The House of Stairs by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

original one comes in the category of disappointing things, she said, the things that are so much smaller and more insignificant than we expect.
    “The Mona Lisa,” Mervyn said.
    Gary said, “The Commons Chamber, a little green box.”
    “Niagara Falls,” I said, “especially now that they can turn them off.”
    “The Central Criminal Court,” said Marcus.
    We all looked at him.
    “The Old Bailey, to you,” he said. “Inside. It’s little, it’s not imposing. You expect something much grander.”
    Strange, aren’t they, these remarks of appositeness, of lighthearted, mild cleverness, uttered without thought that they may have an awful appropriateness, with no knowledge of the long shadows they cast before them?
    “When were you at the Old Bailey, Mark?” Cosette asked him, and she looked so concerned that we laughed. Well, Bell didn’t laugh, but the rest of us did. I think Bell had stopped laughing by this time. Mark said a friend of his who was a journalist, a crime reporter, had got him in. It was a manslaughter case, a man had killed his girlfriend.
    “I thought it would be awe inspiring,” said Mark. “I wasn’t exactly disappointed. I kept thinking about people being there on criminal charges and how it would make them feel less frightened, not more.”
    “And would that be a good thing?” Bell stared intently at him.
    “Of course it would be a good thing,” he said. “Of course it would.”
    In the room where I work is a pen jar made of agate, a hollowed-out lump of red and purple and brown and green striped stone, which Cosette brought back from a holiday in Scotland, and in it, among the pens, is a curious paper knife whose handle, also striped in those colors but somehow a different kind of stripes, Cosette swore was carved out of a heather root. Or a bundle of compressed heather stalks or a fossilized heather root, something like that. In this room too is a cigarette lighter with a blue-and-white Wedgwood base that Cosette gave me because she had it and I saw it and said I liked it. The old generous “It’s yours” response, which savors of the lavish hospitality of some clan chieftain or head of an emirate. On a table in the corner is the old manual typewriter on which I wrote my first book at Archangel Place. This machine, a Remington, had belonged to Douglas. When I said I meant to write a book Cosette got a room ready for me, without telling me in advance, she just got it ready for me, she and Perpetua, and led me up there, showing it to me proudly, the desk she had bought in the Portobello Road, the swivel chair, the sofa for “resting between chapters, darling,” and on the desk the ream of paper, the agate jar full of sharpened pencils, ballpoint pens, the heather-root paper knife, and Douglas’s typewriter.
    I no longer use it. I use an electronic one, not having yet moved on to a word processor. Douglas’s waits there for when I run out of cassettes for the electronic one, or it breaks down, or for the power cuts that seldom come, though they were frequent enough in the Archangel Place days. The bookcases in this house contain a lot of books Cosette gave me. A complete Remembrance of Things Past, a complete Dance to the Music of Time, the complete novels of Evelyn Waugh. A whole set of the novels of Henry James, with The Wings of the Dove present, showing no sign of special wear, bearing no marks of time or pressure or pain. But why should it? It was not this copy in tooled blue leather, stamped with gold print, that Bell picked up and looked at, idly turning the pages, inquiring of me indifferently what it was about, Bell who never read anything more demanding than the Evening News or a fortune-teller’s manual.
    The Complete Works of Kipling, the Macmillan red-leather edition, tooled in gold. How Cosette loved sequences and sets! They enabled her to spend more money, be more giving, to overwhelm with a multiplicity of gifts. A dictionary of obscure quotations, a