The House of Stairs by Ruth Rendell

incredibly, it seemed that Felicity did.
    She nodded, one hand going up to her mouth. Esmond said, “Felicity, phone Dr. Thompson, will you? And perhaps the police, yes, we have to phone the police.”
    Felicity said, “Christ, what a thing! What a thing!” She seemed to realize she was surrounded by staring children. “Come with me, all of you,” and she scooped children up, putting each arm around two or three of them.
    My eyes met Bell’s. She looked at me, I thought, as if I might be the only one there she could like, who might have some sort of affinity with her. Or that is how I took it, how I received her steady, aghast, long, gray-eyed stare. Esmond opened the front door and held it for Bell to precede him out into the dark. I got up and followed them.

5
    STILETTO FATALIS, FAR FROM being some sort of weapon, is the Latin name for the flaw worm, an agricultural pest. The entomologist who devised it must have had a sense of humor. There were posters in the Thornham village shop warning farmers to beware of this creature, and Felicity got hold of the name and made a tremendous joke of it. That Christmas, at any rate before the shooting of Silas Sanger, she was always talking about stiletto fatalis. If she had included a question on it in her quiz, everyone would have been able to give the right answer. Stiletto heels were in fashion that winter and at parties, especially in houses with wood-block floors, you were given little plastic heel caps to keep the spike heels from making stab marks. All the floors at Thornham Hall were of wood, scattered with small carpets and large rugs. Felicity always examined the shoes of newcomers and gave a verdict on them, whether they could be classed as stiletto fatalis or not.
    This aspect of her, which I thought I had forgotten, which I hadn’t thought of for fifteen or sixteen years, the last time I saw her, comes back to me in the morning as I am making up my mind to phone her. I remember stiletto fatalis and how it and all its successors had given place, by the time Felicity was taking refuge at Cosette’s, to a new conversational obsession with Selevin’s mouse. Nothing much had evidently occurred in Felicity’s life since then if she was, as it appeared, still married to Esmond, still chatelaine of Thornham, no longer perhaps much resembling the dramatic intense girl in a miniskirt who had confided in Cosette evening after evening. I regard the piece of paper on which I have written down the number Felicity’s daughter gave me. I dial it. For last night, though I went to Leith’s, though I got the taxi to drop me on the corner of Pembridge Road and walked the rest of the way, I didn’t see Bell, of course I didn’t.
    Felicity answers the phone herself, using, as soon as she knows who it is, her unchanged characteristic greeting.
    “Hallo, there!”
    I once heard Esmond introduce himself to some newcomer as “There,” saying his wife had rechristened him. She sounds just the same and as if the last time we spoke were a couple of weeks ago. There is no marveling that I haven’t been in touch before, am in touch now, am still alive, and there are no reproaches. She doesn’t even say what a surprise it is. I have no recollection of her being so wrapped up in her children twenty years ago or when she abandoned them for nine months to the care of their father and grandmother. But now she talks of them. She talks of them immediately after she has been through the polite requirement of asking how I am, taking my “How is everyone?” au pied de la lettre and telling me all about Miranda’s amazing job with BBC television and Jeremy’s history first. She even follows this up with genius’s mother cliché number one: “And do you know we despaired of him, he didn’t do a stroke of work!”
    I let her go on a bit, then tell her I have spoken to Miranda.
    “Oh, did you manage to catch her? What a relief! You’ve actually taken a load off my mind. I haven’t spoken