The Red Staircase

‘I’m transferring to the part of the regiment that’s going off to India. It’s no place for a woman. It’s a bachelor’s job.’

‘I wouldn’t mind India. I’d like it. I would, I promise.’

‘No, it’s no good, it wouldn’t do, not for me nor for you. It would be a wretched business, Rosie. We should be so poor. God knows, it’s bad enough being poor when you’re married anyway, but in India it would be infinitely worse. I couldn’t bear it for you, Rose.’

‘But we love each other.’

‘Ah, Rose, do we? Really, truly, do we?’

‘I love you.’

‘Do you, Rose?’ He was serious and sad. Hesitantly, he said: ‘I wonder sometimes if you know what love is. Oh yes, in a way, Rose; but a deeper, married love?’

‘We love each other. Together, we shall …’ But he broke in. ‘That’s true in a way, Rose, but is it enough?’ He took my hand. ‘That joke you made about Mrs Dobson and her housekeeping – well, it was true although I didn’t admit it, she is a rotten housekeeper and her house was always untidy and her children run wild. But sometimes I saw a look pass between her and her husband, well, a look that I envied. A look such as you and I could never exchange.’

‘But they have been married for years.’

‘Is that all, Rose? Does it come only with years? No, it was not that sort of look. And if it is not there before marriage, I think it does not come afterwards.’

I was utterly at a loss. There were so many things I wanted to say, but I couldn’t find words for them. So I stood there, just looking at him.

‘I blame myself, not you.’ He sounded weary. ‘I’m older than you, more experienced. I have to protect you. Our marriage would be a mistake.’ He handed me the parcel. ‘Here are your letters, and the book you gave me.’

I threw them on the floor in a fury, and for the first time in the interview felt bitter.

‘Please, Rose,’ he said. ‘I have thought about it very carefully. It is in your interest and mine.’

I sat down; my fury ebbing away had left my legs curiously weak. I suppose he thought I was coming round, because he took a deep breath of relief. As soon as I saw this I felt even more savage. ‘And now I suppose you will go away and explain to yourself that it is my fault. Oh, though I don’t know how it can be. I suppose I’ve failed you somehow, Patrick. Or you choose to think so.’

He quailed before the fury and contempt in my eyes, but he stood his ground – I give him that. When he had made up his mind to do a thing, Patrick did it. ‘No, no, the fault is all mine. I’m not good enough for you.’ He looked at me. ‘Forgive me, Rosie?’

He had given me an antique rose-diamond ring, and I suppose he took it with him, for I never saw it again. I remember nothing of the circumstances of its handing over. Nor of him going; but go he did.

Tibby says she came in and saw me standing staring out of the window, and that I turned to her with tearless eyes and said: ‘He’s gone, Tibby. Gone for good.’ Then I went upstairs and went to my bed. I stayed there, watching the light change on the ceiling as the day reached its peak and then faded into night.

After a while, Grizel and Tibby came to look at me. ‘I’m sick,’ I said, in answer to their anxious questions. And it was, in a way, true; I did feel deadly tired, as if life had seeped out of me. I didn’t look at them, turning my head to stare bleakly at the wall. I could hear Tibby trying to make encouraging, cheerful noises, then I heard her saying something about the doctor, but it was Grizel, my sibling and nearest me in age, who got it right.

‘Leave her alone,’ she said. ‘Let her lie there.’ She drew Tibby out, protesting. ‘No,’ said Grizel firmly. ‘Let her be.’ She pulled my door to and closed it with a decided little bang. It was her message to me, a message of support, and interpreting it correctly I felt a comforting warmth creep into my heart.

I stayed there all night, letting darkness melt in through the window and over the walls, and then recede again into silver light. At no time did I sleep.

Grizel came quietly in when the morning was still early and placed a cup of tea on my bed-table. She did not speak, but adjusted the curtains so that the sun should not shine on my face, and went away. I wondered how much she knew of what had passed between me and Patrick. Almost everything, I supposed, by means of that curious feminine osmosis that sometimes existed between us. I drank the tea, which was very hot and over-sweet, so that I knew Tibby had stirred in the sugar lumps – it had always been her idea that a person in trouble needed something sweet. She might have been right, because the dead weight of fatigue which rested on me began to lift a little.

Presently Grizel came back; I didn’t speak but she lay down on the bed beside me and put her cheek against mine. For a while we lay in silence.

‘There’s a time for keeping quiet and saying nothing, and a time for showing love,’ she said. ‘I think the time has come now for showing love.’ She kissed my cheek.

‘Come on then, Rose.’ Grizel swung off the bed to her feet. ‘I’ll help you dress.’ She opened the big door of the closet where I kept my clothes and, not consulting me, she very deliberately selected a pale pink dress I had never yet worn. Without a word she handed it to me. ‘Wear this.’

‘But it …’I began.

She did not let me finish. ‘Yes. The very prettiest dress from your trousseau. Just the day to wear it.’

I took it and let the pretty soft silk slip through my hands. I remembered the day I had chosen the silk, and I remembered the day Grizel and I had made the dress together. ‘Yes, quite right,’ I said. ‘A pity to waste it.’

Downstairs I went with a flourish. ‘The worst thing about being jilted,’ I said to Grizel as we started down, ‘is that it’s – ’and out it came, the phrase long since picked up in my medical student days, assimilated and made ready to use – ‘such a bloody bore.’

Grizel looked at me, hesitated, and then giggled; and so, laughing, we went forward to meet the day.

Somehow or the other, my life had to be put together again. Twice my circumstances had changed radically. The first crisis, when I had to give up my medical studies in Edinburgh, had seemed to have a happy outcome when I met Patrick and planned our life together. Now this too had collapsed. ‘Third time lucky,’ I thought. It was hard not to be bitter, but it wouldn’t do. I must rebuild my fortunes somehow, and I knew it.

The only thing to do was take life as it came for a bit, and to build it around a succession of small events. Fortunately (from my point of view, although I suppose not from the victims’) it was a busy time in the village with an epidemic of measles with which I was able to help. ‘It’s an ill wind,’ I thought as I cycled down the hill in a rainstorm to a cottage where a child had measles with the complication of bronchitis. ‘At least all this is taking my mind off my own troubles. If the child only lives. A bit hard for the poor little wretch to have to die in order to make me feel better.’

But we saved the child, although we had a bad night of it. ‘He’s turned the corner,’ I said to his mother when I left.

‘I think he has, Miss Rose, praise the Lord,’ she answered.

But as I pushed my bicycle up the hill to breakfast, I knew I had turned a corner in my life too.

‘Have some porridge,’ said Tibby, from the stove where she was stirring a big black pot of it.

‘I’ll just wash my hands.’

When I got back Tibby had laid a place at the kitchen table for me and was pouring herself a cup of tea. ‘How’s the lad?’

‘Better. He’ll do now, I think.’ I began to eat my porridge with relish. ‘Where are the others?’

‘Not up yet. It’s still early. But I knew you’d be home betimes for your breakfast. Either the little lad would come through the night or he’d be gone. Either way the dawn would decide it.’

‘Yes, you’re quite right,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘It’s amazing how the turn of day takes people out or brings them back in. It’s like a tide. But I listened to the birds singing this morning and knew it would be all right. His mother knew, too. We both knew.’

‘It’s the same with life; there comes a turn.’

‘So people say.’ I accepted the truism cautiously.

‘It’ll be that way with you soon.’

‘Can’t be too soon, Tibby,’ I said with a sigh. ‘I’ve got to make my way in the world somehow. It won’t wait on me, you know.’

‘I do know,’ said Tibby.

‘So far I don’t seem to have done anything right. I have to ask myself: What’s the matter with me?’ I looked at her, wondering what she would say.

‘The answer to that’s easy: Nothing,’ she said stoutly.

‘I mean, I can’t retire from life before I’m three-and-twenty,’ I said, continuing with my own stream of thought.

‘Oh, you silly girl.’