The Paying Guests (59 page)

Don’t look at it, she told herself. Don’t think it. Say nothing. For God’s sake! But she couldn’t help it. The madness was rising in her again. She let out a horrid little sneering laugh, and in a voice that didn’t even sound like her own, she said, ‘I’m afraid you didn’t quite get your money’s worth today.’

Lilian lifted her head from the pillow, her face creasing into a frown. ‘Money’s worth?’

‘Or have I misunderstood? Is the payment for something else entirely? Don’t worry, I won’t go to the police, if that’s what’s troubling you. The boy will stay nicely tucked up at Brixton.’

Lilian held herself quite still for a moment. Then she jerked away, threw off the counterpane, got down from the bed. She turned her back to Frances as she straightened her skirt and blouse. Her hair was untidy, but she didn’t pause to comb it; in a series of rigid, furious movements she found her hat, stepped into her shoes, pulled on her coat, stuffed her gloves into her handbag. Only when the strap of the bag was looped over her arm and she had leaned to pick up the suitcase did she turn back to Frances, who, all this time, had been watching from the bed.

And what she said, coldly and levelly, was: ‘I’m sorry you aren’t as brave as you thought you were, Frances.’

Frances stared at her. ‘What?’

‘But don’t punish me because of it, and make out you’re doing it because of that boy. If I want punishing I’ll go to Inspector Kemp and get it for something I deserve.’

She covered her eyes, and spoke less steadily. ‘Now you’ve made me be sharp with you, when all I came for, all I came for was —’ She dropped her hand. ‘I gave things up for you, Frances. I gave my baby up for you. I never asked for what we had. If I’d asked for something like that, don’t you think I’d have asked for it to be easier? Instead – No, get off me. Get away from me.’ Frances had jumped down from the bed and was reaching for her. She pushed her back. ‘Let me alone.’

But Frances was panicking now. The madness had vanished, as completely as if pricked by a pin and exploded. ‘Lily, forgive me. Please. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I —’

‘Get off!’

‘I think – I think I’m losing my mind. The other night, I – Please, Lily.’ Lilian was at the door, had got it open. ‘Don’t go. Don’t leave me again. I don’t know why I said what I did. I didn’t mean it. I —’

‘Let me alone!’

She had struck out properly this time. The blow caught Frances on the bone of the cheek and made her start back. She put a hand to the sting of it, and for a second the two of them faced each other, horrified at what they were doing, horrified at what the moment recalled; but part of their horror, Frances knew, was at their own helplessness, their own inability to do anything to the tangle they were in but make it pull tighter. ‘Don’t go,’ she said again. But it was too late. It was all too late. Lilian had already turned, was fleeing. In the silent house, her heels were noisy as gunshots as she went down.

The Tuesday of that week was the anniversary of John Arthur’s death; Frances looked at his picture, dry-eyed. On the same day, the inquest was re-opened at Camberwell, and the jury, instructed by the coroner, brought back a verdict of wilful murder. When, two days later, it was time to make her way to the next police court hearing, she hadn’t the energy for it. She stayed at home, curled up on the sofa with a copy of
Kidnapped
. The news came at lunch-time, brought down by Mrs Playfair, who had had it from Patty, whose niece was engaged to that boy in the police. There was no surprise about it. The hearing had been over in a matter of minutes. The prosecutor had concluded his case, and the magistrate had declared himself satisfied. To applause from Leonard’s family, and cheers from the crowded public benches, Spencer Ward was committed to trial at the Old Bailey in just over a fortnight’s time.

And, well, if nothing else, she thought bleakly, there would soon be an end to it now: an end to madness, to secrecy, to skulking about in corners. November the sixth, and the trial would open. It was a relief to have the date to fix one’s mind on; a relief to know that the affair would be decided at last. Once, she never would have thought it possible for a person to be bored by fear. She recalled all the various terrors that had seized and shaken her since the thing had begun: the black panics, the dreads and uncertainties, the physical cavings-in. There hadn’t been a dull moment! But she
was
almost bored now, she realised. Bored to tears. Bored to the bone. Bored to death by those exacting lodgers, her own fright and cowardice.

Lilian she saw only once as the fortnight passed, early in the second week. They didn’t mention the appalling way in which they had last parted. They didn’t mention that meeting at all. Lilian’s expression was a closed one, her manner quite dead; they came together at the request of one of the solicitors, sitting with him in an upstairs office while he ran for a final time through their recollections of the night of Leonard’s death. Frances was afraid, at first, that he meant to ask her to be a witness: she imagined having to stand and give evidence for the prosecution, gazing across at the boy as she did it. But it was only Lilian he wanted for that. He was sorry to request it, he told her, but they wouldn’t keep her in the box for long. Mr Ives, the counsel to whom the case had been handed, simply needed her to confirm a few details about her husband’s final day, and would perhaps just touch on her recollections of that night in July when he had been injured… They might have heard of Humphrey Ives, KC? His name was often in the papers. He was a most experienced advocate, a very able chap indeed, and with his involvement the trial shouldn’t take longer than three days; it ‘might just squeak to a fourth’ if the defending barrister, Mr Tresillian, proved tricky. He was rather an untried man – a junior, who had accepted the brief at a nominal fee, and one never knew with fellows like that. Sometimes they were in a tearing hurry, other times they liked to make a bit of a splash by ‘going down kicking’. But Mrs Barber must keep her mind on the certain outcome. Mr Ives had let it be known that he’d rarely seen so straightforward a case.

He meant, of course, to be reassuring. But once the two of them had left his building they paused on the pavement, speechless.

‘Three or four days!’ managed Frances at last. ‘Will you be all right, having to give evidence?’ And then, when Lilian didn’t answer: ‘You needn’t stay there once you’ve done it. I can see to it all, when the time comes. If it comes, I mean. The moment the verdict’s returned, if it’s the wrong one, I can go to this Mr Tresillian and —’

‘You think I’d let you do that for me, too?’ said Lilian, coldly. ‘No, I want to be there for the whole of it. I want to be ready. I’ve told my family I want to be there, and that’s that. And —’ A touch of colour crept into her face, and into her tone. ‘I’ve told them I want you beside me in the court. Is that all right? I’ve said I want you, and no one else.’

Frances looked at her. ‘You told them that? They – They didn’t think it odd?’

The life left her again. ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now, does it?’

And, no, thought Frances, it didn’t matter now, not if they could stand here like this, with a sort of sheet of ice between them. Not if Lilian could look back at her with such wounded, lightless eyes, as if they’d never kissed, lain naked together, lost themselves in each other’s gazes… She searched for words, and couldn’t find them. They made their final arrangements, and parted.

November the first, November the second: the days slithered by. She went to the cinema with her mother; she forgot the film the moment it ended. She paid a visit to Christina, but sat there with nothing to say. At home she gave herself over to chores, wanting to put the house in order before the trial began; but the chores, she realised, were a losing battle. The house had begun to fall apart. The geyser shrieked as it burned. Paint was peeling from window frames and revealing them to be rotten. The scullery roof had sprung a leak: she put down a bowl to catch the drips, but the rainwater spread and darkened, to make treasure maps and Whistler nocturnes of the walls and ceiling. It was just as if the house were suddenly as weary as she was. Or as if it could sense that the jig was up: that their little contract was about to expire. Perhaps, all this time, it had only ever been humouring her, politely.

She worried most about her mother. What would become of her? How would she cope? Would there even be time to explain it, on the day, if the worst happened? Once she and Lilian had stepped forward, wouldn’t the police want to take them into custody right away? Her mother might hear of it from a newspaper! No, that wasn’t to be borne. Night after night she fretted about it. She wondered if her brothers had used to feel like this, on leave from the War. Noel, she remembered, had given her a letter to be handed to her mother in the case of his death; her mother had taken the letter, tucked it away, never referred to it again. It crossed her mind to leave a similar sort of note, ‘To be opened in the event of my not returning from the Old Bailey’ – Oh, but that was too sensational, surely.

Then she thought of Mrs Playfair. The thought came like an answer to a prayer. For Mrs Playfair, of course, could be reached by telephone from the court, and she would see to everything, get Frances’s mother to the police station, handle any newspaper men. And if, at the end of it all, Frances were put into prison or – or worse, then she could be relied upon to take charge of her mother’s finances, help her find new lodgers for the house. She might even put the house up for sale and have her mother to live with her over at Braemar. Yes, the more Frances thought about it, the more likely that seemed. The vision was not quite a happy one. She saw her mother dwindling into some sort of unpaid companion, reading aloud from parish newsletters, winding balls of wool. But better that than being left alone, to brood on her daughter’s disgrace. God! How incredible it was, to think of them being on the brink of such ruin! Two months before, she had been ready to turn her back on her mother, to walk away from the house. But that had been for something, hadn’t it? That had been for Lilian, for love; not for this chaos of bad luck and blunder.

It was that that made her cry, sometimes: the sheer waste and futility of it. She would turn her face to her pillow, her arms drawn in, holding nothing.

And then it was the eve of the trial, Guy Fawkes Day. It fell on a Sunday this year, so there were no bonfires – that seemed to her a pity – but early in the evening a few rockets went up in defiance of the sabbath; she stood at the window in her darkened bedroom and watched the colours burst and die. She gathered her things for the morning, and when, later, she climbed into bed, she prepared herself for a sleepless night. But perhaps she really had reached the limits of her own fear now: she slept quite dreamlessly, awoke feeling no more than mildly apprehensive, and she washed and dressed, and ate a breakfast, with only the sick, fluttery feeling she could remember from the mornings of examination days at school. It proved difficult, when it came to it, to part from her mother with a bright goodbye – though, after all, not that difficult, because this was only the beginning, and there were still two or three more goodbyes to come. For the same reason, as she made the walk down to Camberwell and along the Walworth Road, though she tried to gaze at everything in the knowledge that she might soon be taken away from it, she couldn’t keep it up, she felt mannered and inauthentic – like an actress, she thought, playing a character to whom the doctor had just delivered the fatal diagnosis.

At Mrs Viney’s, Lydia was guarding the door and the dog was barking, exactly as usual. Lilian was ready in a smart hat and coat – but so were her sisters and her mother. They didn’t want her to go without them. It wasn’t right. What was she thinking? Say she was to be taken ill? Suppose she was to fall in a faint again? It wasn’t fair on poor Miss Wray! Or, why not telephone to Lloyd? There was still the time for it. He’d bring her home the moment she’d got through the nasty business in the court. And later on Lydia would run for the evening papers and —

‘No,’ said Lilian. ‘No.’ Her hat had a veil to it; she drew it down. ‘This is how I want to do it. He was my husband, wasn’t he? This is how it’s going to be.’ And her tone was so final, so forbidding, that her sisters fell silent; even her mother was abashed.

They insisted on seeing her down to the street, however, once the taxi had arrived. A couple of reporters and photographers were down there too, and some of the passers-by paused; customers came out of Mr Viney’s shop to watch her leave and to wish her well. ‘It’s like when I got married,’ she murmured, gazing out from the taxi window at the waves of the small, forlorn crowd. But she spoke to the glass rather than to Frances, and once the vehicle had started forward she didn’t speak again. Her coat was a new one, stiff and black with a greenish beetly sheen to it. Behind her widow’s veil, her face looked blurry and remote. Frances was dressed in her soberest costume, the grey tunic, a darker grey coat. She had cleaned and polished her worn black boots – as if polished boots, she thought, gazing down at the toes of them, could make a difference.

The first shock came when they’d crossed the river and were taking the turn off Ludgate Hill. They found a queue stretching down the street from the public entrance of the Old Bailey, not the scrum of people they’d grown used to but a solid line of ordinary men and women with bags and scarves and neatly furled umbrellas. ‘They can’t all be here for us,’ said Frances, ‘surely?’ But even as she said it the faces began to turn, and she saw a shudder of excitement run the length of the queue as Lilian was recognised. By the time the taxi had pulled up at the kerb people were straining for a proper look at her, and policemen were gesturing them back. She fumbled with coins for the driver, and they got themselves into the building as quickly as they could.

But here was the next shock: the scale and grandeur of it all. A flight of stairs took them up to an impressive lobby; a second staircase led to a domed marble hall that was hectic with decoration and as dwarfing as the nave of a cathedral. They stood in it at an absolute loss, until an official took charge of them. Mrs Barber was to give evidence? She was to come with him, please. There was a waiting-place for witnesses; she would have to remain there until she was called. The other lady could go straight to the courtroom. The policeman at the door would let her through.

So they were separated at once, and Frances went into the court alone. And though for a minute it was all right – the room, she thought, was simply another of the brown panelled chambers in which she had spent so much time for the inquest and the police court hearings, and the bench to which she was led, beneath the jut of the public gallery, had Leonard’s father, and brother Douglas, and Uncle Ted already on it, rising gravely to shake her hand – though at first it seemed all right, once she was seated, and could look around, she saw that it wasn’t all right at all. There was no grubbiness here, no bluster: it was the real thing, at last. The clerks and barristers, in their wigs and gowns, were like crafty jackdaws. The chair for the judge had a sword above it. The dock for the prisoner – But that was the worst. Men had been sent to their deaths from there. Hadn’t Crippen stood there? And Seddon? And George Smith?

A stir overhead, out of sight, made her flinch. The doors to the gallery must have been thrown open. There came a rush of footsteps and excited voices as people piled in from the street; they settled down with the protests and shufflings-along of a phantom music-hall audience. Or perhaps it was she herself who was the phantom. How little her thumping heart mattered to any of this, after all! For soon, without warning, without any sort of signal appearing to be have been made, the room, which so far had had a sort of looseness to it, began to knit itself together. Men moved in different directions, taking places at benches and desks; overhead, the invisible audience became hushed and poised. The order was given for the court to rise, and she scrambled to her feet. A gowned official stepped smoothly to a small door beside the judge’s dais. There was some sort of proclamation, there were the raps of a staff or a gavel: they sounded to her like the measured, unnatural raps of the dead on a seance table. And then the judge was admitted, a frightful figure, his robe a bright, bright scarlet; he carried, bafflingly, grotesquely, a posy of flowers. Three other robed men came with him, one in a gold chain of office. They mounted the dais, took their places, and – Where was Lilian? She wanted Lilian! – the thing had begun.

For a time, then, her fear was so sharp that it all came to her as if from a distance. She saw Spencer appear in the dock, rising like a conjurer’s assistant from the floor of the pen as a warder brought him up from some underground passage. She watched them read the charge to him and ask him how he pleaded, and heard his answer – ‘I plead not guilty’ – his voice splintering on the words like a schoolboy’s. Then came the swearing-in of the jury, eleven men and a single woman: with the monotony of the process her panic receded a little, and she searched their faces for signs of kindness as they took their oaths. But they looked ordinary, inexpert, the woman in a fussy hat, the men with the slightly silly expressions that came from knowing they were being stared at, or else straight-backed, with lifted chins, enjoying their own importance. That one at the end, she thought, would make himself foreman. He was a man like a clever shopkeeper: already she could see him gazing at the boy as he might have turned in his experienced hand some bit of cheap merchandise that had come to him soiled from the supplier.

Now a middle-aged barrister with a pouchy face had risen and begun to address the court. She understood that he was Mr Ives, of whom the solicitor had spoken, and that this was the opening speech for the prosecution. She forced herself to pay attention, leaning forward, sitting tensely; beside her, Douglas was doing the same. But the boy’s threats, the first assault, the cosh, the blood, the hairs on the coat: it was all crushingly familiar from the police court hearings, right down to the horrid thrill that coursed around the room when, after twenty minutes or so, Mr Ives paused to have the weapon displayed to the jury. Once he had begun to call in his witnesses Frances could have stood in the box for them, for they were all men whom she had seen give evidence before: a policeman to show a plan of the lane, Constables Hardy and Evans to describe the finding of the body, the doctor who had pronounced Leonard dead at the scene… He was followed on to the stand by the police surgeon, Mr Palmer, and then came all the grisly details about the bruising to Leonard’s brain. But this time he had brought along an exhibit to give an idea of the nature of the bleeding: he drew the lid from a small box and produced a curled, earth-coloured thing that was, apparently, Leonard’s collar. His collar! Frances gazed at it in disbelief. It didn’t resemble anything she could remember from the night; it might have been the withered skin of a snake. When it was taken and shown to the jury, some of them leaned for a better view; some of them looked once, then looked away. The woman made a show of turning her face from it, queasily. But they all looked queasy at what came next: photographs of Leonard’s broken head, which were handed to the clever shopkeeper and passed on by him. Up in the public gallery there were tuts of frustration as people tried, and failed, to see.