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

sun was setting and those tiny clouds colored with pink, came a tall girl too thin and too decorative to be one of Millet’s peasants but having an air about her of some Fragonard woman. This was in the carriage of her elegant head with its crown of soft, fair, untidy piled-up hair, in the length of her narrow neck, in the bunching of her clothes, a long full underskirt, an overskirt clenched in at the waist with a scarf wound round and round, a low-necked blouse, a jacket over it of thin clinging stuff, the sleeves rolled up, a ribbon or two hanging in streamers, the whole in a variety of tones of brownish, pinkish, dusty beige. No such personage ever entered the pages of Beatrix Potter. She carried a tray, not a basket, an ordinary tea tray laden with wet washing, which she proceeded to peg out on the clothesline.
    I paused in my reading and said to Miranda, “Who’s that?”
    On all fours she clambered over me. “That’s Bell.”
    “She lives there with the painter?” Lady Thinnesse’s view had almost unconsciously communicated itself to me.
    “Silas is Mr. Sanger and Bell is Mrs. Sanger. Her washing looks as if it hasn’t been washed, don’t you think?”
    It was all the same sort of light gray and there were big holes in something that might have been a pillowcase. I said it didn’t look very clean, only to be reprimanded by Miranda.
    “I’m not supposed to say that and especially you’re not because you’re grown up. Mummy says it’s despicable to say things about people’s washing being dirty. Go on reading, please.”
    The girl in the garden, the girl called Bell, pegged her clothes out on the line with a kind of weary indifference. You could see her heart was not in it. Her whole stance, her attitude, the way she held her body, spoke of something worse than boredom, of encroaching despair. I had the impression those wet clothes had been lying about all day and at last, at an absurd time to hang out washing, at the close of the day, when the sun was setting, she had forced herself to drag the pile of it out here and rid herself of it, committing it to whatever fate awaited it from the dews of night. The tray empty, the line filled, she stood with the tray held loosely against her, stretched to her full height, gazing down into the valley, raising one hand to shade her eyes from the red sun’s glare in a pose so Fragonard-like that she might have learned it by studying a reproduction in a magazine. But somehow I sensed she had no idea she was observed. Miranda reminded me once more that I was supposed to be reading to her and I reluctantly drew away my eyes.
    The debate party was two days after this and neither of the Sangers came to it. There was a phone in their cottage, according to Miranda, but they had had it cut off or it had been cut off due to nonpayment of the bill. A note was put through the letter-box of the Hall rather late in the afternoon, certainly after the time the cook from Abridge had already arrived. Felicity read it aloud to us with a kind of exasperated resignation. She wasn’t cross, she was amused—disappointed but amused by the way Bell did things like this.
    “‘Felicity: Sorry, we aren’t going to come. I am not equal to it. Yours, Bell.’ She’s proud of always saying what she means, not telling social lies—well, not any lies really.”
    Felicity smiled at us, flinging out palm-upward the hand that was not holding the note. She truly believed Bell never told lies, that Bell told the truth on principle no matter what the cost or how much moral courage was required. She believed this and we, hearing her tone and seeing her expression, believed too. Thus do utterly false testimonials of character and probity spread.
    “She’d hurt someone badly rather than lie to them,” said Felicity. “She’d involve herself in endless trouble. It’s admirable in a way, you have to admire it.”
    Yes, we had to admire it and did. I am not at all sure that Lady Thinnesse and