The House of Stairs (6 page)

It was the girl who answered my call, the girl Miranda. It is amusing to think that if this girl reads Beatrix Potter to her children it will be because I read Beatrix Potter to her when she was six. Of course we do not mention the Beatrix Potter sessions in the bedroom whose window overlooked the garden of Bell’s cottage. She has forgotten them and I have forgotten everything about them except that they took place and that once, while reading
The Tale of Samuel Whiskers,
I saw Bell come out into the garden and peg ragged-looking grayish washing out on a clothesline.

She tells me, this girl Miranda Thinnesse, that her parents still live at Thornham Hall and she gives me their number, a number that I wouldn’t have been able to find in the directory for Outer East London and West Essex (or whatever it is called) because it has recently been changed to deter an anonymous phone caller who said obscene things to Felicity. For all she knows, since she can’t remember ever having heard the name Elizabeth Vetch, I might be the obscene phone caller myself.

I can’t bring myself to speak Bell’s name to her. As she talks about her parents and her brother and the first her brother has just taken at Cambridge, I tell myself she will never have heard of Bell, her parents will have forgotten Bell. And then she says, what did I want to ask her parents? Did I just want to have a chat? Or was it something about that woman who killed someone—what was she called? Christine something?

“Christabel Sanger,” I say, and my voice sounds all right, sounds quite normal, as it might if I were speaking any other name, any name at all. And I say it again, to hear myself say it. “Christabel Sanger,” and then, “but we called her Bell, everyone called her Bell.”

“Did you want to talk to my mother about her?”

I sound remote, almost indifferent, or I think I do. “I want to ask your mother if she knows where she is living.”

“Well, all I can tell you is she phoned my mother. She’d just come out of prison, an open prison, I think, and she phoned home. I don’t know why. It was awhile ago now, I mean weeks. I think she phoned a lot of people. My mother could tell you more. Now you’ve got the number why don’t you phone my mother?”

I say I will and thank her and say good-bye. It is strange what it does to me, this confirmation that Bell is back among us, that it really was Bell I saw. It makes me feel a little sick, nauseous, no longer looking forward to the dinner I am being taken out to. Weeks ago she had phoned Felicity Thinnesse and “a lot of people,” but she hadn’t phoned me. Me she had fled from along the streets of Notting Hill, had hidden from to elude, had seen and stared at without smiling, seemingly without recognition. Or had not seen, had never seen, had not eluded, had merely gone into a shop outside Queensway station to buy a paper or a pack of cigarettes or a flower. Me she had perhaps tried to phone, had dialed my number many times while I was away. For I have been away, was away first in Italy and then for a week staying with my father, who lives in a bungalow at Worthing now, the kind of bungalow they wanted Cosette to buy when she first became a widow.

I have gone upstairs into my bedroom to change my clothes, telling myself that I have no time now to speak to Felicity, telling myself that when I do speak to Felicity she will want to know all kinds of things I may not want to talk to her about. She may, for instance, ask me about Marcus, or even something about what the setup was in Archangel Place just before Bell did what she did. She may invite me to Thornham Hall, and I am not sure whether or not I want to accept such an invitation. Probably I don’t. Or suggest a meeting when next she and Esmond come to London. I move about my bedroom opening cupboard doors, opening drawers, looking at the phone extension and deciding to postpone this call until tomorrow morning. Now I have in my hand a pincushion Cosette made me. It is in the shape of a strawberry and made of red silk, with the seeds of the strawberry’s satiny outside embroidered in pale yellow thread. The pincushion is heart shaped and fatly padded and it has never been used for the purpose it was designed for because I have been afraid to spoil the texture of the silk.

The cameo brooch in the jewel box was one of her birthday presents to me. The face in profile on it, carved from rosy-cream and strawberry-cream coral, is like Bell’s, a classic profile, high of forehead, straight of nose, the upper lip short, the mouth full, the chin of perfect depth, and the hair, loops and tendrils of it arranged in careless Regency fashion, disarrayed and tumbling, ringleted and tangled, is Bell’s hair. I was taken by Cosette to choose this cameo and I chose it because the face was Bell’s, wore it expecting everyone to notice, to comment, to say, “The girl on your brooch looks just like Bell,” but only Cosette noticed, only Cosette remarked on it.

I shall wear it tonight, going out with this man I haven’t known very long but like well enough. He is taking me to Leith’s, something I have known for days and dreaded. How could I go to Notting Hill, the taxi perhaps passing the end of Archangel Place? How could I, in company, revisit those streets which were once my world, where everything that ever happened to me happened? All is changed and I no longer feel like this. I have been there, I have been back, following Bell. I am even excited. And I know the excitement does not stem from the prospect of sitting in a taxi with Timothy, eating dinner with Timothy, but because, up there, where Kensington Park Road meets Kensington Park Gardens or Ladbroke Square, I may see Bell again.

Tonight may be the night I shall find her.

4

AFTER MY MOTHER WAS
dead I went home to live with my father. I hated it and he hated it and both of us, I think now, saw it as our duty, I to be there and he to take me in. The arrangement endured only from the end of June until the end of September, my long vacation. He returned to work long before September came, before August came, I spending my days with Elsa and at Garth Manor with Cosette. Near the end of it my father suggested I go away for a holiday, without thinking perhaps that there was no desirable foreign place to which I could get a package he would pay for at such short notice. Most of the people I knew had already filled up the minibuses and Bedford trucks making for Turkey and India. His dreadful suggestion that he and I should together have a few days in Colwyn Bay caused his voice to falter with dismay even as he was making it. I compromised and went for a week with Elsa to her relations in Essex.

She used to talk of these relations, an aunt, a cousin and his wife, and their two children, and somehow gave me the impression that it was north Essex where they lived, the Stour Valley, Constable country, or the marshes,
Great Expectations
land. Or that was how I received it, which is nearer to the truth. Essex is a big county. When we set off toward the Central Line tube, I thought at first this was merely the first leg of our journey, that we should change trains at Liverpool Street, but no, Elsa bought a ticket for herself and a ticket for me to Debden, which is getting on for as far as the line goes. A huge council estate lay outside the station and my disappointment was bitter.

Elsa laughed and said, “Wait a little, said the thorn tree,” a very nearly incomprehensible remark which was a favorite of hers and had something to do with Africa and the lioness personality she cultivated at that time.

Esmond Thinnesse came to meet us in a Morris Minor Estate car. He was older than I had expected, fair-haired with glasses and, fortunately with that name, extremely thin. Felicity was thin too and so was his mother, Elsa’s aunt Lois, and I used to wonder if there had ever been a fat Thinnesse and if so what misery and humiliation had he or she suffered. Or did Thinnesses keep themselves thin by rigorous diet and exercise and mortification of the flesh? There was no sign of this while Elsa and I were there, large, lavish meals being provided and partaken of enthusiastically by everyone. And no one was made to go out for healthful country walks.

For country it was, as deep I am sure as that to be found on the other side of Chelmsford. The Morris Minor took us no more than two miles away from the Debden Estate, but the little redbrick terraces stopped and the straight white dual carriageway stopped, and the shiny opal-green roof of the factory where they make notes for the Bank of England disappeared behind the trees, and the lanes became narrow and winding, the hedges high, the river Roding running between willows and alders. Thornham Hall had no place in the category of disappointing things. It was a real hall, with fifteen bedrooms and a library and a morning room. I sometimes used to think about those houses, so many of them, Jane Austen puts her people in and describes as “new-built, modern.” Thornham was one such, about 170 years old when first I went there, austere, elegant, square, a balustrade running round its shallow roof, wide bays on either side of its flat, porchless front door. It stands on an eminence commanding a view of the winding Roding, of Epping, and the villages, someone of incredible foresight having planted a screen of scotch pines and Wellingtonias, six trees deep, to conceal the houses for East End of London overspill no less-inspired person could have imagined ever being built. Now, I suppose, Thornham also has a view of the M25 motorway cleaving a long white wound through the meadows.

Its own estate, with vestiges of the feudal, stood near to it: stables, a cottage or two, a farm with barns at the foot of the hill. And there were huge trees, horse chestnuts and limes, fan-shaped screens of elms that must be gone by now, felled by the disease that changed the face of the countryside. I had never before stayed in a house of this size and eminence, have not done so since. It was almost in the class of houses you are taken round on conducted tours. Esmond’s father, a merchant banker, had bought it just before the Second World War, so in no sense was it a family home, he being really the first generation of Thinnesses to live there.

Today, in similar circumstances, I think we girls would have called his mother by her first name, but then she was Aunt Lois to Elsa and Lady Thinnesse to me. Her husband, Sir Esmond, had been rewarded with a knighthood for some particular merchant-banking service two years before he died. To me she was very old, though I suppose no more than in her late sixties. A rather carping though good-natured woman, she lamented the changes in her environment, notably, obsessively, the building of the Debden Estate. These moans dominated her conversation and went along with an often repeated regret that Sir Esmond, on their marriage, hadn’t bought a house farther out in the countryside. She would ask me, or anyone else who happened to be with her, why he had failed to foresee that the London County Council, as it was then called, would take over some of the most beautiful pastoral land in the Home Counties for their “slum clearance.” I was unused to such reactionary talk and her terms shocked me. She gave the impression that her marriage, at least from about 1950, had been permanently soured by her disillusionment over Sir Esmond’s lack of prevision.

Also staying in the house was a friend of hers, an old woman called Mrs. Dunne, who came from another, more rural part of Essex, and who was worried about proposals to extend the capacity and area of Stanstead Airport. No conservationist except where her own immediate interests were involved, Lady Thinnesse showed a bored indifference to poor Mrs. Dunne’s anxieties and wound up any discussion of Stanstead with the advice to her friend to move.

“It isn’t as if you had a big house, Julia. You aren’t trapped like I am.”

Felicity Thinnesse, who was a tease and liked showing up in company the follies and insensitivities of her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law’s guests, used to enjoy what she called winding up this old woman in front of us. In fact I think Mrs. Dunne liked it, had no idea Felicity was anything but serious, and rather appreciated attention from “the younger generation.” Julia Dunne had once been a Master of Foxhounds and such had been her life and the narrow circle she had always moved in, that she had no notion there were people existing—at any rate middle-class people in England—who might consider blood sports cruel or degrading. At the same time she loved animals. Certain horses had played a more important part in her life than her husband had, as far as I could tell. She had once had a pet fox which she had reared from a cub when its mother had been killed by the hounds.

“Didn’t you ever think of that as being a bit odd?” Felicity asked her, innocently interested. “I mean, hunting foxes and keeping a fox as a pet?”

“Oh, no, dear. I was very careful about that. I always shut him up in the stables when the hunt came by,” said Mrs. Dunne.

Grave-faced, Felicity said she found it hard to understand this new disapproval of the keeping of battery hens when it was obvious they were safest while in those boxes. No fox could get them there. Julia Dunne was enchanted by this defense of factory farming. You could see she was storing it up for future use. Later Felicity told me that back home in north Essex Mrs. Dunne used to crouch behind hedges with a stout stick in her hand, ready to club down any rabbit that might start eating the plants in her flower bed.

Felicity found the presence of her mother-in-law as a permanent resident, and her mother-in-law’s friends as temporary ones, a cross to bear. Life was a laughing matter to her, sometimes a sick joke, and she demanded amusement, entertainment, as her daily food. Her husband was a quiet, dull, rather clever man, religious in a conventional Anglican way. Just as Lady Thinnesse usually had someone staying so did Felicity, but Felicity demanded more of her guests, far more; she expected wit and stories and even contributions such as young ladies made at Victorian parties, she expected visitors to play or sing or recite something. And she expected us to take part in the quizzes she set and the debates she instituted in the evenings and which would continue long into the nights. Elsa told me that on a previous visit, just before the Act of Parliament that made homosexuality legal between consenting adults in private, Felicity had organized a debate that “this House will abolish outrageous laws that purport to interfere in the private sexual behavior of adults.” Lady Thinnesse had had some other old woman guest with her and this person had immediately said that if this kind of thing were to be discussed it would be “above her head” and she would go to her room. Lady Thinnesse had soon followed her. The debate had gone on until three in the morning, only breaking up when one of the children was heard crying upstairs.