The Paying Guests

  ‘I’m in the way, I fear.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ said Lilian, catching hold of her.

  ‘You’ll do better without me, I think.’

  ‘No, wait. Please, Frances. We’ll be apart all next week, and —’ She stood with a hand at her eyes for a moment, looking suddenly shockingly weary, all her features dulled and sinking; then she seemed to shake the tiredness away. With a smile, she tossed the tub of rattling links into the half-filled suitcase. ‘I can finish the packing later. Len can help me, for once. I don’t want to be indoors any more. Come out with me, will you?’

  Frances was thrown by the change in her. ‘Out with you? What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s somewhere I want to take you. As a treat. To make things up to you. To make up for – for everything. For going on this stupid holiday. For being married. For being a nuisance and making you love me! I don’t know. You always say you’re sick of stopping indoors with the curtains closed, don’t you? Come out with me, then.’

  ‘But where to?’

  ‘I shan’t tell you. It would spoil the surprise! Don’t you like surprises?’

  No, Frances didn’t like surprises. She hated the thought of people plotting and planning on her behalf. She loathed the burden of being delighted once the surprise was disclosed. So, almost reluctantly, she got herself ready, and when, twenty minutes later, she and Lilian left the house, she immediately began to attempt to guess where they were heading. Lilian had brought no bag with her save a small velvet handbag, so she couldn’t be intending a picnic; and though they approached the park they soon veered away from it, taking the long road south-west towards Herne Hill. Perhaps they were going to Herne Hill station for an outing by train. Yes, it must be that, she decided. A ramble in the country, followed by tea at a café or an inn. She thought of where they could comfortably get to in two or three hours. Somewhere in Kent, obviously. Well, that was all right. She’d enjoy a trip into Kent. She began to put a good mood in place, to fit it together, determinedly.

  But they reached the turning for the station and went marching past it. Lilian had her parasol over her shoulder, and twirled it as they walked, looking mischievous, excited; looking rather like a cat. They were heading for Brixton now. The road was rather noisy. ‘It isn’t much further,’ she said, in her enigmatic way; and Frances couldn’t imagine what, on this dusty suburban street, could possibly merit all this mystery, all this fuss. She could only suppose, with a sinking heart, that their destination would prove to be something whimsical, a gipsy fortune-teller in a room above a shop, a romantic-looking tree around which she’d be invited to tie a ribbon…

  They made a turn, and, ‘You mustn’t look, for this last bit,’ Lilian said. ‘Keep your eyes on the ground, and I’ll lead you.’

  Feeling foolish, but saying nothing, Frances went on with her gaze lowered, letting herself be steered around lamp-posts and over kerbs. They went through a break in the traffic across a busy road; and then they came to a halt.

  ‘May I look now?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lilian. Then, quickly: ‘No.’ Her confidence was failing. ‘Perhaps you won’t like it after all.’

  Frances was afraid to raise her eyes. She waited another moment, as a bus went noisily by; then lifted her head.

  She found herself at the colourful entrance to the Brixton Roller Skating Rink.

  She looked at Lilian. ‘You’ve brought me rinking.’

  Lilian was anxiously watching her face. ‘You said you used to like it. Do you remember? The first time we went to the park?’

  Frances nodded. ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘May I take you in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was like being plucked from one life and hurled bang into another. They could already, as they approached the doors, hear the muddle of sounds from within. They entered the building and were met by music, by laughter, and by the low rumbling note of wheels on the rink. They saw the crowd making its circuit, its unnatural stiff-legged glide, and by the time they had queued for their tickets, then queued again for their skates, Frances was desperate to join in. The toes of her shoes went snugly into the little metal brackets; the worn leather straps pulled tight across her ankles. Straightening up, she felt ten feet tall but horribly ungainly: she’d forgotten the wild insecurity of it. She pushed forward, grabbing at nothing. ‘This is mad! It’s terrifying!’

  Lilian rose, then shrieked and caught hold of her. Laughing, they clattered their way across the floor to the break in the barrier.

  And then they were on the rink itself, on the treacherous chalked surface. Lilian pulled at her arm: ‘Slow down!’ She was clinging to the rail.

  ‘Let go of it,’ urged Frances.

  ‘I daren’t! I’ll fall!’

  ‘You won’t fall. Or if you do, then we’ll both go down together. Come on.’

  She took hold of Lilian’s hand and drew her away from the barrier. Lilian shrieked again, but let herself be led; they found a place in the flow of skaters.

  The building was huge, modern, charmless, like a giant church hall. The bunting that hung from the rafters was in faded Armistice colours, and the songs were mild old things from thirty or forty years before, ‘Funiculì Funiculà’ and ‘The Merry Widow Waltz’. The crowd was thinner than the crowds that Frances could recall from her rinking youth; it might have been made up solely of people who hadn’t yet twigged that thrills, these days, were to be had elsewhere – in jazz clubs, say, or cocaine houses. But the off-season air lent a camaraderie to the proceedings, and there were quite enough skaters to bump into or tumble over. It was still the school holidays, and children were darting like minnows, but there were courting couples too, and girls in pairs and groups, even the occasional game old lady. Boys raced and swooped in an inner circuit of their own, and in the rink’s underpopulated middle a few grave youngsters showed off their talents. Every so often someone flailed like a windmill and went down, to cheers and hoots and sympathetic laughter; they’d pick themselves up, sheepish, hitting the chalk from their knees and behinds. A man on the staff was going about to see that nobody got hurt, and to blow a whistle if ever the boys became too rowdy.

  And in amongst them all glided Frances and Lilian, getting the hang of it, picking up speed. Now and then men looked at Lilian, because men always did look at her, but no one troubled them except to smile at them, or to make way for them, politely. What a genius Lilian was! Nowhere else in the world, thought Frances, could they have been together so publicly, holding on to each other like this. It wasn’t at all like making love. It was a lark, pure, childish. And yet it was like making love: the thrill and intimacy of it, the never letting go of each other, the clutching of fingers and the bumping of thighs, the racing and matching of heartbeats and breaths. After they’d been at it for half an hour the signal was given for the skaters to change direction; in the hilarity that ensued they made their clumsy way off the rink and, still in their skates, sat at one of the tables on the other side of the barrier, drinking tea and eating ginger nuts and watching the crowd. When they returned to the rink after that they were more confident; they put their arms around each other’s waists, or held each other as if for a country dance, Lilian with her right hand raised and Frances holding it from behind, their other hands joined tight down at Frances’s hip. Frances felt graceful and easy now; she wanted to stay on the rink for ever. She looked at the best of the skaters and thought, Lilian and I could do that! They could buy skates of their own, come to the rink every day. They could practise and practise…

  She detached herself from Lilian’s waist and held her hands instead, going ahead of her, skating backward, daring. They laughed into each other’s faces.

  ‘You’ll go over!’

  ‘No. Never.’

  She did not fall, and neither did Lilian. They pushed on with the crowd for another twenty minutes or so. They narrowly avoided a collison with one of the sporting old ladies. But then they began to be tired; their leg muscles were
aching. It was hard work, after all. Hand in hand, they made a final, regretful circuit of the rink; and then, like birds leaving a pond, they were back on the ordinary floor, waddling and ungainly. Removing the skates was, briefly, blissful. But it was sad, Frances thought, to return them to the counter, sad to exchange motion, speed, glamour for safety and unstrained arches.

  And it was something worse than sad to push back out through the doors and find themselves in Brixton again, to rejoin the commonplace, unwheeled afternoon and head home to Champion Hill. They weren’t so aware of it at first. They had the glow of the rink about them. Lilian put up her parasol and they walked with joined arms, humming the harmless tunes they had skated to – still feeling as though, with a push of the foot, they could launch themselves forward into effortless arabesques. But the climb up through Herne Hill pulled at their aching muscles, and the road seemed longer and dustier than it had before. And then, all at once, they were close to home. It was almost five; Leonard would be back in an hour and a half… Frances’s steps began to lag as though she were heading for the gallows. They drew level with one of the entrances to the park, and – ‘I can’t go back just yet,’ she said, coming to a halt. ‘I can’t.’

  Lilian said nothing. Without a word they went in through the gate.

  They finished up at the band-stand. The small, railed space recalled the rink, and for a minute again they were lively: Lilian glided across to the balustrade, then stood smiling as Frances joined her, the tassel of the parasol raised to her mouth. She had waltzed like that, and stood like that, Frances recalled, the very first time that they had come here. How impossibly far off that day seemed! How long ago was it? A little over three months. If she put her mind to it she could just summon up the particular quality of being here with Lilian then, the two of them still more or less strangers, Mrs Barber, Miss Wray, but their intimacy, surely, already taking root, already growing, somewhere deep, deep below the skin of their friendship… The feeling receded and was gone. She could only see Lilian as she was now, her smile fading as they faced each other and her gaze, as it sometimes did, becoming so level, so stripped, so grave and ungirlish, that Frances felt an answering pressure around her heart, something dark and almost frightening, like the intimation of agony.

  She looked away. An elderly man was passing by on one of the paths – a Mr Hawtrey, one of the residents at the local hotel. He raised his cane and called a pleasantry when he recognised Frances, and she answered with a laugh: ‘Yes, we do rather, don’t we? No, we’ve left our trombones at home today…’

  He moved on, and her laughter died. She watched him go, then dropped her gaze and ran her fingers over the scored green paint of the balustrade rail. Bill goes with Alice. Albert & May.

  She said, ‘It’s real, isn’t it?’

  Lilian answered after a pause, with a bowed head, in a murmur. ‘Yes, it’s real. It’s the only real thing.’

  ‘Then, what are we to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What we talked about, living together —’

  Lilian turned away from her. ‘Don’t, Frances.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know why. It’s too much. You don’t mean it, not really. It’s just a dream.’

  ‘I think I do mean it.’

  ‘I couldn’t. I never could.’

  ‘You’d rather stay in an empty marriage? For the rest of your life?’

  ‘It isn’t just that. Don’t ask me. If you loved me, you wouldn’t ask. We’ll just make ourselves unhappy if we keep thinking about it.’

  ‘I can’t love you and not ask you. You must see that.’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘I can’t be without you.’

  That sag came back into Lilian’s face. ‘Don’t, Frances! I love you so badly. But we’re different. You know we are. You don’t care what people think of you. It’s one of the things that made me love you, a thing I liked about you from the beginning, right from the moment I saw you cleaning the floor with that stupid duster on your head. But I’m not like that. I’m not like you. I’d have to give everything up. I shan’t ever love another girl, but you – you’d grow tired of me. I’ve expected you to grow tired of me every day since Netta’s party.’

  ‘But I haven’t. I couldn’t.’

  ‘You will, though. You might. Len’s tired of me, but that doesn’t matter. That’s just what happens between husbands and wives. But if you were to tire of me, and leave me, after I’d left him – what would I do?’

  Frances shook her head. ‘How could I ever leave you, Lilian?’

  Lilian looked back at her, unhappily. ‘But you left your other friend.’

  The words caught Frances off guard, and she found herself unable to answer.

  They stood in silence for a minute. Frances stared at the park without seeing it. ‘Can’t we just,’ said Lilian at last, ‘go on the way we’ve been doing? Something might change, or —’

  ‘What will change, if we don’t change it ourselves?’

  ‘I – I don’t know.’

  ‘And meanwhile, what? I must keep sharing you with Leonard?’

  ‘It isn’t like that.’

  ‘It feels like that. It feels worse than that! He doesn’t even know he’s sharing you.’

  ‘But it means nothing, my being with him. That’s the stupidest thing. He might as well be dead. Sometimes I wish he was. I know it’s an awful thing to say, but sometimes I wish some nice fat bus would just run him over. I wish – Oh, it isn’t fair! If we could only close our eyes, and open them and have everything be different!’

  She did close her eyes as she spoke, as if she were wishing. But just what, wondered Frances, was she wishing for? She had lost sight of where the heart of the difficulty lay. Was it in the fact that they were both women? Or that Lilian was married? The two things seemed hopelessly entangled. She could get one of them smooth in her mind, but the other remained twisted. That came free and the first was in knots again. There had to be something, she thought – a word, a phrase, a key to it all – but she couldn’t find it, she couldn’t see it.

  And before they could speak again there were sounds of giggling on the other side of the band-stand: two small boys were down on the gravel, peering in. They must have sensed the sad intensity of Frances and Lilian’s conversation, or perhaps seen something in their poses, for, ‘Spoony!’ one of them called. They raced off, screaming with laughter.

  The word made Lilian jump. She pushed away from the rail. ‘God! Let’s go down, can we? The whole world can see us up here.’

  ‘No one’s looking. They were only schoolboys.’

  ‘I don’t like it. Let’s just go down.’

  So they went back down the steps and picked their way along one of the paths. Nothing had changed, Frances thought. Nothing had been resolved or decided. She wanted to say again: What are we to do? But how many times could she keep asking it? Even to her own ears, the words were beginning to sound like a whine. So she said nothing. They moved on, with unlinked arms. There was nowhere to go save back to the house.

  And there was no opportunity, after that, to be alone together. Leonard came home early for once, and seemed to spend the evening on the landing: every time Frances ventured upstairs she came face to face with him, fiddling about with his tennis racket, dabbing blanco on his shoes. She saw Lilian only in glimpses, over his shoulder. They didn’t kiss, they didn’t embrace; next morning they didn’t even say a proper goodbye. Mr Wismuth and Betty arrived at the same time as the butcher’s boy, and by the time Frances had taken the meat and sorted out some quibble with the order, Lilian and Leonard’s bags and cases, and then Lilian and Leonard themselves, had been squeezed into Charlie’s narrow motor-car and driven away.

  9

  And in some ways – oh, it was a relief to be rid of them. The whole furtive business of being with Lilian, of finding and securing and making the most of scraps of time with her – those juicy but elusive morsels of time, that had to
be eased like winkles out of their shells, then gobbled down with an eye on the door, an ear to the stair, never comfortably savoured – it had all, Frances realised, been crushing the life out of her. She spent the two or three hours of that Saturday morning going between the kitchen and the drawing-room in a sort of trance. After lunch she lay on the sofa with the paper, shut her eyes against the latest bit of bad news, and actually slept.

  She was still yawning at bedtime. With no closing door to listen for she passed an unfidgety night, and the next day, the Sunday, while her mother was at church, she ran herself a bath, then wandered about the house barefoot, smoking a cigarette. She was ashamed, as she did it, to discover how badly she had let things slip: all she could see were grubby corners, dusty plasterwork, finger-marks, smears. She fetched a pencil and a piece of paper and drew up a list of tasks.

  She started to work her way through them early the following morning, tackling the landing first, dusting and sweeping, beating the rugs. She ended up with a cloudy panful of fluff and tangled hairs: dark hairs from Lilian’s head, reddish ones from Leonard’s, brown from her own; the sight of them all muddled up like that made her feel queasy. She didn’t want them in the house, she decided, not even burning in the stove; instead she carried them all the way down the garden to the ash-heap. The ten o’clock post arrived while she was doing it: she returned to the hall to find two or three letters on the mat. And her heart did just flutter slightly as she stooped to pick them up – for mightn’t one of them be from Lilian? Wouldn’t she send at least a note to say that she had arrived safely?

  The letters, however, were all from tradesmen. She tucked them away in her book of accounts.