The House of Stairs (16 page)

Of course she was waiting, looking about her, biding her time. That was what she wanted of life. We opened her window on to the white sky, the plane tree with its branches on which pink-bronze pigeons perched, its threadlike twigs and fine silky leaves hanging still in the windless air. We leaned out onto the broad windowsill. So many of my memories of Bell concern windows, sashes, casements, glass and drafts and drops, but there was no draft that summer’s day. The air smelled fresh from Regent’s Park, it smelled like the air of a spoiled countryside. Bell took a tobacco tin from a drawer in the table and, without asking me, taking things for granted, began to roll a joint. It was the first time for me. She showed me how to draw in the smoke and hold it in my lungs until my head began to swim and curiously to expand, and with the exhalation feel the arrival of a deep, tomorrowless peace.

That September Cosette and I went to Italy together. She had meant to go with Ivor, but by that time Ivor had gone.

“You come,” she said to me. “I’d rather it was you than him anyway. Really. I was dreading going with him.”

I had seen Bell a few times. She had been to visit me at the House of Stairs and we had gone to the cinema together, to the old Electric Cinema in the Portobello Road, and I would have liked her to come to Italy with us.

“I’ve only once been to a foreign country,” she had said to me, “and that was to France with Silas. We were at a place called Wissant, which is so near it’s practically England.”

It made me marvel that someone young and fit preferred to forgo so many pleasures rather than work. Bell had enough to live on but not enough for holidays. One word to Cosette and she would have been invited to join us, her fares and hotel bills paid as a matter of course, for it was taken for granted that any friend of mine partook of Cosette’s largesse just as I did. That was the reason why I couldn’t say the word. I couldn’t even mention that Bell had scarcely been abroad or had no holiday plans this year. I even had to go further and, against the grain as it was, say to Cosette, “Bell never wants to leave London. She’s got to make up for those years she was with Silas out in the sticks.”

In Florence, at the Uffizi, hangs Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi. This is the painting most critics have agreed inspired the one Henry James describes in
The Wings of the Dove
as hanging in “the great gilded historic chamber” at Matcham and calls “the pale personage on the wall.” It resembles, of course, the doomed Milly Theale in her “eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck …” with its “face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and high.” It also profoundly resembled Bell.

I wish I could remember whether I saw it there on my first visit to Florence when I went to Italy with Cosette. We must have gone into the Uffizi. I have certainly seen the portrait on subsequent visits, but it is no use, try as I will, I can’t remember whether I saw it that time. It was a print of that portrait that, walking along the Arno with Cosette, near the Trinità bridge, I saw in a shop window. Cosette was struck by the resemblance—remember that only Cosette saw the similarity between Bell’s face and that on my cameo—and, standing in front of the print, said that we should buy it.

I concealed my enthusiasm. Although I knew how sensitive to the wishes and secrets of others Cosette was, how she would readily have fallen in with any plan of mine concerning the fate of the picture, I somehow imagined it framed in stainless steel by the “little man” in Kensington Park Road, hung on the drawing room wall and pointed out to all comers.

“A postcard, then,” Cosette said. “Do you know, I have a dress very much like that somewhere that I had made for the Chelsea Arts Ball. I was supposed to be Lady Jane Grey. I wonder if I could still get into it?”

But Cosette couldn’t find a postcard of Lucrezia Panciatichi. Next morning, while she was still asleep, I went out on my own and bought the print of Bronzino’s painting, which I carried home secretly and for a long while kept in a hiding place.

9

I WAS STANDING IN
front of my small version of this portrait when Bell phoned.

For a long time the print lay in a drawer of that desk Cosette bought me. I had it framed as soon as I could afford things like that and hung it in my bedroom. If Cosette ever saw it, she didn’t remark on it. A little while before the murder I took it down and put it away once more, but I never considered ridding myself of it and it traveled with me, first to the flat I had on Primrose Hill when the House of Stairs was sold, then to Hampstead where it again hung on the wall, out to Cambridge for a year or two during my brief marriage, back to London and this Hammersmith house. Though telling myself I am not superstitious, I nevertheless came to associate displaying it on a wall with the coming of bad things.

All the bad things but one thing have happened to me, yet I have put the picture back in the drawer. But three days ago, in the study here, I took the framed Roiter poster down from the wall and hung up the Bronzino in its stead. It is many years since I have looked at it and I seemed to see among its reds and blacks and golds things I have never observed before, the fact for instance that Lucrezia, though well bejeweled, wears only a single ring and that with a very dark stone in it that may even be a bloodstone. Her hair, whatever Henry James may say, is not really red but a very pale copper color. Of course, he speaks only of a Bronzino, of a pale redheaded lady in red, not of this specific portrait, and he would have known very well how many people sat for Bronzino, that this Florentine mannerist was as distinguished a portraitist as a painter of allegories. Looking at the picture, I was reminded not only of Bell herself but of other aspects of our life when Cosette had the House of Stairs, of Bell’s interest in
The Wings of the Dove,
of her surprising request to hear the plot of it, of the conspiracy.

In a moment, I thought, I will make that phone call. I will call that number on the six-two-four exchange and put an end to the fearful impasse I have been in this past week, for it is nearly a week now, put an end to procrastination and doubt and persuading myself it is too early or too late to phone, that she is bound to be out, that it is too soon, that it is not soon enough, that tomorrow is the best, destined, most appropriate day. Lucrezia was returning my regard with her calm, reposeful look—not “handsome in sadness,” surely, not “livid”—was meeting my eyes with her own large, limpid eyes so that I now saw a resemblance there not only to Bell but also to the young Cosette of early photographs, when the phone rang.

It never crossed my mind it would be Bell. But although all she said, when I had given the number, was “Hello,” I was in no doubt even for a second who it was. My silence was due to the stupefaction of shock, a shock I felt even though I was prepared, even though I had seen her and knew she had asked for me.

“It’s Bell.”

“I know,” I said. “Oh, I know.” I sat down, feeling a sudden great tiredness. It was a few seconds before I realized I had closed my eyes. “I saw you,” I said. “I followed you but you disappeared.”

Bell was never one for explanations if she didn’t want to make them, never one to apologize. It was much later I learned that Felicity Thinnesse had rung her up and told her I wanted to be in touch with her.

“Will you come and see me?” she said.

Which is why I am here facing her now across a room that is very like the room in Walter Admetus’s house where I was first alone with her. There is a bed with a dirty white cotton cover and a table and a wicker chair and a couple of suitcases as well as two tea chests. It is a warm spring day and Bell has opened the window, but no fresh breeze from Regent’s Park penetrates here, there are no plane trees outside and no Georgian terraces. This house is squeezed up against a railway bridge, crushed so close as to be absurd, all light surely excluded from its front bays, while the back rooms, of which this is one, overlook a scrap yard. Bell tells me that when she was first released from the open prison where she served the final year of her sentence, she was obliged to live in a hostel. Then her probation officer found this room for her. This woman has also found her a job. It is due to start next week and is in a shop where the owner has of necessity been told who and what she is.

“I don’t know if I shall be equal to it,” she says, but whether this is because she has scarcely had a job before or because the job is in, of all places, Westbourne Grove, I don’t know and she doesn’t say. She is very changed in appearance, though still slender and straight with that high-held head on her long neck. Her hair is iron gray and coarsened by its graying. A tracery of lines lies on her face as if a cobweb had been spread there, and I remember what James said about the portrait in relation to Milly Theale as “a face … that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own.”

She wears black, a skirt and a sort of tunic that seems to be no more than a length of material with a hole cut for her neck and the sides sewn up, sandals, no stockings. Her legs have become very thin. I haven’t touched her yet, I haven’t shaken her hand or kissed her. Shock prevails, and pity and wonder. Will I ever get used to her? Will I ever be able to say calmly to myself, This is Bell.

When I came to the door and she answered it and brought me up here, when the door was shut, she remembered. All these years she has remembered. And she said to me, “Are you out of the woods yet?”

I was immensely grateful to her. It seemed the greatest kindness, more than any valuable gift.

“Coming to the edge,” I said.

She nodded. I haven’t yet seen her smile. “I often thought about it,” she said. “I used to wonder.”

She sleeps a lot. She told me she couldn’t sleep in prison and since she has been out—over two months had passed before she got up the nerve to phone Felicity—she has slept all night and half the days. “That’s why I mayn’t be equal to this job.”

“I don’t work at all and I never shall,” she had once said to me. “I’m never going to work.”

On the evening I saw her she had been to see the therapist in Shepherds Bush she goes to for her counseling. On the way back she got out of the tube to look at the shop where she is destined to work, vanishing into a tobacconist’s in Queensway as I emerged. For while the rest of us gave up cigarettes in the seventies, Bell still smokes. Living on the social security, she goes without food to buy cigarettes. Her clothes smell of them and her hair and this room, just as they must have done in Admetus’s house, only we all smelled of smoke then, so none of us noticed it.

“Do you mind if I sleep for a while?” she asks me. “You can stay if you like, or go. I know where you are now and you know where I am.”

But as she stretches out on the bed under the open window, as she curls up and lays one hand under the pillow, she reaches out with the other and takes mine. Like a sick person or a child she means me to hold her hand while she sleeps.

When we came back from Italy, Cosette and I, Bell had moved away from Admetus’s house and disappeared. She had gone, leaving no forwarding address, no message for me. To this day I don’t know where she went and I no longer care, it no longer matters. Perhaps she was with a man—or a woman—or the simple truth may have been that she could no longer afford the rent Admetus asked.

Somehow, though, I knew she would reappear and find me, that out of the blue or by some other kind of coincidence we would confront each other again. And yet, apart from Felicity, I knew no one who could be called a friend of Bell’s. I had never then heard her speak of any friend, or, come to that, of mother, father, siblings, any relatives. She had been married, been widowed, had never worked, always spoke her mind with what seemed like transparent honesty, and that was all I knew of her. Whereas, so thoroughly already had I confided in her that she knew all about me, my family and, yes, my horrible inheritance, my dead mother, my special regard for Cosette and hers for me, and even the affair, though I am afraid I called it a relationship in those days, I was having with Dominic.

I shouldn’t have done it, I know that now. It was one thing to flirt with him, to dance with him, quite another, when we all reached home in the small hours after that dinner at the Marco Polo and that visit to Ivor’s club, to go up to his room with him almost as a matter of course. I fancied him, you see. He was so beautiful. It not only didn’t seem important then that he was Perpetua’s brother, a country boy nearly illiterate, naive, lacking in almost any kind of sophistication; I also didn’t even think about it. I must have known he was a devout Catholic, too. Hadn’t I seen him go off to mass every Sunday, every Day of Obligation? I didn’t think of that, either. I made him my lover because he was slim and tall and straight, because he had the bluest eyes I ever saw and the silkiest raven’s-wing hair (the kind that turns gray before any other kind) and a face like one of El Greco’s young clerics. Also, and this is more excusable, because of the terror and the bore, because of the thing that hung over me, so that I believed I must take everything I wanted, do everything, live, before an end was put to living forever.

We were drunk that first time. We didn’t talk. But in the morning we made love again and afterward he said, “How can someone like you love me?”

I felt a little chill, for I didn’t love him, but I didn’t understand then, either. I didn’t understand his simplicity, that from his innocence and his strict life he believed not only that a woman would sleep with a man solely if she loved him, but also that this man would be the one she had chosen forever, to be her life partner, almost as though human beings were as monogamous as certain birds who, imprinted in early youth with the image of a mate, remain exclusively bonded to this one for always. Instead, I asked him what he meant. Humble, shy, without self-confidence, his attitude of mind entirely at odds with his splendid, even arrogant, looks, he said that I was clever, educated (had “been to college” was what he said), was of a “different class.”