The Paying Guests (7 page)

And, after all, he had only done what she herself had done, been tempted to linger out here by the balminess of the night. Her quivering began to subside. She explained stiffly about the mouse, and he chuckled. ‘Poor blighter! He just wanted his bit of cheese, didn’t he?’ He lifted his cigarette to his mouth, so that the blazing point of it reappeared, briefly illuminating his slender hand, his moustache, his foxy jaw.

But when the cigarette had faded he spoke again, and she could tell by the sound of his voice that he had tilted back his head.

‘A grand night for star-gazing tonight, Miss Wray! I used to know all about the stars when I was a boy; it was a regular hobby of mine. I used to sneak out my bedroom window after the family were asleep and sit for hours on the scullery roof, with a library book and a bicycle lamp – matching the sky, you know, with the pictures. My brother Dougie caught me at it once, and locked the window on me, so that I had to stay out all night in the rain. He was always pulling stunts like that, my brother. But it was worth it. I had all the names: Arcturus, Regulus, Vega, Capella…’

He was murmuring now, and the words had a charm, spoken softly in the darkness. It was odd to be standing there with him, in her night-clothes, in that lonely spot – but then, she thought, it’s only the garden. Looking back at the house she saw the lights: the kitchen door standing open, the window with its blind half lowered, the window above it, at the turn of the stairs, with the old Morris curtains not quite meeting in the middle.

And he had been right about the night. The moon was slim, the merest paring; against the deep blue-black of the sky the stars stood out, precise, electric. So she put back her head, and, ‘Which one is Capella?’ she asked, after a pause. She had been attracted by the name.

He gestured with the hand that held the cigarette. ‘The bright little chap above your neighbour’s chimney. That’s Vega, over there. And up there —’ He shifted about, and she turned to follow the glow of the cigarette. ‘That’s Polaris, the North Star.’

She nodded. ‘I know the North Star.’

‘You do?’

‘I know the Plough, and Orion.’

‘You’re as good as a Girl Guide. How about Cassiopeia?’

‘The ones shaped like an M? Yes, I know them.’

‘They’re a W tonight. You see them? That’s Perseus beside them.’

‘No, I don’t see that.’

‘It’s a matter of joining the dots. You have to use your imagination. The fellows who did the naming – well, they were short on entertainments back then. How about Gemini, the twins?’ He moved closer, and sketched an outline. ‘You see the two of them? Holding hands? And just across from them there’s the Lion… To the right of him there’s the Crab. And there’s the Whiting.’

She peered. ‘The Whiting?’

‘Just over there, beside the Whelk.’

She realised two things at the same moment: one, of course, that he was teasing her; the other that, in order to steer her gaze, he had moved very close to her and raised his free hand to the small of her back. The unexpectedness of the contact gave her a jolt: it made her start away from him, her shoulder clipping his as she did so, her galoshes noisy on the path. He seemed to step back too, to put up his hands in an exaggerated way, like a man caught out at something, playfully pretending innocence.

Or perhaps he really was innocent. She was suddenly uncertain. It was too dark to make out his expression; she could see only faint gleams of starlight at his eyes, his teeth. Was he smiling? Was he laughing at her? She had the tricked, trapped feeling she’d sometimes had with men in the past, the sense that, through no act of her own, she had become a figure of fun, and that whatever she did or said now would only make her more of one.

And she felt the loneliness of the spot again, the moist and crafty garden. It seemed to be on Mr Barber’s side, in a way it hadn’t been before. She tightened the belt of her dressing-gown, straightened her back, and spoke coldly.

‘You oughtn’t to linger out here, Mr Barber. Your wife must be wondering where you are.’

As she expected, he laughed, though with a sort of wryness that she didn’t understand.

‘Oh, I dare say Lily can live without me for another minute or two. I’ll just have my smoke out, Miss Wray, and then I’ll wend my way to bed.’

She left him without a farewell, stumping back to the house, feeling just as much of a fool as she’d known she would. Once she had kicked off the galoshes she saw to the stove and the breakfast things at top speed, not wanting to have to encounter him for a third time that night. But in any case, he didn’t appear. She was up in her room, groping for the pins in her hair, before she heard the back door closed and bolted.

She listened to his step on the stairs with a lingering crossness – but found herself curious, too, as to how he would greet his wife. She thought of Christina asking her if she had put a tumbler to the wall. But it wasn’t eavesdropping, was it, if one simply stole closer to the door and tilted one’s head?

She heard Mrs Barber’s voice first. ‘There you are! I thought you’d got lost. What have you been doing?’

He answered with a yawn. ‘Nothing.’

‘You must have been doing something.’

‘Having a smoke, out the back. Looking at the stars.’

‘The stars? Did you see your future in them?’

‘Oh, I know that already, don’t I?’

That was all they said. But the
way
in which they said it – the absolute deadness of their tones, the absence of anything like affection – took Frances aback. It had never occurred to her that their marriage might be anything other than happy. Now, astonished, she thought, Why, they might almost hate each other!

Well, their feelings were their own affair, she supposed. So long as they paid their rent… But that was thinking like a landlady; that was a horrible way to think. She didn’t want them to be miserable. But she felt unnerved, too. She was reminded of how little she knew them. And here they were, at the heart of her house! Her mind ran back, unwillingly, to Stevie’s warning about the ‘clerk class’.

She wished now that she hadn’t listened. She crept into bed and blew out her candle, but lay wakeful, open-eyed. She heard the couple moving about between their sitting-room and kitchen, and soon one of them paused on the landing – Mr Barber, yawning again. She watched the shrinking away of the light from under her door as he turned down the gas.

Her sense of disquiet passed with the night. When the couple rose in the morning they sounded ordinary, even cheerful. Mr Barber was humming as he shaved at the sink. Before he left for his half-Saturday at the office he said something in a low tone to his wife, and she answered him with laughter.

An hour or so later, Frances left the house herself: she went to the florist’s to fetch the wreath for her father’s grave. And as soon as she and her mother had had their lunch, they set off for the cemetery.

The weather had dulled overnight, and they had dressed for it, and for the occasion, in their soberest coats and hats. But it was May, after all: they grew warm on the journey to West Norwood, and warmer still as they made the long uphill walk to her father’s plot. By the time they arrived at it, Frances was sweating. She took off her gloves, considered removing her hat – had got as far as drawing out its pin before she caught her mother’s disapproving eye.

‘Father wouldn’t mind, would he? He hated being too warm himself, remember?’

‘Father always knew when to keep a hat on, however warm he was.’

Frances thrust the pin back in, turning away. ‘I’ll bet he’s warm just now.’

‘What was that?’

‘I said, “I’ll get some water now.”’

‘Oh.’ Her mother looked wary. ‘Yes, do.’

They unpacked their tools, their cemetery kit: the trowel, the rake, the brush, the bottle, the bar of Monkey Brand. Her mother got to work on the weeds and the moss while Frances went to the tap. She returned to the grave to wet the brush and draw it across the soap, and then to start scrubbing at her father’s headstone.

The stone was plain, solid, handsome –
expensive
, she thought, on every visit, with resentment; for, of course, the funeral arrangements had all been made in the first bewildering days after her father’s death, before she and her mother had had a chance to discover just how stupendously he had managed to mishandle the family funds.
J
OHN
F
RYER
W
RAY
,
the inscription read,
BELOVED
HUSBAND
AND
FATHER
,
MUCH
MISSED
, the letters black against a marble that had once been a gleaming quartz white, but which the sooty drizzles of suburban south London were bent on staining khaki.

Running her brush in soapy circles over the tarnished marble she thought of her brother John Arthur’s grave, just north of Combles: she and her mother had visited it, along with John Arthur’s fiancée, Edith, in 1919. They had made the journey in December – perhaps the worst time to do it, for in the bitter weather the raw, still-shattered landscape had looked like a scene from hell. There had been no shred of comfort to be found in it, only a new sort of agony in thinking of the months that John Arthur had been forced to spend there. Since then, Frances had heard people speak of the consolations of the cemeteries. One of her mother’s friends had described the sense of peace that had descended on her as she’d stood at her son’s grave. She had heard his voice, she’d said, as clearly as she had ever heard it in life: he had told her not to mourn, that mourning was wasteful, mourning would keep the world in darkness when what it needed was to progress into light. At John Arthur’s grave Frances had heard nothing save the wet cough of the elderly farmer who had guided the way to the site. The plot itself had meant little to her. It had simply been beyond belief that all she had known and loved about her brother should have had its finish in that slim depression of earth at her feet. She regretted ever having made the trip. She still visited the place, sometimes, in dreams, and felt the same empty horror; she was always alone on the sticky ground, sinking.

Then again, Noel had no grave at all, and that was hard in a different way. He had been lost in the Mediterranean, in the final year of the War, when the ship on which he’d been travelling out of Egypt had been torpedoed. How exactly had he died? Had he drowned? Could he have been killed in the first blast? There had been confusion at the time, someone claiming to have seen him floating face-down in the water, someone else alleging that he had been hauled on to a raft, wounded but very much alive. But no such raft had ever been found. Might the enemy have picked him up? Certainly his body was never recovered; and so many tales had been told, in those days, of the miraculous reappearances of shell-shocked soldiers that for months after his death, well into the first year of Peace, Frances’s mother had clung on to the hope of his return. There had been several dreadful moments: knocks at the door at odd hours, boys on the street who faintly resembled him… Frances shuddered to remember that time now. Poor, poor Noel. He had been the baby of the family. When she thought of him she saw him not as the nineteen-year-old he had been when he was killed, but as a boy in a striped pyjama suit, his pink feet smooth and rounded as pebbles. She remembered him once on the beach at Eastbourne, crying because a wave had gone over his head; she had jeered at his faint heart. She would give anything to be able to take that jeer back.

Don’t think of it. Chase it away. Wet the brush again, quickly, quickly. Here was a spot that she had missed. Look how nicely the marble scrubbed up! That was better… She had left the headstone now and was inching her way around the coving. A few more trips to the tap, and the job was done. Next time, she and her mother decided as they rose, they would bring a garden sieve and go through the earth properly; but they’d made it neat enough for this visit. Frances put away their tools, wiped her hands and addressed the grave.

‘Well, Father, there you are, all spruce and tidy for your birthday. It’s more than you deserve, I’m sure.’

‘Frances,’ her mother scolded.

‘What? I’d say the same thing to his face if he were here right now. That, and a good many other things. I suppose he’d manage not to hear them. It was about the only thing he
could
manage.’

‘Hush.’

They stood a little longer, her mother dipping her head and closing her eyes in silent prayer, while Frances surreptitiously drew her wool collar away from her hot neck. They made the walk back to the gates through the older part of the cemetery, the part she by far preferred, with its vulgar last-century monuments, its weeping angels, its extinguished torches, its stone ships in full sail. She read aloud the Dickensian surnames. ‘Bode… Epps… Tooley… Weatherwax! Queer how the names belong to the period. Can surnames change, like fashions?’

‘Perhaps nobody cared to marry poor Mr Weatherwax.’

‘That’s what you think. “Sorely missed by his five surviving sons”! There ought to be Weatherwaxes all over the place at that rate.’

Out on the street, they gazed doubtfully upward. Frances’s father had always admired the flower gardens in Dulwich Park, and they had planned to take a bus there, have their tea in the café, make a subdued Saturday afternoon of it. But the sky was darker and lower than ever – ‘Thundery,’ said Mrs Wray, who since the War was bothered by storms. They decided to give the day up and go straight home. They took a bus directly to Champion Hill, and had just stepped from its platform when the first great drops of rain came plashing down. They ran the last few yards to the house – Frances going quickest, to have the door open and ready. They tumbled into the hall, gasping and laughing and pulling off their wet things.

Almost as soon as the door was closed behind them they became aware of a stir of voices and movement in the rooms upstairs. There were thumps, and bursts of laughter, followed by quick, light footsteps. Mrs Wray, taking off her hat, raised apprehensive eyes: ‘Good gracious!’

Frances’s heart sank. ‘The Barbers,’ she murmured, ‘must be entertaining.’

As she spoke, the footsteps crossed to the stairs, and the banisters of the upper flight were grasped and set creaking by small, sticky-looking hands. And then a couple of children appeared at the turn, a girl of seven or eight and a younger boy. The boy came first, frowning, determined, but troubled by the trickiness of the descent. Catching sight of Frances and her mother he gave a wobble, mid-step; then, blind with terror, he turned and groped his way past the girl’s legs to scramble back upward. The girl stayed where she was, holding Frances’s gaze, sucking in her lower lip and laughing.

‘He’s a baby,’ she said.

Frances’s mother, her hat in her hand, had moved forward to peer anxiously after him.

‘He’s certainly too much of a baby to be allowed on these stairs. If he should fall – Go back, child!’

The boy, safe now on the landing, and attracted by the tremor of alarm in her voice, had put his head through the spindles of the section of banister directly above her. She grew pale. ‘Get away!’ She made shooing motions at him. ‘Go back, little boy! Oh, if the banisters should break! Frances —’

‘Yes, all right,’ said Frances, going ahead of her, beginning to climb.

At her approach the girl sped off with a giggle, and the boy hastily withdrew his head. He must have caught his ear against one of the spindles as he did it, because after he’d gone scampering away in terror again – into the Barbers’ sitting-room this time, with the girl charging behind him – Frances heard him begin to wail. The wail was answered by a woman’s voice, brisk and satisfied: ‘Well,
now
what have you done!’ At the same moment another woman put her face around the sitting-room door. Neither the voice nor the face belonged to Mrs Barber. This woman was older, perhaps Frances’s age. Her waved hair was glossy with oil, her mouth liberally lipsticked, her features rather sharp. She saw Frances and her mother advancing warily up the stairs and said, ‘Oh.’ She emerged further. ‘Did you want Lil? She’s out the back.’

Frances, coming to a halt a stair or two from the top, explained about having been anxious for the children. She was afraid that she and her mother had frightened the little boy. She thought he might have hurt his ear on the banister?

Aside from the moans of the injured child, the Barbers’ sitting-room, it seemed to her, had grown unnaturally still. She had the disturbing sense of its being packed with eavesdropping strangers. Unable to see anything past its partly open door, she said, ‘Is Mr Barber here, perhaps?’

The woman snorted. ‘Lenny? Not him! He’s keeping out of our way. Lil won’t be a minute, though, if it’s her you’re after.’

‘No, it isn’t that,’ repeated Frances. ‘We just wanted to be sure about the little boy.’ She added, a touch crisply, ‘I’m Miss Wray. This is Mrs Wray, my mother. We’re the owners of the house.’

At that, from the silent sitting-room, there burst yet another woman’s voice – a jolly, throaty, hop-picker’s one. ‘Is that Mrs Wray? Is that Mrs Wray, Vera?’

The sharp-faced woman tilted her head, and with her gaze moving coolly between Frances and her mother she called back into the room: ‘Yes, and Miss Wray too!’

‘Well, for goodness sake, bring the ladies in! Don’t leave the poor things standing out there on the landing, in their own house.’

The woman shrugged, and half smiled – as if to say to Frances, not unkindly,
Now you’re for it
. She moved back into the sitting-room, opening the door wider so that the Wrays might follow. Frances glanced at her mother; she was madly re-pinning her hat. The two of them climbed the last few stairs and crossed the landing.

Entering a fug of scent and cigarette smoke they found – not a crowd, after all, but three women, sitting in chairs drawn together around the unlighted hearth. Frances noticed the chairs first, in fact, because one of them, a black oak armchair, looking surprisingly at home among the Barbers’ rococo trimmings, was not actually the Barbers’ at all; it was one of her father’s Jacobean monstrosities and had been brought up from the kitchen passage downstairs. Seated on it now was a short, stout woman of fifty or so, with brown button eyes, dreadfully swollen ankles, and hair so artificially frizzed and hennaed it resembled the lustreless wig of a waxwork. It was she, obviously, who had called out to the landing, for as Frances and her mother made their awkward entrance she said, in the same game Cockney tones, ‘Oh, Mrs Wray, Miss Wray, how very nice to meet you! How nice indeed! And Lil said we shouldn’t see you – that you’d be out all afternoon. Oh, what luck! I’m Mrs Viney. I hope you’ll excuse my not rising to shake your hands. You may see the state of things with me.’ She indicated her appalling ankles. ‘Once I’m down, I have to stay down. Min’ – she leaned to tap at the arm of a sandy-faced girl on the sofa – ‘give Mrs Wray your place, my darling. You can make do with the puff, a slip like you. – This is Min, my youngest,’ she told Frances, as if that explained everything. ‘Miss Lynch, I suppose I ought to call her, in a well-to-do house like this! And here’s Mrs Rawlins and Mrs Grice. My Lord, don’t that make me feel old! Mrs Grice you’ve just met, of course.’

Frances could do nothing but move forward across a floor littered with bags and scarves and elaborate hats to shake hands with each of the visitors in turn. Her mother, protesting feebly that they oughtn’t to trouble, that she wouldn’t stay, was somehow steered to the vacant place on the sofa, beside the sharp-faced Mrs Grice – Vera. The girl called Min sat down on a red leather pouffe. Frances took the remaining empty chair, beside the woman who had been introduced as Mrs Rawlins.

Mrs Rawlins was sitting in a pink plush easy chair of the Barbers’; she occupied it with an air of entitlement, like a slightly smug Madonna. The little boy had his face in her lap, his long-lashed eyes still wet with tears, but the tears themselves apparently forgotten; he seemed to be idly biting her thigh. He gazed up at Frances as he did it, and she repeated her anxiety about his having put his head between the banisters and possibly hurt his ear. Mrs Rawlins smiled – smiled in that pitying, knowing way in which married women often smiled, Frances had found, at the fears of spinsters, saying, Oh, they had ears of India-rubber at that age. And, to prove it, she reached for one of the boy’s already scarlet ears and drew the top and bottom tips of it together, then let them spring back against his scalp. The visitors laughed – the little girl laughing loudest, on a forced, hard, jarring note. The boy clapped his hands to his head, looking torn between triumph at having made a comedian of himself and mortification at the way he had done it. Mrs Viney, still tittering, said, ‘Poor Maurice. We oughtn’t to laugh. But there, if little boys will go putting their heads through other people’s banisters, they must expect to be laughed at.’ Her tone grew indulgent as she spoke, and she held out her hands to him. ‘Oh, come here to Nanny!’