The House of Stairs (25 page)

Mark didn’t talk about himself and it was from Bell that I found out what he did. He had a part in a radio serial, precarious work since there were constant threats to kill off the character he played, but it was more secure than his past, which was a history of tiny parts in television drama, as a film extra, and repertory work in places such as Colchester or Gateshead. It took me just as long to find out where he lived, in a studio flat in the neighborhood of Brook Green, and his age, and that he was single and had never been married. But Mark was a listener, at any rate not one to fill the conversation with his history and his opinions, and for a while we knew of him only that he was charming and interesting and “an addition to our circle,” as Cosette put it in a kind of parody of Victorian talk.

“Why have you kept him to yourself for so long, Bell?” Cosette asked her when we were all down in the dining room, eating one of those luxury cold meals the fridge disgorged.

She shrugged but looked at him with the modest satisfaction of someone who has brought unquestionably the most stunning exhibit to the show. “He could have come before. He knew it was here.”

“Don’t you believe her. She never said a word about all this.” He put out a hand to encompass Cosette’s art nouveau hanging lamp, the walls all laden with Flora Danica porcelain, the purple curtains not drawn but carelessly flung back to show the gray garden made yellow and shiny and glittering by shed lamplight and winter wet. Later he was to say he had always hated the House of Stairs, but there was no sign of that then. “She never said a word about you, all of you. I just knew she had a room here and a friend.” His glance lighted on me charmingly, it seemed to me admiringly. “For all I knew, it was another glory-hole like old Walter’s dump where the cat fleas can be seen nightly, dancing on the carpet.”

“The origin of the term
entrechats
perhaps,” said Cosette with a smile at the dancer, who, not understanding, returned her look with her usual one of wistful wonder.

Mark laughed. Cosette’s gratitude for his amusement fairly blazed in her face. She wasn’t sitting next to him, she would have thought it selfish to have placed this prize next to herself, but now that we had finished eating, though two just-opened bottles of wine remained, we followed one of our customs of changing places at table and Bell, who had been between Mark and me, got up and invited Cosette to take her chair. In my turn I moved to change with Fay, ostensibly to sit beside Gary, who had come in just as the meal began, but really to be in a position to observe Cosette and Mark. I was afraid for her, I was already afraid.

They talked about Walter Admetus. Though he had been to his house to see Bell, he had never actually met Admetus, but he was far more familiar with the pieces he wrote for
Private Eye
and the
New Statesman
than Cosette was. With the kind of intellectual approach actors rarely have, he told Cosette what a good critic he thought Admetus was, how considered and searching, never going in for the cheap jibe for the sake of raising a laugh and at the expense of truth. Did Cosette know he had written a novel that had never received the attention it deserved? This led Cosette into fulsome praise of my own imperishable works. I was embarrassed, of course I was, but to my surprise I found Mark knew I was a writer, had in fact read my first book and the only good review I had ever had—almost the only review—and instead of Ivor Sitwell’s sneering remarks or Admetus’s manner of ignoring entirely that I had ever written or published anything, said, “I sat up all night to finish your book, I had to know what happened. You deserved that prize.”

I muttered some sort of thanks. “Did Bell tell you about it?”

If she had, he would have answered directly, but, “Oh, Bell’s illiterate and proud of it,” he returned. “And I’m not one of your readers who gets your book out of the library and then expects you to go down on your knees to me for graciously borrowing it.”

This was so accurate I began to laugh. “Did you actually pay good money?”

“The best,” he said.

Cosette fell in love with him that evening. It happened as quickly as that. I was dismayed to see it, I watched aghast as, when we returned to the drawing room to drink, for some forgotten reason, champagne, she turned on him a look I had once seen on another face in very different circumstances. This had been when Cosette and I were together in Italy and into this café in Bologna came an itinerant musician with a guitar. There was a child in the café with her parents and older sister, a girl of about eight. She fell in love at first sight with the guitarist, following him in worshipful silence around the restaurant from table to table, watched with unconcealed amusement by her mother and father and the older girl. When he became aware of her attention he turned to her and performed only for her, seating her on a chair at a table alone, playing for her a grotesque pluck-plucking version of “Santa Lucia,” and receiving with evident kindly delight her gaze of adoration. Cosette, of an age to be that girl’s grandmother, wore that look identically, and for a long moment when he brought her glass of champagne she met his eyes with undisguised wonder and glory in her own.

It would pass, I thought, it
must
pass, it must be no more than a “crush,” an evening’s infatuation that with nothing to feed on would die, would become for poor Cosette no more than a piece of nostalgia on which to look back with a “Do you remember that beautiful man who came here once and was so nice to us? I was madly in love with him for a whole week !”

But she wasn’t going to give that a chance to happen. She wasn’t going to let him get away. Bell she rightly knew as evanescent, unreliable, an occasional “disappearer,” one not to be trusted to bring her showpiece back again. And Cosette was aware of the invalidity of the vague invitation that postulates another visit “sometime soon” or “when you’re passing.” Mark had to be summoned back for a specific occasion and he was: a party. She would give a party— for what? For Bell’s birthday, her thirtieth it was going to be. This seemed tremendously young to Cosette, though I am less sure of how Bell felt about it. Not too happy to have this milestone advertised, I suspect.

“If I could be thirty again, I’d be a ‘manizer,’ I’d go about stealing everyone’s husbands.”

I remembered that then. I remembered that when she invited Mark to Bell’s birthday party, including Fay in the invitation, of course, and Perdita. Her face was radiant still. It was like the little Bologna girl’s face in that there was no disguising her joy, as if she had seen no men before, never been married and had her two or three lovers, but had slept her youth away in the depths of a wood or wasted it in a nunnery, and, like Miranda, cried, “O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!”

That night, later, lying in bed beside Bell, I said to her, “Cosette is going to fall in love with Mark.”

“She’s in love with him already.”

“You saw that?” I said.

“Didn’t you? Of course you did.”

“I wish there was something we could do to stop it.”

“Why? Why ever? Because you’re afraid for her? But he’ll be different, he won’t be like that bastard Ivor thing. Mark doesn’t fuck women over.”

“I mean he won’t feel the same as she does, he won’t be able to return what she feels.”

“He’ll be kind to her, though. That’ll be the difference, you’ll see what a difference that makes. He’ll be so kind.”

“I’d rather he didn’t get the chance,” I said.

“Would you? Cosette wouldn’t.” She turned over, pulling herself away from me. “I’m going to sleep now. Goodnight.”

This morning we went shopping together, Bell and I, down to the supermarket where I buy food for my cats. As we waited in the queue at the checkout, I pointed out to her the pictures in bright gilt frames the supermarket offers for sale at £9.95 apiece. In one of them was represented a favorite subject of Silas Sanger’s, an animal walking across a clearing in woodland, though this animal was a retriever in a sunlit grove, whereas Silas’s would have been a bloody-jawed predator in a rain forest.

She thought of him too. “Silas used to freak out when he saw things like that,” she said. “They’re obscene, they make me feel sick.”

“That’s the Leicester Art College view, is it?” I said. I know I shouldn’t make these scathing remarks to her every time we come near places in the past where she lied to me, but I can’t help it. Still, I must, I must resist. She doesn’t seem to care though; she takes it as if I have a right to try to settle scores, and perhaps I have.

“You know I was never there. It’s a wonder you ever believed all that crap in the first place.”

“Curious as it may seem to you, people do tend to believe what they’re told.”

Her laughter is as dry now as sticks crackling when they start to burn. We paid for the cat food and lugged it out and waited for a taxi. She hasn’t after all found herself equal to that job in the shop in Westbourne Grove and has moved in with me; she lives with me now. Not that this has actually been said, not in those words, and rent is still being paid for that room under the railway arch. How she expresses it is that she is staying with me, but I know she means to remain. The irony of it amuses me greatly, for I remember how ecstatic I would once have been to have Bell living with me, to know Bell wanted to live with me—wanted it more than I wanted it. But such a state of affairs was unthinkable, unimaginable.

Now, frankly, I don’t want it at all. I don’t want Bell as some sort of temporary but long-term guest in my house. She is too much for me, her past is too much, the things she has done. I jib at that. Who wouldn’t? It has made me nervous, all of it. It is causing me the kind of stress that always results in—well, you can guess what, can’t you? In a tic, a twitching, a jumping of the muscles. The more I worry about it the worse it gets. This is not the way Huntington’s begins, but I don’t like it and I worry about it. I know I am still not too old.

My fortieth birthday has passed. Bell and I went out to dinner and celebrated. We go out together a lot, several evenings a week, often to the cinema, for there have been so many good films lately,
Mona Lisa
and
A Room with a View
and
Prick Up Your Ears.
I haven’t been to the cinema so much for years. And last week we went to see
Antony and Cleopatra
at the Olivier, the finest performance this century, some say, and had our supper at the National Film Theatre restaurant by the river. Two rather good-looking women in early middle age, people must think us, not sisters, too dissimilar for that, and not suburban neighbors either. No one could think Bell in her black layers, her different black textures all bunches and bundled and tied, anyone’s suburban neighbor. She wears nothing but black now. Like Chekhov’s Marya perhaps, she is in mourning for her life.

“What bollocks,” she said when I told her this. “Half your trouble is you’ve read too many books.”

“You mean half
your
trouble is I’ve read too many books.”

You see, I want to get her to talk about Cosette and Mark. Sooner or later, if she fails to respond to all these hints, I shall have to say their names to her, talk about them myself, but I don’t want to do that yet. No, that’s not true, I’m afraid to mention them. When we got home the phone rang and it was Timothy. Do you remember Timothy, the man I was having dinner with in Leith’s the day after I first saw Bell? He doesn’t mean much to me, I am not in love with him or he with me, but he is a friend and I can’t see him now, not at present. I can’t ask people to meet Bell, I can’t introduce her to them. They may not know who she is and what she has done, there is no need for them to know, but I know and it inhibits me.

Bell smoked all the way back in the taxi in spite of the driver’s notice saying THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING. She couldn’t believe this wasn’t a joke when she first read it. The driver coughed ostentatiously and when we got to my house said, “I’d have put you out of my cab, only I’ve got old-fashioned ideas about what’s due to ladies. Pity others aren’t so considerate.”

I thought Bell might swear at him, but she didn’t, she didn’t say anything, hardly seemed to have heard. She walked up to the front door and waited for me to unlock it and when we were inside said, “Shall I tell you how I really met Silas?”

“Suit yourself.”

“Come on,” she said, “that’s me, that’s what I say. You’re pinching my lines.”

I started laughing. “Tell me how you really met Silas.”

“It was in the children’s home. The home was a big house that was a sort of experimental unit-experimental fuck-up, actually. I mean they mixed up big kids with much younger ones and really little ones. It was supposed to be like a family, Christ. Give me my cigarettes, will you?

“They put me in there when I was sixteen. You know where I’d been and why. Well, they put me in there sort of secretly. It was all supposed to be very progressive, in tune with the changing times and all that, it was 1958, not a word to get into the newspapers. There wasn’t much else in the way of media then. But they weren’t progressive enough to think I ought to be at school. I went out to work and lived at the home and in the evenings I used to have to help put the little ones to bed. Yes, really, that was a laugh, wasn’t it? I was dying to get away but I didn’t know when I could, if I ever could, being me, whether it was eighteen or twenty-one then or what, or whether it was just another kind of prison. Well, it wasn’t.

“Silas had a relation with a kid in care but they used to let the kid go home at the weekends. Sometimes it was Silas who brought her back. Felicity was his girlfriend then. She was at college and I reckon she thought it ever so wild and daring screwing around with a schizzy soak like Silas. Okay, so I got him away from her and I really did get pregnant and the superintendent that ran the home made him say he’d marry me. They told him who I was and made it look like he’d done something really awful even touching me, like I was a leper, and now we’d both have leprosy but we’d have to have it together. I had a miscarriage on my wedding day. I started bleeding in the Registry Office.”