The Paying Guests

  It was not nothing. It was the crisis of her life. But she felt sick now with the knowledge that she had blundered, said too much. What on earth had she been thinking? She had let herself be seduced by the warmth and the ease of her friendship with Lilian, forgetting how unlikely their friendship actually was. Lilian was married, after all. Christ! Would she tell her husband? Tell her sisters? Tell her chatterbox mother?

  Feeling sicker than ever, she risked another look over her shoulder. She saw Lilian wiping at the blades of the scissors, so patently struggling to digest what she had just learned that the information was almost visible, like a sharp crust going down.

  But then, without meeting Frances’s gaze, she moved in and began, again, to cut. Frances didn’t mind the snips now. Instead, she was willing the blades forward. She’d become aware in a way she hadn’t been before of the intimacy of their poses, herself a sort of captive on the chair, Lilian leaning into and over her, breathing against her neck and ear. The cutting part of it, thank God, took only another few minutes. But when Lilian had put aside the scissors she returned to the vanity case, to bring out an appalling-looking thing like a goffering-iron. Seeing her take the iron to the stove, realising what it was for, Frances said, ‘You needn’t do the waving as well, you know. There’s no need for it. I really don’t mind.’ But Lilian’s eyelids fluttered. No, she had promised to do the wave. She wanted to do it properly. It wouldn’t take long… She turned the tongs in the blue gas flame, tested them on a scrap of paper, waved them about to cool them slightly – all in silence, unsmiling. Then she returned to her spot behind the chair and, with the very tips of her fingers, she straightened Frances’s head. In a toneless voice, she said, ‘Now, sit quite still.’

  The wet hair sizzled alarmingly as the tongs took hold, and the air quickly became sour with a scent like that of burning feathers. The heat of the iron, close to Frances’s scalp, was blistering, insane! Lilian, however, pressed on without a word, making her way along one length of hair and then another, regularly stepping back to survey her handiwork, every so often returning to the stove to re-heat the iron. She never once caught Frances’s eye as she was doing it, and she never lost her flaming colour. Frances sat as sweating and as miserable as if she were in the dentist’s chair.

  At last the ordeal came to an end. Lilian spent another minute or two making adjustments with the comb. Then she fetched her husband’s shaving-glass from the shelf above the sink, and put it into Frances’s hands.

  ‘Well?’ she asked quietly. ‘Do you like it?’

  The sight of her own reflection took Frances aback. The hair was heart-stoppingly short, the waves so wonderfully well done that she struggled to recognise herself. She turned and tilted her head. ‘I might be someone else completely.’

  ‘It makes you look awfully modern and shick.’

  ‘Shick?’

  Somehow, Lilian blushed even harder. ‘Chic. It shows off the nice bones in your face.’

  And, after all, perhaps it did, for the blunt bottom edge of the haircut drew attention to the line of her jaw; and Christina had always used to say that Frances’s jaw was her best feature. But she couldn’t enjoy it. She couldn’t relax. Lilian took away the mirror and began to gather together the hair that had collected on the newspaper; it looked revolting heaped there like that, like a bit of stuffing from the inside of an armchair. Frances rose and did her best to help. They made a bulky packet of it, and stuffed the packet into the bin.

  But their hands met as they did it, and they twitched away from each other; everything between them was wrong, off kilter. The hilarity of the past hour, the beauty-parlour silliness, the slipping in and out of clothes – it had all evaporated. Or, worse than that, it had all, Frances supposed, become suspect, become charged and tarnished by her confession. Lilian was tidying away the scissors and the combs now, looking almost angry. Frances had never before seen her look anything but open and kind. Was her mind running backward? Was she remembering odd incidents between Frances and herself, the Turkish delight, the chivalry, Frances chasing away her admirer from the band-stand? Was she thinking that Frances had seen him off in order to take his place?

  Was that what Frances had done?

  She watched Lilian close the vanity case, and drew a breath. ‘Lilian. What I told you, just now —’

  Lilian snapped the latch shut. ‘It’s quite all right.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you won’t mention it to anyone?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And you won’t – you won’t brood on it? I should hate it to come between us, now that we’ve become friends.’

  At that, Lilian smiled and made a gesture, an airy movement with her hand. It was an attempt, perhaps, at sophistication, as if to say that women made sapphic disclosures to her – oh, every other day.

  But the gesture was unconvincing, the smile rigid, confined to the mouth. And after a few more minutes of uncomfortable chat, the two of them parted. Frances went around the landing to her bedroom, to stare at her reflection in dismay. Her confidence in the haircut was gone. It seemed to have all the wrongness of the afternoon in it. She kept fingering her naked neck, feeling exposed.

  And then – since it had to be done, and might as well be done right away – she screwed up her courage and went downstairs.

  She opened the drawing-room door softly, in case her mother should still be dozing. But she was awake – at the bureau now, addressing an envelope. She looked at Frances over her spectacles, and it must have taken her eyes a moment to refocus. When they did, she lowered her pen, removed the glasses, and said, ‘Good gracious!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frances, with an attempt at a laugh, ‘I’m afraid I allowed Lilian to twist my arm.’

  ‘Mrs Barber did this? I hadn’t an idea she was so talented. Come closer, into the light. Oh, but it’s charming, Frances.’

  Frances stared at her. ‘You think so?’

  ‘Very smart. Turn around, let me see. Yes, very up-to-the-minute!’

  ‘I felt sure you wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Why would you think that? It’s a treat to see you making the best of yourself. I wish you would do it more often.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well —’ Her mother flushed. ‘You can sometimes look a little slipshod as you go about the house; that’s all I meant. I don’t mind for myself, I’m simply thinking about callers. But this – No, it’s very smart.’

  Her words caught Frances off guard. Coming so closely on the heels of the awkwardness with Lilian, they left her, absurdly, back on the brink of tears. She crossed to the hearth and stood at the mantel-glass, pretending to pat and tweak the new haircut. Idiot! Idiot! she said to herself, pushing the feelings down again.

  When she left the room she remained in the hall for a minute, uncertain. And once she had climbed the stairs she hesitated at the top. Surely Lilian would come, if only to ask what her mother had made of her?

  But though the door of the little kitchen was ajar, and there were sounds of activity beyond it, Lilian did not appear.

  5

  The hair held its wave for the rest of that day, but when Frances rose the next morning she looked, she thought, like someone from a mental ward, one half of the hair squashed flat where she had lain on it, the other half frizzed and bushy, impossible to comb. She didn’t know what to do with it, so she ran herself a bath and ducked her head right under; after that the waves disappeared altogether and the hair dried oddly.

  Her mother, looking her over, was distinctly less enthusiastic than she had been the day before.

  ‘Why not ask Mrs Barber to put you tidy? She did such a splendid job in the first place.’

  But when Frances did seek out Lilian, there was more of that wrongness between them. She showed Frances how to dress the hair so that it fell into loose waves of its own – standing behind her at her bedroom mirror, rearranging the locks with her fingertips. But her gaze,
in the glass, seemed always to be in the process of sliding away, and her pose was a cautious one, as if she were reaching into a thicket, trying to avoid being snagged by thorns. Her manner made Frances feel sad. She had the sense that with her confession she had wrecked their friendship, thrown it away. And for what? For honesty. For principle. For the sake of a love-affair that in any case had already had the life pressed out of it, years before.

  The hair continued to look peculiar to her in the days that followed, but she received so many compliments, from her mother’s friends and from neighbours, that she supposed it must be all right. Mr Barber went about the house whistling ‘A Little Bit off the Top’ – which she took to be a tribute, of sorts. And Christina, when she saw her, said, in a faintly put-out tone, ‘Yes, well, not bad, though it’s a pity it shows up that great lantern jaw of yours,’ which she took to be another. Even the boy who brought the meat looked at her in a new way. Everyone admired her, it seemed; everyone save Lilian. It was just as though, with a clash of its gears, their accelerated friendship had suddenly gone into reverse. For nearly a week they met only as landlady and lodger, on the stairs, on the landing, one of them heading out of the front door as the other crossed the hall. In Anna Karenina, Kitty was expecting her baby, Anna and Vronsky were wretched, disaster was on its way. But there were no more literary discussions, no more picnics in the park, no more cigarettes on the back step; and no further mentions of Netta’s party.

  There were also, Frances couldn’t help but notice, no more anti-Len days. Quite the opposite. One night the couple went out with Mr Wismuth and his fiancée and came tiptoeing up the stairs at half-past midnight, bringing with them a sense of crowded places, lifted voices, music, drinks, laughter – or so, anyhow, it seemed to her, listening to them in the dark. Another night they blared out gramophone tunes; later, going up to bed, she found their sitting-room door open and got a glimpse of them squashed together in their pink plush easy chair. Mr Barber had hold of what appeared to be a doll or a puppet and was making it prance about in his lap; Lilian, enchanted, had worked her stockingless foot under the cuff of one of his trouser legs and seemed to be idly toeing the diamond pattern on his sock. And the sight of those questing toes had an extraordinary effect on Frances. They made her feel lonelier, suddenly, than she had ever felt before. She went creeping into her room and undressed without lighting a candle, then lay curled in bed in a ferment of misery. What was the use of her being alive? Her heart was some desiccated thing: a prune, a fossil, a piece of clinker. Her mouth might as well be filled with ashes. It was all utterly hopeless and futile…

  Next morning, out in the WC, she discovered that her ‘friend’ had arrived. Why it was called a friend she could never imagine – it was more like an enemy within the gates – but, anyhow, seeing the smear of scarlet on the square of Bromo made her, perversely, feel better. One was always a bit demented, she thought, round about the time that one fell poorly. One couldn’t be held accountable for one’s mood then. She told her mother that she had a spot of neuralgia, and spent the rest of the day in bed with a hot water bottle.

  Lying propped up on her pillows, her short hair pleasant against her neck, she was aware of the Barbers coming and going beyond her door. Now and then she heard Lilian’s voice: detached from Lilian’s physical presence, the elocution-class tones seemed very pronounced, and her laughter, when it came, had something grating about it. Once again, Frances struggled to understand what had ever drawn the two of them together. Had it simply been boredom, a question of empty days? She thought of the way they had spent their time. Trips to the park, Turkish delight: it all seemed so narrow, so footling. Gazing across at her wardrobe, she remembered how Lilian had gone through her frocks. This is what you ought to wear. Not these terrible cotton stockings! Hadn’t that been rather smug of her? Hadn’t there been a hint of condescension in her attitude to Frances? – as if Frances’s life needed gingering up, and she was the person to ginger it?

  She didn’t like it, after all, when she discovered that Frances’s life had already been gingered rather too liberally by someone else.

  Well, so much the worse for her! Frances wouldn’t apologise for it. Better to be me, she thought, than married. Better a spinster than a Peckham-minded wife! She rose from her bed full of new resolutions. ‘We must get out and about more,’ she told her startled mother. ‘We must try different things. We are getting groovy.’ She drew up a list of events and activities: concerts, day trips, public meetings. She went in a fit through her address book, writing letters to old friends. She borrowed novels from the library by authors who had never interested her before. She began to teach herself Esperanto, reciting phrases as she polished and swept.

  La fajro brulas malbone. The fire burns badly.

  Ĉu vi min komprenas? Do you understand me?

  Nenie oni povis trovi mian hundon. Nowhere could they find my dog.

  ‘You’re looking awfully well, Frances,’ her mother’s friend Mrs Playfair told her, when she was visiting the Wrays one day in the middle of the month. ‘You’ve shaken off that air of mopiness you sometimes have; I’m glad to see it. Now, I think you and your mother ought to come and have dinner with me. I’ve a wireless set now, did you hear? We can all listen in. What do you say? Shall we make it soon? Next Thursday night?’

  And – oh, why not? Frances had known Mrs Playfair all her life. Her husband had been the senior broker in Frances’s father’s firm; Frances had gone to school with her daughters; and now she and Frances’s mother sat together on the same small charity committees. She was one of those solid Edwardian women with a passion for organisation, and evenings in her company could sometimes be a little wearing. But – well, it would make for a change. And change was what Frances had been after. So, when Thursday night came round, she donned her puddle-coloured gown and carefully combed and dressed her hair, and she and her mother made the short journey across the crest of Champion Hill to Braemar, Mrs Playfair’s grandish 1870s villa.

  ‘There!’ said Mrs Playfair as she greeted Frances in the drawing-room. ‘How nice you look! I knew an outing would suit you. You must come and sit in the light of the window, beside Mr Crowther here. I know that you young people can stand any amount of sun. I can’t, that’s for sure!’

  Mr Crowther, then, was the other dinner guest. Frances remembered, as she shook his hand, having heard her mother mention him. He had served in the same battalion as Mrs Playfair’s son, Eric – or he had been in the bed next to Eric’s when Eric had died, something like that – and Mrs Playfair had only recently tracked him down. For that was another of Mrs Playfair’s passions: going over and over the details of Eric’s death in Mesopotamia. She corresponded, Frances knew, with chaplains, nurses, surgeons, colonels. She had photographs of Eric’s grave, and of the place where he had fallen. She had books, maps, plans – could shut her eyes, she liked to boast, and see the streets of Baghdad as vividly as she could picture those of Camberwell.

  Frances wondered if Mr Crowther knew quite what he was in for. He was a nice-enough looking man of twenty-nine or thirty, dark-haired, with a trim moustache. ‘You’ve known Mrs Playfair a good while?’ he asked her as they sipped their sherry, and she explained the connection between the families.

  ‘I was a regular here in my schooldays,’ she said, ‘when Kate and Delia were still at home. They’re married now, and both living far away; Delia out in Ceylon.’

  He gave a nod. ‘I’ve thought of Ceylon for myself. Or perhaps South Africa. I’ve a cousin out there.’

  ‘Yes? What sort of work would you look for?’

  ‘Oh, an administrative post, if I could get it. Or engineering. I don’t know.’

  ‘You sound as though you have many talents.’

  He smiled, but in a way that seemed to throw the subject off.

  The dinner-gong sounded, and they went through to the dining-room. The evening sun was just as bright in there, and again Mrs Playfair put Frances in the full of it, at Mr Crowther’
s side; she had to squint against the light for the whole of the meal. Still, it was a treat to eat four courses that had been prepared by someone else. Mrs Playfair, her investments undented, had managed to hang on to her servants right through the War. She had a cook, and a parlourmaid, Patty, as well as a daily woman for the roughs. Frances, cutting her buttery breast of chicken in the sunlight, was very aware of the state of her hands. She saw Mr Crowther look once at them, then politely look away.

  He kept up the politeness even when the conversation turned, as it was bound to do, to Eric, talking in a stilted but obliging manner about their time in Mesopotamia, describing the heat, the grit, the marches, the rush and confusion of the skirmish in which he and Eric had been injured; Mrs Playfair nodded at his words like a collector with some new trophy, as if already seeing the spot in the display case in which it would be placed. And when the meal was finished and they returned to the drawing-room to admire the wireless set, he made himself handy with the twiddling of the switches. Frances was dubious about the wireless. She felt faintly ridiculous as she fitted on the ear-phones, and there was an anti-climactic few minutes when all that could be made out was a sort of prolonged death-rattle in the wire. But finally the crackles and the hisses resolved themselves into a voice – and then, yes, it was thrilling and uncanny to recognise a bit of Shakespeare and know that the words were coming across miles of empty space, directly into one’s ear, like a whisper from God. Somehow, though, it was even more uncanny to take the ear-phones off and realise that the whisper was still going on – to think that it would go on, as passionate as ever, whether one listened in to it or not.

  Patty brought the coffee, and they moved outside. It was the day after midsummer, and still fantastically balmy and light. Frances’s mother and Mrs Playfair settled themselves in cane chairs on the terrace, but Frances and Mr Crowther wandered down into the garden. Mrs Playfair’s Siamese cats, Ko-Ko and Yum-Yum, wandered with them, and when they sat, on a carved stone bench, the she-cat, Yum-Yum, jumped on to Mr Crowther’s knee, and he stroked and fussed the little creature until she purred like an engine.