The House of Stairs (11 page)

In which to recall Cosette seems to come naturally.

She didn’t mean to live alone in the House of Stairs. She was going to have Auntie with her and Dawn Castle’s daughter, Diana.

If I haven’t mentioned Auntie before, it isn’t because she was unknown to me or played a small part in Cosette’s life, but because it is so hard to know what to say about her. She was a cipher, a little old woman who seemed without character or opinions, almost without tastes, who seemed to dislike nothing yet enjoy nothing. I have never known her Christian name. Cosette always called her Auntie, though she wasn’t her aunt but I think her mother’s cousin. We—I mean the crowd of the young—were supposed to call her Mrs. Miller, but no one ever did for long and she became Auntie to us too. To her we were all “dear,” because our names eluded her memory, even Cosette’s.

Two or three years earlier Auntie had been living in a miserable room in a run-down part of London. Somewhere in Kensal Rise I believe it was. She was being harassed by a landlord who wanted the house vacated so that he could sell it, and was plagued too by the four-man jazz band who occupied the top floor. Cosette had always looked after her, paid her some sort of allowance, had her shopping done, taken her out. She and Douglas rescued Auntie and bought her a tiny one-room flat near them in Golders Green. From this flat Cosette removed her and carried her off to Notting Hill.

She gave no reason for doing so. Auntie had seemed quite happy where she was, though it was always hard to make any sort of assessment of the state of her emotions, and if Cosette could have gone from Golders

Green to Kensal Rise to tend to her, she could probably have made the journey equally often in reverse. It may have been a simple act of kindness. I shouldn’t express surprise at Cosette’s kindness, which was so frequent as not to be remarked, and yet I came to believe there was another motive. I came to see that Auntie was needed in the House of Stairs for her role in the attempted recapture of Cosette’s youth.

Her presence had no effect on me one way or the other. It was different with Diana Castle. My reactions to her being asked to live there, given a room there, were I am afraid those of jealousy and resentment. You have to understand that, without being fully aware of it then, I had replaced my mother with Cosette—and this not just since my mother’s death but long, long before. Of course I should have known that Diana’s being there didn’t exclude my being there, that I was always welcome, that there would always be a place for me, that Cosette took it for granted and supposed I did too, that her home was my home whenever I chose to make it so.

I sulked a little. I had my degree and I wandered about Europe, meeting nomadic people like myself, thinking of the books I meant to write. The first of these was in fact written in Cosette’s house, but not yet, not then. Instead, I went off to do a year’s postgraduate teacher training, something I have been glad of since, but which was undertaken as a result of the injury I felt Cosette had done to me, a result of sulking.

The House of Stairs I had seen once or twice and had responded to it in a way that might have been more justly expected from my own father, say, or Mrs. Maurice Bailey. I saw it as big, old, dirty, and cold, the stairs a curse and a handicap, the arrangement of the rooms—the kitchen was in the basement, all the best living and sleeping space loftily high up—seemingly designed to be as inconvenient as could be, the steep staircase and windows dangerous. The second time I saw it Cosette had moved in, had been in three weeks, but the furniture still stood about where the movers had stuck it, the crates of books and china and glass remained unpacked, the windows uncurtained and the phone not yet connected.

But the third time I went there all was changed. I had been away and Cosette had been busy, though this is the wrong word to use about someone so gently and contentedly indolent. Others had been busy on her behalf: Perpetua, who still came to her, traveling down each day on the 28 bus; Jimmy, the gardener and handyman; a troop of carpet fitters and curtain hangers. The rooms hadn’t been repainted, that was something she refused to have done, and their faint faded shabbiness suited them, keeping them from a glossy
Homes and Gardens
look, though there was never much danger of this
chez
Cosette. But the windows had been festooned with curtains in slub silk and curtains in velvet, with Roman blinds and Austrian blinds and Chinese bead curtains that were melees of rainbows when they moved and showed pastoral pictures, remote and Oriental, when they hung still. I don’t think Cosette any longer knew there were such colors as brown, as beige, as fawn, as gray. The house gleamed with rich blues and reds and purples, with emerald green, with dazzling white. And in her own wardrobe gone were the tailored suits and gone the cotton tents in tablecloth patterns. That day when I came in, when I used the key she had sent me and mounted the stairs, carpeted now in bloodred, came to the top and found her seated at her table, she was in yellow silk on which blossomed white daisies and red roses and sprays of green ferns. And that was by no means the only change in her.

She put out her arms and without a word I went to her and into that embrace and we hugged each other. Being sent the key had touched me, had moved me near to tears, the trust it implied. I hugged Cosette and felt her warmth and smelled her scent and felt the new thinness of her under the slippery silk.

“I’ve been on a diet.”

“I can see,” I said.

“The doctor told me to lose weight because of my blood pressure.”

It was a shy look she gave me, her eyes not meeting mine. I had a curious feeling that though she was telling the truth, it wasn’t the whole truth. This wasn’t her honest and entire motive for losing weight.

“You’ve done something to your hair.”

Cosette put up her hand to the reddish brown coiffure. “First of all they tint it to your natural color and then every time you have it done,” she said confidingly, “they tint it a slightly paler color until you end up nearly blond. That way all the gray gets sort of absorbed and doesn’t show.”

“Yes, I see,” I said.

Had that ever been her natural color? Come to that, had it ever been anyone’s natural color?

“The hairdresser says it takes ten years off my age.”

I wasn’t going to deny it, though I couldn’t see it myself. The strange coppery color made Cosette’s face appear tired as the gray never had, and worse than that, her hair looked like a wig. I told her heartily that she looked very nice, it was all an improvement, and this seemed to make her happy. She said I must come and see upstairs, I must see “my” room, and I half expected her to jump out of her chair with a new lightness of step. But she was the same languid Cosette, apparently with all the time in the world at her disposal.

We climbed up, looking into the rooms as we went. Auntie was out in the garden, sitting in a deck chair, sleeping probably, so we looked into her room up on the next floor, a big room full of old lady’s things, a strange radio from the forties in a polished wooden case, silver-paper pictures and a collage of sepia postcards, antimacassars on the two armchairs. A flypaper hung from the central light. I looked out of the window that, being at the back, was one of those glass-doors-opening-onto-a-balcony arrangements. Among all that gray foliage the top of Auntie’s head looked rather like a white chrysanthemum. She was sitting with her hands folded and her legs up and stretched out. If she had been doing anything, sewing for instance or even reading, I think I should have been very surprised. But she was doing nothing, just existing, basking in the mild autumn sun, the gray leaves all around her. Later I came to learn that the smoke-colored tree which made dappled shadows was a eucalypt, but I didn’t know it then, I didn’t know the names of anything in that pale, ghostlike garden.

Cosette had allotted me a room on the floor above, but at the front. It had one of the Venetian bays. I have harped rather on windows, I see, as if I noticed them more than I noticed the proportions of the room and their sizes. Of course I didn’t. It was what happened later that makes me think I must always have been more aware of the windows than of any other feature of the House of Stairs, even the staircase itself, aware not only of the windows’ size and shape but of the danger to which they exposed those inside them. The ones at the front were safe enough, with their deep sills or guarded by their graceful iron baskets, but at the back of the house—what careless architect had designed windows that were in fact glass doors out of which you stepped almost into the void, onto at any rate a narrow ridge of plaster with a low wall a child could have stepped over? And one at the top that, when open, was just a doorless doorway?

The room that was to be mine had a bed in it and crates and crates of unpacked articles. I began to wish I hadn’t committed myself to that teacher training course. For some reason, and this sort of attitude isn’t typical of me, I wanted to start unpacking and arranging immediately. The sun was shining, the last sun before the winter came perhaps. On the balcony in a house opposite, an austere Parisian angular balcony very unlike the ones on this side, a woman was watering geraniums. There were more trees in the street than cars.

“You can come every weekend,” said Cosette.

Going downstairs, we met Diana Castle and a boy coming up. Their appearance had been heralded by the front door slamming and making the house shake, shivering on its spine of stairs. Diana kissed Cosette and to my surprise the boy did too. They went on up into the room that became known as the room of the “Girl-in-Residence.” Who coined the expression I don’t know, perhaps Cosette herself. The door up there slammed too. Cosette smiled in a way I knew meant she was glad Diana could make herself at home in her house.

She said to me, “I like the idea of having a girl living here. I’d like it to be you, but until it can be I’ll have someone else. People do seem to like it here. I
am
pleased.”

Diana was supposed to look after Cosette a bit, do some shopping, clear up after parties, count and pack up the laundry, things like that, but not cleaning. Perpetua did the cleaning. But if Diana started off doing these tasks, she soon gave it up, just as her successors did. With the best will in the world it is almost impossible to wash dishes, tidy up, go down to the shops, when someone (the someone you are doing it for and in lieu of rent) keeps telling you not to bother, to leave it, that it isn’t important, but to sit down and talk to her instead. Already an enormous untidiness, a jumble-sale clutter, had begun to accumulate in the house around Cosette, covering the surfaces and lying in heaps on the floors. But it was a somehow pleasing disorder, it was the kind of delightful mess that puts visitors at ease.

A great deal of it was strewn across the large circular rosewood table at which Cosette had been sitting when I arrived, at which I was to learn she sat for a large part of every day. It was the reception point of her salon, the place from which she held court. I remembered this table from Wellgarth Avenue, where, with two leaves inserted in its center and twelve chairs around it, it had nearly filled the dining room. There it had been kept polished to an immaculate glassiness. This gloss was already dimmed, the surface already marked with white rings and dull rings, water spots, the indentations made by handwriting on thin paper without a pad beneath. And this somehow, of all the observable changes in Cosette’s style of living, more than anything expressed to me the break she had made with the past, the revolution in her life.

And of course, because this is the way with human beings, I felt a twinge of fear and more than a twinge of resentment. When we are young we want ourselves to change, but everyone and everything else to remain the same. She didn’t mention Douglas. Perhaps that wasn’t unnatural, but by no oblique word or hint or adumbration did she refer to her loss or her widowed state. There was no photograph of him in the house that I could see or ever did see. Later that day we went into her bedroom, a lavish boudoir newly furnished with a big oval-shaped bed, a Hollywood-style dressing table, the circular mirror surrounded by light bulbs, Chinese screens in ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The rich-man’s-bride furniture of Wellgarth Avenue, such as the honeymoon bed with its frilly white canopy, was distributed about the house, a piece here, a piece there, a couple of chairs for Auntie, the bed itself, stripped of its flounces, donated to the Girl-in-Residence. The silver-framed photographs Cosette now had were of me, of her St. John’s Wood brother and sister-in-law, and a niece’s wedding.

That evening people came, all of them young, students, hippies, I suppose. Someone must have set this influx in motion, started it off. Cosette can hardly have advertised or stood in the street crying the house’s amenities like a barker. Perhaps Diana was the moving spirit behind it originally and her friends told their friends. I think even then I knew they came because it was free, what they got there, drink, at any rate tea and sometimes wine, food if they wanted it, unlimited cigarettes, talk or silence, and an offer if not of a bed, of a floor to sleep on. But it was also because of Cosette herself, her capacity for loving. She should have had ten children.

These people came like the flies came to Auntie’s flypaper, lured by the sweetness of the gum, but unlike those flies paying no penalty for their attraction. And Cosette sat at her table with the books on it and the phone books, the sheets of paper, the empty cups and glasses, the phone and the radio, the dying flowers in the vase, her bulging handbag, glasses, cigarettes, powder compact, and her nail varnish, but no biscuits or chocolates because she had to retain her new figure. For Cosette was looking for a lover.

I didn’t know it then, I couldn’t have guessed. To me she looked like these people’s mother, an impossibly indulgent one of course, for what mother in the late sixties would have permitted a daughter to take a boyfriend off to bed or a son to roll a joint and, as it was passed round, partake of it? These things Cosette not only allowed but seemed positively to promote with her all-permissive smile. Did she smile with greater warmth on those passive bearded boys, the silent one who sat with bent head over Kahlil Gibran or the frenetic one who for hours on end plucked tuneless vibrations from a guitar? If she did, I would have attributed her smile to some other cause; I would never have guessed at a loneliness and an almost agonized longing that made her consider boys thirty years her junior as potential lovers. It was only later, at Christmas, when by a miracle we actually found ourselves alone together one evening, that she explained to me. It was then she talked about being a “manizer,” about stealing husbands.