The Paying Guests (28 page)

She had been speaking slightly sheepishly up until now. But the suggestion of a smirk must have crept into her features, because Christina, tutting, said, ‘Yes, well, I don’t want the details, thanks. Honestly, I don’t know what to say. I’d always supposed this Mrs Barber a perfect man’s woman.’

‘So had I. So had she.’

‘And so, I presume, had her husband. And your mother hasn’t tumbled to it? You think you can keep it from her, in that house?’

‘But you forget,’ said Frances, ‘what an old hand I am at keeping things from my mother. I don’t mean just about – about you and me. I mean things like – oh, stuffing kippers into my handbag, so as to keep up the idea that I don’t carry my own parcels. I mean going about with holes in my petticoats so that hers might be less ragged. You think I’m out to punish her, don’t you, by making a martyr of myself? You don’t know the countless little lies I tell for keeping the worst of our situation from her. But when I’m with Lilian I feel honest. I feel like a knot that’s been unpicked. Or as if all my angles have been rubbed smooth.’

Christina was gazing at her now with a look of perplexity. ‘And it’s really Love? Upper case?’

‘Oh, Chrissy, I don’t know what else to call it.’

‘But what can happen? Where can it lead? Do you expect her to abandon her husband for you?’

‘I don’t expect anything. Neither of us does. We aren’t looking ahead. The present’s too thrilling.’

That made Christina’s expression harden. ‘You aren’t looking ahead. You’re like everyone else just now, then.’

‘Oh, well, and what if I am?’ said Frances. ‘I’m keeping step with the world for a change. Will it kill me? And there’s so much antagonism everywhere, so much stress and chafe. Lilian and I – we can’t let this bit of love go by. We just can’t.’

Her voice had thickened with an emotion that surprised even herself, and in the pause that followed she guessed that she had been too frank, or over-sentimental. But Christina turned away from her to take a final puff on her cigarette, and then to grind the cigarette out on one of the smooth old stones beneath their feet. And what she said, as she did it, was, ‘Well, lucky Mrs Barber.’

It was plain what she meant, though they hadn’t discussed it in years. Frances was silent for a moment, then spoke in a murmur.

‘I let you down, Chrissy.’

‘Yes. I’ve waited all this time to hear you admit it.’

‘But I lost more than you did.’

‘You did? How’s that?’

‘Well, how do you think? You got our life, but with Stevie in it.’

Christina flicked a speck of ash from her sleeve. ‘Yes, well,’ she said grudgingly, ‘I’d prefer to have had it with you.’

The admission astonished Frances. She said, ‘You don’t mean that? I’d supposed you were happy with Stevie.’

Christina made a face. ‘I am. You needn’t grow conceited. I wouldn’t swap her for you now. And, really, Frances, you’re such a queer combination of things – so conservative one minute, so reckless the next – it would have driven me to tears to live with you. I think I should have finished by wanting to throttle you! It’s simply that – well, I’d like to have had the chance to find out. And most of all,’ she added, ‘I’d have liked it if, when faced with a choice between me and a life of buns and parish bazaars and games of two-handed patience with your mother, you had chosen me. But you didn’t, so there’s an end of it.’

She had lowered her head. Her hands were restless in her lap, the fingers with shadows of ink at the tips, the nails nibbled at the edges. And by some association of memories too convoluted to untangle, the sight of her hands fidgeting like that brought something into Frances’s mind: a moment from the very beginning of it all, opening a book in a public meeting, finding the slip of paper inside.
You chump. Don’t you know by now what a horrible huge lot I like you?

And perhaps Christina was remembering something similar. Mixed in with the muted traffic sounds of Fleet Street there suddenly rose a bit of music: some event was being advertised from the back of a motor-van. The strains of it blared, then faded, and as they died altogether she said, with a sigh, ‘No one’s grinding out “our” song today, then.’ She got to her feet, straightening her skirt. ‘I ought to be getting along. Shall we go?’

So they left the yard and rejoined Fleet Street, their pace wearier than before. Once they had entered the Strand, Frances said, ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll turn at the bridge. How’s your corn?’

‘No, I don’t mind. The corn’s all right.’

‘And you’ve forgiven me?’

‘Forgiven you?’

‘Yes, for – Oh, wait here a sec, will you?’

There was always a flower-seller on the pavement at St Clement Dane’s, an elderly, tobacco-coloured woman who, as a girl, she’d once told Frances, had sold carnations to Charles Dickens. Frances dodged across the busy road to her now and bought a bunch of white lilac. She carried it back through the hooting traffic, and Christina looked sour.

‘For Mrs Barber, I suppose.’

But Frances held it out. ‘For you. For your birthday. I’m sorry I forgot.’

Christina coloured. She took the flowers and raised them to her nose. ‘Well, thank you. I’m glad to have seen you. Don’t let it go another month.’

‘I won’t. And Chrissy, what I’ve told you – You won’t go talking all about it? Not even to Stevie? Lilian has a morbid fear of it getting back to her sisters.’

‘Well, I don’t blame her! Do you?’

‘Oh, how maddening you are. I thought you’d think it all terribly progressive and Gordon Square.’

‘But Mrs Barber isn’t Bloomsbury.’

‘I do wish you’d call her Lilian. Is there one rule for Bloomsbury, then, and another for the suburbs?’

‘What if her husband discovers it? What will happen then?’

‘I don’t know. We haven’t thought that far. I told you, that’s the joy of it.’

Christina’s gaze flicked to the passers-by. She lowered her voice. ‘Well, just be careful. A married woman, Frances! Properly married, not just like Stevie and me. It can’t end well, can it?’

But the end, Frances wanted to say, was impossible to imagine. It was like the idea that one would grow old, when one was thrumming with youth; like the knowledge that one would die, when one felt full to one’s fingertips with life.

Instead she nodded, and kissed Christina’s cheek, and promised: ‘I’ll be careful.’ And then they parted, Christina limping off in the direction of Covent Garden, Frances heading south across the bridge – pausing for a minute in the middle, to look at the toffee-coloured river below.

And on the other side, she paused again. A display in a fancy-goods shop had caught her eye. The display was of cheap china ornaments: windmills, cottages, Scottie dogs. Nestled in amongst them was a caravan and pony, a gaudy, gimcrack thing, meant for children or doting old ladies; but it made her think of that fantasy of Lilian’s, about the gipsy king and queen. The price was a shilling and sixpence. It would be money thrown away. And she had already bought that lilac…

Oh, what the hell, she thought. One wasn’t in love every day! She went inside and bought the thing, carried it home, took it up to her room, spent ages wrapping it in a bit of coloured paper and a ribbon.

She gave it to Lilian the next morning, while her mother was in the garden. And though she laughed as she handed it over, and though Lilian laughed too once she had unwrapped it, somehow when the cheap little ornament was resting between them in her upturned palms their laughter died and they grew almost grave.

‘I shall look at this when we’re apart,’ Lilian said, ‘and it won’t matter who I’m with, whether it’s Len or anyone. He’ll think I’m here, but I won’t be here. I’ll be with you, Frances.’

She raised the caravan to her mouth, closed her eyes as if wishing, and kissed it. And then she set it on the mantelpiece in place of Sailor Sam – put it right there, in Leonard’s own sitting-room, where his gaze, Frances thought, would pass unwittingly over it perhaps a hundred times a day. The idea set off a mixture of feelings inside her: she didn’t know which of them was uppermost, excitement or disquiet.

And perhaps the conversation with Christina broke some sort of spell; for, almost immediately, things began to change. At breakfast a few days later, Frances’s mother received a note inviting her over to Braemar for an hour or two, so that she and Mrs Playfair might discuss some new charity venture. And though Frances had planned to devote the morning to housework, and would ordinarily have used her mother’s absence to throw herself into some especially grubby chore, once her mother was safely out of the way the knowledge that Lilian was upstairs, alone, unguarded, began to mount in her like a dreadful itch. At last she gave in and went up, tapped at the sitting-room door. Lilian pulled across the curtains, and the room became the dim, warm, insulated place that it had been on the night of Snakes and Ladders. They lay kissing on the sofa for a while, then moved to the floor, gently undoing each other’s clothes as they went.

But when Frances made to draw up Lilian’s skirt, Lilian stopped her. ‘No.’

‘No?’

‘Not yet. Lie back first, and let me love you.’

So Frances did as she was told, lay flat, closed her eyes, let her skirt be raised, let her legs be eased apart. She felt Lilian’s hand, and then her mouth, warm and mobile, on her stockinged thigh; she felt the mouth grow wet and velvety where it met the flesh above the silk. Then her underclothes were thumbed aside and the mouth was between her legs, tight against her, hot, quite still – unbearably still, so that she started to stir against it – then becoming movement, becoming lips, tongue, breath, pressure, insistence —

Then, with painful abruptness, the mouth was withdrawn. She lifted her head. ‘What —?’

‘Sh!’ said Lilian. She was looking over at the door, a finger raised to her wet lips. And then Frances heard it too: a creak, a footstep, leaving the stairs. Before she could react, there came a voice: ‘Frances? Are you up here?’

It was her mother, out on the landing, just on the other side of the not-quite-shut sitting-room door.

They leapt to their feet as if shot through with electricity. Lilian was madly wiping her mouth and chin. Frances’s skirt was up around her hips, one of her stockings come free of its suspender: she groped for the catch, got it fastened, straightened seams, smoothed her hair. Where were her slippers? She spotted the heel of one: it had got kicked under the sofa. She tried to hook it out with her toe, tilting sideways as she did it… Now her mother was calling again. ‘Frances?’ She gave up on the slippers, looked once at Lilian, and, her heart hammering, went to the door.

Her mother was just turning away as if to head downstairs again. Hearing Frances, she turned back. ‘Oh, you
are
here. Good.’

‘Yes,’ said Frances. ‘Yes, I’m here.’ She moved forward, pulling the door to behind her. ‘What is it? Are you all right?’

‘Yes, I’m fine. But it’s Patty, over at Mrs Playfair’s. An upset stomach. Nothing to trouble a doctor with, but she has set her mind on arrowroot as the cure; and Mrs Playfair’s kitchen is out of it. Don’t we have some? I was sure we would. I’ve promised to take it straight back to them. But I’ve looked right through the larder and can’t see any.’

She was still in her hat and her coat. The front door hadn’t sounded; she must have come by the lane and the garden, for quickness. Stammering slightly over the words, Frances said, ‘How long have you been here?’

‘Just a few minutes. I did wonder where you were. I saw that you weren’t in the drawing-room.’

‘No. No, I’ve been up here, with Lilian.’

Her mother was paying more attention to her now. ‘Yes? What have you been doing? You look as though you’d run a race!’

‘Do I?’ Frances laughed. ‘Oh, Lilian’s been teaching me a dance step.’

It was the first thing that sprang to mind. But she’d had to say something to account for her manner and appearance. She was acutely conscious of her uncombed hair, the colour in her cheeks, her creased clothes and shoeless feet – and also of the fading slippery commotion between her thighs. Thinking to use a small lie to deflect attention from a larger one – because that was a strategy that had sometimes worked for her in the past – she added, in a coming-clean sort of way, ‘We’ve been smoking, too. I didn’t want you to be bothered by the smell of it.’

Did that help, or make things worse? Her mother’s mouth straightened, conventionally. But then she seemed to hesitate, her gaze sliding past Frances to settle with a touch of wariness on the pulled-to door.

There was nothing to do now, however, but brazen it out. Frances moved forward. Poor Patty. Yes, there was certainly arrowroot. She had used it only last week, for the shape at Sunday’s lunch. If her mother would just come back to the larder… They went down the stairs and into the kitchen in silence. The larder door was open, the box right at the front of the shelf – right there, where anyone but her mother would have spotted it. It was rather a full box. Patty, surely, wouldn’t need so much as that? She fussed for a minute, tipping the powder into a bit of brown paper, making a neat packet of it with two rubber bands.

Her heart was racing the whole time, though her voice, she thought, was steady. But her mother’s manner remained stilted, and her goodbye, when it came, was rather a muted one. She headed off down the garden in a rigid way, as if she knew full well that Frances was at the window watching her go.

Once she had disappeared through the door to the lane, Frances went weakly back upstairs. The sitting-room curtains were open now. Lilian was standing on the hearth rug, her clothes made neat, her hands at her face, covering her nose and mouth. She looked at Frances over her fingertips, and for a moment it seemed possible that, appalled, relieved, the two of them might burst into nervous laughter.

But somehow the moment passed. Frances sank on to the sofa. ‘God!’ She gazed down at her crumpled skirt. ‘I look untidy as hell, don’t I? And my face is blazing. Did you hear me out there? I told her we’d been dancing. That you’d been teaching me a step. Oh, it’s all too music-hall for words!’

Lilian lowered her hands. ‘But your mother wouldn’t guess, would she?’

‘I don’t know. She guesses more than you’d imagine. Then again, she’s good at not seeing the things that don’t suit her… Oh,
bloody
Mrs Playfair! It’s exactly like her to send my mother home for half an old box of arrowroot, when she might easily have sent one of her army of maids to buy a new one. It’s exactly like my mother, too, to come!’

‘But she won’t think of it,’ insisted Lilian. ‘Nobody would. They’d think of anything but that.’

Frances answered unwillingly. ‘She might, though. Because of Christina and me.’

Lilian stared at her, then abruptly turned away. She sat down on the easy chair, biting at her thumb-nail. Frances looked from her to the patch of carpet where they had lain to make love. The room felt airless to her now. At least her mother hadn’t come the street way and seen the pulled-across curtains. The curtains were silk summer things of Lilian’s, put up just recently. They matched some of the cushions on the sofa. There were silk flowers in the hob-grate, too; the birdcage was twirling slowly on its ribbon; and there on the mantelpiece, of course, were those toys and trinkets, the china caravan amongst them… Frances suddenly saw the room with her mother’s eyes, and it looked like something from a Piccadilly back street.

She gazed across at Lilian and, in a deflated sort of way, her shoulders sinking, she said, ‘What are we doing, Lilian?’

Lilian looked back at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean. It’s half-past ten in the morning. It’s no surprise my mother nearly caught us. The wonder is she never has before.’

‘But didn’t you want it?’

‘Of course I wanted it.’

‘It was you that came up to me.’

‘Yes, because if I hadn’t come then, when would I have been able to see you? Maybe for five minutes, later, while Leonard was down in the lav?’

‘But what else can we do?’ Lilian asked. And then, when Frances didn’t answer: ‘You don’t want us to stop?’ She came across to the sofa, sat, took hold of Frances’s hands. ‘You couldn’t stop, could you? Oh, Frances, say you couldn’t. I think I’d die! I love you so much.’

‘And I love you. But we say it, and what does it mean?’

‘You know what it means. You know. Why do you even have to ask me?’

‘Sometimes I think we’ve a sort of delirium.’

‘It’s the rest of the world that has that. We’ll just have to be more careful. It doesn’t matter what time of the day we see each other, does it? What does the time matter? It doesn’t matter that it’s in secret; that just makes it more special, more ours.’

‘Do you suppose my mother would think it special? Do you imagine Leonard would?’

‘Oh,’ Lilian answered automatically, ‘I don’t care what he thinks. And it isn’t as though I’m going with a man, is it?’

Frances’s heart dropped. ‘Isn’t it?’

At once, Lilian grew flustered. ‘I mean, that’s how he would see it.’

‘How, precisely?’ asked Frances. ‘As a small thing, you mean. Why not tell him all about it, then, if it’s as small as all that?’

Lilian sat with her gaze lowered, and spoke quietly. ‘It isn’t a small thing. You know it isn’t.’

Frances did know it. Or, she was almost sure she did. But she felt a perverse temptation to kick out, start a fight… The impulse subsided. She lifted Lilian’s hand to her mouth, and sighed against her fingers. ‘I’m sorry. Don’t let’s quarrel.’

Lilian smiled at her, uncertainly. ‘Come back to the floor. I’ll draw the curtains again. We can —’

‘No. I’d better go down.’ She began to get to her feet. ‘Mrs Playfair might send my mother home for something else.’

Lilian kept hold of her. ‘Don’t go.’

‘I must, Lilian.’

‘Well, just – just kiss me, first, will you?’

So, after a moment of resistance, Frances allowed herself to be pulled back to the sofa; and the kiss, as usual, went on and on.

Once her mother had returned, Frances took care to keep the conversation well away from the subject of Lilian. They discussed Patty’s upset stomach, which the dose of arrowroot, it seemed, had done nothing much to calm. But after dinner that evening, as they sat sewing in the drawing-room, her mother mentioned some task she had promised to do for Mrs Playfair – numbering tickets for a forthcoming raffle. Would Frances help? It was easy work, but rather boring. They might do it at the week’s end? Say, Saturday afternoon?

‘Of course,’ said Frances. After a second she added awkwardly, ‘But it might have to be Sunday, I’m afraid. Lilian and I have talked of doing something together on Saturday.’

Her mother was silent after that, sorting through the silks in her basket. She snipped off a length, moistened the end of it, ran it through the eye of a needle. But when she had secured the first of her stitches she said, ‘You’ve been rather in Mrs Barber’s pockets lately, I’ve noticed. Doesn’t Mr Barber miss his wife?’

She said it quietly, without looking up, and sounding so unlike her normal self that Frances’s stomach gave a jump as if she were ten years old. She made a stitch or two in her own work and answered, as lightly as she could, ‘They often spend their Saturdays separately. He plays tennis after work, remember?’

‘I wasn’t thinking only of Saturdays.’

‘Well, Lilian and I have become good friends.’

‘You’re certainly on very familiar terms these days. She must be flattered that you’re taking such an interest in her.’

Frances managed a laugh. ‘Taking an interest? You make it sound as though I’m running a Girls’ Club!’

‘Perhaps you ought to try running a Girls’ Club, or something like it. Mr Garnish asked me only yesterday how you fill your time. I didn’t know what to tell him.’

‘I fill my time by looking after this house.’

‘Yes, well, it doesn’t seem to have been especially well looked after just lately.’

Frances put down her mending. ‘Oh, Mother, that’s a bit rum. One minute you can’t bear to see me scrubbing a floor. The next you’re complaining that the floor hasn’t been cleaned.’

Her mother had coloured. ‘I’m not complaining, Frances. You know how I feel about you and your chores; you know how very grateful I am for all you’ve done. But wasn’t it for the sake of the house that we brought in Mr and Mrs Barber in the first place? If the housework is to suffer because you spend your mornings with her, smoking cigarettes and dancing polkas… Doesn’t Mrs Barber have chores of her own? Or perhaps you’re doing them for her.’

‘Of course I’m not doing her chores for her.’

‘You seem so awfully in thrall to her. And she has always struck me as such an ordinary young woman. You mustn’t let her monopolise you. Don’t go running around after her. Where are all your other friends? You never seem to see Margaret these days. And Mrs Barber has friends, surely? Friends of her own background?’

Was that what this was about, then? wondered Frances. Background? She almost hoped it was. She said, ‘I enjoy Lilian’s company, that’s all. She enjoys mine.’

‘More than her sisters’?’

‘You know very well that they’re rather different types.’

‘And her husband’s?’

‘I’ve told you before, they don’t always get along.’

‘Well, but don’t let her take advantage of you. When she patches things up with Mr Barber —’

‘Perhaps she won’t patch them up,’ Frances couldn’t help but say.

At that, her mother looked impatient. ‘But of course she will! She’ll make herself thoroughly unhappy if she doesn’t. No wife likes to think she hasn’t made a success of her marriage. I hope you haven’t been putting any odd notions on the subject into her head. If I thought – If I thought for one moment that you’d been encouraging her in turning away from her husband —’

Frances spoke without a blink. ‘Why on earth would I do that?’

And her manner must have been convincing. Her mother’s gaze lost some of its edge. ‘Well. Just don’t go making some sort of “cause” out of her. She and Mr Barber won’t live here for ever. There are sure to be children at some point. They’ll move back into their own sphere, and then – what? You’ll see less of her, and be sorry.’