The Paying Guests (4 page)

Mrs Barber was on the bottom stair now and clearly doubtful about where to step to. After the slightest of hesitations, she took the hand that Frances offered, braced herself against her grip, then made the small spring forward to the unwashed side of the floor. Her kimono parted as she landed, exposing more of her nightdress, and giving an alarming suggestion of the rounded, mobile, unsupported flesh inside.

They went together through the kitchen and into the scullery. The bath was in there, beside the sink. It had a bleached wooden cover, used by Frances as a draining-board; with a practised movement she lifted this free and set it against the wall. The tub was an ancient one that had been several times re-enamelled, most recently by Frances herself, who was not quite sure of the result; the iron struck her, today especially, as having a faintly leprous appearance. The Vulcan geyser was also rather frightful, a greenish riveted cylinder on three bowed legs. It must have been the top of its manufacturer’s range in about 1870, but now looked like the sort of vessel in which someone in a Jules Verne novel might make a trip to the moon.

‘It has a bit of a temperament, I’m afraid,’ she told Mrs Barber as she explained the mechanism. ‘You have to turn this tap, but
not
this one; you might blow us sky-high if you do. The flame goes here.’ She struck a match. ‘Best to look the other way at this point. My father lost both his eyebrows doing this once. – There.’

The flame, with a whoosh, had found the gas. The cylinder began to tick and rattle. She frowned at it, her hands at her hips. ‘What a beast it is. I am sorry, Mrs Barber.’ She gazed right round the room, at the stone sink, the copper in the corner, the mortuary tiles on the wall. ‘I do wish this house was more up-to-date for you.’

But Mrs Barber shook her head. ‘Oh, please don’t wish that.’ She tucked back another curl of hair; Frances noticed the piercing for her earring, a little dimple in the lobe. ‘I like the house just as it is. It’s a house with a history, isn’t it? Things – well, they oughtn’t always to be modern. There’d be no character if they were.’

And there it was again, thought Frances: that niceness, that kindness, that touch of delicacy. She answered with a laugh. ‘Well, as far as character goes, I fear this house might be rather too much of a good thing. But —’ She spoke less flippantly. ‘I’m glad you like it. I’m very glad. I like it too, though I’m apt to forget that. – Now, we oughtn’t to let this geyser get hot without running some water, or there’ll be no house left to like, and no us to do the liking! Do you think you can manage? If the flame goes out – it sometimes does, I’m sorry to say – give me a call.’

Mrs Barber smiled, showing neat white teeth. ‘I will. Thank you, Miss Wray.’

Frances left her to it and returned to her wet floor. The scullery door was closed behind her, and quietly bolted.

But the door between the kitchen and the passage was propped open, and as Frances retrieved her cloth she could hear, very clearly, Mrs Barber’s preparations for her bath, the rattle of the chain against the tub, followed by the splutter and gush of the water. The gushing, it seemed to her, went on for a long time. She had told a fib about her and her mother’s use of the geyser: it was too expensive to light often; they drew their hot water from the boiler in the old-fashioned stove. They bathed, at most, once a week, frequently taking turns with the same bathwater. If Mrs Barber were to want baths like this on a daily basis, their gas bill might double.

But at last the flow was cut off. There came the splash of water and the rub of heels as Mrs Barber stepped into the tub, followed by a more substantial liquid thwack as she lowered herself down. After that there was a silence, broken only by the occasional echoey plink of drips from the tap.

Like the parted kimono, the sounds were unsettling; the silence was most unsettling of all. Sitting at her bureau a short time before, Frances had been picturing her lodgers in purely mercenary terms – as something like two great waddling shillings. But this, she thought, shuffling backward over the tiles, this was what it really meant to have lodgers: this odd, unintimate proximity, this rather peeled-back moment, where the only thing between herself and a naked Mrs Barber was a few feet of kitchen and a thin scullery door. An image sprang into her head: that round flesh, crimsoning in the heat.

She adjusted her pose on the mat, took hold of her cloth, and rubbed hard at the floor.

The steam was still beading the scullery walls when her mother returned at lunch-time. Frances told her about Mrs Barber’s bath, and she looked startled.

‘At ten o’clock? In her dressing-gown? You’re sure?’

‘Quite sure. A satin one, too. What a good job, wasn’t it, that you were visiting the vicar, and not the other way round?’

Her mother paled, but didn’t answer.

They ate their lunch – a cauliflower cheese – then settled down together in the drawing-room. Mrs Wray made notes for a parish newsletter. Frances worked her way through a basket of mending with
The Times
on the arm of her chair. What was the latest? Awkwardly, she turned the inky pages. But it was the usual dismal stuff. Horatio Bottomley was off to the Old Bailey for swindling the public out of a quarter of a million. An MP was asking that cocaine traffickers be flogged. The French were shooting Syrians, the Chinese were shooting each other, a peace conference in Dublin had come to nothing, there’d been new murders in Belfast… But the Prince of Wales looked jolly on a fishing trip in Japan, and the Marchioness of Carisbrooke was about to host a ball ‘in aid of the Friends of the Poor’. – So that was all right, then, thought Frances. She disliked
The Times
. But there wasn’t the money for a second, less conservative paper. And, in any case, reading the news these days depressed her. In the quaintness of her wartime youth it would have fired her into activity: writing letters, attending meetings. Now the world seemed to her to have become so complex that its problems defied solution. There was only a chaos of conflicts of interest; the whole thing filled her with a sense of futility. She put the paper aside. She would tear it up tomorrow, for scraps and kindling.

At least the house was silent; very nearly its old self. There had been bumps and creaks earlier, as Mrs Barber had shifted more furniture about, but now she must be in her sitting-room – doing what? Was she still in her kimono? Somehow, Frances hoped she was.

Whatever she was doing, her silence lasted right through tea-time. She didn’t come to life again until just before six, when she went charging around as if in a burst of desperate tidying, then began clattering pans and dishes in her little kitchen. Half an hour later, preparing dinner in her own kitchen, Frances was startled to hear the rattle of the front-door latch as someone let themself into the house. It was Mr Barber, of course, coming home from work. This time he sounded like her father, scuffing his feet across the mat.

He went tiredly up the stairs and gave a yodelling yawn at the top, but five minutes later, as she was gathering potato peelings from the counter, she heard him come back down. There was the squeak of his slippers in the passage and then, ‘Knock, knock, Miss Wray!’ His face appeared around the door. ‘Mind if I pass through?’

He looked older than he had the day before, with his hair greased flat for the office. A crimson stripe across his forehead must have been the mark of his bowler hat. Once he had visited the WC he lingered for a moment in the yard: she could see him through the kitchen window, wondering whether or not to go and speak to her mother, who was further down the garden, cutting asparagus. He decided against it and returned to the house, pausing to peer up at the brickwork or the window-frames as he came, and then to examine some crack or chip in the door-step.

‘Well, and how are you, Miss Wray?’ he asked, when he was back in the kitchen. She saw that there was no way out of a chat. But perhaps she ought to get to know him.

‘I’m very well, Mr Barber. And you? How was your day?’

He pulled at his stiff City collar. ‘Oh, the usual fun and games.’

‘Difficult, you mean?’

‘Well, every day’s difficult with a chief like mine. I’m sure you know the type: the sort of fellow who gives you a column of numbers to add and, when they don’t come out the way that suits him, blames you!’ He raised his chin to scratch at his throat, keeping his eyes on hers. ‘A public-school chap he’s meant to be, too. I thought those fellows knew better, didn’t you?’

Now, why would he say that? He might have guessed that her brothers – But, of course, he knew nothing about her brothers, she reminded herself, even though he and his wife were sleeping in their old room. She said, in an attempt to match his tone, ‘Oh, I hear those fellows are over-rated. You work in assurance, I think you told us?’

‘That’s right. For my sins!’

‘What is it you do, exactly?’

‘Me? I’m an assessor of lives. Our agents send in applications for policies. I pass them on to our medical man and, depending on his report, I say whether the life to be assured counts as good, bad or indifferent.’

‘Good, bad or indifferent,’ she repeated, struck by the idea. ‘You sound like St Peter.’

‘St Peter!’ He laughed. ‘I like that! That’s clever, Miss Wray. Yes, I shall try that out on the fellows at the Pearl.’

Once his laughter had faded she assumed that he would move on. But the little exchange had only made him chummier: he sidled into the scullery doorway and settled himself against the post of it. He seemed to enjoy watching her work. His blue gaze travelled over her and she felt him taking her all in: her apron, her steam-frizzed hair, her rolled-up sleeves, her scarlet knuckles.

She began to chop some mint for a sauce. He asked if the mint had come from the garden. Yes, she said, and he jerked his head towards the window. ‘I was just having a look at it out there. Quite a size, isn’t it? You and your mother don’t take care of it all by yourselves, do you?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we call in a man for the heavier jobs when —’ When we can run to it, she thought. ‘When they need doing. The vicar’s son comes and mows the lawn for us. We manage the rest between us all right.’

That wasn’t quite true. Her mother did her genteel best with the weeding and the pruning. As far as Frances was concerned, gardening was simply open-air housework; she had enough of that already. As a consequence, the garden – a fine one, in her father’s day – was growing more shapeless by the season, more depressed and unkempt. Mr Barber said, ‘Well, I’d be glad to give you a hand with it – you just say the word. I generally help with my father’s at home. His isn’t half the size of yours, mind. Not a quarter, even. Still, the guvnor’s made the most of it. He even has cucumbers in a frame. Beauties, they are – this long!’ He held his hands apart, to show her. ‘Ever thought of cucumbers, Miss Wray?’

‘Well —’

‘Growing them, I mean?’

Was there some sort of innuendo there? She could hardly believe that there was. But his gaze was lively, as it had been the night before, and, just as something about his manner then had discomposed her, so, now, she had the feeling that he was poking fun at her, perhaps attempting to make her blush.

Without replying, she turned to fetch vinegar and sugar for the mint, and when the sauce was mixed and in its bowl she removed her hot-pot from the oven, put in a knife to test the meat; she stood so long with her back to him that he took the hint at last and pushed away from the door-post. It seemed to her that, as he left the kitchen, he was smiling. And once he’d started along the passage she heard him begin to whistle, at a rather piercing pitch. The tune was a jaunty, music-hall one – it took her a moment to recognise it – it was ‘Hold Your Hand Out, Naughty Boy’. The whistle faded as he climbed the stairs, but a few minutes later she found that she was whistling the tune herself. She quickly cut the whistle off, but it was as though he’d left a stubborn odour behind him: do what she could, the wretched song kept floating back into her head all evening long.

There was more jaunty whistling, in the days that followed. There were more yodelling yawns at the top of the stairs. There were sneezes, too – those loud masculine sneezes, like shouts into the hand, that Frances could remember from the days of her brothers; sneezes that for some reason never came singly, but arrived as a volley and led inevitably to a last-trump blowing of the nose. Then there was the lavatory seat forever left in the upright position; there were the vivid yellow splashes and kinked wet gingerish hairs that appeared on the rim of the pan itself. Finally, on the dot of half-past ten each night, there was the clatter of a spoon in a glass as Mr Barber mixed himself an indigestion powder, followed a few seconds later by the little report of his belch.

None of it was so very irksome. It was certainly not a lot to put up with for the sake of twenty-nine shillings a week. Frances supposed that she would grow used to it, that the Barbers would grow used to her, that the house would settle down into grooves and routines, that they’d all start rubbing along together – as Mr Barber himself, she reflected, might say. She found it hard to imagine herself ever rubbing along with him, it was true, and she had several despondent moments, lying in bed with her cigarette, wondering again what she had done, what she had let the house in for; trying to remember why she had ever thought that the arrangement would work.

Still, at least Mrs Barber was easy to have about the place. That mid-morning bath, it seemed, had been a freak. She kept herself very much to herself as time went on, doing more of that ‘titivating’ her husband had pretended to grumble about, adding lengths of beading and swaths of macramé and lace to picture-rails and mantelpieces, arranging ostrich feathers in jars: Frances caught glimpses of it all as she went back and forth to her own room. Once, crossing the landing, she heard a sound like jingling bells, and glanced in through the open doorway of the couple’s sitting-room to see Mrs Barber with a tambourine in her hand. The tambourine had trailing ribbons and a gipsy look about it. Gipsyish, too, was Mrs Barber’s costume, the fringed skirt, the Turkish slippers; her hair was done up in a red silk scarf. Frances paused, not wanting to disturb her – then called lightly into the room.

‘Are you about to dance the tarantella, Mrs Barber?’

Mrs Barber came to the doorway, smiling. ‘I’m still deciding what goes where.’

Frances nodded to the tambourine. ‘May I see it?’ And then, when the thing was in her hand, ‘It’s pretty.’

Mrs Barber wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s only from a junk shop. It’s really Italian, though.’

‘You have exotic tastes, I think.’

‘Len says I’m like a savage. That I ought to live in the jungle. I just like things that have come from other places.’

And after all, thought Frances, what was wrong with that? She gave the tambourine a shake, tapped her fingers across its drum-skin. She might have lingered and said more; the moment, somehow, seemed to invite it. But it was Wednesday afternoon, and she and her mother were off to the cinema. With a touch of reluctance, she handed the tambourine back. ‘I hope you find the right spot for it.’

When, a little later, she and her mother left the house, she said, ‘I suppose we might have asked Mrs Barber to come along with us today.’

Her mother looked doubtful. ‘Mrs Barber? To the picture-house?’

‘You’d rather we didn’t?’

‘Well, perhaps once we know her better. But mightn’t it become awkward? Shouldn’t we have to ask her every time?’

Frances thought about it. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

In any case, the programme that week was disappointing. The first few films were all right, but the drama was a dud, an American thriller with a plot full of holes. She and her mother slipped away before the final act, hoping not to draw the notice of the small orchestra – Mrs Wray saying, as she often did, what a pity it was that the pictures nowadays had so much unpleasantness in them.

They met a neighbour, Mrs Hillyard, in the foyer. She was leaving early too, but from the dearer seats upstairs. They walked back up the road together, and, ‘How are your paying guests?’ she asked. She was too polite to call them lodgers. ‘Are they settling in? I see the husband in the mornings on his way to the City. He seems a very well-turned-out chap. I must say I rather envy you, having a young man in the house again. And you’ll enjoy having some young people about to argue with, Frances, I expect?’

Frances smiled. ‘Oh, my arguing days are all behind me.’

‘Of course they are. Your mother’s grateful for your company, I’m sure.’

That night there was skirt of beef for dinner: Frances worked up a sweat beating it tender with a rolling-pin. The next day, with an hour to herself, she cleared soot from the kitchen flue. The muck got under her fingernails and into the creases of her palms, and had to be scrubbed off with lemon juice and salt.

The day after that, feeling rather as though she’d earned a Friday treat, she left her mother a cold lunch and bread already buttered for tea, and went into Town.

She liked to go in when she could, sometimes as a shopping expedition, sometimes to call on a friend. Depending on the weather, she had various ways of making the journey; the days had kept fine since the Barbers’ arrival so she was able, this time, to make the best of it on foot. She caught a bus as far as Vauxhall, and from there she crossed the river and wandered north, taking any street that caught her eye.

She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn’t a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments – these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous. But it was the anonymity that did it. She never felt the electric charge when she walked through London with someone at her side. She never felt the excitement that she felt now, seeing the fall of the shadow of a railing across a set of worn steps. Was it foolish, to feel like that about the shadow of a railing? Was it whimsy? She hated whimsy. But it only became whimsy when she tried to put it into words. If she allowed herself simply to feel it… There. It was like being a string, and being plucked, giving out the single, pure note that one was made for. How odd, that no one else could hear it! If I were to die today, she thought, and someone were to think over my life, they’d never know that moments like this, here on the Horseferry Road, between a Baptist chapel and a tobacconist’s, were the truest things in it.

She crossed the street, swinging her bag, and a couple of gulls wheeled overhead, letting out those seaside cries that could be heard sometimes right in the middle of London, that always made her think that just around the next corner she would find the pier.

She did her shopping at the market stalls of Strutton Ground, going from one stall to another before committing herself, wanting to be sure that she was ferreting out the bargains; she ended up with three reels of sewing thread, half a dozen pairs of flawed silk stockings and a box of nibs. The walk from Vauxhall had made her hungry, and with her purchases stowed away she began to think about her lunch. Often on these trips she ate at the National Gallery, the Tate – somewhere like that, where the refreshment rooms were so bustling that it was possible to order a pot of tea, then sneak out a home-made bun to have with it. That was a spinsterish thing to do, however; she wouldn’t be a spinster today. Good grief, she was only twenty-six! She found a ‘cosy corner’ café and bought herself a hot lunch: egg, chips and bread and butter, all for a shilling and sixpence, including a penny tip for the waitress. She resisted the temptation to mop the plate with the bread and butter, but felt quite vulgar enough to roll herself a cigarette. She smoked it to the satisfying chink and splash of crockery and water that floated up from the basement kitchen: the sound of someone else washing up.

She walked to Buckingham Palace after that, not from any sentimental feeling about the King and Queen – whom, on the whole, she considered to be a pair of inbred leeches – but simply for the pleasure of being there, at the grand centre of things. For the same reason, after she had wandered about in St James’s Park she crossed the Mall and climbed the steps and went up to Piccadilly. She strolled a little way along Regent Street simply for the sake of its curve, pausing to goggle at the prices on the cards in the smart shop windows. Three-guinea shoes, four-guinea hats… A place on a corner was selling Persian antiques. A decorated jar was so tall and so round that a thief might hide in it. She thought, with a smile: Mrs Barber would like that.

There were no smart shops once she had crossed Oxford Circus. London made one of its costume changes, like whipping off a cloak; it became a shabby muddle of pianola sellers, Italian grocers, boarding-houses, pubs. But she liked the names of the streets: Great Castle, Great Titchfield, Riding House, Ogle, Clipstone – her friend, Christina, lived on this last one, in two rooms on the top floor of an ugly, newish building. Frances went in by a brown-tiled passage, greeted the porter in his booth, passed on to the open courtyard and began the long climb up the stairs. As she approached Christina’s landing she could hear the sound of her typewriter, a fluid, hectic
tap-tap-tap
. She paused to catch her breath, put her finger to the push of the doorbell, and the typewriting ceased. A moment later Christina opened the door, tilting up her small, pale, pointed face for Frances’s kiss, but narrowing her eyes and blinking.

‘I can’t see you! I can only see letters, hopping about like fleas. Oh, I shall go blind, I know I shall. Just a minute, while I bathe my brow.’

She slipped past Frances to wash her hands at the sink on the landing, and then to hold the hands to her forehead. She came back rubbing at an eye with a wet knuckle.

The building was run by a society offering flats to working women. Christina’s neighbours were school-mistresses, stenographers, lady clerks; she herself made her living by typing up manuscripts and dissertations for authors and students, and by odd bits of secretarial and book-keeping work. Just now, she told Frances as she led her into the flat, she was helping out on a new little paper, a little political thing; she had been typing up statistics on the Russian Famine, and the constant fiddling about with the margins had given her a headache. Then, of course, there were the figures themselves, so many hundreds of thousands dead, so many hundreds of thousands still starving. It was miserable work.

‘And the worst of it is,’ she said guiltily, ‘it’s made me so hungry! And there isn’t a bit of food in the flat.’

Frances opened her bag. ‘Hey presto – there is, now. I’ve made you a cake.’

‘Oh, Frances, you haven’t.’

‘Well, a currant loaf. I’ve been carrying it about with me, and it weighs a ton. Here you are.’

She brought the loaf out, undid its string, parted its paper. Christina saw the glossy brown crust of it and her blue eyes widened like a child’s. There was only one thing to do with a cake like that, she said, and that was to toast it. She set a kettle on the gas-ring for tea, then rummaged about in a cupboard for an electric fire.

‘Sit down while this warms up,’ she said, as the fire began to tick and hum. ‘Oh, but let some air in, would you, so we don’t swelter.’

Frances had to move a colander from the window-sill in order to raise the sash. The room was large and light, decorated in fashionable Bohemian colours, but there were untidy piles of books and papers on the floor, and nothing was where it ought to be. The armchairs were comedy-Victorian, one of scuffed red leather, the other of balding velveteen. The velveteen one had a tray balanced on it, bearing the remains of two breakfasts: sticky egg cups and dirty mugs. She passed the tray to Christina, who cleared it, gave it a wipe, set it with cups, saucers, plates and a smeary bottle of milk, and handed it back. The mugs, the egg cups, the cups and saucers, were all of pottery, heavily glazed, thickly made – all of it with a rather ‘primitive’ finish. Christina shared this flat with another woman, Stevie. Stevie was a teacher in the art department of a girls’ school in Camden Town, but was trying to make a name for herself as a maker of ceramics.

Frances did not dislike Stevie exactly, but she generally timed her visits so that they fell inside school hours; it was Chrissy she came to see. The two of them had known each other since the mid-point of the War. With the coming of Peace, perversely, they had parted on bad terms, but fate had brought them back together – fate, or chance, or whatever it was that, one day last September, had sent Frances into the National Gallery to escape a torrent of rain, had nudged her out of the Flemish rooms and into the Italian, where she had come upon Christina, as sodden as herself, gazing with a mixed expression at
Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time
. There had been no chance of a retreat. While Frances had stood there, disconcerted, Christina had turned, and their eyes had met; after the first awkwardness, the more-than-coincidence of it had been impossible to resist, and now they saw each other two or three times a month. Their friendship sometimes struck Frances as being like a piece of soap – like a piece of ancient kitchen soap that had got worn to the shape of her hand, but which had been dropped to the floor so many times it was never quite free of its bits of cinder.

Today, for example, she saw that Christina had re-styled her hair. The hair had been short at their last meeting, a fortnight before; now it was even more severely shingled at the back, with a straight fringe halfway up Christina’s forehead and two flat, pointed curls in front of her ears. Rather wilfully eccentric, Frances thought the style. She thought the same of Christina’s frock, which was a swirl of muddy pinks and greys, and matched the Bloomsbury walls. She thought it of the walls, for that matter; of the whole untidy flat. She never came here without looking at the disorder of it all in a mixture of envy and despair, imagining the cool, calm, ordered place the rooms would be if they were hers.