them. I dream of Cosette and of those things, I dream of her coming here to rescue me, but from what? From what? After fourteen years I have written to her and now, each time the phone rings, I start and I tremble.

Bell watches me when I tremble. She watches me as if she is weighing things up, calculating her chances. She has been out house-hunting and is full of some house in Notting Dale she wants me to buy and which is so expensive I would have to take out a mortgage and, for safety’s sake, cover it with an insurance policy in her favor. I may just do it, to avoid argument. I shall probably give in, though now as I in turn watch her, dressed in silvery gray and wearing my cats as if they too were part of her clothing, taking and lighting another cigarette, her youth returned to her as when Cosette was happy it returned her, I think how infinitely I should prefer to do what Cosette herself had in mind and buy her a home of her own.

I have my fantasies about the bloodstone. Some would call them delusions. Sometimes I see it as the bearer of love, as if love were contained inside it, in the pinpoints of jasper perhaps that are embedded in the dark green chalcedony and glitter of its depths. When Bell gave it to me I see her as giving me back Cosette’s love, so long suspended. And sometimes it seems to be a carrier of affliction, resting on the fingers of those genetically prone to the disease so many of its wearers died of, passing the others by. It was loose on Bell’s finger, is tight on mine, and I pretend to her it won’t come off, that unless it is cut off it must stay there forever.

The phone is ringing. I start, of course I do, and in the seconds that separate its rings, wonder if I can in fact have a happy ending, wonder who will get to me first, Bell, who may be my fate, or Cosette, who would certainly be my salvation. Or will it be that third possibility on which Bell pins her faith …?

I put out my hand to stop her getting up and I cross the room to answer the phone.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1988 by Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd.

cover design by Jaya Miceli

ISBN: 978-1-4532-1489-3

This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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