The House of Stairs

The House of Stairs Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: The House of Stairs Read Online Free PDF
Author: Ruth Rendell
that I had manufactured, he had never deceived her. He had loved her and made her safe and in exchange she had only to accept the way of life he had imposed on her: the neighbors to dinner and dinner with the neighbors, meetings of the Wellgarth Society in her dining room, Perpetua coming daily to clean, Maggie to cook, and Jimmy to weed the lilies, a view of North End in one direction and the Heath Extension in the other, inexhaustible money and unending placidity, Dawn Castle running in to drop platitudes from clacking lips, a surrogate child, and six bedrooms. Of course it was not unending, nothing is. Cosette was fond of a story supposedly about the dying Buddha and I often heard her tell it in that soft, unhurried voice.
    “His disciples came to him and said, ‘Master, we can’t bear to lose you, how can we live when you’ve left us? At least give us some word of comfort to help us after you have gone.’ And the Buddha said, ‘It changes.’”
    I used to smile because nothing ever changed for Cosette. Or so it seemed in those years while I lived most of the time with her and Douglas, her life an unvarying round of small, pleasant tasks, the high spots those holidays in conventionally exotic places, her excitements the dressmaker’s delivery of a new evening gown for some livery company dinner or, I selfishly flattered myself, my own satisfactory A-level results. It changes, but in some lives change is a long time coming.
    One autumn morning, when the traffic was particularly heavy in Hampstead and the Rolls-Royce stationary in the queue above Belsize Park station, Douglas looked up from the document he had been reading, laid his head back against the seat and died.
    The driver knew nothing about it. Douglas was not in the habit of talking to him unless something untoward happened and a traffic jam would not qualify as that. He had heard a sigh from the back of the car and a sound like throat clearing, which was later how they were able to pinpoint the time at which death came. When they were down in the City, in Lombard Street, the driver came round to open the door and saw him reclining there with his head back as if asleep. He touched him and the skin of his face already felt unnaturally cool.
    Douglas was fifty-three and therefore had almost certainly passed the time when his inheritance could have appeared in him. His death had nothing to do with this particular hereditary disease, for it was quick and merciful, not the long drawn-out torture that awaited my mother. Some kind of vascular catastrophe had wrecked his heart. The doctor told Cosette it happened so fast he would have known nothing about it.

3
    THEY STOOD IN THE rain, Cosette and her brothers and their wives, a reception line of mourners under black umbrellas. Douglas, naturally, had had no brothers or sisters. We shook hands with the brothers and sisters-in-law and kissed Cosette on her cheek. I saw everyone else do this, so I did it too. I was there at Golders Green Crematorium with my father, my mother being past going to funerals by that time, or indeed going anywhere. A great many relatives of Cosette’s were pointed out to me, but there was only one member of Douglas’s family there apart from myself, his and my cousin Lily, an unmarried civil servant, who at the age of fifty was so deliriously happy at realizing she must now have escaped the scourge that even on an occasion like this she could scarcely suppress bubbling high spirits. She came up to my father and laid a hand on his arm.
    “Tell me, how is poor Rosemary?”
    No one ever asked a man after the health of his dying wife in more cheerful tones. Me she eyed with unconcealed speculation, for she knew, none better, that you can’t get it unless one of your parents has it, that if the parent who carries the gene reaches fifty without it, you too will never get it.
    Perpetua, who was there with a grown-up son, had told me when I called to see Cosette that she had screamed and sobbed
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