Free The House of Stairs by Ruth Rendell Page B

names had been invented by Gilbert Romme, but when I brought the pen to the paper my hand felt paralyzed. I tried to read the remaining questions, but the print danced before my eyes, and when I forced myself to eye the lines of type as coolly as I could, the sense of what was there failed entirely to communicate itself to my brain.
    It was almost funny. I didn’t see it at all like that then, but later on, much later, I did. I saw it as an extreme irony that I, whom Felicity had certainly picked along with Elsa and Paula and her brother-in-law, Rupert, as her white hopes, her high scorers, would end up with a blank exam paper while the brigadier’s wife, a self-confessed ignoramus, would certainly have answered three or four questions correctly. And this had happened to me not through simple exam nerves or drinking too much wine at lunch but solely as a result of the emotive, almost occult power, of a question composed by Felicity with a view only to demonstrating the superiority of intellect of those she saw as her own personal friends over her mother-in-law’s cronies.
    I looked up. I met Elsa’s eyes and she winked at me. She had been busily writing away and I could see she had a good chance of winning the brandy. I was wondering what to do, whether to admit to a sudden onset of blankness of mind or, more deceitfully, feign illness and escape upstairs to my room. I was wondering this and at the same time letting my gaze wander vaguely about the room, from Felicity kneeling on the carpet and helping her nephews build a fort from plastic bricks, to the tall, overdressed, candle-laden Christmas tree in the corner diagonally opposite the fire, to the two long windows and the unrelieved misty dusk outside, back to Elsa feverishly scribbling, her head bent and her lower lip caught under her upper teeth. The room was silent but for an occasional crackling from the fire, a clearing of the throat from Felicity’s sister, who had a cold. Even the children, raptly attentive to new toys, made no noise.
    I had decided. I would stay there and face it out. What did it matter? People are made happy by such defeats of others. I had turned the papers over, so that that name would no longer leap black lettered out at me, was reaching out to return my pencil to the box of pencils on the low table where the triumphant Elsa, her quiz completed, had already returned hers, when the front door flew open to let in a gust of wind and Bell Sanger.
    The front door at Thornham was locked only at night. I expect things are different today. Then it was always unlocked and everyone knew it, but still Bell’s eruption into the hall was a shock. The wind blew the papers the contestants were holding and actually blew Lady Thinnesse’s quiz out of her hand and straight into the flames of the fire. She jumped up with a little shriek. Bell stood there, on the rug, in fact some kind of animal skin, just inside the door, her clothes and hair blown by the wind, a wild woman with staring eyes. Felicity got up from her knees and said rather crossly, “For God’s sake, shut the door.”
    And Bell did. She reached behind her and pushed the door, which slammed. The whole house seemed to shake. Bell said, “Would someone come, please? Silas has shot himself.”
    Someone said, “My God,” but I have never known who it was, one of the men. Esmond got up, pushed his chair aside to let himself out of the circle, and took a few steps toward her. Bell didn’t wait for him to speak.
    “He was drunk,” she said. “He was playing one of his games. He shot himself. I think he’s dead.” She hesitated, looking at us all with a kind of dawning dismay, realizing who we were, as if we were the last people she would want to communicate this to, to share this with. But what could she do? What choice had she? We were there, we were the only people, it was unavoidable. “He was playing,” she said, addressing these words to Felicity. “You know what I mean,” and,