The Red Staircase. Gwendoline Butler

Ariadne.

      ‘What is it? What’s the girl crying about?’ The elderly woman who was the housekeeper had appeared. Mechanically, I handed the weeping maidservant over to her. I felt sick.

      ‘She says that Mademoiselle Laure is lying upstairs, dead.’

      The girl gave an hysterical wail as if to confirm what I had said. ‘Dear God,’ said the housekeeper, and crossed herself. ‘Be quiet, girl.’

      ‘She’s mad. It can’t be so,’ declared Ariadne. ‘Mademoiselle can’t be dead.’

      ‘I’m sure she is,’ I said. I was already mounting the stairs.

      ‘Come back!’ wailed Ariadne.

      ‘Get help,’ I said. ‘Order two of the servants to come with me. No – ’ as Ariadne made a move. ‘Don’t come yourself. Go to tell your mother. And then send for a doctor.’ Resolutely I mounted the stairs.

      The door to Laure’s room stood open. The curtains were drawn and the blinds were down, but enough light was seeping through to see by. In the middle of the room, surrounded by a nest of towels, was a flat tin bath. In it lay the figure of Laure, her head falling backwards with her dark hair streaming to the floor; I could see her features foreshortened and distorted.

      I walked over to one window, wrenched the curtains back and drew up the blind. Then I looked again in the full light.

      She was lying in a bath of water, wearing a white shift. The water seemed stained with blood. The shift was unbuttoned and I could see her small breasts. Instinctively, I leant forward and buttoned it.

      I knelt by the bath. ‘Oh, Laure, Laure, what have you done?’ I could see that she had cut her wrists to the bone and then let her life-blood drain out in the warm water. I could see the knife on my right as I knelt facing her. She had let it drop on a towel. ‘Why did you do it?’

      The strangely posed and artificial death scene gave me an answer of a sort: it said that life had been to her such an ennui that she must end it the best way she could.

      I picked up the knife and held it in my hand; it was an ordinary pen-knife, such as any woman might have in her writing-desk, but its blade was wickedly sharp and pointed. When she had wanted it, Laure would have had her weapon ready to hand. On the table by the bed was a dark blue medicine glass. I got up from where I was crouching and looked into it. A little sediment remained; I supposed she might have taken some sedative to see that she became sleepy and died easily. Or perhaps she wanted to make sure she was too tranquil to draw back. I supposed I must have been the last person to speak to her, except for the servants who had brought the bath and water.

      There was the end of a dream in this room. I could feel it: Laure’s dream which had kept her, sad and secretive, in Russia. You could sense it in the shut-in and cloistered atmosphere of the room, full of brooding, and the stale scent of clothes and papers; but I couldn’t tell what the dream had been about. ‘I feel free now,’ she had said. I could only suppose that she had woken up to find that freedom meant emptiness. Poor Laure, Russia had been too much for her in the end.

      I stood at the door, no longer able to bear looking at Laure, and almost at the same moment Madame Denisov, accompanied by the housekeeper and another maid, came hurrying up.

      Dolly took a long look, then closed the door. ‘Go downstairs now, please, Rose, and stay with Ariadne. On no account is she to come up.’

      ‘But can’t I help?’ I began.

      ‘No. Go downstairs. Leave me. I shall arrange everything that has to be arranged.’

      I went down to the big drawing-room to face Ariadne. She was sitting at a table with an open book before her, which she was making no attempt to read. She turned to look at me as I came into the room. ‘Well?’

      ‘Yes.’ I sat down facing her. ‘She is dead.’

      ‘How? What happened?’

      I hesitated.

      ‘Yes, tell us, please, Miss Rose.’ Peter’s long length uncoiled itself from the big chair where he had been sitting. I too am listening.’

      ‘I didn’t know you were here,’ I said mechanically, my thoughts far away. I glanced again at Ariadne; I was unsure how much to say in front of her. ‘Mademoiselle Laure died in her bath,’ I began. ‘I know – that is, she told me – that she was in the habit of taking a prolonged warm bath after an attack of migraine. I suppose it was soothing and helped recovery. She must have been taking such a bath when she died.’

      ‘But how did she die?’ asked Ariadne. ‘Come now, Rose, I shall find out, you know.’

      ‘Yes, you must tell us, Miss Rose,’ said Peter gently.

      ‘She did not die from her bath, that is certain,’ said Ariadne.

      ‘In a way she did,’ I said sadly. ‘That is, I think it must have given her the idea. Wasn’t it Marat who was stabbed in a bath?’

      Ariadne gave a little hiss of alarm. ‘Stabbed?’

      ‘Yes. You asked for the truth, and this is it: Mademoiselle Laure severed the arteries in both wrists with her pen-knife and then sat in the warm bath to die.’

      My news was received with shocked silence. Then Peter said: ‘The Roman way to die.’

      ‘Yes, I had the same thought.’

      ‘It’s terrible,’ said Ariadne. She was very white, her cheerful ebullience dowsed. ‘Much worse than I thought. Poor Mademoiselle.’ She stood up. ‘I grieve for her.’

      ‘Had you any idea this was likely to happen, Miss Rose?’ asked Peter Alexandrov.

      ‘No. How could I have? I hardly knew her.’ I was even startled that he should ask me.

      ‘But you were with her last night.’

      ‘I didn’t think she was going to kill herself,’ I said sadly. ‘No, I got a totally different idea. She did say that at last she felt free.’

      ‘Ah,’ said Peter.

      ‘But I did not interpret freedom as death.’

      ‘To the sick mind it may seem so.’

      ‘I suppose it couldn’t be – no,’ I stopped short.

      ‘What? What couldn’t it be?’ he asked sharply.