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Authors: Sarah Waters

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She wasn’t joking at all. Frances frowned. ‘Weren’t you frightened?’

‘Yes, but he never hurt anybody. We found out about him from the neighbours. He had lived in the house years before, and his wife had died, and he’d wasted away through missing her. They said he went up and down the stairs looking for her, night after night. Sometimes I wonder if he’s still there. It’s sad to think he might be, isn’t it, when all he wanted was to be with her.’

Frances’s cigarette had gone out. She relit it and didn’t answer. She was marvelling at Mrs Barber’s candour, her simplicity, her lack of self-consciousness – whatever quality it was, anyhow, that allowed her to say such a thing aloud, with such obvious sincerity. She knew that she herself would find it as hard to confess to an almost-stranger that she had seen a ghost as to admit to believing in elves and fairies.

Which was why, of course, she realised, she never would see a ghost.

She felt slightly dashed, suddenly. The feeling took her by surprise. She fiddled with the box of matches, setting it on one end and then on another. And when she raised her eyes she found that Mrs Barber was watching her, her brows drawn together in an expression of concern.

‘I’m afraid I’ve said something to upset you, Miss Wray.’

Frances shook her head, smiled. ‘No.’

‘I wasn’t thinking. I shouldn’t have been talking about ghosts and unhappy things on a day like today.’

‘A day like today?’ said Frances. Then: ‘You mean, because of my father? Oh, no. No, you mustn’t think that. Think it about my brothers, if you like. I miss them every day of my life. But as for my father —’ She tossed the matches down. ‘My father, Mrs Barber, was a nuisance when he was alive, he made a nuisance of himself by dying, and he’s managed to go on being a nuisance ever since.’

Mrs Barber said, ‘Oh. I – I’m sorry.’

They were plunged back into silence. Frances thought of her reticent mother, just across the hall. But again the stillness was tempered by those gentle kitchen sounds, the tumble of coals, the scullery music. And Mrs Barber had spoken freely… She found she had an urge to meet the candour, repay it with something of her own. She took a long draw on her cigarette, and went on in a lower tone.

‘It’s simply that my father and I – we never got along. He had old-fashioned ideas about women, about daughters. I was a great trial to him, as perhaps you can imagine. We argued about everything, with my poor mother as referee. Most of all we argued about the War, which he saw as some sort of Great Adventure, while I – Oh, I loathed it, right from the start. My elder brother, John Arthur, the gentlest creature in the world, he more or less bullied into enlisting; I shall never forgive him for that. Noel, my other brother, went in practically as a schoolboy, and when he was killed my father’s response was to have a series of “heart attacks” – to take to an armchair, in other words, while my mother and I ran about after him like a pair of fools. He died a few months before the Armistice, not of a heart attack after all, but of an apoplexy, brought on by reading something he disagreed with in
The Times
. After his death —’ Her tone became rueful. ‘Well, it must be obvious to you and your husband, Mrs Barber, that my mother and I aren’t as well off as we might be. It turned out that my father had been putting the family money into one bad speculation after another; he’d left a pile of debts behind him that we’re still paying off and – Oh.’ She stubbed out her cigarette, unable to be still. ‘Look, you mustn’t let me talk about him! It isn’t fair of me. He wasn’t a bad man. He was a blusterer and a coward; but we’re all cowardly sometimes. I’ve got into the habit of hating him, but it’s a horrible habit, I know. The truth is, the most hateful thing my father ever did to me was to die. I – I’d had plans, you see, while he was alive. I’d had terrific plans —’

She paused, or faltered; then drew herself up. ‘Well, my father always did say that my plans would come to nothing. He’d certainly smile if he could see me now, still here, on Champion Hill. Like your ghost!’

She smiled, herself. But Mrs Barber did not smile back. Her gaze was serious, dark, kind. ‘What sort of plans did you have, Miss Wray?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. To change the world! To put things right! To – I’ve forgotten.’

‘Have you?’

‘It was a different time, then. A serious time. A passionate time. But an innocent time, it seems to me now. One believed in… transformation. One looked ahead to the end of the War and felt that nothing could ever be the same. Nothing
is
the same, is it? But in such disappointing ways. And then, the fact is, I had had – There had been someone – a sort of proposal —’

But now she caught sight of those rings on Mrs Barber’s finger: the wedding-band, the little diamonds. She said, ‘Forgive me, Mrs Barber. I don’t mean to be mysterious. I don’t mean to be maudlin, either. All I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that this life, the life I have now, it isn’t —’ It isn’t the life I was meant to have. It isn’t the life I want! ‘It isn’t the life I thought I would have,’ she finished.

She seemed to herself to have been very nearly raving. She felt as exposed and as foolish as if she had inadvertently given a glimpse of her bare backside. But Mrs Barber nodded, then dropped her gaze in her delicate way – as if, impossibly, she understood it all. And when she spoke at last, what she said was, ‘It must be funny for you and your mother, having Len and me here.’

‘Oh, now,’ said Frances, ‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘No, I know you didn’t. But it must be funny all the same. I like this house so much. I wanted to live in it the minute I saw it. But it must be awfully strange for you to see me and Len here; as if we’d gone helping ourselves to your clothes, and were wearing them all the wrong way.’

She reached to the saucer as she spoke, tucking in her chin, self-conscious, the wooden beads of her necklace gently nudging at one another. Frances, watching the crown of her head, saw a fingertip-sized spot of scalp appear, lard-white against the glossy dark hairs that sprang from it.

‘What a thoroughly nice woman you are, Mrs Barber,’ she said.

That made Mrs Barber look up with a smile of surprise. But she winced, too. ‘Oh, don’t say that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, because some day you’re sure to find out that it isn’t true, and then you’ll be disappointed in me.’

Frances shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine it. But now I like you more than ever! Shall we be friends?’

Mrs Barber laughed. ‘I hope so, yes.’

And that was all it took. They smiled at each other across the table, and some sort of shift occurred between them. There was a quickening, a livening – Frances could think of nothing to compare it with save some culinary process. It was like the white of an egg growing pearly in hot water, a milk sauce thickening in the pan. It was as subtle yet as tangible as that. Did Mrs Barber feel it? She must have. Her smile grew fixed for a second, a touch of uncertainty entering her gaze. But the frown came, and was gone. She lowered her eyes, and laughed again.

And as she did it there was a sound in the hall, the rattle of the front-door latch. Her husband was back from Peckham: the two of them realised it at the same time and their poses changed. Frances drew slightly back from the table. Mrs Barber put an arm across herself, making a prop with her wrist for the elbow of her other arm, and taking a puff of her cigarette. Frances saw her sisters in the gesture, and in the new tilt of her jaw. When she spoke, it was in a whisper; but her sisters were in the whisper, too.

‘Just listen to him creeping about!’ He was going softly across the hall. ‘He’s practically on tiptoe. He’s afraid my family are still here.’

Frances answered in the same low tone. ‘Does he really dislike them?’

‘Oh, there’s no telling with him. No, he just pretends to, I think. It seems funnier to him that way.’

They sat in silence in the shadowy room, oddly intimate for a moment as they listened to Mr Barber mount the stairs. Then, with a sigh, Mrs Barber began to get to her feet. ‘I’d better go up.’

Frances watched her rise. ‘Had you?’

‘Thank you for my cigarette.’

‘You haven’t quite finished it.’

‘He’ll only come looking for me if I stay. He’ll make a joke of it, and it’s been so nice, and – No, I’d better go up.’

Frances rose too. ‘Of course.’

But she was sorry. She was thinking of the little alembic shift that had taken place a minute before. She was thinking of the honest way in which she had spoken – or, the almost-honest way – a way, anyhow, that was nearer honesty than any way she felt that she had spoken, to anyone, in years.

She got as far as the kitchen door, her hand extended to draw it open; then she turned back.

‘Listen, Mrs Barber. Why don’t you and I do something together some time? Let’s – I don’t know – take a walk, or something. Just locally, I mean. One afternoon next week? Tuesday? – Wait, Tuesday won’t do. Wednesday, then? My mother’s abandoning me that day; I’ll be glad of the company. What do you say?’

The idea had come from nowhere. Was it all right? she wondered at once. Could a woman like her ask a thing like that, of a woman like Mrs Barber? Did it make her sound odd, sound lonely, sound a bit of a leech?

Mrs Barber looked slightly thrown. But it seemed she was flattered, that was all; Frances hadn’t thought of that. With a blush, she said, ‘That’s kind of you, Miss Wray. Yes, I’d like to. Thank you.’

‘You’re quite sure?’

‘Yes, of course. Wednesday afternoon?’ She blinked, considering; then grew more decided, her chin rising, her blush fading. ‘Yes, I’d like to very much.’

Again, they smiled at each other – though without the alchemy of before. Frances opened the door, and Mrs Barber nodded and was gone. There was the pat of her slippers in the hall and on the treads of the stairs, followed by the sound of her husband’s voice as they greeted each other up on the landing. Frances, standing in the open doorway, listened shamelessly this time; but there was nothing to hear but murmurs.

And what a funny thing it was to feel excited about, she thought later. She and Mrs Barber settled on their destination – Ruskin Park, just down the hill, the most ordinary, small, unthrilling, neat and tidy place, with flower-beds and tennis courts and a stand for the band on Sundays. But she
was
excited about it, she realised; and she had the feeling, as the days passed, that Mrs Barber was excited about it too. A picnic tea, they decided, would make the event jollier, so on the Wednesday morning they spent time in their separate kitchens, putting together a few bits of food. And when she was dressing to leave the house, Frances found herself taking trouble over her outfit, rejecting a dull skirt and blouse in favour of the smart grey linen tunic she generally saved for her trips into Town, then wasting minute after minute trying out different hat-pins – amber, garnet, turquoise, pearl – in an effort to liven up her old felt hat.

Had Mrs Barber taken trouble? It was difficult to say, for she took pains over her outfit every day of the week. Frances, joining her on the landing, found her in her usual combination of warm colours and comfortable lines, a violet frock, pink stockings, grey suede shoes, lace gloves, a hat of the snug modern variety that didn’t require a pin at all: she wore it pulled down nearly to her dark eyelashes. But around her wrist was the tasselled silk cord of something – Frances thought it a bag, until they moved down the stairs together; then she saw that it was a red paper parasol. And that made her think that Mrs Barber had taken trouble after all, for though the weather was sunny it wasn’t so sunny as all that; the parasol was simply a flourish, to lend a gaiety to the occasion. They might have been heading for the sea-front. Suddenly, she wished they were. Hastings, Brighton – why hadn’t she thought of it? She ought to have been more ambitious. Once they had left the house it took only a few minutes to reach the gates of the park. They might as well have stayed in the back garden! The sounds of trams and motor-cars barely faded once they were inside.

Still, it was nice to be among the trees, on a path of hard earth, rather than on the dusty pavement. And a stretch of long grass had bluebells in it: Mrs Barber paused to look at them, stooping, taking off a glove, running a hand across the drowsy-looking stems.

The bluebells led them to an odd sort of ruin: a pillared portico, standing alone, wound about with ivy. The park had been put together from the grounds of several large houses when Frances was a child, and she could remember very clearly the house at this end, sitting in a wilderness of bramble, grand and derelict as a mad old duchess. She had once, for a dare, led Noel into its garden, and had been punished for it later – spanked on the back of her legs with a slipper – when he had had nightmares. Now the house, like Noel himself, was gone; there were only a few stranded details to recall it and its neighbours; she thought it sad, sometimes. The park seemed self-conscious, pretending. On wintry days, in particular, the place could be depressing.

But she said some of this to Mrs Barber as they strolled, and perhaps saying it broke the spell of it – or perhaps the weather made the difference; perhaps it was something about being here with Mrs Barber herself, the parasol glowing at her shoulder – anyhow, whatever the cause, the park had a charm today that she couldn’t recall it ever having had before. Its very neatness seemed appealing, everything in such perfect trim, the lawns clipped, the beds of gaudy flowers like icing piped on a cake. It was a little after four, and the passers-by were a daytime crowd of idlers, invalids, children just out of school, women with toddling infants, elderly gents with dogs on leashes – the sort of people, she thought wryly, who’d be the first to get admitted to a lifeboat. How Christina and Stevie would smile at all this! Christina and Stevie, however, seemed far away. She and Mrs Barber took paths scattered with fallen blossom. They walked the length of a terrace made dappled by hanging wisteria. When they looked for a spot on which to settle, she wished they had brought a blanket to spread out on the grass.

Instead, they found a bench, and unpacked their bags. And at once, it became apparent that they had had rather different ideas about what should constitute the picnic. Mrs Barber had made finger-rolls, pin-wheel sandwiches, miniature jam tarts: the sort of fiddly dainties written about in the women’s magazines that Frances now and then read over shoulders on the bus. She herself had brought hard-boiled eggs, radishes from the garden, salt in a twist of paper, half a round of seed cake and a bottle of sugarless tea, swaddled in a dish-cloth to keep it hot. But once they had set out the food on a chequered cloth, the meal looked surprisingly complete. ‘A perfect feast,’ they agreed, as they touched their cups together.

The jam tarts rather fell to pieces when one picked them up, and the pin-wheel sandwiches uncurled, letting out their cheesy innards. It didn’t matter. The rolls were good, the radishes were crisp, the eggs gave up their shells as if shrugging off cumbersome coats; the parasol, propped up, lent everything its winey colour. And Mrs Barber made the bench appear as comfortable as a sofa, letting herself settle sideways, resting a cheek on her fist. Once she laughed her natural laugh again, leaning forward with her wrist at her mouth; a man seated alone on a nearby bench turned his head at the sound. Frances had feared that the day might be awkward. The two of them, after all, barely knew each other. But they seemed to pick up the thread of their intimacy exactly where they had left it in the shadowy kitchen on Saturday afternoon, like retrieving a dropped stitch across a few rows of knitting.

That man, however, kept looking. She met his gaze in a frosty way; that only made him smirk. When the food was finished, she gathered the egg-shells, shook the crumbs from the cloth. ‘Shall we stroll again? See the rest of the sights?’

Mrs Barber smiled. ‘I’d like to.’

There was little enough to look at, really. The small formal garden had some pretty snapdragons in it. On the pond there were ducklings, and comical dirty-yellow goslings. At the tennis courts, two young women were in the middle of a match, playing well, their pleated skirts flying as they raced after the ball. Did Mrs Barber play tennis? No! She was far too lazy. Len played at the sports club at the Pearl; he’d won cups. How about Miss Wray?

‘Oh,’ said Frances, ‘I played at school. That, and lacrosse – a beastly game. I was never much good at those team things. I did better on a bicycle. Or roller-skates. We had a skating rink right here in Camberwell for a while.’

Mrs Barber said, ‘I know. I sometimes went there with my sisters.’

‘You did? I used to go with my brothers – until my father decided it was vulgar, and put a stop to it. We might have been there at the same time.’

‘Isn’t that a funny thought?’

The idea of it seemed to impress them both. They moved on at a livelier pace – making now for the band-stand, a quaint octagonal pavilion with a red tiled roof. They crossed the gravel, climbed the steps, and the wooden floor must have made Mrs Barber think of dancing: she went across it in the slow twirls of a graceful, unpartnered waltz.

She came to a stop at the balustrade, and stood looking down at the rail. Frances, joining her there, was dismayed to discover that the glossy green paint, which had looked neat from a distance, was in fact scored with naughty drawings – a bare-breasted woman, a cat’s behind – and carved with names:
Bill goes with Alice
,
Albert & May
,
Olive loves Cecil
– though the
Cecil
had been scratched through, perhaps with a hat-pin, and
Jim
carved instead.

She ran her fingers over the scorings. ‘Fickle Olive,’ she said.

Mrs Barber smiled, but made no reply. She seemed to have grown slightly wistful since her solitary waltz. For a minute she and Frances gazed out across the park, at the rather uninspiring view – the red-brick buildings of the local hospital. Then she turned and leaned back against the rail, catching hold of the cord of the parasol, absently running the red tassel back and forth over her lips. And since she seemed content to sit there, Frances turned and leaned beside her. It was a curious place to rest, rather a showy spot to sit in; but the parasol, raised behind them, gave an illusion of privacy.

Of course, the mood of the park would be different later, once dusk had begun to fall. Lovers would come here, clerks and shop-girls: Bill and Alice, Olive and Jim. Mrs Barber might return with her husband. Would she, though? It didn’t seem very likely to Frances. She recalled the dead little conversation she had overheard the week before; she remembered the encounter in the starlit garden that had preceded it. Looking sideways at Mrs Barber, watching her stroke the tassel in that idle way over her rounded chin and mouth, she said, ‘May I ask you something, Mrs Barber?’

Mrs Barber turned, intrigued. ‘Yes?’

‘How did you and your husband meet?’

Frances saw her expression fix slightly. ‘Me and Len? We met in the War, in my step-father’s shop. I used to work in there in those days – my sisters and I, we all did. Len was going by, on one of his leaves. He looked in, and saw me through the window.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that.’

‘What happened then?’

‘Oh, well, then he came inside, making out that there was something he wanted to buy. We started talking, and – I didn’t think him specially handsome. He’s rather a weed really, isn’t he? But he had nice blue eyes. And he was fun. He made me laugh.’

She smiled as she spoke, but her gaze had turned inward, and the smile was a strange one, fond but faintly scornful. Aware of Frances waiting for more, she lifted a shoulder in a shrug. ‘There isn’t anything to tell about it, really. He took me to tea. We went dancing. He’s a good dancer when he wants to be. And then, when he went back to France, we began to write to each other. Other boys had taken me out, but Len – I don’t know. The War didn’t seem to touch him in the way it touched everybody else. He never got injured – only scratches. He told me he had a charmed life, that there was something uncanny about it, that fate had picked us out for each other, and —’ She let the tassel drop. ‘I was awfully young. It’s like you said the other day: the War made things seem more serious than they were. I don’t suppose he really meant to marry me. I don’t suppose I really meant to marry him.’

‘And yet, you did marry each other.’

She put out a foot, began to nudge at a knot in the wooden floor. ‘Yes.’

‘But why, if neither of you meant to?’

‘It was just one of those things, that’s all.’

‘One of those things?’ said Frances. ‘What a funny way to put it. You can’t marry someone by accident, surely?’

At that, Mrs Barber looked at her with a curious expression, a mixture of embarrassment and something else, something that might almost have been pity. But, ‘No, of course you can’t,’ she said, in an ordinary tone. She drew in her foot. ‘I’m just fooling. Poor Len! His ears must be on fire, mustn’t they? You oughtn’t to listen to me today. He and I – we had words last night.’

‘Oh,’ said Frances. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter. We’re always having words about something. I thought we wouldn’t, once we’d left Peckham. But it turns out we do.’

Frances found the simplicity of this statement, combined with the matter-of-fact tone in which Mrs Barber made it, rather terrible. For a few seconds she struggled to find an adequate reply. At last, in an effort to lighten the moment, she said, with a smile and an air of conclusion, ‘Well, my Yorkshire grandmother used to say that marriages are like pianos: they go in and out of tune. Perhaps yours and Mr Barber’s is like that.’

Mrs Barber smiled back at her; but the smile quickly faded. She lowered her gaze, and her eye was caught by something on the stretch of balustrade on which they were perched. She put her hand to it and, ‘This is marriage, Miss Wray,’ she murmured. ‘This is marriage, exactly.’

She had found a spot on the rail where the paint was chipped, exposing several older colours, right down to the pale raw wood beneath. Running her fingers over the flaw, she said, ‘You don’t think about all these colours when everything’s going all right; you’d go mad if you did. You just think about the colour on the top. But those colours are there, all the same. All the quarrels, and the bits of unkindness. And every so often something happens to put a chip right through; and then you can’t
not
think of them.’ She looked up, and grew self-conscious; her tone became ordinary again. ‘No, don’t ever get married, Miss Wray. Ask any wife! It isn’t worth it. You don’t know how lucky you are, being single, able to come and go just as you please —’

She stopped. ‘Oh, I do beg your pardon. Oh, I oughtn’t to have said that, about luck. Oh, that was stupid of me.’

Frances said, ‘But what do you mean?’

‘I wasn’t thinking.’

‘Thinking about what?’

‘Well —’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I had the impression – Maybe I misunderstood. But didn’t you say, on Saturday, when we were sitting in the kitchen, that you had once been engaged to be married, and —?’

Had Frances said that? No, of course she hadn’t. But she had said something, she recalled now – something careless and unguarded. Something about a proposal – was it? A disappointment? A loss?

The parasol was still raised, making that screen behind their shoulders. It was a moment for confidences, for putting things straight. But how, she thought, to explain? How to answer Mrs Barber’s kind, romantic speculations, that were in one way so wildly wide of the mark and in another so horribly near? So she didn’t answer at all – and, of course, her silence answered for her. It isn’t a lie, she said to herself. But she knew that it was a lie, really.

The moment put a slight distance between them. They sat without speaking, side by side, their hips and shoulders close and warm, but she felt that the pleasure of the afternoon had been punctured, was beginning to leak away.

And now, yes, as if summoned up to chase off the last of their intimacy, here came someone – a man, on his own – strolling up into the band-stand, tipping his straw hat to them, then lingering stubbornly a few yards off, pretending to be admiring the view. Frances kept her face turned away from him. Mrs Barber was sitting with her own head bowed. But every so often he looked their way – Frances could see him in the corner of her vision – his eye was roving over towards them with what he must have imagined to be a ‘twinkle’.

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