The House of Stairs by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page B

that if anyone does. I should know. Then I remember that these cousins had a pied-à-terre in London, a studio in Chelsea they hardly ever used, the address of which I don’t know, have never known, but in this case that doesn’t matter because these cousins have a name so odd, so unique even, that in any phone book in the entire world anybody named Thinnesse is going to be one of them or closely related to them.
    It is quite hard to pronounce correctly, that is to pronounce with both those middle n’s separately enunciated as Esmond and Felicity always did. “Thinnis” is the best other people usually attain to. I find their Chelsea number in the phone book and dial it and, miracle of miracles, someone actually answers. It is not really a miracle at all, it is only what I should have expected. I knew their children must be in their early twenties by now, must be of an age when people are desperate to find accommodation in London away from parents, hostels, tiny furnished rooms. Perhaps I am not very happy admitting to myself that those Thinnesse babies who were three and six when I first went with Elsa to Thornham Hall are now grown up, are of an age to be taken by shop assistants and waiters for my children, just as once I was taken for Cosette’s child.
    It was the girl who answered my call, the girl Miranda. It is amusing to think that if this girl reads Beatrix Potter to her children it will be because I read Beatrix Potter to her when she was six. Of course we do not mention the Beatrix Potter sessions in the bedroom whose window overlooked the garden of Bell’s cottage. She has forgotten them and I have forgotten everything about them except that they took place and that once, while reading The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, I saw Bell come out into the garden and peg ragged-looking grayish washing out on a clothesline.
    She tells me, this girl Miranda Thinnesse, that her parents still live at Thornham Hall and she gives me their number, a number that I wouldn’t have been able to find in the directory for Outer East London and West Essex (or whatever it is called) because it has recently been changed to deter an anonymous phone caller who said obscene things to Felicity. For all she knows, since she can’t remember ever having heard the name Elizabeth Vetch, I might be the obscene phone caller myself.
    I can’t bring myself to speak Bell’s name to her. As she talks about her parents and her brother and the first her brother has just taken at Cambridge, I tell myself she will never have heard of Bell, her parents will have forgotten Bell. And then she says, what did I want to ask her parents? Did I just want to have a chat? Or was it something about that woman who killed someone—what was she called? Christine something?
    “Christabel Sanger,” I say, and my voice sounds all right, sounds quite normal, as it might if I were speaking any other name, any name at all. And I say it again, to hear myself say it. “Christabel Sanger,” and then, “but we called her Bell, everyone called her Bell.”
    “Did you want to talk to my mother about her?”
    I sound remote, almost indifferent, or I think I do. “I want to ask your mother if she knows where she is living.”
    “Well, all I can tell you is she phoned my mother. She’d just come out of prison, an open prison, I think, and she phoned home. I don’t know why. It was awhile ago now, I mean weeks. I think she phoned a lot of people. My mother could tell you more. Now you’ve got the number why don’t you phone my mother?”
    I say I will and thank her and say good-bye. It is strange what it does to me, this confirmation that Bell is back among us, that it really was Bell I saw. It makes me feel a little sick, nauseous, no longer looking forward to the dinner I am being taken out to. Weeks ago she had phoned Felicity Thinnesse and “a lot of people,” but she hadn’t phoned me. Me she had fled from along the streets of Notting Hill, had hidden from to