The Paying Guests (32 page)

‘The clever girl with all the masses of fair hair. I remember meeting her with you – oh, three or four times. Once just here, on the hill. You don’t remember?’

‘No, I don’t remember that.’

‘But you still see her? You were such great friends. You used to frighten me, the two of you. You had an opinion on everything! I’ve always been so muddle-headed. Mr Pacey calls me his goose. What’s become of her? Did she marry?’

‘She’s living in Town, in a flat, with another girl. Working. She wears her hair very short now.’

‘Oh, what a pity! I used to envy her her hair. Yes, I must have seen her with you three or four times, at least.’

There was nothing behind the comment, Frances decided. The scandal over Christina had happened long after John Arthur’s death, and would never have been allowed to reach Edith. She was simply pulling out these memories in the same wistful way in which, a few minutes before, she had been gazing around the Wrays’ hall at the black oak furniture. She must be thinking still how strange it was that here was a life, a world, of which she might have been a part, a life she had had some claim on all this time, but from the clinging fibres of which she was finally being eased away.

As they drew near to the station entrance they heard the approach of a west-bound train. But there was no question of Edith’s running for it: she let the train go by, and they stood in the shade at the top of the platform steps, waiting for the next one.

Frances said, ‘It was good of you to come to us today, Edith. It was good of you to tell us about Mr Pacey – rather than writing it, I mean. I’m really happy for you.’

‘Are you? I wish I thought your mother was.’

‘Mother is happy for you, too. She will be, anyhow, once she’s had time to take it in.’

‘She was always so kind to me. She thinks I’ve let Jack down. You don’t think that, do you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘You know what he was to me. I shan’t ever forget him. I shall always wear his ring. Mr Pacey is very understanding about that.’ She brought her gloved hands together, as if to reassure herself of the solidity of the metal under the kid – though it was the new ring that her fingers strayed to, Frances noticed, rather than the old.

And she was blushing again – blushing with excitement, with delight, for her unlikely-sounding sweetheart. For, now that they were away from the repressions of the drawing-room, Frances saw the delight for the physical thing it was; she saw it, she recognised it, because it was like her own delight for Lilian. She felt fonder of Edith suddenly than she ever had before – an artificial fondness probably, produced by the currents of the moment, but she thought that Edith also felt the leap of intimacy between them, because she gazed into Frances’s face in a franker way and said, ‘It’s good to see you, Frances! I wish now that I’d kept up with you more. You, and your mother. Are you both all right? Your mother’s quite well? She’s aged, I think, since last year. And you —’

‘What?’ asked Frances, smiling. ‘I don’t look older too, I hope?’

‘Not older, exactly. But – perhaps as though you’re settling into your role?’

Frances was startled. ‘My role?’

‘I don’t mean it badly! But in the past – well, you’ve sometimes seemed not quite happy. Your mother, too. But you must be such a comfort to each other. I’m so glad. – Oh, but I must go!’ Another train was coming. ‘I’ve arranged to meet Herbert – Mr Pacey, I mean – and he fusses if I’m late. Thank you for being so nice to me!’

They shook hands, hurriedly, though she made a point of pressing Frances’s fingers. Then she turned and made her quick, smart way down the steps.

She boarded the train without looking back. Probably it didn’t occur to her that Frances would stand and watch. But Frances remained there while the train moved off, and stayed even for a minute or two afterwards, thinking,
Settling into my role!
The words had filled her with horror. She had taken on the role herself; she had given up Christina to do it. But that was an age, a lifetime, ago, and since then – She stared at the shining railway line and thought of the night of Netta’s party, when she and Lilian had sat squashed together in the train. She remembered their silent climb up these steps, and all that had come after. There had been no roles to follow, then. The two of them had been reborn in each other’s kisses – hadn’t they?

She didn’t know. She’d lost her confidence in it. It all felt oddly insubstantial, as though Edith’s visit had chased it away, like a cockerel crowing away a ghost. She left the station and headed home, but the thought of the house, the tired house, the empty rooms, her grieving mother, made her falter. Instead of pressing on up the hill she crossed the road and went into the park.

She was suddenly desperate to conjure up Lilian’s presence, the substance and reality of her. But the fine weather had brought people out: the band-stand had a courting couple on it, the boy tickling the girl’s nose with a blade of grass; Frances didn’t even think of climbing the steps. She went on instead to the tennis courts, where she and Lilian had once stood to watch the young women play. A few games were in progress, but the nets were sagging, the courts worn to dust by the demands of the long summer. She approached the pond, and found the water dark, with scummy banks; she left it quickly. But everywhere was the same. It was all small, suburban, unspecial. The exposed western slope was like a desert plain. What struck her most were those remnants of the grand houses and gardens from which the park had been patched together years before: the stranded portico; a sundial, still telling the time for a lost age; a mournful avenue of trees, leading nowhere.

Frustrated, she kept moving. She thought she had come in here to find Lilian, but she realised as she made the turn from one path to another that she was not so much in search of something as in flight: she was trying to outrun the implications of Edith’s visit. She kept seeing Edith’s ring. She kept recalling the wink of the diamond. ‘Here I am, Miss Wray,’ that diamond seemed to say to her. ‘The real thing. You can’t compete with the likes of me, so don’t try. Be content with your “role”, that you are settling so nicely into, like an oyster digging its dumb way into the sea-bed.’ She had resisted thinking like this for the whole of her adult life. She would as soon have worn a ring like Edith’s as worn a saddle on her back! But she felt drained of strength and spirit; she felt bruised, she felt alone. Was this what the affair with Lilian had done to her? Made her a stranger to herself? With dragging feet, she left the last stretch of arid grass and started for home.

And as she approached the house, she spotted the postman just ahead of her. She arrived at the garden gate as he did; he offered her a letter, and when she took it, and saw her own name, written in Lilian’s curling hand, she felt not grateful, not relieved – she felt unnerved, as if she had called the letter into life by some dark magic. The envelope was almost weightless. She didn’t want to open it. She held it in her fingers, watching the retreating figure of the postman, and had the urge to run after him and stuff it back into his bag.

Instead she folded it into her pocket and went indoors. She found her mother just emerging from her bedroom, her face with a newly powdered look; and since her mother wore powder so rarely, she guessed that she had been weeping. The thought was like a final blow to her spirits. She wanted to sit at the foot of the staircase with her head in her hands. ‘Oh, Mother,’ she wanted to say, ‘our hearts are breaking. What on earth are we to do?’

But she hadn’t spoken candidly like that to her mother in about twenty years. Even after her brothers’ deaths, the two of them had done their crying in private. So, with the points of the folded letter digging into her through her pocket, she stood at the looking-glass to take off her hat. And when she spoke, she made her tone breezy. ‘Well! Edith marrying a jam-jar millionaire! Who ever would have thought it?’ – which allowed her mother to answer, in a gently chiding way, ‘Really, Frances.’

‘Oh, I’m thrilled for her. I just can’t help but feel that Mr Pacey is somehow getting the better half of the bargain. He must be ancient, too. And what a whopper of a ring! Perhaps there was a chip left over at the glass-works, what do you think?’

The little bit of shared snobbery was just sufficient. She caught her mother’s eye in the glass and they exchanged a tremulous smile.

But once her mother had returned to the drawing-room she watched her own smile fade. She turned away from it, climbed the stairs, went into her bedroom, closed the door. The letter looked more insubstantial than ever now that it had got creased from her pocket; more sinister, too. It still seemed to have been conjured into life as an answer to the failings of the day. The trudge around the park had brought it, the loss of confidence. She had finally admitted her own unhappiness, and that had allowed Lilian to admit hers. And between them they had made this thing, this flimsy, horrible thing, that – she knew, knew,
knew
it – was about to finish what the holiday had started, was going to separate them absolutely, like a contract of law.

With a burst of bravado, she thought: Well, perhaps it’s for the best.

She got the envelope open and drew out the paper. She readied herself, unfolded it, and saw the first dark line of ink.

Her heart, that had shrivelled, seemed rapidly to inflate. She went to her bed and leaned against the footrail, putting the back of her hand to her face, closing her eyes against her own knuckles. Then she lowered the paper and read on.

Never in her life had Frances received such a letter. Never in her life would she have believed that something so artless, so entirely without guile or finish, could have stirred and moved her to such a degree. She read it over again; she read it a third time, and a fourth. Her weariness had disappeared. She held the paper to her lips, and it was exactly as Lilian had promised: she could feel her kisses, she could feel her mouth, alive and urgent against her own.

And the next day Lilian was home, back in her arms, clinging to her on the landing while Leonard was still bringing in the bags. She came again a little later, while he was running himself a bath. And on Monday morning, with the house to themselves, they lay half-dressed on Frances’s bed, she put her face against Frances’s shoulder, and she wept.

‘I hated it, Frances! I hated it so much! I wanted to come home every day. I kept on smiling and playing the fool, but it was like being in a prison. Whenever Len kissed me, I thought of you. That was the only way I could stand it. Whenever he touched me, whenever he looked at me, I thought of you, I thought of you!’

The tears shook her like a storm. Frances held her while she shuddered and moaned, amazed at the passion in her; afterwards she stroked her wet, stained cheeks and swollen eyelids, ran fingers over her lips. ‘How I love you. How I love you.’

But the words made Lilian’s eyes fill again. Frances drew back to look at her properly. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

She shook her head, so that the tears spilled. ‘I just wish,’ she said unevenly, ‘that things were different. I wish it so much.’

‘No, it’s more than that. Did something happen while you were away?’

She wiped her cheeks. ‘I just missed you. I felt so alone.’

‘And what you wrote in your letter, about wanting to be brave – did you mean it?’

‘You know I did.’

Frances took hold of her hands. ‘Then listen. I’ve been thinking, all night long. We can’t go on like this. Look at you! It’s killing you! And I – I can’t do it any longer, not the way we’ve been doing it till now. I can’t share you with Leonard any more. I can’t share you with something that passes itself off as a marriage, but is really habit and pride and… empty embraces, or worse. If I loved you less, I might be able to, but – I can’t. I won’t. I want you to leave him, Lilian. I want you to leave him and live with me.’