Free The House of Stairs by Ruth Rendell Page A

bottle of brandy was the first prize and a box of chocolates the second. The force of one woman’s personality dictated our obedience. No one had considered demurring, though those old ladies certainly must have feared failure and humiliation, that, in Bell’s curious phrase, they would not be “equal to it.”
    Felicity had a chair at that point of the circle farthest from the fireplace, directly facing the fire, where for a few moments she had ensconced herself between her husband and Elsa the Lioness. To that chair she never returned, but stood watching us as we turned our eyes to our papers, a tall, strongly built yet slender dark woman, Juno-faced with massy black hair and the faintest black down on her upper lip, miniskirted as was the fashion, though not a fashion designed for a woman as strapping as she. Thirty minutes we could have, she said, precisely half an hour, the maximum possible score fifty points. Then she went over to the children, turning on lights as she passed the switch.
    It was three-thirty but already dusk. The red light from the fire had been inadequate to see by. Some of the contestants were already writing, but I did what I had been taught to do and read through the questions on the paper before I began. I don’t remember all the questions, only the first and the fifth. The first inquired what were Germinal, Brumaire, and Fructidor and what did they have in common? I think the second question was something to do with architecture, the third with Second World War battles, and the fourth with Shakespeare. The fifth question required contestants to explain what were Pott’s disease, Klinefelter’s syndrome, and Huntington’s chorea.
    It gave me a shock, I felt the blood rush into my face, and that everyone must see that crimson blush. Inescapably, paranoically, I thought it was deliberately set for me, geared for me, designed as some kind of mockery of me. At the same time almost, or immediately afterward, I knew that it couldn’t be, that Felicity was not a cruel or vindictive woman, and moreover she didn’t know, couldn’t know, no one knew but my father and his cousin Lily and my mother’s doctor and Cosette. Elsa the Lioness didn’t know. There was nothing to show, nothing in my appearance, my face, eyes, bodily movements. I had even been told (and my mirror told me) I was good to look at, beautiful even. If it was there waiting for me, as it had waited for my mother, my grandmother, her father, it lurked silently in my central nervous system, hidden, static, resting, biding its time.
    I looked up to meet the eyes I expected to see fixed on me, but all of them were looking at their papers with varying degrees of comprehension, lack of comprehension, pleasure, dismay. Most of them were writing. My eyes returned to the paper. Huntington’s chorea. The words stood out of the rest of the text as if executed in boldface. My hands were shaking, the hand that held the pencil and the hand that, trying to grip the sheets of paper, failed and trembled as if Huntington’s had already struck, had sent its first tremors down the nerves.
    For once, of course, when experiencing trembling or lack of coordination or ordinary failure of manual dexterity, I had no real fear that this was the onset of Huntington’s. I knew it was the effect of shock. But I told myself that I must exercise control, I must behave as if nothing had happened. And, after all, nothing had happened, everything was the same as before I read the questions on the paper, nothing had changed. Huntington’s chorea were words I repeated to myself if not every day of my life, almost as often. But for all these reassurances, trying to steady my still-shaking right hand, I found myself quite unable to answer the questions, unable to write a word. I knew, for instance, that Germinal, Brumaire, and Fructidor were months in the French Revolutionary calendar, knew even (because I had had occasion to look this up not long before) that these