The Paying Guests

  The music was still playing when she went up. It buzzed in the boards at her feet while she stripped and washed. On went clean underwear. Up came the stockings, gliding with supernatural smoothness over her newly shaven legs. The frock took a bit of fiddling with. It was disconcertingly loose at the bust, alarmingly short at the hem – Lilian had raised it after all – and, gazing at her reflection, at the Burne-Jones lacing, Frances thought again of Sherwood Forest, of lutes and pageants. And did her hair look all right above the satiny collar? Her neck seemed as long as a sea-serpent’s. Pointing her jaw this way and that she was reminded of those stretched wax mannequin heads and shoulders she had now and then seen on display in hairdressers’ windows.

  The gramophone record ended as she was dabbing her nose with a leaf of papier poudré. In the abruptly unnerving silence she fitted on her borrowed hat, and cautiously crossed the landing.

  She found Lilian’s bedroom door ajar, and could just glimpse Lilian beyond it: she was at the mirror, dressed in a frock that Frances had never seen before, the frock that she must have made for the party, a striking thing of white silk with a gauzy overskirt, and with slender shoulder straps that left her arms and upper back bare. She was pushing a gold snake bangle over her wrist when she caught sight of Frances; she paused with it part-way up her arm as their gazes met through the glass. But at once she looked away, lowering her kohl-darkened eyelids, sliding the bangle higher. And what she said was, ‘Here’s Frances. Doesn’t she look nice?’

  Leonard was in there with her; Frances hadn’t realised that. But now, with the creak of a floorboard, his gingery head appeared around the door.

  He pursed his lips in a silent whistle. The admiration, Frances thought, was part pretend, part genuine. ‘Well, Clapham won’t know what’s hit it tonight! You look like the lady in the tower, in the poem – what’s her name?’ He came out on to the landing; he wanted the clothes brush, for his jacket. ‘You’re in the right colour for Lily’s family, anyhow. They like anything that reminds them of the auld Emerald Oisle!’

  She watched him tidying his shoulders. She had never seen him looking so dapper. He had taken as many pains over his outfit as she had over hers. His hair was severely oiled and parted; the creases in his trousers were sharp as blades. He was wearing a regimental tie, had some sort of crested ring on the smallest finger of his left hand, and his fingernails were gleaming: he’d been to see ‘Thidney, my manicuritht’, he told her, with a chorus-girl flop to his wrist.

  But his manner had a hint of restraint to it. He had been cautious with her since the night of Snakes and Ladders. She said, ‘You’re looking forward to your evening?’ and he nodded: ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘What is it, exactly? A supper?’

  ‘Yep. A slap-up one, by all accounts. Then we head off to a private room, and it’s there that the real business happens. Or so I’m told.’

  ‘Rolling up your trouser legs, learning the handshake – something like that, is it?’

  He was straightening his cuffs now, and smiled at his sleeve. ‘No! Just a few chaps together, all in the same line of work. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” You know the sort of thing, Frances.’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  He didn’t answer that. His gaze had slid over her shoulder. Lilian had come to the bedroom doorway, one of her snug cloche hats on her head, a silk shawl over her arm; he looked her up and down as if taking her in for the first time. And when he spoke again, it was with an air of grievance. ‘I dunno. It doesn’t seem right to me, a fellow going one way on a Saturday night and his wife going another. I must want my head read, letting you loose among those cousins of yours!’

  Lilian began to step past him. ‘You should have thought of that before you agreed to go to your stupid supper.’

  ‘Stupid supper? I like that! Don’t you want your man to get on? You’re quick enough to spend his money. – Just a sec.’ He reached for her wrist. ‘What time will you be home?’

  She pulled against him. ‘I don’t know. Earlier than you, most probably.’

  ‘Well, mind you behave yourself. And don’t I get a farewell kiss?’

  He still had hold of her arm. She let herself be drawn back, and gave him a dry peck on the cheek. ‘That’s more like it,’ he said, releasing her, and then his blue eyes twinkled at last. ‘Your turn next, Frances!’ He offered his face. ‘How about it? Lily’s warmed it up for you.’

  Lilian spoke with a tut, before Frances could reply. ‘Frances isn’t interested. Let her alone.’ She was blushing.

  Down in the hall, the two of them paused. Frances had to say goodbye to her mother, but found herself loitering at the glass. She adjusted her collar and the angle of her hat, seeing again what a terrific trouble she had gone to: the shoes, the stockings, the frock, the hair. She felt half disguised by the outfit; half exposed by it.

  But when she made her tentative entry into the drawing-room, her mother was as delighted as she had been that other time.

  ‘Oh, now, don’t you look stylish! So handsome, I shouldn’t have known you!’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘I don’t recognise that hat. Is it one of Mrs Barber’s? And the gown?’

  ‘No, the gown’s my own. It’s the one – I’ve had it for years.’

  ‘You ought to wear it more often. The colour becomes you. Oh, what a pity that Mrs Playfair isn’t here to see you! You wouldn’t think of calling in there before you go to the station?’

  ‘No, Mother.’

  ‘It wouldn’t take you a moment.’

  ‘No, Mother. Please!’

  ‘Well, it was only an idea… And is that Mrs Barber out there? Come in from the hall, Mrs Barber, let me see you too!’ Her smile grew slightly forced at the sight of Lilian’s lipstick and kohl. But, ‘Yes,’ she said gamely, ‘you both look very fine.’

  Now Frances was itching to be gone. She felt more exposed than ever with Lilian standing there beside her. She edged her way towards the door. ‘I don’t expect we’ll be late. Leonard’s still here, but he’ll be leaving soon. His friend Mr Wismuth’s coming for him; you needn’t answer the knock. You’ll be quite all right, now?’

  ‘Yes, I shall be fine. Oh, but I did have some letters for the post. You couldn’t take them for me, could you? Now, have I put stamps on them yet? No, I haven’t. Just a moment. Oh, and this one lacks an address. I need my letter-case. Can you see it…?’

  When she and Lilian escaped from the house at last, Frances felt as she imagined a fly might feel when, by some miracle, it had managed to prise its limbs free from a strip of sticky paper. It was only a little after seven, and the sun was still high in the sky. The pavement threw up heat like a griddle; they kept to the shade as much as they could as they made their way down the hill, but it was warm even on the platform of the station, in the bluish dusk of the railway cut. The crowd was a Saturday-night one. People were heading to theatres, picture-houses, dancing-halls. The men had an oiled-and-varnished look. The women were like heavy-crested birds: crimson, gold, green, violet. But none of them was as handsome as Lilian, she thought. Against the white silk and gauze of her dress the flesh of her arms and shoulders had a solid, creamy texture – as if one could dip into it with a spoon, or with a finger.

  Mothers called to children to keep away from the edge of the platform, and their train arrived. Frances tugged open a compartment door and was met by a gust of warm stale air; she followed Lilian in and they sat side by side. Two boys and a man had the seat opposite, the boys about thirteen, looking at them with shy interest, the man staring at them both – staring at Lilian in particular, in that unabashed, amazing way that men, Frances had found, did stare at Lilian, even lowering his newspaper to do it, so that she felt like leaning to him to say, Put your feet up, why don’t you? Make yourself comfortable. Have you a pipe? Why not light it? Go on… But the feeling was partly envy, she suspected. When the man got out at East Brixton, she thought of slipping into his place. She was beaten to
it by a woman who came in laden with bulging string bags.

  And the next halt was Clapham. They went out and down the steps and a minute later were on the High Street, picking their way along the crowded pavement. The doors of the shops stood open. The air was soupy with smells: meat, fish, ripe fruit, perspiring bodies. A gramophone-seller’s was blasting out the hit of the moment, ‘The Laughing Policeman’.

  ‘He said “I must arrest you!”

  He didn’t know what for.

  And then he started laughing

  Until he cracked his jaw!

  Oh — ’

  The ha-ha-has pursued them as Lilian led the way into a residential street. The houses here were terraced, red-brick, neat, narrow, identical, each with a tiny front garden, flower-bedded or crazy-paved. In one of the gardens a boy was repairing a bicycle. In another a man in his shirt-sleeves was watering geraniums. There was the tinkle of a pianola from an open window, accompanied by the wobbly parps of a trumpet as someone tried to keep up with the tune.

  Frances grew conscious all over again of the medieval flourishes on her frock. ‘Are we almost there?’ she asked as they made another turn, and when Lilian gestured – yes, the house was just at the end of this row – the sudden looming reality of the evening made her slow her step. When she got a glimpse of Netta’s front window, its Nottingham lace curtains lighted up from within and showing the heads and shoulders of people sitting or standing inside, she faltered completely.

  Lilian stopped, and looked curiously at her. ‘What’s the matter? You’re not nervous?’

  ‘I am, a bit.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just, we’ve gone to so much trouble, come all this way. But now that we’re actually here…’

  Lilian glanced ahead at the house, biting her lip. ‘I feel that too, a bit. Aren’t we silly?’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘Well, we can’t not go in. The party’s why we’ve come, after all.’

  Was it, though? All at once Frances wondered what would happen if she were to catch hold of Lilian’s hand and pull her in the opposite direction. Let’s go, she wanted to say, right there on the Clapham street. Let’s go! Now! Quickly! Just you and me!

  But she didn’t do it, she didn’t say it; and in any case, it was too late. Someone had seen them from the window. The Nottingham lace was raised. Netta’s door opened and Vera’s little girl emerged, bumping a creaking doll’s pram over the step. ‘Auntie Lily! Come and see!’

  After the houses of Champion Hill this one seemed built to a miniature scale, the narrow hall widening only slightly at the foot of the stairs, so that when Netta appeared, bringing with her her husband, Lloyd, they all had to reach around each other in order to embrace or shake hands.

  ‘Many happy returns,’ Frances remembered to say. She had brought along a gift, a jar of bath-crystals. Lilian’s gift was scent. There was a minute or two of unwrapping, unstoppering and sniffing, children coming to sniff too, the boys making faces, rushing away with their noses pinched. There seemed to be children everywhere. A small back room was like a school playground. Ahead was a tiny kitchen, and a few men stood drinking at the garden door, but most of the grown-ups were gathered in the front room, the room that Frances had glimpsed from the street. Seen here, from the hall, it looked even more alarming. There might have been two dozen people in there, sitting on every sort of chair, the younger ones sharing places or cross-legged on the floor. It was bright, hot, crowded, yet intimate and challenging too; the open patch of carpet in the middle recalled a space for fighting cocks. When Lilian led her in at last, she spoke only to say ‘Good evening’ and ‘How do you do?’, but she could at once sense the impact of her accent. People sat straighter in their seats. She felt herself looked over in an interested way. ‘That’s the lady that keeps the house that Lil and Len have,’ she heard someone murmur, as if they knew all about her and had been curious to meet her. The horrible idea came into her head that perhaps the only reason Lilian had brought her here – had dressed and curled her – was to show her off.

  It was a relief to recognise Vera and Min. And to spot Mrs Viney, lavishly hung about with jet, her dress rising very nearly to her knees, her swollen ankles on full display, was like seeing a dear old friend.

  ‘Oh, Miss Wray, don’t you look handsome! And ain’t your hair done lovely! I bet it was Lil done that, wasn’t it?’

  She put out her hand as she spoke. Frances moved forward to take it, and was drawn down and given a smacking kiss on the cheek.

  Places were rearranged, cushions moved, chairs passed. Frances and Lilian squeezed themselves in next to two elderly women. They proved to be Lilian’s Irish aunties, a Mrs Daley and a Mrs Lynch. Other aunties sat near by, Mrs Someone, Miss Someone Else: Frances forgot the names at once, but was glad to tuck herself in amongst them, grateful to be less on show. She was complimented on her frock. She was given a drink, a glass of claret-cup with chunks of tinned fruit bobbing about in it. The aunties offered her a piece of birthday cake, a glossy sausage roll. And how did she like Clapham? It wasn’t quite what she was used to!

  ‘And has Lenny not come, then?’

  She explained about his supper.

  ‘Oh, what a pity! He’s a real comedian, that Lenny. Keeps you in stitches, that one.’

  ‘Yes, doesn’t he?’

  She didn’t really want the claret-cup; it brought back memories of Snakes and Ladders. But she sipped it, smiling, self-conscious, gazing about. The room was blandly showy: Toby jugs on a high shelf, tankards and salvers in factory brass. The furniture seemed all brand-new, the varnish on the side-board was gleaming. But, of course, furniture, she remembered having been told once, was Lloyd’s ‘line’. He managed a warehouse, somewhere in Battersea. The man over there, as round as a turnip, she guessed to be Mrs Viney’s brother. The younger man beside him, scarred and sightless, was clearly the son who had been blinded in the War. The boys in the corner must be Lilian’s famous hot-eyed Irish cousins. Two of them had ordinary brown good looks; the third was handsome as a film star. The girls were like Vera, sharp-faced, but with thin unlipsticked mouths. They were calling to Lilian now: they wanted to see her Theda Bara bangle. She eased it free and passed it over, and one after another they tried it on.

  It was disconcerting, Frances found, to see Lilian so at home among so many strangers, to think of her as having this world, this life, quite separate from her daily life in the house on Champion Hill. She thought, These people all have their claim on her. What’s mine, exactly?

  But as she began to feel almost glum about it, Lilian turned to her to ask in a murmur, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘It isn’t too much, all these people?’

  ‘No, it isn’t too much.’

  And, with that, it wasn’t. They smiled at each other, and the blushes and the jitters of the past few days fell away. Instead, a knowledge seemed to leap between them, to leap all the more thrillingly for doing it there in that hot, bright, overcrowded room. And, of course, that’s why they had come. Frances realised it all at once. They could never have looked at each other so nakedly in the dangerous privacy of Champion Hill. But here, among so many people… They turned from one another’s eyes, but the knowledge remained. They were sitting tight together, more or less sharing a chair, Lilian so close that Frances could catch the separate scents of her, the scents of her powder, her lipstick, her hair. She called something to one of her cousins. She leaned to move an auntie’s glass, and then to straighten the beads of her mother’s necklace. Frances took all this in, even while angled away from her, gazing at her – how, exactly? Perhaps with the pores of my skin, she thought.

  More guests arrived. There was a commotion in the hall: a barking dog, a crying baby. The dog came into the room with the newcomers, rushing about with a dripping tongue. The baby was handed from lap to lap, a scrap of a thing in a frilled frock, bawling its head off. The aunties rearranged themselves,
and the chair to Frances’s left became free. It was taken by a pleasant-looking man of about her own age, who introduced himself as Ewart and shook her hand with hot rough fingers. Was he one of the cousins? No! He didn’t know the family well. He worked as a driver for Lloyd. He’d come to the party on his own. Seeing that Frances’s and Lilian’s glasses were empty, he took them away and refilled them. It was to Frances that he spoke, however, when he had returned.

  ‘How do you like this weather, then?’ He was wiping his neck with his handkerchief.

  ‘Not quite so good for a party, is it?’

  ‘Not so good in the city, full stop. I want to get out of it, I do.’ He tucked the handkerchief away. ‘I have it in mind to take a run down to Hampton Court one of these Sundays.’

  He seemed self-conscious about the word run. Frances said, as she lifted her glass, ‘You’ve a motor-car, then?’

  ‘Near enough. I’ve a pal with one, and he lets me take it out when I fancy. I put him in the way of some work one time, you see, so he owes me the favour. Yes, I’m thinking of Hampton Court. Perhaps take a little row-boat on the Thames.’

  ‘Or, why not Henley?’ she suggested, struck with the image of the little row-boat; imagining herself and Lilian in it.