The House of Stairs Read Online Free PDF Page A

answer in words. It was a slow, mysterious smile that overspread her face, vague and gentle, but it somehow always put an end to further probing. I got it into my head then, for no reason, that Douglas had married Cosette without telling her of his inheritance. There was no foundation for this belief, you understand; I read it or thought I read it in her rueful eyes, in a kind of resignation. Adolescents do that, weave impossible romances around the lives of their older friends. I taught myself to believe Douglas had deceived Cosette, denied her children when it was too late for her to retreat, had attempted to compensate by showering her with opulence. That winter they went to Trinidad and I went home, where I found myself watching my mother in an almost clinical way. One day she dropped a wineglass and I screamed. My father came up to me and smacked my face.
    It was a light slap, not painful, but I received it as an assault.
    “Never do that again,” he said.
    “And you never do that again to me.”
    “You had better learn to control yourself. I have had to. In our position you have to.”
    “Our position? What position? You’ve got one position and I’ve got another. I’m the one people are going to scream about, not you.”
    Strong stuff for a fifteen-year-old. In the spring I went back to Cosette and Garth Manor from where I could walk to school across the Heath Extension and where I had in my large bedroom with its view of the woodlands of North End such luxuries as my own television and electric blanket and bedside phone. Though I must say, in my own defense, that it was not these things which attracted me. Why do young girls, at this particular stage of their development, enjoy the company of an older woman? I should like to think it wasn’t stark narcissism on my part, it wasn’t that Cosette, very nearly thirty years my senior, presented no competition, or that my own good looks showed up more delightfully by contrast to her aging face and body. For as aging I certainly saw her, aged in fact, past hope as a woman and sexual being. The truth was that I had made Cosette into another mother for myself, the mother I had chosen, not had thrust upon me, the mother who listened and who had infinite time to spare, was prodigal with a flattery I believed and still believe sincere.
    In those days she never seemed to mind being taken for my mother. That came later, in Archangel Place, when though she might not express it aloud, the pain she felt and a kind of humiliation at the frequent assumption made that I (or Bell or Birgitte or Fay) was her daughter showed in her eyes and the wry twist of her mouth. But Mrs. Cosette Kingsley of the Townswomen’s Guild, the Wellgarth Residents’ Association, school governor, purveyor of Meals on Wheels, and occasional volunteer social worker, had no such vanities. Sometimes, in the holidays or on Saturdays, we would go shopping together and in Simpson’s or Swan and Edgar, then still dominating the corner between Piccadilly and Regent Street at the Circus, an assistant would sometimes refer to me as her daughter. The same thing happened in the restaurants we dropped into for the cups of coffee Cosette seemed to need every half hour in order to survive.
    “That would suit your daughter,” said an assistant in the Burlington Arcade, and across Cosette’s face would come an almost adoring look of appreciation and pleasure.
    “Yes, that would suit you wonderfully, Elizabeth. Why not try it on?” And then, as happened so often, “Why not have it?” which meant she would buy it for me.
    I had no impression then that she wanted to appear younger than she was. But would I have had, at fifteen? She dressed in suits that she had made by a tailor, an unheard-of thing today, and something that was old-fashioned even then. They were formal suits, “costumes” made of cloth very like that which Douglas himself wore, with square shoulders and box-pleated skirts, the kind of garments