The House of Stairs Read Online Free PDF

least suited to someone of Cosette’s type. She should have worn floaty dresses, cloaks, and draperies. Later on she did, and not always to happy effect. On the shopping expeditions it was underwear she bought for herself, cruel ineffective girdles and slips of shiny pastel satin, clumping lace-up shoes with two-inch heels, blouses with big bows at the neck to show between the lapels of those worsted suit jackets.
    As I grew older I, who had never judged Cosette but loved her in a simple unquestioning way, became critical of her appearance. I never put this into words, or at least not into words I uttered to her. Sometimes, though, I am afraid I would make these comments to my friends and there would be giggling in corners. Cosette was one of those people whom others laugh at secretly, behind their backs. How cruel that it should be so, how painful! I wince as I form the words. But I am trying to tell the whole truth and it was true that when I brought a friend home (you see how I was then thinking of Garth Manor as home) and Cosette appeared, flushed and hot perhaps, untidy as she often was, that bird’s nest of graying gold hair a mass of fluff and strands, collapsing and shedding pins, the hem of a silk blouse escaping from the waistband of a tailored skirt too tight over her jutting stomach—then we would glance at each other and giggle with sweet soft contempt.
    Quite often, and especially when Douglas was away on a business trip, Cosette would take me and the friend out to dinner in Hampstead. First, though, a preening session took place in her huge and sumptuous bedroom (white four-poster with organza-covered tester, curtains festooned and window seat cushioned, dressing table with organza petticoat and triptych mirrors). There in her admiring presence we tried on, like little girls, the clothes Cosette no longer wore, her fur capes and stoles and scarves, belts and artificial flowers and jewels. I always took care never verbally to admire, for I knew from experience what the result would be. But my friend, out of ignorance or concupiscence, exclaimed, “Oh, I love it! Isn’t it lovely? Doesn’t it look nice on me?”
    And Cosette would say, “It’s yours.”
    It was among these treasures of Cosette’s that I first saw the bloodstone. It was a ring, the dark green stone flecked with red jasper embedded in a setting of densely woven gold strands. A ring for a strong hand with long fingers, Cosette said it was, and when she put it on it looked clumsy on her very feminine hand with the shiny pink nails.
    “It belonged to Douglas’s mother,” she said. I knew what had become of Douglas’s mother and the cause of her premature death, but said nothing. I only smiled, the smile that grows stiff as the lips are held unwillingly stretched. “She was born in March,” said Cosette, “and heliotrope is the birthstone for March.”
    “I thought heliotrope was a flower,” said my friend.
    And Cosette smiled and said, “Heliotrope is anything that turns to face the sun.”
    I may not have been as kind to her as she was to me, but I loved her, I always loved her. The nastiness of adolescence is ironed out as the senior teens are reached and, just as I now regret with a kind of agony the lack of compassion I had for my mother, so then I looked back with shame on my laughter and contempt. I was able to feel relief that Cosette had never known. For she asked nothing from those she loved except to be able to trust them. Perhaps that is not nothing, perhaps it is a great deal. I don’t know, I can’t say. She only wanted to feel she could surrender herself, her heart and mind, into the loved person’s keeping and be safe there, not be betrayed. Years later, when I saw a college production of The Maid’s Tragedy, two lines especially struck me, reminding me of her: “Those have most power to hurt us, that we love. We lay our sleeping lives within their arms.”
    Douglas she could trust. Whatever earlier doubts about