The House of Stairs (17 page)

“I’m just an ordinary working fellow,” he said in that voice that was like the
Playboy of the Western World,
that was like Christy Mahon’s.

“What,” I said, with incredible insensitivity, “does any of that matter?”

Later on I made him read that bit out of Synge about the holy bishops straining the bars of paradise to catch a glimpse of Helen of Troy, and her walking abroad with a nosegay in her golden shawl. Only he couldn’t read it very well, he stumbled over the words, and I had to help him. Oh, I have been too fond of literature one way and another, and produced too little of it myself!

So when I came back to the House of Stairs there was Dominic waiting for me like a husband, calling me “dear” and telling me he had changed the sheets on the bed for my homecoming. And my heart sank as had begun to happen whenever he came home to me or I to him, for I had wanted a sensuous, tumultuous adventure lasting a few weeks and he, it grew ever more obvious, wanted an exclusive lifetime’s partnership. Cosette, romantic and with that Wife of Bath side to her, who had rather encouraged our affair in the beginning as she would have encouraged almost any affair, especially one between the young and good-looking, now saw it all.

“The next thing will be he’ll want you to marry him,” she said. “In Brompton Oratory, I expect, or even the cathedral.”

“I thought it was women who clung and men who wanted to be off,” I almost wailed. “How can someone look like Don Giovanni and have the soul of a milkman?”

“You can’t judge a sausage by its overcoat,” said Cosette.

She had shifted her enthusiasm from my sex life to my career, or at any rate to my immediate project. The idea that I should write a book in her house was delicious to Cosette. What kind of book hardly mattered. Almost without critical judgment, she came close to worshiping anything made by someone she was fond of. Thus, Diana’s typing was the fastest and most accurate in London, Gary was the world’s greatest virtuoso of the sitar, and the section of the underground tunnel dug out by Dominic was the best bit. To her the only flaw in my writing project was my insisting on having a job as well, though working in an after-school play center wasn’t much of a job, and if I am honest about it I shall have to admit it brought me in enough to live on only because I lived rent free.

The writing room was created in secret during the two or three hours I spent at work in the early evening. It was almost the only room in the house vacant at that time. Gary and Mervyn having one each, Dominic his and I mine—I had never consented to move in permanently with him—Cosette with her grand chamber, and Birgitte, the new Girl-in-Residence, a real au pair girl this time, in Fay’s old room. The top floor of the attic, where the high, balconyless window was, remained unfurnished, an depository for cardboard crates and tea chests. The room Cosette and Perpetua prepared for me was directly below this one, its window having one of those narrow balconies without a railing that overlooked the gray garden.

A quiet woman with an intense devotion to Cosette, Perpetua would have probably done anything she asked, did in fact put herself out tremendously for her, traveling all that distance daily by bus and cleaning up after a troop of careless, untidy people. Otherwise I doubt if she would have consented to carry furniture upstairs for my benefit, lay carpet and hang curtains for me. She saw what everyone but poor Dominic now saw, that I had been using him and was not in the least in love. And twenty years his senior, a sister grown up before he was born, she resented it as a mother might. Her resentment took the curious form of her ceasing to use my Christian name when she spoke to me. How I was to recall this later when the woman who failed to use my name meant so much, so infinitely much, more to me!

Instead of, “Coffee’s ready, Elizabeth,” she would say, “There’s coffee if you want it,” or, calling upstairs, “Are you there?” and waiting until the appropriate voice answered.

The desk was delivered and the typewriter unearthed and dictionaries placed in a new bookcase. I stood and admired, was effusive in my gratitude. Cosette, a good as well as a generous giver, took a simple, innocent pleasure in being thanked and enjoyed an enthusiastic reception of her gifts. It was then that I said how much I should like a dictionary of classical Greek (which I intended to teach myself and later did) and then that Cosette promised me one for Christmas, failing, producing instead a modern Greek dictionary, and earning from me those unkind reproaches I am forever ashamed of having made.

So that winter, the winter that was the bridge from the sixties into the seventies, I sat down to write my novel, beginning on a glorious day at the end of October when it was as hot as midsummer. With the example of Henry James before me, knowing James as thoroughly as I did, I might have at least tried to write something that was an examination of the human heart, but I didn’t. I wanted money, I was after the fast buck, the quick return, because I was an inheritor of Huntington’s chorea and I had to live while I could, I had to have it all now. So I embarked on a cheap, sexy, romantic adventure story about people of the kind I had never met and set in places I had never been to but could mug up well enough for my purposes from travel books and other people’s novels. That is the sort of book I have been writing ever since.

Cosette treated my endeavors with reverence. In her eyes I had become almost overnight an “artist” and she had the attitude the French have toward those who create, almost irrespective of what they create. My work must be looked on by others as the most important activity going on in the house; they must creep up the stairs, forbear to play their records and musical instruments, lower their voices, and never, never interrupt me by coming to my door. Naturally, after a while, this discipline slackened and the old hubbub returned, but Cosette herself never changed, continuing to treat me in this area of my life in a way appropriate to a Balzac, say, or at any rate Graham Greene.

One afternoon, when I had been writing for most of the day and was nearly due to go off to my play-center job, I had a phone call from Felicity Thinnesse. She sounded excited and distrait.

“I got your number from Elsa. The woman whose house you’re living in, she takes paying guests, doesn’t she?”

I was unreasonably incensed. Poor Felicity of course had asked me in good faith, probably like most people being unable to imagine anyone giving board and lodging to a host of freeloaders like Gary and Mervyn and Fay and Birgitte.

“Why do you ask?”

“I’ve left Esmond. Well, I will have left him when I’ve found somewhere to go. I have to find a room.”

I don’t know why I thought of the children. I remembered Miranda repeating her mother’s strictures on right behavior. “For three of you?” I said doubtfully.

“I can’t cope with Jeremy and Miranda. They’ll stay with Esmond. Then,” Felicity added very oddly, “he won’t have so much to make a fuss about.”

I told her I would ask Cosette, promising to call her back “before Esmond gets home or after he’s gone out to the Conservative Association.”

I found Cosette in the drawing room accompanied only by Auntie and Maurice Bailey from Wellgarth Avenue. Now that he was a widower he would spend a lot of time pottering about in Harrods and the big Kensington High Street stores, and at teatime take a taxi through the park and look in on Cosette for half an hour. The purpose of these visits seemed to be to make comments on the wretchedness of Cosette’s lifestyle by contrast to what she might have had. Therefore the question I had to ask Cosette only served to inflame him further. I made it in his presence because I knew, or thought I knew then, that Cosette rather enjoyed what Felicity would have called “winding him up.”

“Another sponger,” he said. “This place must be notorious as the local doss-house.”

Auntie, enjoying it, looked timidly from one to the other of them. Cosette appeared rather splendid in a totally unsuitable blue brocade caftan. Since the departure of Ivor Sitwell she had been wearing less makeup and had regained some of her lost weight, so that she looked younger and quite well and flourishing. Her hair was by then a very pale silvery blonde. I told her, quoting Wilde, that at the loss of Ivor it had turned quite gold from grief, and she liked this so much that she repeated it to everyone. Now, mildly to rile Maurice Bailey, she began to enthuse over the coming of Felicity.

“Of course you must tell her she can come here, darling. How awful to be obliged to stay with a man because you’ve nowhere to go. Can you imagine?”

“I’ll call her back, then, shall I?”

“Yes, do that, and tell her she’ll be most welcome. I don’t know where we’ll put her, one of the rooms at the top, I suppose. Perpetua will organize that, you know how marvelous she is. Don’t look at me like that, Maurice.” She put one of her beautiful hands out to him, lightly touching his jacket sleeve. Unused all her life, Cosette’s hands were still girlish, plump and white, taper fingered, with nails like blanched almonds, heavily beringed. “Maurice,” she cajoled, “haven’t you a smile for me? Felicity will pay me rent, you know, or at least she’ll make it up in kind. There’ll be all sorts of little jobs for her to do.”

As there were for Mervyn and Gary, who had long since ceased to carry out their functions of floor polishing and car cleaning; as there were for Birgitte, the Danish au pair, who, perfectly willing to work for her living when first she arrived, had rapidly been persuaded by her employer that there was nothing for her to do, told it was a shame for someone so young and pretty not to have a good time while she could, and why not enjoy herself in Carnaby Street and down the King’s Road?

So Felicity came a few days later. Subdued and chastened at first, fearful that Esmond would find out where she was and come after her, she took to Cosette immediately and poured out her heart to her. A tête-à-tête was virtually impossible, there were always too many people around for that. People used to follow Cosette into her bedroom at some ungodly hour of the morning, at three or four, and continue their conversations or their musical renderings sitting on her bed. But Felicity, undeterred, would commandeer Cosette, corner her and talk, sometimes sprawling at her feet with her head in Cosette’s lap, sometimes opposite her at the table, leaning forward, gazing into her eyes, and snatches of what she said would reach the rest of us, or those who cared to listen, isolated words and phrases: “my bloody husband,” “his old bitch of a mother,” “prison,” “buried alive,” “living death,” “frustration,” “pain,” “misery.”

At that period there were living in the House of Stairs Cosette, myself, Dominic, Mervyn, Gary, Birgitte, Mervyn’s girlfriend Mimi, Auntie, and now Felicity. Nine people. At Christmas Diana Castle and the man she lived with came up to stay for the holiday and stayed on for several weeks. That made eleven. Those two were obliged to bed down in sleeping bags on the floor of the top front room. Cosette, of course, was prepared to buy a bed to accommodate her visitors, except that no one, not least the shop delivery people, could be found willing to carry it up a hundred stairs. Even Perpetua rebelled, saying darkly that any more lifting would give her a prolapse.

She and Dominic had transported a convertible sofa bed upstairs for Felicity, for which service they each got extravagant praise and a fiver from Cosette. The room was the one above what Cosette called my “sanctum,” and Felicity, when she arrived, was very politely requested to be “as quiet as a mouse” during the sacred hours of ten till three, while I was working. It had once been for a maid or maids and was a shabby chamber with sloping ceiling, very different from the rooms on the lower floors. By the look of the walls and woodwork, no one had painted it since the house was built. Cosette was all for getting Gary to paint it before Felicity moved in and gave him some sort of extravagant payment in advance, but in fact it was a long time before he got around to the painting and by then Felicity had gone back to Esmond and her children.

A few days in the House of Stairs and of confiding in Cosette set her up splendidly and she was soon her old self, teasing, fascinated by everything, censorious, dispensing useless, inconsequential information, contemptuous of the slower witted. I was invited up to her room to look at the view and pronounce on whether the dome she could see was Whiteley’s or the Greek Orthodox Church. That window was alarming when you stood close up to it and looked out. Even worse when you looked down through the sheer drop of forty feet or so to the garden, its gray-leaved plants sodden with rain or nipped by frost. Directly below the window was an area paved with York stone that Cosette called the terrace and Perpetua the patio. Somehow the window would have been less frightening if there had been lawn beneath it or a flower bed.

Felicity said she had been out of the window onto the narrow ledge. You have to understand that this was a window, not a glass door or pair of doors, but coming very low down, to no more than six inches or so from the floor, a sash window that could be opened to create an aperture four feet deep either at the top or the bottom. Outside, Felicity said, on the stone or ashlar or whatever it was surrounding the window frame, there were deep holes, each with a trickle mark of iron stain under it, to which, she was sure, the bars of some kind of cage or grille had once been attached. It was long gone by Cosette’s time. We speculated as to why the foot of the window should be so close to the floor, and Felicity suggested, rightly no doubt, that at some time the floor had been raised. For soundproofing? To make a greater space between the floor of this room and the ceiling of the room below? Because the maids, rising early, might have disturbed a sleeper in the “sanctum”?

“No one ever opened their windows in those days,” Felicity said very sweepingly, and lingering with relish over the word, “so there wouldn’t have been any risk of defenestration.”

I don’t believe I had come across the word before. “Haven’t you ever heard of the Defenestration of Prague?” said Felicity. “I expect that was when it was first used.
Defenestratio
would be the Latin, you know. It was in the Thirty Years War. Some Protestants threw two Catholic bishops out of a window in Prague, but they weren’t really hurt; they fell into the moat.”