The House of Stairs Read Free

Cosette had bought it, the house was painted the dull green of a cabbage leaf but the stonework remained its natural cream color, as it still is now. The windows, five sets of them above ground level and one below, you can see for yourself in Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, the plate that shows the arch masonry in the Broletto of Como. Whether the architect went there to see for himself or simply copied these windows from Ruskin’s drawing I don’t know, but they are very faithful renderings, each consisting of three arches with a knot like a clove hitch halfway up the two double shafts which are surmounted by Corinthian capitals. You can get a better idea from the picture.
    There were lights on in these windows and not all the curtains were drawn. I retreated across the road and stood under one of the plane trees that line the street. It was shedding from its dying flowers the pale fluffy stuff that Perpetua used to say gave her hay fever. The new owners or the builders had changed the front door, which when Cosette lived there would also have been to Ruskin’s taste, having a pointed arch and its woodwork ornamented with ears of corn and oak leaves enclosed by fillets. The new one was a neo-Georgian monstrosity and the arched top of the architrave had been filled in with a pane of ruby-colored stained glass. But no one had changed the garden—the front garden, that is, for the back was invisible from where I stood.
    It is a very small area of garden, between the pavement and the deep recess that separates it from the basement window. What always made back and front gardens remarkable was that they were gray gardens of gray flowers and gray foliage, cinerarias and sea holly, rabbit’s ears, lavandula lanata, the silver dwarf lavender, lychnis coronaria with leaves like felt, cardoons that are sisters of the globe artichoke, artemisia with its filagree foliage, ballotas, and senecios. I who knew nothing of gardening learned the names of all the plants in Cosette’s garden. Jimmy the gardener taught me, was delighted to find someone who cared enough to learn, and those names have stuck with me. Did Jimmy still come? He used to say that lanata was frail and would scarcely survive without his care. The plants looked thriving to me and the pale silver irises were in full bloom, their papery petals gleaming in the greenish lamplight.
    Without being able to see it, aware that I couldn’t have borne to see it, I knew that the back garden would be different, would have undergone some tremendous change. Whoever had the house after Cosette, and after I refused it, must have known, must have been discreetly told and must have decided to accept the facts and live with them. But along with this decision would have come a need to alter the garden, change the positions of things, perhaps plant trim box bushes and sharp-pointed conifers, bright-colored flowers. All this would be designed to exorcise the ghosts that some say derive from the energy left behind after an event of violent terror.
    I tried to see between the houses, to make my eyes penetrate brick wall and high hedge, black, nearly solid, masses of evergreen foliage. But if the eucalypt had still been there, its thready branches with fine-pointed gray leaves would by now far exceed in height the hollies and the laurel, for gum trees, as Jimmy once told me, grow tall quickly. If it was still there, it might even by now have reached close to that high window. It wasn’t there, it couldn’t be, and before I turned my eyes away I imagined its felling and its fall, the powerful medicinal scent that must have come from its dying leaves and severed trunk.
    These are two balconies only on the facade of the House of Stairs, on the windows of the drawing room and principal bedroom floors, and they are copies of the balconies on the Ca’ Lanier, bulbous at the base, somewhat basketlike. This disciple of Ruskin was not averse to a hotchpotch of styles. As I stood there the central