Free The House of Stairs by Ruth Rendell

typewriter would take, this being before the days of ubiquitous photocopying. We were to undertake this particular quiz on the day after Boxing Day, December 27.
    The Thinnesses’ house was full. Mrs. Dunne was there and Lady Thinnesse had also invited an ancient brigadier and his wife. He had risen to this rank during the First, not the Second, World War, which gives some idea of how very old he was. Felicity had her sister and her sister’s husband and their twins and a friend she had been at college with and the friend’s daughter and every day local people from Chigwell or Abridge or Epping came as well. On the day in question there would be fifteen of us doing the quiz, the children being excluded. No mention was made of the Sangers, Silas and Bell, and I concluded they hadn’t been asked. I concluded more than that, that a coolness now existed between the Thinnesses and the Sangers, and this was confirmed by Jeremy Thinnesse, aged three.
    “My daddy wants Mr. Sanger to go away and live in another house.”
    “Really,” said the Lioness. “Why would that be?”
    “It’s despicable,” said Miranda loftily, “to wheedle information out of children who are too young and innocent to know better, Mummy says.”
    It was not clear whether she referred to Elsa’s conduct or possibly Silas Sanger’s, but it had the effect she aimed at, that of stopping the conversation. No more inquiries were made. I found myself often looking in the direction of the cottage but saw no one. The clothesline had gone and the two posts and the place looked unoccupied. Whether Silas and Bell celebrated Christmas I didn’t know and don’t know to this day; their life inside there was a mystery, their ways secret and surely wildly unconventional. Sometimes smoke could be seen rising from the cottage chimney and this fretted Lady Thinnesse, who seemed to think the house would catch fire.
    After lunch on December 27 we all sat down in the hall to do the quiz Felicity had prepared, our twenty questions typed on two sheets of paper, foolscap size. This room, rather than the drawing room, was chosen because the latter being enormous took a great deal of heating and the weather was very cold. The hall at Thornham is itself very large with the two-branched staircase mounting to a gallery at the back of it, but this area can be closed off with double doors, making a cozy chamber at the front where the fireplace is. A big fire of logs had been lighted and chairs and two sofas drawn up in three hundred degrees of a circle round it.
    Thornham Hall has no porch and there is no inner lobby or vestibule, so drafts tend to come in round the front door. The long windows on either side of it rattled in the wind, but it was warm enough round the fire. Lady Thinnesse wore only a thin silk dress and seemed to take it as an insult to her household arrangements that Mrs. Dunne had a shawl round her shoulders and Felicity’s sister had put on fur-lined boots. I remember precisely where I was sitting in the circle: on the right-hand side of the fireplace and directly facing the front door. Felicity’s brother-in-law sat on one side of me and her college friend on the other. It had been tacitly arranged that the old people should have their seats nearest to the fire, and between the college friend, Paula, and the fireplace were sitting the ancient brigadier, the ancient brigadier’s wife, and Mrs. Dunne, with Lady Thinnesse and an old couple from Abridge facing them. The children were all up at the other end of the hall playing with their Christmas presents and warmed by a portable electric radiator.
    Felicity handed out the papers, our names written on the tops of them. I think it was at this point that I began questioning what I was doing, what we were doing, taking part in an examination we were not obliged to sit, giving up our leisure to an absurd general knowledge test, vying with each other in a pointless contest. And for what? For what? A quarter