The Paying Guests (6 page)

‘I hope you’re never broke!’

She turned around, embarrassed, and tried to speak lightly. ‘What makes you think I’m not broke already?’

He looked disgusted, raising his hand and then bringing it down, turning away. ‘You’ve done all right, you bloody women,’ she heard him say.

She had seen the same opinion, scarcely less bald, in the daily papers. But she arrived home more disgruntled than ever. She found her mother in the kitchen and told her all about it.

Her mother said, ‘Poor fellow. He oughtn’t to have spoken so roughly to you; that was certainly wrong. But one does have sympathy for all these fighting men whose jobs have been lost.’

‘I have sympathy for them, too!’ cried Frances. ‘I was against their going to war in the first place! But to blame women – it’s absurd. What have we gained, aside from a vote that half of us can’t even use?’

Her mother looked patient. She had heard all this before. ‘Well, no one is hurt. No one is injured.’ She was watching Frances unpack her shopping. ‘I don’t suppose you found a match for my sewing silks?’

‘Yes, I did. Here they are.’

Her mother took the reels and held them to the light. ‘Oh, clever girl, these are – Oh, but you didn’t buy Sylko?’

‘These are just as good, Mother.’

‘I do find Sylko the best.’

‘Well, unfortunately it’s also the most expensive.’

‘But, surely, now that Mr and Mrs Barber have come —’

‘We still need to be careful,’ said Frances. ‘We still need to be very careful.’ She checked that the door was closed; they had already lowered their voices. ‘Don’t you remember, when I showed you the accounts?’

‘Yes, but, well, it did cross my mind – I did just wonder, Frances, whether we mightn’t be able to afford a servant again.’

‘A servant?’ Frances couldn’t keep the impatience out of her tone. ‘Well, yes, we might. But you know how much a decent cook-general costs nowadays. It would be half the Barbers’ rent gone, just like that. And meanwhile our boots are falling in pieces, we dread ever having to send for the doctor, our winter coats look like things from the Dark Ages. And then, another stranger in the house, someone to have to get to know —’

‘Yes, all right,’ said her mother, hastily. ‘I dare say you know best.’

‘When I can take care of things perfectly well —’

‘Yes, yes, Frances. I do see how impossible it is. Truly I do. Don’t let’s talk about it any more. Tell me about your day in Town. You made sure to have luncheon, I hope?’

Frances, with an effort, made herself sound less shrewish. ‘Yes, I did. At a café.’

‘And after that? Where did you go? How did you spend your afternoon?’

‘Oh —’ Turning away, she answered at random. ‘I walked about a bit, that’s all. I finished up at the British Museum. I had my tea there.’

‘The British Museum? I haven’t been there in years. What did you look at?’

‘Oh, the usual galleries. Marbles, mummies, that sort of thing. – Look, how hungry are you?’ She had opened the meat-safe door. ‘We’ve skirt, again. I might run it through the mincer.’ I shall enjoy doing that, she thought.

She did not enjoy it as much as she had hoped to. The beef was poor and kept clogging. She’d meant the meal to be an easy one, but, perhaps because she was discontented, the food seemed to turn against her, the potatoes boiling dry in their pan, the gravy refusing to thicken. Her mother, as sometimes happened, disappeared at the critical moment: she still liked to change her gown and re-pin her hair for dinner, and she tended to misjudge the minutes as she was doing it. By the time she had re-emerged, the food was cooling in its dishes. Frances almost ran with the plates to the drawing-room table. Another delay, then, while her mother said Grace…

She swallowed the food without enjoying it. They discussed the various appointments of the days ahead. Tomorrow they were off to the cemetery: it was her father’s birthday; they were taking flowers to his grave. On Monday they must remember to change their library books. On Wednesday —

‘Oh, now, on Wednesday,’ said Frances’s mother apologetically, ‘I’ve promised to see Mrs Playfair. I really must see her next week, to discuss the bazaar, and Wednesday afternoon is the only time she can manage. We shall have to miss our trip to the cinema, I’m afraid. Unless we go another day?’

Frances felt absurdly disappointed. Could they make it Monday, instead? But, no, Monday wasn’t possible, and neither was Thursday. She could always go alone, of course. She could always invite a friend. She did have friends – not just Christina. She had friends right here in Camberwell. There was Margaret Lamb, a few houses down. There was Stella Noakes, from school – Stella Noakes, with whom she’d once, in a chemistry lesson, laughed so painfully hard that the two of them had wet their flannel drawers.

But Margaret was always so awfully earnest. And Stella Noakes was Stella Rifkind now, with two small children. She might bring the children along. Would that be fun? It hadn’t been, last time. No, she’d rather go alone.

But how dismal, at her age, to be so disappointed over something like this! She pushed the food around on her plate, enjoying it less than ever – and picturing Christina and Stevie, who would almost certainly at that moment be eating some jolly scratch supper of macaroni, or bread and cheese, or fried fish and chips, and who might be heading off shortly to the sort of brainy West End entertainment – a lecture or a concert, cheap seats at the Wigmore Hall – to which Frances and Christina had used to like to go together.

Her spirits lifted slightly when, at half-past seven, Mr and Mrs Barber left the house, giving the distinct impression that they would be out until late. The moment they had gone she threw open the drawing-room door. She walked in and out of the kitchen and up and down the stairs, purely for the sake of being able to do so without fear of meeting anyone on the way. She lit the temperamental geyser and ran herself a bath, and as she lay in the water she summoned up a sense of possession and allowed it to expand across the house: she felt it as a physical sensation, a letting-out of breath, a loosening of nerves, through every blissfully untenanted room.

But by twenty to ten the Barbers were back. She heard the front door open and close and couldn’t believe it. Mr Barber came straight out to visit the WC and caught her in the kitchen, in her dressing-gown and bedroom slippers, making cocoa. Oh, no, he said blandly, when she expressed surprise at seeing him, no, he wasn’t home earlier than planned. He and Lilian had been for an early evening drink with a friend of his. The friend was an old army chum, and they’d gone to meet his fiancée… Not noticing, or not minding, that she gave him no encouragement, he settled himself in what was becoming his ‘spot’ in the scullery doorway, and told her all about it.

‘The girl’s a saint,’ he said. ‘Or else, I dunno, she’s after his money! The poor devil lost both his arms, you see, Miss Wray, from here down.’ He made a cutting gesture at his elbow. ‘She’ll have to feed him his dinners, shave him, comb his hair – do everything for him.’ His blue eyes held hers. ‘The mind fairly boggles, doesn’t it?’

There it was, she thought, the little innuendo, as reliable as a cuckoo coming open-mouthed out of a clock. She wished he didn’t feel it necessary to go on like this. She wished he’d leave her to herself in her kitchen. She was conscious of her dressing-gown, of the strands of damp hair at her neck, of her slightly downy ankles. She went rigidly back and forth between the counter and the stove, willing him to go; but, just as he had that other time, he seemed to like to watch her working. His colour was high, she noticed. He smelt, distinctly, of beer and cigarettes. She had the sense, perhaps unfair, that he was enjoying having her at a disadvantage.

He headed out to the yard at last. She washed up the milk pan, carried the cocoa through to the drawing-room, and as she handed the cup to her mother she said, ‘I’ve just been collared by Mr Barber. What an annoying man he is. I’ve made every effort to like him, but —’

‘Mr Barber?’ Her mother had been dozing in her chair, and pushed herself up to sit more tidily. ‘I am growing quite fond of him.’

Frances sat. ‘You can’t be serious. When do you see him, even?’

‘Oh, we’ve had our chats. He’s always very civil. I find him cheery.’

‘He’s a menace! How his wife ended up with him, I can’t imagine. She seems such a pleasant woman. Not at all his type.’

They were speaking in their special furtive ‘Barber’ voice. But her mother blew on her cocoa and didn’t reply. Frances looked at her. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Well,’ she answered at last, ‘Mrs Barber doesn’t strike me as the most doting of wives. She might take a little more care, for instance, over her household duties.’

‘Doting?’ said Frances. ‘Duties? How mid-Victorian you sound!’

‘It seems to me that “Victorian” is a word that’s used nowadays to dismiss all sorts of virtues over which people no longer wish to take the trouble. I always saw to it that the house was nicely kept for your father.’

‘What you saw, in fact, was Nelly and Mabel keeping it nice for you.’

‘Well, servants don’t manage themselves – as you would know, if we still had any. They take a great deal of thought and care. And I always sat down to breakfast alongside your father looking cheerful and nicely dressed. That sort of thing means a great deal to a man. Mrs Barber – well, I am surprised that she returns to bed once her husband has gone to work. And when she does attend to her chores, she seems to do them at a gallop, in order to spend the rest of the day at her leisure.’

Frances had thought the same thing, with envy. She opened her mouth to say as much – then closed it again, and said nothing. She had noticed, perhaps belatedly, how weary her mother was looking tonight. Her cheeks seemed as slack and as dry as overwashed linen. It took her an age to drink her cocoa, and when she had put the cup aside she sat with her hands in her lap, the fingers moving restlessly together with a paper-like sound, her gaze unfixed, on nothing.

In another ten minutes they rose to go to bed. Frances lingered in the drawing-room to put things tidy and to turn down the lights, then headed across the hall, yawning as she went. But as she entered the kitchen passage she heard a cry of alarm or upset; she went running, and found her mother in the scullery, shrinking back in distress from the sight of something that was wriggling in the shadow of the sink.

They had been bothered by mice for a week or two, and Frances had put down traps. Now, at last, a mouse had been caught – but caught badly, pinned by its mangled back legs. It was making frantic efforts to escape.

She moved forward. ‘All right.’ She spoke calmly. ‘I’ll see to it.’

‘Oh, dear!’

‘Now, don’t look.’

‘Shall we call Mr Barber?’

‘Mr Barber? Whatever for? I can do it.’

The mouse grew even more panicked at Frances’s approach, its little front paws scrabbling uselessly at the wire that held it. There was no point in attempting to release it; it was too injured for that. But Frances didn’t want to leave it to die. After a moment of indecision she ran water into a bucket and dropped the wriggling creature into it, trap and all. A single silvery bubble rose to the surface of the water, along with a line of blood, fine as dark red cotton.

‘Those beastly traps!’ said her mother, still upset.

‘Yes, he was unlucky.’

‘What will you do with him?’

She rolled up a sleeve, drew the trap from the bucket and shook off the drips. ‘I’ll take him outside, down to the ash-heap. You go on to bed.’

The water had made greasy-looking spikes of the mouse’s fur, but in death the creature appeared oddly human, with pained, closed eyes and a slack lower jaw. She carefully released the little body, catching hold of it by its gristly tail. On a rack beside the back door were various old coats and shoes. She thought she would do without a coat, but the grass might be damp; she stepped into a pair of galoshes that had once belonged to her brother Noel, and let herself out into the yard. With the mouse dangling from her fingers she clumped across to the lawn, then began to pick her way along the flagstone path that led down the garden.

Lights showed at one or two of her neighbours’ windows, but the garden had high walls, a towering linden tree, shaggy laurels and hydrangeas, and was almost completely dark. She went by sense rather than by sight, having made the journey so many times before. Arriving at the low wooden fence that formed a screen around the ash-heap, she tossed the tiny corpse over. There was a percussive little rustle as it landed.

And after that there was a silence, one of those deep, deep hushes that sometimes fell or gathered up here on Champion Hill, even by daylight. They gave the place a lonely air, made it impossible to believe that just a stone’s throw in any direction were houses with families and servants in them, that beyond the far garden wall was a cinder lane that led in a trice to a road, an ordinary road with rattling trams and buses on it. Frances thought of her walk through Westminster earlier that day; but she couldn’t recapture it now. All that sort of thing had fallen away. Bricks, pavements, people: all melted away. There were only the trees, the plants, the invisible flowers, a sense of stealthy vegetable activity just below the surface of sound.

It was rather creepy, suddenly. She drew closed the lapels of her dressing-gown and turned to head back to the house.

But as she did it, something caught her eye: a point of light bobbing about on the darkness. A second later, smelling tobacco, she realised that the light was the burning tip of a cigarette. Her eyes changed their focus, and she made out a figure.

Someone was there, in the garden with her.

She let out a yelp of fear and surprise. But it was Mr Barber, that was all. He came forward, laughing, apologising for having given her a fright. The night was such a nice one, he said, that he’d stayed out to make the most of it. He hadn’t liked to speak, before; it had seemed a pity to disturb her. He hoped she didn’t mind, that he’d wandered down the garden?

For a moment she wanted to hit him. The blood was roaring through her ears; she felt herself quivering like a bell. She’d supposed that he’d gone up to bed ages ago. He must have been out here for – well, close on half an hour. She didn’t like to think that he had been near by while she’d been standing at the ash-heap so unguardedly. She wished she hadn’t let out that yelp. She was glad, at any rate, that he couldn’t see her in Noel’s galoshes.