The Paying Guests

  She knew very well that Lilian was twenty-two. But she was counting on her mother having reached a stage in life from which it was impossible to tell the age of anyone under forty. So her mother surprised her by narrowing her eyes in a sceptical way and saying, ‘Well, she has a very youthful air indeed for a woman of five-and-twenty. As for Snakes and Ladders —’

  ‘A nice Victorian game.’

  ‘A nice noisy one, apparently! Noisier than I remembered it. I’m amazed you were up to playing. Your head was too sore, I thought, for bridge at Mrs Playfair’s.’

  Frances couldn’t answer. She’d had another flashing vision of Lilian’s stocking coming down. If her mother knew about that! The thought went through her on a wave of heat. With a trembling hand she drew herself a glass of water. Once she had drunk it she managed to take care of the stove. But then she caught another whiff of the butter-dish.

  ‘If it’s all the same to you, Mother, I think I’ll go back upstairs for an hour. Tasker’s boy will be here soon, but you can take the meat from him, can’t you? I’ll just slip a coat on and fetch the milk —’

  ‘The milk is in already. Mr Barber brought it in for us. And, yes, I think bed is the best place for you. Goodness knows, we don’t want anyone to see you while you’re in this sort of condition.’

  Frances drew herself another glass of water and slunk from the room.

  So Leonard had brought in the milk, had he? He had never done that before. He must have guessed that she wouldn’t be up to it. The thought made her uncomfortable. She remembered how, the previous night, he had pressed the gin on her, filling up her glass the moment it was empty. He’d practically poured it down her throat! Just why, exactly, had he done that? She recalled the grip of his hand on her ankle. She remembered, again, simpering at him over the box of cigarettes. And hadn’t she leaned and poked his knee? Another wave of shame ran through her. She had to pause on the stairs and put a hand across her eyes. Once she was back in her room she lay turning the scenes over in her mind until she fell into a fretful sleep.

  When she awoke from that, at almost eleven, she felt much better. She made a second start to her day, taking a bath, even managing a few light chores. She and her mother spoke politely to each other. They ate their lunch in the garden, in the shadow of the linden tree.

  There was still no sign of Lilian. Frances began to wonder if she mightn’t have quietly left the house. In a way, she hoped she had. In another – oh, she didn’t know what she wanted. Her burst of energy was already fading; bringing in the lunch things from the garden seemed to finish it off. She had planned to go out today. She had promised to visit Christina. But she thought of the jolting journey, the walking about, the four flights of stone steps up to Chrissy’s flat… She couldn’t face it. When her mother settled herself in the drawing-room with a new book of brain-teasers, she crept back upstairs to her bedroom and lay fully clothed on the bed.

  She no longer felt sick; that was something. And the room was comfortingly warm and dim. She had opened the window wide but left the curtains almost closed, and now and then a breeze stirred them, making the column of light between them blur and sharpen, widen and thin. The scents were those of the garden: sweet lavender, sharp geranium. From the scullery of a house near by she could just hear the splash of water, from a kitchen the whistle of a kettle, hectically rising, rising, then falling weakly away. The sounds and the smells snagged and tussled, but struck a precarious kind of balance. She felt herself held in the balance along with them, an infinitely fragile and humble thing.

  She closed her eyes. Perhaps she dozed. She was faintly aware, in time, of the opening of Lilian’s bedroom door, followed by slippered footsteps on the landing. But the steps slowed, hesitating, and something about the hesitation made her wake up properly; she could feel, as it were, the direction of it. Her stomach gave an unpleasant flutter. She was just pushing herself up into a sitting position when Lilian tapped at her door.

  ‘Are you there, Frances?’

  She cleared her throat. ‘Yes. Yes, come in.’

  The door opened and Lilian came gingerly into the twilit room. ‘You weren’t asleep?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I wanted to see how you were.’

  She stood with a hand on the doorknob, her other hand raised to her face, pushing in her cheek with her knuckles. She and Frances looked at each other, neither of them knowing what to say. Then Frances let her head fall back against the iron bed-head.

  ‘God, but I feel seedy!’

  Lilian said, ‘Oh, so do I! I feel like nothing on earth! I don’t know what to do with myself. Can I – Can I sit with you for a bit?’

  Frances’s stomach fluttered again, but she nodded. ‘Yes, of course.’

  Lilian closed the door and moved towards the bedroom chair. But the chair was draped with clothes from the night before, all of them reeking of cigarette smoke, and Frances, seeing the uncertainty in her step, said, ‘I’ll have to tidy that later. I haven’t the strength for it now.’ She shuffled back against her pillows and drew in her legs. ‘Up here, instead? Is that all right for you?’

  If Lilian hesitated, it was only for a moment. She climbed on to the bed, keeping right down at the foot of it, then sinking sideways against the wall, closing her eyes. Her eyelids were heavy, Frances saw now, and her hair had lost its dark shine. She was wearing a skirt the colour of an envelope, and her plain white blouse had just a bit of violet stitching on its cuffs and at its collar – as if that was all the dash she had been able to muster.

  She opened her eyes, and met Frances’s gaze. ‘I’m so sorry about last night.’

  Frances blinked, embarrassed. ‘So am I.’

  ‘I don’t know what was the matter with me. I didn’t do or say a natural thing all evening. Len was even worse. What must you think of us? He feels awful about it now.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Don’t you believe me?’

  Frances didn’t know what to think. She recalled the sound of Leonard that morning, going springily about his kitchen. But, ‘It isn’t that,’ she said. ‘It’s just – Oh, Lilian, I can’t make your husband out. He isn’t to blame for last night. I made a fool of myself, I know that. But I can’t help feeling that he enjoyed watching me do it… And he wasn’t very pleasant to you. But then, I wasn’t very pleasant to you either.’

  Lilian lowered her eyes. ‘It’s only what I deserved.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  But she shook her head and wouldn’t answer.

  For a minute or two they sat sighing. Gradually Frances’s sighs became groans. She rubbed her face. ‘What a state to get ourselves into! I haven’t been as drunk as that in the whole of my life. My stomach feels like some poor creature that’s been beaten with a club. My eyes might as well have had gunpowder rubbed in them! Shall we have a smoke? Will that make us feel better, do you think, or worse?’

  They didn’t know, but decided to find out. Frances got out papers, tobacco and a glass ashtray, and rolled two untidy cigarettes.

  When she had taken her first puff she sank back on to her pillows. ‘Oh, it does help, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Does it?’ asked Lilian. ‘I’m not sure. It makes me feel racy.’

  She meant it innocently, putting a hand to her galloping heart. But Frances, hearing the word, and seeing her hand at her bosom, had another flashing vision: the cushion on the floor and Lilian stepping tipsily about to get her balance; her heel coming down on the carpet, and the bounce of her breasts. The image brought a tangle of feelings with it: disbelief, embarrassment, and something else, a queasy remnant of the excitement of the night before.

  Lilian was watching her face. ‘What are you thinking, Frances?’

  ‘Oh —’ She drew on the cigarette. ‘I’m thinking how frightful I was last night.’

  ‘You weren’t frightful. It was Len and me.’

  ‘I should never have come in in the first place. Had the two of you been quarrelling?’ br />
  ‘No, we hadn’t been quarrelling.’

  ‘But all those awful things Leonard said to you. Is he often like that?’

  ‘He’d just had too much to drink. Anyhow, I say awful things to him.’

  ‘That doesn’t make it any better. It makes it worse! Surely a marriage oughtn’t to be so unkind?’

  ‘We get along all right, really.’

  ‘You never seem to, to me.’

  ‘That’s just what husbands and wives are like. You can’t expect love and romance and things like that from a marriage, can you?’

  ‘Can’t you? What’s the point of it, then? You and Leonard must have loved each other once, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Yes, I expect we did.’

  ‘You don’t sound at all convinced. Why did you marry, if you weren’t sure?’

  Lilian was rolling the tip of her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray. She frowned at it. ‘You asked me that once before. Why do you mind so much?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m simply trying to understand, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t worth your thinking about. It was just… a mistake. It was all a mistake.’

  ‘A mistake?’

  ‘Yes, Len and I made a mistake, when we were young. We did something silly, and now we’re paying for it, that’s all.’ Her tone had grown uneasy. But looking up, seeing the perplexity on Frances’s face, she spoke almost with exasperation. ‘Oh, Frances, for somebody so clever you can be awfully dull sometimes. Don’t you know the sort of mistake I mean? I was going to have a baby. That’s why Len and I married.’ She dropped her gaze again. ‘My baby died when it was born, you see.’

  Frances, shocked, said, ‘Lilian. I’m so sorry.’

  She had begun biting her lip. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Of course it matters.’

  ‘It seems ages ago now.’

  ‘I had no idea. I wish I’d known.’

  ‘You won’t tell your mother, will you?’

  ‘Well, of course I won’t.’

  ‘And it doesn’t make you think badly of me? That Len and I did that?’

  ‘Oh, do you really think it could?’

  Lilian’s expression cleared. ‘No, I don’t,’ she said. ‘But you’re not like other people. Len’s parents, for instance. They said one hard thing after another. That I’d fallen for the baby on purpose, as a way of getting hold of Len – as if he’d had nothing to do with it! That the baby was some other man’s, not his. And then, when my baby died, they said it was a judgement on me. Oh, it was all so horrible, Frances. It made me go a bit mad, I think. It made an evil person of me. I couldn’t look at other women’s babies. I couldn’t even be kind to Maurice, Netta’s little boy. She’s never forgiven me for it. Nobody understood. They said I ought to think of all the men who’d been killed in the War, and the people who’d died of the influenza, and what did one little baby boy matter, against all that… I suppose they were right.’

  ‘No,’ said Frances, ‘they weren’t. Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don’t you?’

  Lilian hesitated, then nodded, and answered in a murmur. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And have you never thought of – of trying for another child?’

  She looked away. ‘Len would like to. But what I always wonder is, what if it were to happen again? It did for my mother. I don’t think I could stand it. And then, it isn’t a nice world to bring babies into. But probably I will, in the end. It’s against nature not to, isn’t it? And if I don’t – well, then it means that Len and I will have married for nothing. It isn’t so bad, after all.’ She spoke as if trying to convince herself. ‘Len’s a good husband, really. Everybody tells me he’s a good husband. It’s just that – well, you saw how he was last night. In the days when we were courting, he pushed and pushed me into saying yes to him. And then I did say yes to him; and it’s as though he’s never forgiven me.’

  ‘He doesn’t ever… mistreat you?’

  That brought the ghost of a smile to her face. ‘No! I’d like to see him try. And he knows my sisters would skin him alive.’

  ‘And he never – with other women —’ Frances was thinking of that moment, weeks before, in the starlit garden, Leonard’s hand in the small of her back.

  But, ‘Oh, no,’ said Lilian. ‘He fancies himself as a bit of a ladies’ man, but he wouldn’t ever do anything about it. He learnt his lesson with me, you see.’

  Her features sank as she said this, and she looked almost plain. She looked older, too, with shadows and creases around her eyes. Frances said again, ‘I’m so sorry, Lilian.’

  But that made her hang her head as if ashamed.

  ‘You’ve always been so kind to me, Frances. Right from the start you’ve been kind. And you were honest with me, that time —’ She faltered. ‘You know the time I mean. You didn’t have to be honest with me, but you were; and I wasn’t kind in return. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.’

  Frances didn’t answer. From beyond the open window there came again those distant domestic noises: a barking dog, a calling woman, a spoon being tapped against a sink. The curtains rippled in the breeze, shifting on their rings with a scrape of metal, and once they had settled back into place the room seemed dimmer than before.

  And perhaps the dimness made it easier for Lilian to speak. As she crushed out her cigarette she said quietly, ‘What you told me that time —’

  ‘I oughtn’t to have said anything,’ said Frances, adding her own cigarette stub to the ashtray, then moving the ashtray aside.

  ‘Was it true, though, what you said? A love affair with a girl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There wasn’t a man?’

  ‘No, there wasn’t a man. There never has been a man, for me. It seems I haven’t the – the man microbe, or whatever it is one needs. My poor mother’s convinced that there must be one in me somewhere. She’s done everything to shake it loose save turn me upside down by my heels. But —’

  ‘But how did it begin? How did you know?’

  ‘I fell in love. How does anyone know that?’

  ‘But where did you meet?’

  ‘My friend and I? We met in Hyde Park, in the War. I had gone there with Noel, to listen to the speakers. It was just before conscription came in, and a man was speaking against it. He was being heckled and jostled by the crowd; it was shameful, horrible. But there, going calmly about, handing out pamphlets on his behalf and looking as though she wouldn’t care if someone spat in her face because of it, was a small, slight, fair-haired girl in a velvet tam-o’-shanter… I took a pamphlet, and went to a meeting – I had to lie to my parents about it – and there she was again. She didn’t remember me from Hyde Park, though I remembered her. After the meeting I walked her home, all the way from Victoria to Upper Holloway. In the perishing cold, too! I think I began to be in love with her by the time we crossed the Euston Road. We started to be friends. She stayed here, often. And then, suddenly, she loved me.’

  ‘But weren’t you shocked?’

  ‘That someone should love me? I was astounded.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘I know you didn’t. No, I wasn’t shocked. The whole thing was too marvellous. There had been romances in my schooldays – but all my friends had had those; we were forever sending each other Valentines, writing sonnets on the prefect’s eyes… This wasn’t like that. It was a thing of the heart and the head and the body. A real, true thing, grown-up. Well, we thought ourselves grown-up. But the War did make young people wiser, didn’t it? John Arthur had already died by then. Christina – my friend – had lost cousins. We were impatient. We had – oh, such energy! We began to want to live together. We planned it, seriously. We did everything seriously in those days. Christina took typewriting and book-keeping classes. We looked at rooms, we saved our money. Our parents thought it a nonsense, of course. Then they made it into a fight – endless, exhausting, the sa
me quarrel over and over, how could we think of leaving home, how would it look, we were too young, people would suppose us fast, no man would ever want to marry us. But even the quarrels were thrilling, in their way. Christina and I talked as though we were part of a new society! Everything was changing. Why shouldn’t we change too? We wanted to shake off tradition, caste, all that…’

  She paused, and took a sip of water, feeling the scratch of her throat. Lilian was watching her. ‘Then what happened?’

  She set the glass down with a chink. ‘Oh, then we got into that scrape with the police, when I threw my shoes at that MP. My father threatened to send me away. I’m afraid I laughed in his face. But my mother —’ She drew a breath. ‘My mother went through my things, and found a letter from Christina, and read it. I think she’d known all along that the friendship had something queer about it. She took the letter to Chrissy’s parents. They turned out Chrissy’s room, and found letters from me. Well, it was clear what the letters meant. I ended up with most of the blame, perhaps because I was a little older. They made me out to be some sort of vampire —’

  ‘Vampire!’

  ‘You know what I mean. One of those women, neurotic schoolmistresses and so on, who get written about in books. They talked of sending me to a doctor – to get my glands examined, they said. – Oh, I can’t bear to think of it now.’ She shuddered, remembering a scene, like something from a frightful dream, her father’s stillness, his silence, the cold distaste in his expression: worse, infinitely worse and more shaming, than twenty years of bluster. ‘If we’d been bolder,’ she went on, ‘we might have escaped. I think perhaps we ought to have tried to. We ought to have stolen away, like thieves. But we decided to face the thing out. People were saying that the War wouldn’t last another year. We thought that, once it was over, everything would somehow be different… And while we were waiting, Noel was lost. That was the March of ’eighteen. It had been bad when John Arthur had died, but after Noel – I don’t know. My father made an invalid of himself. My mother went to pieces for a while. Our servants had left us; now we had a series of cooks and chars, one small calamity after another. It seemed easier to begin taking care of the house myself…