The House of Stairs (7 page)

On that occasion, Elsa said, the people from the cottage had come up for the evening and had taken part. They were friends of Felicity. Silas Sanger had in fact been an old boyfriend of Felicity’s, they had parted on the best of terms, Felicity to be courted by, become engaged to, eventually marry Esmond Thinnesse, Silas Sanger to live with and later marry (or not marry, as Lady Thinnesse appeared to believe) Christabel. He was a painter, but not the sort who ever made much money by his painting, not the sort of “artist” that Lady Thinnesse had known and approved of in her younger days. He had had nowhere to live, had been through some kind of breakdown, and Felicity had persuaded Esmond to let him and his wife, or nonwife, live in one of the cottages near the house, the one that was in the better state of repair.

There he continued to paint, feverishly sometimes, at others sporadically, gloomily, from time to time doing nothing, lying on his bed all day, suffering what Felicity rather inaccurately called a dark night of the soul. He was a ferociously heavy drinker and the substances he drank were bizarre. What Christabel did no one seemed to know, at any rate no one said, and she appeared as something of a mystery. These people were due to come up to the house for dinner—a dinner that would be cooked by a woman who cycled over from Abridge—and remain to join in the debate, scheduled to be on the subject: This House deplores the present divorce law and would make divorce possible between consenting parties after two years’ separation. Such a provision was to become law in 1973. I couldn’t imagine there would be any dissenting voices, unless Lady Thinnesse and Julia Dunne consented to take part, which they had already declared with shudders to be out of the question, and I was surprised when Esmond said in his mild way that as an Anglican he must disapprove of any kind of divorce in any circumstances. Did Felicity remember that gently uttered but decisive statement when she ran away to Cosette’s?

The painter’s wife I had already seen. Reading to Miranda, the two of us sitting on the window seat in her bedroom, I could see the garden below and around us, the fans of high elms full of chattering starlings, the small meadow with the two horses and the big meadow shorn of its barley crop, the giant conifers that hid so much, that were always, at any time of the day, black silhouettes. I could see all this without raising my head and it was all curiously like what I was reading, all like the illustrations to
Samuel Whiskers,
the same sleepy windless pastoral, the same birds going to rest, the same sky of very high, small myriad clouds. To the right, on the slope of the hillside, stood Silas Sanger’s cottage and its garden, a fenced plot of shaggy grass with nothing in it but two clothes posts with a length of dark gray rope sagging between them. The cottage and its surroundings had an air of neglect. If Beatrix Potter had drawn it and been faithful to its true appearance, she would have used it as an illustration of the home of some villain of her animal world, a fox perhaps, or Bad Mouse. Curtains were at the windows, but these were torn or coming down or, in the case of those at one downstairs window, apparently refusing to be drawn back, had been looped to either side of the frame with what looked from my vantage point like string.

Out of this hovel and into this small wilderness, as the sun was setting and those tiny clouds colored with pink, came a tall girl too thin and too decorative to be one of Millet’s peasants but having an air about her of some Fragonard woman. This was in the carriage of her elegant head with its crown of soft, fair, untidy piled-up hair, in the length of her narrow neck, in the bunching of her clothes, a long full underskirt, an overskirt clenched in at the waist with a scarf wound round and round, a low-necked blouse, a jacket over it of thin clinging stuff, the sleeves rolled up, a ribbon or two hanging in streamers, the whole in a variety of tones of brownish, pinkish, dusty beige. No such personage ever entered the pages of Beatrix Potter. She carried a tray, not a basket, an ordinary tea tray laden with wet washing, which she proceeded to peg out on the clothesline.

I paused in my reading and said to Miranda, “Who’s that?”

On all fours she clambered over me. “That’s Bell.”

“She lives there with the painter?” Lady Thinnesse’s view had almost unconsciously communicated itself to me.

“Silas is Mr. Sanger and Bell is Mrs. Sanger. Her washing looks as if it hasn’t been washed, don’t you think?”

It was all the same sort of light gray and there were big holes in something that might have been a pillowcase. I said it didn’t look very clean, only to be reprimanded by Miranda.

“I’m not supposed to say that and especially you’re not because you’re grown up. Mummy says it’s despicable to say things about people’s washing being dirty. Go on reading, please.”

The girl in the garden, the girl called Bell, pegged her clothes out on the line with a kind of weary indifference. You could see her heart was not in it. Her whole stance, her attitude, the way she held her body, spoke of something worse than boredom, of encroaching despair. I had the impression those wet clothes had been lying about all day and at last, at an absurd time to hang out washing, at the close of the day, when the sun was setting, she had forced herself to drag the pile of it out here and rid herself of it, committing it to whatever fate awaited it from the dews of night. The tray empty, the line filled, she stood with the tray held loosely against her, stretched to her full height, gazing down into the valley, raising one hand to shade her eyes from the red sun’s glare in a pose so Fragonard-like that she might have learned it by studying a reproduction in a magazine. But somehow I sensed she had no idea she was observed. Miranda reminded me once more that I was supposed to be reading to her and I reluctantly drew away my eyes.

The debate party was two days after this and neither of the Sangers came to it. There was a phone in their cottage, according to Miranda, but they had had it cut off or it had been cut off due to nonpayment of the bill. A note was put through the letter-box of the Hall rather late in the afternoon, certainly after the time the cook from Abridge had already arrived. Felicity read it aloud to us with a kind of exasperated resignation. She wasn’t cross, she was amused—disappointed but amused by the way Bell did things like this.

“‘Felicity: Sorry, we aren’t going to come. I am not equal to it. Yours, Bell.’ She’s proud of always saying what she means, not telling social lies—well, not any lies really.”

Felicity smiled at us, flinging out palm-upward the hand that was not holding the note. She truly believed Bell never told lies, that Bell told the truth on principle no matter what the cost or how much moral courage was required. She believed this and we, hearing her tone and seeing her expression, believed too. Thus do utterly false testimonials of character and probity spread.

“She’d hurt someone badly rather than lie to them,” said Felicity. “She’d involve herself in endless trouble. It’s admirable in a way, you have to admire it.”

Yes, we had to admire it and did. I am not at all sure that Lady Thinnesse and Mrs. Dunne admired it. They had looked at the small, torn, dirty piece of paper, written on in pencil, and then glanced at each other and Lady Thinnesse said, “What does she mean, she isn’t equal to it? Isn’t she well? Does she mean she isn’t up to it? Your debates can be rather strenuous, Felicity.”

“Living with Silas can’t be any bed of roses,” was all Felicity said.

I was disappointed. I had looked forward to meeting the Fragonard woman who carried her washing about on a tray and hung it on the line at dusk.

“Wait a little, said the thorn tree,” said Elsa.

“That’s all very well,” I said, “but we’ve only got two more days here. Can’t we go and call on her?”

“I don’t think we could do that, I really don’t. He is rather strange, Silas Sanger. Rude, you know, and often drunk. He wouldn’t ask one in if he was in one of his moods, and he mostly is. In a mood, I mean. He doesn’t like anyone much except Felicity—he adores her.”

“Doesn’t he like this Bell?”

“I’ve only seen them together once,” said Elsa, “and he didn’t take any notice of her at all, not any notice. He didn’t speak one word to her.”

“Are they married?” It was more important in 1968 than it became soon after that.

“Frankly, I wouldn’t think so.”

The debate was postponed and we went home without meeting Bell or Silas Sanger, Elsa promising to take me there again soon. This I didn’t take very seriously. I knew I should have to spend the Christmas holiday with my father. Or try somehow to maneuver my father to spend Christmas at Cosette’s. For Cosette was still at Garth Manor, withdrawn, quiet, grieving, it seemed, and apparently unable to make up her mind whether or not to move. Then she told me she meant to take the holiday she and Douglas had intended to spend together in Barbados. It was arranged for Christmas and the New Year. She had never cancelled those arrangements, and she would go. This announcement was curious in that it was a preparation for another announcement she was to make as soon as she returned, something far more momentous, something to stun us all. In the meantime I could comment to Elsa and to Dawn Castle’s daughter, Diana, how very odd it was of Cosette to return to the hotel on Barbados where she and Douglas had stayed twice before, to return there alone and a widow, anticipating the pain and bitter nostalgia surely such a revisiting must evoke.

I thought I was condemned to sharing my father’s Christmas, and then he told me, with apparent insouciance, that he had been invited to spend it with my mother’s cousin, that Cousin Lily who had been in such high spirits at Douglas’s funeral. And he wanted to go, he was looking forward to it. I hadn’t been asked, he said, but he would inquire if he could bring me. This was spoken in such a tone of gloom and grudging unwillingness that I almost laughed out loud. “Please don’t,” I said. “Please don’t trouble, you’ll have a great time without me, you’ll be better on your own.” He gave me a sidelong look, he asked if I thought it would be all right. And then I understood he felt he was doing a daring thing, a thing likely to give rise to gossip, for my father belonged in that generation, the last perhaps to think this way, who believed there was something improper and even scandalous in sleeping under the same roof alone with a member of the opposite sex. “Times have changed,” I said. “No one would care.” He seemed disappointed.

Thus I was free to go to Thornham Hall with the Lioness.

Two memorable things happened that Christmas. The first was Felicity’s quiz.

Felicity was apparently as famous for her quizzes as her debates. She composed them herself, using the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Steinberg’s Dictionary of British History,
and the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
The quiz forms were typed by her and she did as many carbons as the typewriter would take, this being before the days of ubiquitous photocopying. We were to undertake this particular quiz on the day after Boxing Day, December 27.

The Thinnesses’ house was full. Mrs. Dunne was there and Lady Thinnesse had also invited an ancient brigadier and his wife. He had risen to this rank during the First, not the Second, World War, which gives some idea of how very old he was. Felicity had her sister and her sister’s husband and their twins and a friend she had been at college with and the friend’s daughter and every day local people from Chigwell or Abridge or Epping came as well. On the day in question there would be fifteen of us doing the quiz, the children being excluded. No mention was made of the Sangers, Silas and Bell, and I concluded they hadn’t been asked. I concluded more than that, that a coolness now existed between the Thinnesses and the Sangers, and this was confirmed by Jeremy Thinnesse, aged three.

“My daddy wants Mr. Sanger to go away and live in another house.”

“Really,” said the Lioness. “Why would that be?”

“It’s despicable,” said Miranda loftily, “to wheedle information out of children who are too young and innocent to know better, Mummy says.”

It was not clear whether she referred to Elsa’s conduct or possibly Silas Sanger’s, but it had the effect she aimed at, that of stopping the conversation. No more inquiries were made. I found myself often looking in the direction of the cottage but saw no one. The clothesline had gone and the two posts and the place looked unoccupied. Whether Silas and Bell celebrated Christmas I didn’t know and don’t know to this day; their life inside there was a mystery, their ways secret and surely wildly unconventional. Sometimes smoke could be seen rising from the cottage chimney and this fretted Lady Thinnesse, who seemed to think the house would catch fire.

After lunch on December 27 we all sat down in the hall to do the quiz Felicity had prepared, our twenty questions typed on two sheets of paper, foolscap size. This room, rather than the drawing room, was chosen because the latter being enormous took a great deal of heating and the weather was very cold. The hall at Thornham is itself very large with the two-branched staircase mounting to a gallery at the back of it, but this area can be closed off with double doors, making a cozy chamber at the front where the fireplace is. A big fire of logs had been lighted and chairs and two sofas drawn up in three hundred degrees of a circle round it.

Thornham Hall has no porch and there is no inner lobby or vestibule, so drafts tend to come in round the front door. The long windows on either side of it rattled in the wind, but it was warm enough round the fire. Lady Thinnesse wore only a thin silk dress and seemed to take it as an insult to her household arrangements that Mrs. Dunne had a shawl round her shoulders and Felicity’s sister had put on fur-lined boots. I remember precisely where I was sitting in the circle: on the right-hand side of the fireplace and directly facing the front door. Felicity’s brother-in-law sat on one side of me and her college friend on the other. It had been tacitly arranged that the old people should have their seats nearest to the fire, and between the college friend, Paula, and the fireplace were sitting the ancient brigadier, the ancient brigadier’s wife, and Mrs. Dunne, with Lady Thinnesse and an old couple from Abridge facing them. The children were all up at the other end of the hall playing with their Christmas presents and warmed by a portable electric radiator.