The House of Stairs (9 page)

I do reply. I say in a silly, faint, mealymouthed sort of way, “Not then.”

“Well, no, not then, of course. But at the time of the trial? I mean when all those other things about Bell’s past came out. It did mine, I can tell you. And I knew all about his games. I knew all about what he got up to and his drinking and I still thought Bell might have shot him. Oh, Elizabeth, I wish we could meet and really talk this through. I mean it’s fascinating, don’t you think? Are you ever down in this neck of the woods?” Mercifully, she goes on without waiting for an answer. “No, I don’t suppose you are. We shall have to meet in London sometime. We still have the flat, but of course you know that if you’ve talked to Miranda. Look, I’ll call you back without fail and give you that number and then we can fix something. I can’t promise when but it’ll be today absolutely without fail. Good-bye till later. We’ll speak again soon.”

She has always had that power of exhausting those she is with or just talking to. With some people it may be enjoyable, but it is also a wearisome battle to be in their company. And there are others, like Cosette, who revive their companions, revitalize them, leave them feeling restored and content simply by their own attentive listening and ability to ask the right small questions at the right time. When I got home from Thornham after the death of Silas Sanger—and Elsa and I were peremptorily dispatched by Lady Thinnesse on the following day—I gave an account of all of it to Cosette. And she listened, she was interested, she seemed really to want to know. By that time Elsa and I together with Paula and Felicity’s sister had been amply regaled by Felicity on the subject of Silas’s games.

Silas had two guns, a twelve-bore shotgun and a Colt revolver, which he claimed to have bought from a stall-holder in the Portobello Road market, a man who sold silver. He had a passion for guns, which was not easy to gratify in this country where to collect guns and have the appropriate license and so forth you have to be a respectable person with no criminal record and one who doesn’t mind visits from the police. Silas, of course, had no gun license. Felicity told us he used to play Russian roulette with the Colt and that was the least of his games.

“They don’t kill themselves, those people, but they don’t care for their lives the way the rest of us do. They do reckless things, they tempt fate.” I thought she looked wistful, as if she rather hankered after being that kind of person herself. “You know how Carmen goes to the most dangerous places, sets herself out to get the dangerous men?” We didn’t know. I, at least, had never heard
Carmen
then, not even on records. “And at the end she doesn’t have to get herself killed, she can easily avoid it, but she’s too proud to avoid it and, anyway, what else is there for her?”

Was Felicity saying Silas was like that? And if you take the analogy with Carmen as far as she took it, to the end of the last act, what was she implying?

She said Silas liked to play firing squads. It was never quite clear whether she had been the partner in these games or had only heard of them. If she had been, I could understand she might not want the rather straitlaced High Anglican Esmond Thinnesse to know about it, and therefore could not risk telling us. What she did tell us was that Silas would get his woman, in this case presumably Bell, to gag him and tie him up, he having previously loaded one of the guns, the Colt or the shotgun. She wouldn’t be told which one was loaded. She was to choose one and shoot him as a member of a firing party might do. Of course neither Bell nor her predecessors were good shots; he had taught them the basics of handling a gun and that was all. Felicity said that after her affair with Silas came to an end she met him once with his arm in a sling and he said he had been shot. She concluded some woman had picked the right (or the wrong) gun, but the shot had gone a bit wide.

He never shot animals or birds, that didn’t interest him, and he was a vegetarian. Another one of his games was to get his girls to shoot at a target with the aim of improving their marksmanship, and just as whoever it was—and I believe at least once it was Felicity herself—took aim and fired, he would dash across in front of the target. He liked the naked terror, the loss of control, the screams.

“But was it something like this he had been doing that last time?” asked Cosette.

“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows.”

“This girl called Bell must know.”

“If she does, I don’t think she’ll tell.”

We walked across to the cottage, Esmond, Bell, and I, through the wind and darkness. Can it really have been so dark at four o’clock even in December? I remember it as dark and the shock I felt at seeing the cottage in darkness, at observing that Bell had left no lights on. She had not at any rate locked the front door but left it on the latch as the front door to Thornham Hall was always left. We went in and lights were switched on and there was Silas Sanger lying dead on the floor.

I think it was at this point Esmond realized I was there. You see, no one had spoken a word since we came out of the Hall. Esmond realized and turned to me and said something about it not being right for me to be there, for me to see such things. But by then it was much too late. I had seen and Esmond had seen and he had gone very pale.

It might have been worse. I remember thinking that.

Silas’s face was intact. He had shot himself through the neck, severing, it later transpired, the spinal cord. He lay in a lake of blood and his face reminded me of paintings I had seen—they are legion—of John the Baptist, or rather the head of John the Baptist, in a dish of blood, being held by Salome. His face was a translucent greenish white, white-lipped, the red-brown curly hair and beard and moustache looking very soft and somehow young. I thought I could look at this dead man with detachment, with simple interested curiosity, and I had no feelings of nausea, no physical revulsion. Or so I thought until my knees sank earthward and a terrible faintness overcame me. I don’t think the others saw. I sat down and breathed deeply, my eyes closed, and heard Esmond say, “What happened?”

“He’d been playing with the Colt. It’s there on the floor, in the—in the blood. He said he was going to fire it once, out of the window. To see what happened. He meant to see if you’d come out, I think.” When Felicity, later, was telling us about Silas’s games she also told us that his indiscriminate letting off of the Colt and the shotgun was the reason for the quarrel between him and the Thinnesses. Esmond had been horrified, had had no idea of Silas’s propensities. Silas must go and at once. The difficulty was that he and Bell had nowhere to go. And now she had nowhere to go. “I went upstairs then,” she said. “The bugger didn’t fire out of the window. He was playing Russian roulette instead.”

She was very calm. It was despair, perhaps. She sat down on the only other chair in the room, looked at me, and performed that action known as casting up the eyes, a curiously inadequate gesture in the circumstances. It suggested not so much shock or grief as exasperation. That day she was dressed in assorted garments of browns and grays—Bell’s clothes were never like other people’s, though a few years later they were to become wildly fashionable in the alternative mode—and the bundled layers were caught in at her thin, stalklike waist by what looked like a luggage strap. There was blood on her left sleeve.

She said to Esmond, “Cover him up!”

Esmond looked around the room for something to serve the purpose. It was a sparsely furnished, squalid little room with linoleum on the floor and cutoff pieces of carpet serving as rugs, two upright chairs and a horsehair sofa, a gateleg table with a broken leg propped up on a flowerpot, and bookshelves made of planks resting on bricks. A shawl, hand-crocheted in shades of mud and granite, obviously Bell’s, was draped over the back of the sofa, and this Esmond covered the body with, an action for which the police later reprimanded him. But everything felt better; the atmosphere didn’t exactly lighten, yet it was like a sigh of relief. It was possible to keep one’s eyes open, to breathe, now that the face and that awful neck were hidden.

“You had better come back to the house,” Esmond said to Bell. “You had better let Elizabeth take you back. I’ll stay here.”

“I’m staying here,” she said.

I went back alone and in a few minutes the police came. Cosette, when I told her all this, asked me what Bell was like to look at and then what age she was. She had become, I noticed, very interested in other women’s ages.

“Like an actress in a Bergman film.”

Cosette, dating herself, revealing the preoccupations of her own youth, mistook my meaning. “Ah, yes.
Intermezzo. Casablanca.”

“Ingmar,” I said. It was the era of the director. No one any longer knew the names of stars. “Like a Swedish actress, tall and thin and with a long neck but very soft features, a little straight nose and full lips, big eyes. Masses of sort of dusty fair hair. About, I don’t know, twenty-five?”

“As young as that?” said Cosette.

I thought she meant Bell was very young to have experienced so much, and perhaps she did. But it was from this time, I believe, that Cosette’s obsession with age began to grow. It was as if she had slept away her life, or most of it, and had woken up in a panic to find it gone and irrevocable. The sad, wistful look came into her face. It had nothing to do with her grief over Douglas and not much to do with the sagging of facial muscles, which came later. It was a change wrought in her by that awakening. I think she saw Bell in her mind’s eye and thought that to be twenty-five again and tall and beautiful would be worth any amount of suffering and tragedy and poverty and deprivation. But of course I don’t know what she thought, I can only guess, I can only hazard ideas about her in the light of what happened later.

“And they sent you home next day?” she said.

“Well, you can understand that. We must have been in the way. They sent everyone home and took Bell into the house and I think they were very nice to her.”

“There would have to be an inquest, wouldn’t there?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps. Yes, of course there would. She told us what happened, you know, later on. She wouldn’t stay in the room with him when he started playing with the gun. She went upstairs and sat in the room where all his paintings were. It must have been very cold, it was icy in that cottage, and there were only oil stoves heating it. He had been drinking, the stuff he usually drank, cheap wine with methylated spirits in it. She told us in a very matter-of-fact way. And the thing was she told all of us, I mean Elsa and Paula and Felicity’s sister and brother-in-law. That didn’t seem to bother her, the fact that we were strangers.

“She sat up there, looking at his paintings. Apparently she had some idea his paintings might be salable; I mean, in the sort of way he would have scorned. Some of the landscapes she thought she could take down to the local pub and ask them if they’d hang them in the bar to see if any of the customers would pay five pounds for one of them. It seems they were desperately poor—to the extent of not getting enough to eat, only he always had his wine. Anyway, she was sitting up there thinking like this when she heard the Colt fired, she heard a shot. It wasn’t specially unusual, that, but what followed was. She heard a sort of gurgle, an awful sound, she said, between a groan and a gurgle. So she went down and she found him, and if he wasn’t dead thirty seconds before, he was by the time she got there.”

Not a very credible story, was it? But I believed it then and Cosette believed it. Cosette wasn’t the sort of person to ask the question Elsa asked me some months later: why couldn’t Bell have got a job if they were so poor? Jobs were to be had then, it was different from now. But I never knew Bell to keep a job of any kind, then or later or ever. A very strange thing happened to make employment for her not essential: a few hours before Silas died his father had died of heart disease. He wasn’t a rich man and he had no savings, but he owned the house he lived in and, though he had made no will, he was a widower and Silas his only child. It came automatically to Bell, for Silas and Bell had been married. She was as much his wife as Felicity was Esmond’s. She sold the house for £10,000 and this sum, when invested, brought her just enough to live on, just enough to scrape by on without working, to hang on by the skin of her teeth.

All this was in the future. I knew nothing of it when I was relating my story to Cosette. I awaited a verdict from her, a summing-up. I meant to receive it, discuss her conclusions, then (on the grounds that it would be good for my psyche) if my mood could be rightly established, confide in her question number five of Felicity’s quiz and confess my foolish tremors, my spontaneous terror. I was so entirely accustomed, you see, to Cosette as listener, Cosette as recipient. When Cosette talked about herself, it was almost an affront. As, instead of pronouncing on the probable fate of Bell or the curious cerebral processes of a man who played firing squads with his wife, she now did: “I have bought a house.”

It was hardly an astounding act but only what everyone expected her to do sooner or later. I looked inquiringly.

“I made an offer for it before I went to Barbados.”

She could have a very childlike look sometimes, the look of a child who expects to be reprimanded. I asked her where this house was.

“It’s in London.” She lived in London already. I waited. “It’s in Notting Hill. You’ll like it, it’s a big tall house on five floors with a staircase of a hundred and six stairs. I counted. I call it the House of Stairs.”

I must have looked rather blankly at her. It all seemed to be out of character, so unlike Cosette, whose two weeks in the heat had reddened her skin but done nothing to reduce her weight. One of her cotton tents enveloped her. The chignon her hair was done up in was very like Bell’s but on her not Fragonard-like, only untidy. The flesh-tinted transparent rims of her glasses had been mended with a piece of sticking plaster. All I could think of was, how was she going to manage climbing all those stairs?

“You won’t have so far to come to see me,” she said.

“Notting Hill?” I said. It was still, at any rate the northern and western parts of it, a slummy, shabby, dirty, and dangerous area of London. The street carnival, an annual event that had begun a few years before, led to trouble, recalling the violence of the riots of the fifties. All Saints Road, black Notting Hill, was known as the Front Line. I asked her why she wanted to live there.