The House of Stairs (13 page)

But Cosette, of course, wasn’t sorry to see me. Had she even feigned sleep so that I was obliged, when I had knocked repeatedly, to open the door and go inside? She was gratified that I should see her with her young lover, in a situation to prove their sexual involvement. He lay on his front, bundled up in bedclothes, a selfish man who grabs the sheet and blankets to himself, his bald head showing. Her hair, which she had formerly been in the habit of pinning up overnight, flowed loose onto her shoulders. She wore a nightgown designed for a young mistress, black lace and thin straps.

“Don’t make a noise, darling. We mustn’t wake Ivor.” Her finger to her lips, she climbed with exaggerated care out of bed.

He turned over, snorting as he did so. I felt quite shaken by the sight, by this encounter. Sometimes, in the past, as adolescents do, I had tried to imagine Cosette and Douglas in bed together. And I had succeeded in imagining the two of them engaged in the sexual act, a lovemaking carried out in a stately way with the minimum of movement, without speech, in darkness, to their mutual, quiet, unexpressed satisfaction. It is only recently, in the past couple of years, that I have come to understand this is the way most children imagine their parents making love.

To envisage Cosette and Ivor together—this was harder, this was to be shied away from. And I was too old to indulge that kind of curiosity. I pictured Ivor as merely servicing Cosette and with less enthusiasm than an animal at stud, but I may have been wrong. In the light of what happened later with another man I may have been quite wrong. Ivor may not have been in love with Cosette, may have been waiting for some young “sweetheart” to come along, but he could still have been attracted by her. That languor can be very attractive, that slow sweet gentleness, that air of issuing invitations to love in idleness. And no doubt the pains Cosette had taken with her appearance had paid off. I alone still saw her as she had been before the transformation, stout, gray-haired, in her tailored suits. I alone saw her as a mother.

Nor was she in love with him. At the time I couldn’t face so bleak a notion, but now I know she wanted a man of her own, a man to show off to others, a man to go about with, perhaps too a man to sleep with. Strange that I could accept such a concept quite naturally when it applied to my contemporaries, to myself, to Diana Castle, say. Diana and Fay, the pretty floor-cushion girl Ivor flirted with, had taken full advantage of sixties morality to sleep with anyone they fancied. Love didn’t come into it. Why should it? They had discovered it isn’t necessary to love someone in order to enjoy yourself with him. And that was all right, I understood that, I felt the same. But that Cosette might feel the same—that was too much for me, that was something I didn’t want to confront. I know now that while Cosette had loved Douglas dearly, had been a good and faithful wife to him and mourned his death with great bitterness, she was only in love once in her life, and that was neither with Douglas nor Ivor.

I wish, I really do wish, I could say something in Ivor Sitwell’s favor, could have found in him some redeeming feature. It would have reconciled me to his presence in the House of Stairs, it would have gone some way to explaining Cosette’s unaccountable partiality. He was ugly and mean-spirited, ungrateful and rude, as discourteous to Auntie as he was to Diana and me, capable of caressing Fay in Cosette’s presence and then walking up to Cosette and asking her for money in front of all of us. He did nothing to help in the house and used Perpetua as if she were a servant in a Victorian household. Perhaps he was a good poet. I can’t say, I don’t know. Cosette had shown me, as she promised, a volume of his verses. They had been published but had he, as I was sure at the time, paid to have them published? Or, rather, got some woman, some predecessor of Cosette’s, to pay for their publication?

These verses weren’t bad in the way Patience Strong is bad. They weren’t doggerel, they didn’t express stale emotion in clichés. That I found them incomprehensible is nothing against them. I might not do so now if I was ever able to get hold of any examples of them. After all, people in the sixties found Pinter incomprehensible and fraught with non sequiturs. Once or twice, in the evenings, Cosette read them aloud to whoever might be there. It was only while she was reading his poetry that I ever saw Ivor look at her in a loverlike way, look at her, that is, with neither indifference nor anger.

That spring I stayed with Cosette for several weeks. I had teaching practice to do as part of my course and had, by a lucky chance, been sent to a school in North Kensington. Times had changed, but even then it was a rough area, shabby and sordid by day and dangerous by night. The children, then as now, were a mixed lot and in order to teach them satisfactorily one should really have been proficient in Gujarati and Bengali. But it had the great advantage of being within walking distance of Archangel Place.

In the evenings Cosette often used to take us all out to dinner. Perhaps the truth was that Ivor didn’t especially want to spend time alone with her. They hardly ever went out alone. Instead Cosette would gather up whoever happened to be around, myself and Fay, who had become the Girl-in-Residence since Diana had gone off to Cornwall to live with her boyfriend, the boy with the sitar and the boy with the ocarina, Perpetua’s brother—an Irishman from County Leix who had come to London to seek his fortune and been given a room in Archangel Place, “just until you find somewhere, darling”—and, of course, Ivor. We always went to expensive, exclusive places: the Marco Polo in the King’s Road, San Frediano’s, The Pheas-antry, the Villa dei Cesari. On the few occasions Cosette found herself dining at the Hungry Horse in the Fulham Road she thought she was slumming.

She had brought the big old Volvo with her from Wellgarth Avenue and she left it parked in the street. It was still possible to do this at that time in the little streets of Notting Hill. An old-fashioned woman in some ways, she never drove the car herself when Ivor was with her but handed the keys to him before we left the house. He was a terrible driver. Already the Volvo, which Cosette’s years of slow, skillful driving had left unscathed, was scarred and marked and chipped and one of the rear lamps smashed. To drive eastward to the Edgware Road and then south along Park Lane is neither the easiest nor the shortest way to get to Chelsea, but it was the way that Ivor took. Perhaps he took it in order to drive along Moscow Road and give himself the opportunity of pointing out to all of us the house in which Edith Sitwell had once had a flat. Cousin Edith, he called her. To other Sitwells he referred in a similarly familiar way, speaking of Sachie and Georgie. I didn’t then know that he had absolutely no right to claim this relationship. Interested, I even asked him if he had any special memories or anecdotes to relate of the celebrated three. He then told several tales which I later came across pretty well word for word in Osbert Sitwell’s
Laughter in the Next Room.

It showed me one thing. That if you wanted to put Ivor in a good mood you either had to praise his poetry or ask him about these people we all believed were his relatives. Nothing else would do it. We went to the Marco Polo that evening, as we often did then, and it was there that I received, without knowing it at the time, news of Bell.

Chinese restaurants were not common then as they are now. At least, good ones were not. It felt very grand to sit round a table big enough to accommodate us all and fiddle about with the dishes that make up what was then a rarity for London, Peking duck. I sat between Dominic and a boy called Mervyn, and on the other side of Dominic was Fay and on the other side of her, Ivor. I sat there enjoying it but thinking how strange it all was, recalling the decorous dinner parties at which Cosette and Douglas had entertained her relations and the Wellgarth neighbors. Some of those people had occasionally called at Archangel Place and their astonishment, expressed in wandering eyes, hesitant inquiries, was greater than mine. They were older and more set in their ways. They thought Cosette had gone mad.

Eating at the Marco Polo, or wherever it might be, produced the same sort of astonishment in some of Cosette’s young guests. You could see they wondered what it was all about, why Cosette did it, and in the case of some of them, what price were they going to have to pay? This was especially evident in the Irishman, youngest of Perpetua’s large family of siblings. Dominic had come to London to find work and, when his sister told him she had found a place for him to stay, must have expected a miserable room in a comfortless house, an exigent landlady, a shabby neighborhood. He could scarcely believe his luck or overcome his terrible suspicions. Like the streetwise beggar picked out of an alley to attend the rich man’s feast, he seemed always on the watch for the reckoning. Sooner or later Cosette’s motive must emerge. What was surely some gross and elaborate practical joke would end in his humiliation, or else she was mistaken in him, believed him other than he was, and when she discovered the truth, that he was a laborer by necessity not inclination, poor and nearly illiterate, accustomed to a diet of fried bread and chips at his mother’s kitchen table, she would expose him and fling him out-of-doors.

Or so I suppose. This is what his expression told me, for at that time he never spoke except to say thank you, and later on when I might have asked him, I didn’t. His wild, beautiful dark face was anxious in repose, marvelous when he smiled, as he did whenever he was spoken to, his eyes, the bluest I have ever seen, positively glowing with gratitude and apprehension. On the other hand, the boy called Mervyn was out to get what he could. I think Fay was too. I think it now, though at the time I never quite believed in people actually and purposefully having an attitude of this sort. I thought it was something come upon in old novels whose authors were not conversant with the subtleties of human nature. I had never read Balzac. I hadn’t yet begun reading Henry James.

So when I saw Fay raise and lower her long eyelashes at Ivor Sitwell, stretch her bare arms behind her head to lift her breasts, smile at him and whisper something indecent and provocative, having apparently waited for the moment Cosette left us to go to the bathroom, I thought it done in innocence and by chance. And these factors of accident and random acts I thought operating again when she later turned her back on him and concentrated on Cosette, pinning up

Cosette’s back hair that was flopping out of its pins, complimenting her on her perfume, sniffing with eyes closed as if ravished by it, going off to find a waiter and demand a jug of water because Cosette had asked for it. Mervyn had different methods: eating and drinking as much as he could get, far more than any reasonable person would want to eat and drink—Cosette always asked for the bill and paid it without a word, with scarcely more than a glance at it—remarking that he had run out of cigarettes, observing loudly and often how much he liked the jacket some man on the other side of the restaurant was wearing or how he had always longed for a certain kind of pen or cigarette lighter. I believed it all artless, but I learned.

At Cosette’s table, whether at home or in a restaurant, there was always excess, too much food, too much wine, a bottle or two left half-empty, cigarettes stubbed out half-smoked, cigarettes left in packets on the cloth, liqueurs left in glasses, chocolates on dishes. If Gary, the boy who played the various exotic musical instruments, was there, he would gather up all these leftovers and put them into a carrier bag he carried with him for this purpose. For all I know, this may have been the first doggy bag to make its appearance in London. As well as the bag, Gary carried a Tupperware box to put bean sprouts and noodles in, including those that other people had left on their plates.

It was a few days after this that I first witnessed this spooning up of leftovers, and saw him, green in the face after drinking four glasses of kirsch, stagger to the bathroom to be sick. On this occasion Ivor burned the five-pound note to show his contempt for money.

“Can you let me have a fiver?”

Cosette didn’t hesitate. The bank note, worth so comparatively little now, would then have paid a week’s rent of a better room than Dominic could have afforded. Ivor took it out of her fingers. He had been discoursing on the wealth of “his” family and how happy he was that, due to some legal mix-up, none of it had come the way of the particular branch to which he belonged. He talked about money corrupting and about selfishness. I have since then noticed that it is only deeply selfish people who point out the selfishness of others. Earlier that day, it appeared, he had proposed that Cosette should back the founding of a poetry magazine of which he would be editor. She hadn’t refused outright, only said it would be hard for her to lay hands on such a large sum at short notice.

“Now, why do you suppose we refer to people who oppose innovations in the arts as Philistines?” he asked us, still holding up the bank note in his fingertips.

No one answered him, no one knew or cared.

“Possibly because no documents in the Philistine language are extant,” Ivor said. “Equally possibly because the Philistines long held a monopoly in smithing iron, their only known skill.” He looked at Cosette, drawing toward him with his free hand the candle a waiter had just lit. “But how did the use of the term in its modern sense arise?”

Cosette was very tolerant, very easygoing, so well able to conceal hurt that you might think she scarcely felt it. Betrayal was what she feared and Ivor, who had presumably made her no promises, given her no guarantees, couldn’t betray her. But she liked things to be pleasant, she was one who poured oil on troubled waters.

“You’ve just told us how, Ivor,” she said. “It’s very interesting. I didn’t know that.”

“The use of the term for people deficient in liberal culture and whose chief interests are material was first applied by German students in the nineteenth century to those who hadn’t been to a university. People like you.” He might equally have said people like himself, since his claims to have been to Oxford, or indeed any seat of learning after he left Northampton High School at the age of sixteen, were without foundation. The information about Philistines I later discovered he had purposefully mugged up in advance. Cosette didn’t in the least mind these insults, having no inflated image of her own intellect, indeed very much underestimating it. He too saw this, he saw he had misjudged his victim and her vulnerable area, and now, unerringly, he aimed at her tender place. “Not that I blame you for that, you can’t help it. You were born too soon.” He said to the rest of us, “Women of her age just weren’t allowed higher education.” And leaning forward, he thrust the folded note into the candle flame and lit his cigarette with it. “Naturally their chief interests would be material, but there’s no harm in showing them how … little … these … things matter.”